Here’s the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder explaining that he’s leaving the blog format to concentrate on reporting. Good for him! Then there’s this:

I will not miss the navel-gazing, though I don’t think I will be able to entirely escape its allure, as I plan to continue to write short posts at National Journal on occasion and will Tweet to my heart’s content. (@marcambinder).

I’ve got a piece at the Standard about some different cross-trends concerning Obama’s reelection. In it, I mention that there’s a possibility Obama could face a primary challenge, but it would come most probably from his left. Galley Friend P.G., however, makes the following observation:

Go check out last week’s NYT op-ed pages. Guess who has a really good op-ed: Evan Bayh. Guess what else he has: a $10M war chest that he refused to donate to dem candidates even as he was retiring from the Senate. $10M isn’t much in terms of presidential runs, but it’s enough to build an organization for Iowa.

I think it’s wrong to hypothesize about a primary challenge solely from the left. You can’t run on Obama’s left on domestic policy, and if you try to run to his left on the wars, he’ll just say that he tried to end the wars but was blocked by Republicans and the military (and he wouldn’t be lying). However, you can run against the war to Obama’s right, based on the cost of the war and its impact on the deficit.

Maybe there isn’t a difference in saying “We need to end the wars because our soldiers are dying, we’re occupying a foreign country, blah, blah, blah” and “we need to reduce the deficit, as part of my plan I’d like to end the wars because they cost too damn much”. I, however, think there is a huge difference in these two positions. I think one comes across as post-VietNam pacifist nonsense while the other seems fairly reasonable. And I suspect there is a huge portion of middle-class white Dems who would agree.

Wanna know what I secretly think: Evan Bayh, with a Republican Congress and split Senate, would make a helluva Prez. He’s like Clinton without all the Clinton baggage and Clinton attack machine. Kinda like a 2000 McCain, only a little more pro-union and a little less pro-life.

Galley Friend K.A. sees broader openings:

The conventional wisdom is that a primary challenger to Obama couldn’t get traction because of the black vote. But I seem to remember Hillary polling pretty respectably against Obama among blacks. That all disappeared once it was time to get to voting, of course. But primary challengers might be able to believe that they could peel off some significant black support. The point is that Russ Feingold, or Hillary, or a prevailed-upon Howard Dean would only have to think they could beat Obama in order to really shake up the 2012 race. And a wounded Obama will look vulnerable, causing ambitious Democrats to see an opportunity. A primary challenge isn’t unthinkable, and even talk of a primary challenge is itself enormously damaging. Especially if the economy is continuing to doing poorly.

And about that: Americans’ feelings about the economy tend to lag around six to twelve months behind the actual data about how well or badly the economy is doing. People were still feeling pretty happy when the recession first started; they will still feel like they’re hurting long after unemployment has gone back down to 5 or 6 percent. That means that if the economy doesn’t really get moving immediately, people are still going to be really unhappy with the president by the late summer of 2011 — when potential 2012 candidates will be making their am-I-serious-or-not decisions. Prime conditions for a primary challenge!

Howard Dean is the other guy I’ve been thinking could challenge Obama, and he’s even better poised than Feingold. A former DNC chair who led the party during its recent successes times, he’s well liked for being a straight talker; his primary-night howl has now long been forgotten, or at least forgiven; and he’s been very smart about putting a bit of distance between himself and President Obama on healthcare and a few other issues. But I now see that, just in the last few hours, Dean has reportedly said, through a spokesman, “He is absolutely, categorically not running in 2012.” Ah well. Always time to change your mind, Howie!

The other wild card in all of this is Bloomberg, who needs neither the time to build an organization nor any rational evidence that he could win a presidential election.

Better than all three prequels put together.

Galley Friend Mike Russell–who, I’ll reiterate, is the best interviewer working today–has an amazing sit-down with Berkeley Breathed to talk Bloom County. Don’t miss it.

Jennifer Kahn has a great piece in the New Yorker on marathoner Alberto Salazar and Nike’s Oregon Project. Filled with gee-whiz stuff, like this look into Nike’s training facility:

Salazar took Ritzenhein to see Gordon Valiant, Nike’s house expert in biomechanics. Valiant put him on a sixty-metre test track outfitted with a force plate and had him run barefoot. Sensors in the force plate recorded the amount of force exerted on each part of the foot during impact: his so-called “loading pattern.” That pattern revealed a spike under Ritzenhein’s third metatarsal. To compensate for that, Valiant engineered a thin orthotic embedded with a small oval of ultra-soft foam to support the injured bone, which Ritzenhein has been using since mid-July, when he returned to high-mileage training. Salazar also instructed Ritzenhein to replace his sharp forefoot strike with a less aggressive landing on the midfoot, and he reduced the number of miles that Ritzenhein ran, compensating for the lost distance with long sessions of aqua jogging, plus workouts on Nike’s altered-gravity treadmill, a pressurized pod that allows athletes to run with artificially lowered body weight.

