She may have bet wrong on the presidential sweepstakes, but former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has a number of things going for her as a California gubernatorial candidate.

Sen. Barack Obama may be the only smoker running for president, but the occasional snapshot of him taking a puff has not endeared him to the powerful tobacco lobby.

It’s about the court, it would seem.

Sen. John McCain is doing well with many voters. However, some conservatives insist they wouldn’t vote for him should he get the Republican presidential nomination.

The acrimony between Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney dates back to 2000 and a fight over funding for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, which Romney headed.

“The dispute provided an early preview of the fissures that still divide McCain and Romney as they face what may be decisive contests” in the Super Tuesday primaries, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.

It was a rare moment, a journalist and a politician actually letting their frustration with each other show.

In one corner at a Staples in Columbia, S.C., last week was Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Celebrity support, always important in national campaigns, is likely to play an increasing role in the high-cost, heated presidential campaign of 2008.

When it comes to good-looking supporters, Barack Obama leads the pack, with Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, and George Clooney. And of course, there’s his powerhouse stumper, Oprah Winfrey.

Hillary Clinton is backed by a slightly older, more established, show business crowd which includes Chevy Chase, Danny DeVito, Rob Reiner and Steven Spielberg.

If traffic to a candidate’s web site is any indication of the candidates popularity in the Iowa caucuses, then Barack Obama and Ron Paul will be the winners of their parties caucuses after the votes are tallied this evening.

Web site traffic statistics provided by Alexa show Obama with a clear lead in the Democratic contest over second place finisher Hillary Clinton. John Edwards lands in third place with Joe Biden taking a distant fourth and Christopher Dodd finishing fifth. Bill Richardson’s doesn’t even break the top 100,000 websites, so there is little data on Alexa about their traffic trends.

It was a story of connections. But were they real?

“Hillary’s Mystery Money Men,” first appeared on the website the Real News Project on Oct. 18.

The story was then reprinted in the Nov. 5 issue of The Nation and it has circulated widely on the Internet.

It either opens a window on to a significant shift of a controversial Republican money man to the Democratic camp, or it overstates the actions of a hedge-fund savvy financier who may have been hedging his bets by contributing to several candidates.

The piece by Russ Baker and Adam Federman argues that “notorious financier Alan Quasha” was a secret force behind the presidential campaign of New York’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

We’ve come to expect political dynasties. They’re a fact of life in the U.S., perhaps even more than royal succession is in the modern UK.

While CEO Erik Prince has been the public face of Blackwater USA during recent weeks of intense government and media scrutiny, the often outspoken Cofer Black, company vice chairman, has kept out of the limelight.

Black, one of the nation's eminent authorities on combatting terrorism, is deeply involved in the network of Blackwater-related companies. He also serves as chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions and is CEO of Black Group, LLC.

With more than 30 years of service in the Central Intelligence Agency, Black is known as a superspy. He helped catch the international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal" and in 1999, was named head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center.

Two seasons have collided - the endless season of the presidential campaign and the shorter season of the baseball playoffs.

This means that presidential candidates have been showing up at the playoffs, most especially Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, who was there front and center to see his beloved New York Yankees exit the playoffs in the first round.

These sporting appearances make sense. The politicos get a little TV airtime away from the coffee shops of New Hampshire and Iowa. And they associate themselves with a game that’s American as apple pie and steroids. (OK. They don’t stress the steroids.)

But there can be risks to rooting for a team, as it inevitably means rooting against another team. Giuliani have picked up some votes in New York, but the inhabitants of Red Sox Nation might not be able to forgive his connection to, in their opinions, an evil empire.

Scooter Libby, Joe Lieberman, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Mitt Romney all have at least one thing in common: They’ve been the recipients of Mel Sembler’s largesse and his fund-raising effectiveness.

Sembler, a Florida shopping center developer who founded a controversial non-profit group of drug treatment centers for adolescents, helped raise millions for the elections of Bush the elder and Bush the younger.

Blackwater USA, the State Department’s largest private security contractor, is under siege on several fronts.

Iraq’s state minister for national security affairs announced today that the firm would face criminal charges for the fatal shootings of Iraqi citizens. Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., is also under investigation on the home front.

But a tight web of political and business connections helps shield the company from the most formidable of attacks.

Mitt Romney’s years at Bain & Company and Bain Capital are proving useful beyond the millions he is able to pour from his personal fortune into his presidential campaign.

Two of his finance co-chairs - Meg Whitman of eBay and David Brandon of Domino’s Pizza - have Bain ties.

The Washington Post noted yesterday that the campaign had attracted at least $196,000 in donations from Bain employees.

Romney personally loaned nearly $9 million to the campaign during the first six months of 2007.

Mitt Romney made a fortune at Bain Capital relying on business analytics.

Now he’s applying similar tactics to his presidential campaign, hiring Alex Gage, the expert used by Karl Rove in George W. Bush’s re-election.

Gage uses data-mining techniques to predict the behavior of voters, clustering them into groups such as “Flag and Family Republicans.” The approach is similar to that used by demographic marketing companies such as Claritas.