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The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn't matter if you're a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic "Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race," or someone fairly serious and "savvy," like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

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The former New York Times editor has lately been celebrating his return to writing by fearlessly tackling hacky column ideas already exhausted by everyone who was writing bad opinion columns during Keller's tenure as a person with an actually important job. Having offered his own takes on classics like "The Huffington Post isn't as good as a real newspaper" and "Twitter is dumb," Keller today tries the old "running mate switcharoo" scenario.

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Caddell and Schoen, two loser "Democratic" "pollsters," regularly publish very lame link-bait columns about how if Democrats want to succeed electorally, they must immediately cease being Democrats, and become, instead, Republicans. This week's variation on that theme: Barack Obama should step aside (already heard that one last year around this time) and allow himself to be replaced by Hillary Clinton, for the good of the party and the nation.

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country.

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Clearly Clinton's competence is an asset to the president, and her power and credibility reflects well on his ability to work with a former rival. And the Time piece, in particular, makes clear, while praising Clinton, that ultimately Obama makes most of his decisions with a small team of confidantes, and she is not among them. He's the commander in chief.

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That’s why it’s particularly painful to see her nearing the end of her career as our top diplomat with a scandal looming. It’s not too late for her to nip it in the bud, and if she doesn’t President Obama can still put a stop to it, as well. But right now, it threatens to tarnish her legacy.

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No. No. You know, Savannah, I'm very privileged to have had the opportunities to serve my country. I'm really old-fashioned. I've made my contribution. I've done the best I can. But now I want to try some other things. I want to get back to writing, maybe some teaching, working on women and girls around the world.

I have made my contribution. I'm very grateful I've had a chance to serve, but now I think it's time for others to step up.

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But it's just not going to happen. Clinton says she doesn't want it, Biden says it's impossible, and it would damage more than help the president by making him look desperate.

The rumor hangs on little more than Bob Woodward's claim that it was "on the table" last fall, because the president had lost support among "the women, Latinos, retirees that she did so well with during the [2008] primaries." But Clinton's 2008 popularity with Latinos, to take one group, wouldn't translate into electoral enthusiasm; she can't pass the Dream Act by herself, any more than President Obama can. Changing vice presidents doesn't change the Congressional mess that impedes the president's agenda.

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"Rather than reveling in these flights of reverse political fancy, I find myself wanting the revisionist Hillary fantasists -- Clintonites and reformed Obamamaniacs alike -- to just shut up already."

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I've already written about why I think liberals pondering "buyers' remorse" over Obama is useless and divisive. My discussion with Melber and my Facebook friend made me realize something else. One of my primary complaints about Obama supporters in 2008 was the way so many blamed the Clintons for the GOP crusade against them, as though Republicans would have played fair if only the unethical Clintons hadn't given them Whitewater, Travelgate and most notably, sex scandals. That was unfair to the Clintons, and it was also naive. It hugely underestimated the ferocity of modern-day GOP attack politics. Now I find myself wondering if progressives are over-focused on Obama's perceived shortcomings when it comes to dealing with Republicans, because we likewise don't want to deal with the amoral political savagery of the enemy he faces.

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If I were a Democrat (and I'm only posing as one here!), this would be why I think Hillary Clinton should challenge Barack Obama in 2012.

To begin, the president is in deep political trouble. I presented some basic economic indicators earlier that show the historical comparisons indicating that Obama is in Jimmy Carter territory. These are crude measures, of course. But more sophisticated forecast models, such as Yale economist Ray Fair’s, which uses per capita growth of real Gross Domestic Product during the three quarters preceding the election; the growth in inflation during the incumbent’s term; and the number of quarters during the incumbent’s term in which real GDP grows by more than 3.2 percent to predict the popular vote, now show Obama winning slightly less than 50 percent of 2012 popular vote. Given current economic projections, there’s not likely to be any more strong growth quarters between now and November 2012, meaning the odds for Obama’s reelection are probably not going to get better. To be sure, most of the political science forecast models don’t kick in until a year from now, so it’s a bit early to rely on them. But if Clinton is going to run, she can’t wait. And right now Obama is very vulnerable to a strong Republican challenger.

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Clinton announced Friday that Washington accepts the Transitional National Council as the legitimate governing authority of the Libyan people. Diplomatic recognition of the council means that the U.S. will be able to fund the opposition with some of the more than $30 billion in Gahdafi-regime assets that are frozen in American banks.

