Offline events are likely to keep me tied up for the next couple of days, so here’s a buffet of some of the more thought-provoking comments and analyses around the blogosphere…

Former Giuliani guy Patrick Ruffini says the field needed to attack his guy a month ago and didn’t; the rest of the field needed to attack Romney now and isn’t.

The Hedgehog Report looks at some head-to-head polling between Republican candidates and Hillary in some key blue Midwestern states. It’s an uphill climb for the GOP candidates, but not insurmountable.

One of my favorite poll-watcher and debunkers, Jay Cost, writes:

I think that such an occurrence – a contested convention – is more likely to occur this cycle than in any cycle in recent memory. First, there are so many states that are voting on February 5th that momentum may not be as influential this year as it has been in the past. If those February 5th primaries were to be spread out over the course of two weeks, the later states could use the earlier states as a cue to who is “electable,” and therefore converge around a single frontrunner. This will not happen to the same extent this cycle.

That comment comes in a column about Florida’s fight with the DNC. Anybody else wonder if the Florida Democratic Party has developed something of a victim/martyr’s complex? They’ve been told that they were cheated and “disenfranchised” in 2000 for so long by the rest of the party, that they feel entitled to hold their primary whenever they like, no matter how much it sets off a domino-effect with the other states. Howard Dean tells them no, and tries to return some semblence of order to the process, and they turn on him as if he were Jeb Bush or Katherine Harris.