Richardson

Just saw Richardson on Meet the Press. This guy is a mixed bag. He's clearly a very seasoned diplomat who's willing to do the blocking and tackling necessary to get stuff done. I actually think he might be able to soft-land a halfway decent energy policy.

On the other hand, he's full-blown bat-guano crazy on a complete withdrawal from Iraq. Surely he can't really believe that US troops are the problem, as he states, with truck-bombs going off in marketplaces and sectarian cleansing occurring every night? Also, the creep factor with him is fairly high. (Of course, if you give too much credence to the creep factor, you wind up not voting for anybody...)

Things are still pretty wide open for me. I have fairly short list of people I would never vote for:

Democrats:

Just Kucinich gets ruled out completely--no news there!

Republicans:

Tancredo is just nuts on the immigration thing, and slimy to boot.

Hagel has developed that quivering-lipped, Murtha-like, "I just can't stand it that the world is a mean mean place and I don't want to deal any more" thing.

Huckabee just barely makes the list for proselytizing in politics.

Tommy Thompson appears to be an idiot.

Jim Gilmore is pandering to the religious right.

Sam Brownback appears to be clueless.

My favorites right now:

Giuliani

Biden

McCain (despite him being possibly the worst legislator of all time)

I am willing to admit that both Romney and Clinton are hard-headed enough to be competent (my principal concern following 6 years of Bushco) but I don't believe a word that comes out of their mouths. Obama appears to be a very nice man (clean and articulate, too!), but has yet to present an idea. I love Gingrich poking at people from the sidelines (he has a very high content-to-nonsense ratio, too) but suspect that he would be a very Bush-like president. I could be convinced on either Gore or Fred Thompson.