An “anti-gravity treadmill”? Awesome.

The piece also gets at something fascinating about running–the idea that achievement often happens not gradually, but in tiers. For example, if you’re a high school cross country runner, your 5K time might be 19:30, with small variation. Until, one day, you go out and run an 18:15. After which, that becomes your new normal. It wasn’t that you weren’t running as hard as you could before. It’s that your body was running as hard as it thought it could. Or something. I’ve never scene this phenomenon properly explained, but Kahn gets at it with this account of a Salazar race:

In college, Salazar did well but not spectacularly. In 1978, as a sophomore, he finished sixth in the ten-thousand-metre race at the N.C.A.A. Championships. Later that summer, Salazar, after struggling to keep pace with Rodgers, collapsed with heatstroke when he crossed the finish line at the Falmouth Road Race, in Cape Cod. He likely survived only because the race doctor had him lie in a plastic kiddie pool filled with ice water.

Though Salazar finished tenth, he nevertheless believed that he had passed a mental milestone. “After that race, I really felt, All right. I’m getting tough now,” he recalled.

That’s more of a conscious, rather than subconscious, moment, but it’s getting at the same thing, I think.

Initial thoughts on the election. First, the recriminations!

* Mark Levin: Thanks. It was only, like, 16 points. Not that anyone should be surprised–after all, Levin’s the one person in America who likes Stephen A. Smith. And besides, it’s probably all the fault of the RINO’s anyway. After all, Levin is “an extraordinary intellect.”

* How’s that Limbaugh Rule working out? Or has it been downgraded to a mere hypothesis?

* It would be nice for the GOP to have Senate seats in CA and CT. And eMeg seems like a very nice and capable woman. But on the other hand, it’s encouraging to see that money can’t always buy votes. Unless you’re Mitt Romney, that is. (I mean the “encouraging” part, not the “can’t by votes” part.)

* Virginia was a purple state 24 months ago. Last night the 4 of the state’s 6 incumbent Dems lost and a fifth is on life-support, leading by 500 votes with 99% reporting.

* Jon Runyan wins in NJ-3. It’ll be fun having him in Washington. Expect chop blocks.

* If Lisa Murkowski holds on, then Mitch McConnell deserves some credit for finessing the situation after her primary loss. Remember the reports that the leadership was going to strip her of committee assignments, etc. if she mounted a write-in campaign? Good thing the GOP thought better of it.

* You’ve got to respect what Harry Reid did, coming from behind and grinding out a +5 win as the third most unpopular politician in America. Even while his son was losing the governor’s race by 12 points. Sure, the GOP helped him out by nominating Angle, but even so. Professional politicians win elections. Reid is a pro.

* That said, I would have gladly traded a Reid win for a Feingold, just on general principle. I won’t miss Feingold’s votes, but I’ll miss his general presence in the Democratic party.

* Where will the final House number be? It’s +58 now and we’re still waiting on 11 races. I suspect the GOP will end somewhere near +65.

* Remember when Obama told nervous House Democrats that “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.” Turns out he was right!

* Data to be on the look-out for today:

* What was the won-loss record for Dems in districts carried by McCain?

* How close were the races at the margins? Did the Dems avert a much larger disaster by winning a bunch of races by a couple hundred votes, or did they have bad luck by losing a bunch of very tight contests?

* How did the Obamacare Dem dissenters do? Was staying away on that bill enough?

* What was the win/loss ratio on incumbents polling under 50 percent (but still ahead) at the end?

Update 10:30: This may be too deep a reading, but Sarah Palin emerges as somewhat of a loser from last night. A number of her candidates did well, and she can point to Nikki Haley in South Carolina and a number of other pick-ups in which she batted comfortably over .500. But her three most high-profile candidates–Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharon Angle–all got housed.

What’s more, those three candidates were each, in their own way, minor proxies for Palin as a political commodity. Miller tested free-base Tea Party-ism; O’Donnell tested the strength of anti-anti-Palinism sprung from deeply unfair treatment from the press and the left; and Angle tested the ability of a flawed candidate with high negatives to compete with a deeply unpopular liberal, Democratic incumbent on a relatively even playing field. You could read too much into this, but each of these losses undercuts, to some degree, the thesis that Palin could win a 2012 general election. (Mind you, I wouldn’t completely discount this thesis yet.)

But the thing which struck me as most problematic for Palin was a moment on Fox last night where, asked about O’Donnell’s loss, she said something to the effect of, Yeah, well the exit polling shows Castle would have lost, too, so why dontcha ask the lying MSM about that? (I paraphrase.)

