This reinforces my continued misgivings about Kerry:

Presidential candidate John Kerry can�t resist painting a scenario showing how Democrats can win the White House without the South.
The U.S. senator from Massachusetts has done it on at least three occasions. Each time it landed him in political hot water.
You’d think he would have learned.
Last March at a California fund-raiser far from the ears of Southerners � he thought � Kerry spelled out how he could lose all 11 states of the Old Confederacy and still beat President Bush next year.
“Al Gore proved that you can get elected president of the United States without winning one Southern state � if he had simply won New Hampshire,” he said, referring to the former vice president’s near miss in 2000.
“Democrats have to stop looking at the small solution that the country is compartmentalized in that way.”
In a recent appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning, America,” he was asked about rival John Edwards’ claim that the U.S. senator from North Carolina is more electable with his base in the South.
Kerry disputed Edwards’ assertion and repeated the Gore example to prove his point.
“That�s not a real argument,” Kerry maintained.
If that weren’t enough, the senator told a New Hampshire audience yet again on Saturday that Democrats didn’t have to appeal to Southern voters in order to win the presidency. He called such thinking a “mistake.”
“Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South,” he said in response to a question about winning the region.

Bad strategy, senator.
Kerry is technically correct that a candidate can win the White House without any southern electoral votes. But if he thinks he can win without being competitive in culturally more conservative areas such as the South, he’s headed for a train wreck.

One more place where you better use the spell checker.

Gadhafi sends East Tennessee a belated Christmas present:

Tons of nuclear material and sensitive equipment were airlifted out of Libya Monday night and brought to a government facility in Oak Ridge, officials confirmed Tuesday – hours after the secret shipment had reached its destination.
. . .
The big shipment, estimated at 55,000 pounds, is part of a rapid U.S. response to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s December promise to abandon his weapons-development program.
. . .
McClellan said the cargo was sent to a “secure facility” in Tennessee. That facility is Y-12, a warhead-manufacturing facility that also houses the nation’s primary stockpile of weapons-grade uranium.

Nothing spruces up the neighborhood quite like 55,000 pounds of nuclear materials.

New Hampshirites have enjoyed their moments of fame and made Senator Kerry their primary’s big winner. Not only did Kerry win by a large margin, but every other candidate lost on the expectations scorecard. Dean was supposed to make a come back in the neighboring Granite State. Clark skipped Iowa altogether to marshal support in New Hampshire. Edwards failed to seize a lasting wave coming out of Iowa. Lieberman literally moved to New Hampshire, though most people didn’t notice.
One entertaining aside I had during the day was trying to get the inside with the early exit polls. Whoever took them did a better job of keeping the results secret than I expected, for the findings were not as widely available over the Internet as I expected. That’s probably a good thing, for they turned out to be way off. Calpundit allegedly gathered the results from several exit polls, and averaged the totals as follows:

Kerry – 35.7
Dean – 31.1
Edwards – 12.6
Clark – 11.5
Lieberman – 6.4

The exits erroneously had Kerry and Dean much closer with Edwards edging Clark. So much for their methodology.
It’s going to be easy for the lazy, one-line media to now proclaim Kerry as the nominee-in-waiting. Let’s hope that’s not the case. I don’t have any major problems with Kerry per se, but if the Democrats settle for picking a New England candidate solely because he has momentum coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire, the party is heading for trouble this fall. The Democratic winner needs to earn the nomination by offering a message which resonates in liberal, moderate, and conservative states. Thus far we’ve only seen races in liberal ones.
With seven states on the electoral horizon, it’s going to be interesting to see the strategies the top four candidates take. Which states will they target? Will they now go ofter the front runner? Can Kerry handle the media spotlight?
Stay tuned.

With 14% of precincts reporting, Senator Edwards leads General Clark in the race for third place by 27 votes.
You can follow results here.
UPDATE: ABC News seems to be a little quicker with the returns. Clinton (Hillary?) has received a write-in vote. Time to rev up the right-wing Hillary hysteria machine again.