Clinton made the announcement at an international conference on Libya in Istanbul.

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A day after the State Department said it was handling the issue through quiet diplomacy and not public pronouncements, Clinton on Tuesday spoke out in praise of the protesters. She says their actions are "brave" and their goal is "right." Clinton stressed it is a homegrown appeal for equal rights and is not being driven by outsiders.

A coalition of Saudi activists on Monday urged Clinton to publicly support the campaign to end male-only driving rules in the ultraconservative Muslim country. Last week, about 40 Saudi women challenged the restrictions by getting behind the wheels of cars.

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Clinton was to have spent Monday night in Addis Ababa. But she will now leave the Ethiopian capital immediately because the ash cloud from the explosion in Eritrea is heading toward the city.

U.S. officials said the airport at Addis Ababa was to be closed. That meant Clinton faced being stranded if she had proceeded with her planned meetings in Ethiopia on Tuesday.

Clinton was scheduled to depart Tuesday afternoon and arrive back in Washington early Wednesday. It's unclear when she'll now return.

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"Let me address this as definitively as I can, on the record ... The story is completely untrue," said Philippe Reines, Clinton aide and deputy assistant secretary of state."

Political commentators were all a-Tweet last night in response to the rumor and its rebuttal, weighing in on whether Clinton would have been elected and what this might have meant. Slate's Dave Weigel tweeted "But isn't the World Bank presidency supposed to go someone discredited?", while Reuters' Felix Salmon posted, "The next head of the World Bank should be a woman AND from a developing country. My vote: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala [Nigeria's finance and foreign minister]."

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"We have reached a turning point" following the long hunt for bin Laden, Clinton said after intensive meetings in the Pakistani capital under tight security.

"It is up to the Pakistani people to choose what kind of country they wish to live in," Clinton said, "and it is up to the leaders of Pakistan to deliver results."

Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised Pakistan's stand against some militants and challenged its leaders to take decisive steps to jointly take on al-Qaida. Both the senior leadership of al-Qaida and the Taliban are thought to live in Pakistan, and affiliated militants use safe havens in Pakistan to attacks U.S. forces fighting next door in Afghanistan.

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Clinton made the remarks after meeting with Pakistani leaders on a seven-hour trip aimed at repairing ties badly damaged by the May 2 U.S. raid that killed the al-Qaida chief. A brief portion of the meetings witnessed by reporters was stiff and awkward, with no smiles among the U.S. delegation, and it was unclear how much, if any, progress was made.

Although she stressed that the U.S. won't abandon an alliance it considers critical to success in the war in Afghanistan and that both countries had shared interests, Clinton also criticized Pakistanis for propagating conspiracy theories and anti-American sentiment.

Pakistani officials are angry they were not told in advance of the raid against bin Laden, who was living in an army town not far from the capital, Islamabad. Parliament has passed resolutions condemning the U.S. incursion, and the U.S. has been asked to reduce the number of military personnel it has stationed in nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has become a nexus for Islamic extremism.

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Clinton says President Ali Abdullah Saleh "is turning his back on his commitments and disregarding the legitimate aspirations of the Yemeni people."

The secretary also says she was "outraged" to learn that Saleh's supporters had surrounded an embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, trapping U.S., European and Arab diplomats. Hundreds of Saleh loyalists wielding knives, swords and automatic rifles, blocked the entrances to the mission for hours before they were finally dispersed by security forces.

Yemen has been consumed by chaos for three months as hundreds of thousands of protesters demanded Saleh's ouster.

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Particular attention has gone to Clinton's seemingly emotional expression (which she says may have been due to allergies) and to the one other woman in the shot, Audrey Tomasen, a counterterrorism analyst whom the media had never heard of before.

But instead of analyzing the two female faces in the photo, one Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper, Der Zeitung, took a simpler approach: They just photoshopped them out. The Yiddish publication left two empty spaces in place of the two women. According to the Jerusalem Post, the blog Failed Messiah was the first to pick up on Der Zeitung's radically edited depiction of the Situation Room.

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The image, which now has nearly 2 million views on Flickr, has appeared on every major news website and turned up in countless newspapers and television broadcasts this week. But it’s also sparked questions (and spawned spoofs) worldwide. The most basic query: What is actually going on here?

To find out, let's start at the beginning, with the caption provided by the White House on its Flickr photostream (key phrase in bold):

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