This strikes me as not the kind of answer Palin should be giving. Her bread-and-butter is (or should be) authenticity. The correct response for O’Donnell supporters this morning goes somewhere along the lines of: “Yeah, it didn’t work out for us, but at the end of the day, the risk seemed worth the reward. If you’re going to make broad gains anyway, you might as well make some bold ideological bets. Some won’t pay out. And besides, did Republicans really need another guy in the Senate who’s been a professional politician since Calvin Coolidge graduated high school?”

That’s just about the only sensible response. Palin taking a Levin-like I-have-an-answer-for-everything is fine, except that that’s not who she’s supposed to be. She’s supposed to be a truth-teller, like a political Simon Cowell.

Update 12:25: Best lines so far:

* Rush Limbaugh was the big winner!

* Mark Levin says everything is great for conservatives. Because compromise is “irrational.” Sounds like he’s auditioning to be an Obama boogeyman.

Update 12:45: Meanest thing ever said about Jon Stewart:

Maybe it’s not fair to blame Jon Stewart for all this. He’s a comedian, after all. But he’s the left’s closest equivalent to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

Fightin’ words.

Update 12:58: The Sex Cannon is BACK baby! Two tons of twisted steel and sex appeal, firing that ball in there deep, real deep, where it’s gotta be, ’cause he’s not a gunslinger, he’s a–GUH–WATCH THE BLINDSIDE!

(Where’s the Emo Eagles fan? We need him.)

Also, Tony Dungy and Rex Ryan intervene to help a troubled teen sort out some strange feelings he’s been having recently. Don’t miss this Very Special Episode of KSK.

Update 2:50: Dana Milbank writes, “At Rupert Murdoch’s cable network, the entity that birthed and nurtured the Tea Party movement, Election Day was the culmination of two years of hard work to bring down Barack Obama – and it was time for an on-air celebration of a job well done.”

While the thrust of what Milbank is getting at is true–Glenn Beck has played a large (if not irreplaceable) role in stoking the Tea Party movement, the entire Tea Party moment began on CNBC with non-politico Rick Santelli. Does no one remember?

As promised, I’m going to venture a guess at what’s happening. Some thoughts, in no particular order.

* Two weeks ago, the CW seemed to have 50-ish seats as the best bet.

* Last week, the CW seemed to believe that 60 seats was the most likely GOP pickup.

* Looking around, I believe that as of Sunday night, 70 is the new 60.

* The major reason for this shift was Gallup’s release of its final generic ballot numbers. As my buddy Jay Cost explains, the final GOP generic lead in 1994 was +6.4 and they wound up with a net of 54 seats. Gallup’s final number this time is GOP +15. The RCP average is only GOP +9.4. If you drew a straight-line, this would put the Republican pickup today somewhere in the range of net +79 and +126.

* I doubt that this straight-line projection is much help, but then again nobody knows because we’ve never seen numbers like this in the modern era.

* Also of some note is the gerrymandering of districts along racial lines. This practice produces a reliable number of minority House members, but at the cost of somewhat overstating the electoral throw-weight of Democrats in national polls. The astounding difference between Obama’s approval ratings among racial groups suggests that the polls we look at today may understate how well Republicans will perform.

At the end of the day, who knows what this all means. Predictions are just a parlor game and we’ll know soon enough. But since parlor games are fun, I’ll throw out a guess: Republicans pick up a net of +80.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they finished at +65 or +70. And I also wouldn’t be totally shocked if they finished +90. Ninety seats seems totally within the realm of the possible, if not the likely. (I would be very surprised if the pickup was sub-60.)

Update: I’m still not sure what number would shake Democrats into worrying about Obama in 2012 (meaning, pushing for a primary challenge or for him to not run for reelection). I suspect that if such a number exists, it’s likely to be very, very high. And in any case, it’s unlikely Dems will reach for the eject button on Obama, however much they might like to.

However, if a Democrat was so inclined to punch out of Obamaworld, there’s an easy line to take: That Obama has already accomplished so much for the country that the most important thing left now is to consolidate those gains and to make sure Those Evil Republicans don’t repeal them. In fact, Obama’s contributions are so immense that they’re more important than the man himself, even!

Why is it that Hollywood hasn’t done a remake of The Road Warrior yet? It’s a hugely commercial property that’s got two generations of fresh audience in addition to the massive, built-in cult following. The effects are ripe for updating and the story is appealing enough to make it a global property. Plus, toys.

The remake machine has been tearing through properties at an astounding rate. Why not The Road Warrior? Must have complicated rights.

PS: I’m not suggesting that the original would be improved on. Just that a remake makes a ton of corporate sense.