Live-blogging another primary day, the primaries in Vermont, Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island--VOTR as Keith Olberman said last night--as they unroll on the big media outlets.

Morning on MSNBC, and we're not off to a good start. Morning Joe and his sidekicks and assorted panelists are boosting Hillary Clinton like a trampoline. A four-person colloquy starts off, somewhere after 9:30 a.m., by downplaying the voters. Typical line, and undoubtedly sincere: the politics of selfishness, renamed 'conservatism,' requires that, after all: Raising that hackneyed query about Which candidate do you wanna have a beer with--this one works against Obama, in their view, since they rightly consider Obama smart--one panelist asks, Do you think anybody really votes on that basis? Another suggests, Maybe some young people . . .

Demonstrating anew that some media personalities have little to no contact with young people nowadays, most of whom are to put it nicely displeased with the criminal carnage that is the Iraq war. Not to mention the waiting non-job market.

A rough consenses also emerges that Nobody voting for Obama wd even know his position on NAFTA.

Joe Scarborough then repeatedly refers to Clinton on SNL; shows nice clip of her on the Colbert Report; gets aggressive Clinton manager Howard Wolfson on; polls are cited suggesting a late Clinton uptick in OH if not TX.

Joe and sidekick opine soberly that there is simply no reason for Clinton to get out of the race, regardless of what happens in the primaries today. As sidekick says at length, it's a long way until Denver, and ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN--now what, do you suppose, do they have in mind?--between now and then. Even at the convention itself, the morning joe-ers conclude, ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN. The superdelegates can do ANYTHING THEY WANT, AT ANY TIME. So why in the world wd Clinton exit the race, even if she were losing?

All this reinforces the impression I got from the Sunday morning talk shows this week--every rightwinger on the air was looking glum. They were looking sober and down, 100 percent because Obama is doing well--and they desperately want to face the Clintons in the general election. Therein lies their only hope of a GOP victory.

btw, David Shuster, on briefly, does a good quick recap of the delegate arithmetic. Does not cheer up the sidekickers.