Mark Penn Blackwater

That Clinton finally fired him as chief consultant -- though strangely retaining him as pollster, not realizing that failure to fire cleanly is as bad as not firing at all -- is a Hail Mary pass, but it's the best supporters can hope for.

Penn may have lost his Chief Strategist title, but he continues to be an advisor to Clinton.

Mark Penn should have been fired back in September and again in January. He should have been fired after Super Tuesday, and fired after the 11 contests that followed.

lived there. Twice. I know from Ohio. What I now believe to be true is that: "As Ohio goes, no longer goes the nation."

As the Clinton campaign struggles to pull out of a potentially terminal nosedive just four days before the decisive Ohio and Texas primaries, much of ...

In a very successful week for its most notorious client, Mark Penn's firm was able to get Blackwater CEO Erik Prince several major TV appearances. Lob-ball questions were included at no extra charge.

Are we okay with a bunch of lawless mercenaries being the public face of the U.S.? Strange that we're not winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis, isn't it?

This week, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's top strategist, desperately tried to spin away the reasons Burson-Marsteller, the PR giant he oversees, had taken on Blackwater as a client. It was only a temporary assignment; it was the work of a GOP-friendly subsidiary; Penn "did no work on the Blackwater account," said Team Hillary. But why hasn't Penn been forced to choose between advising Hillary and overseeing a client list that has included Philip Morris, Merck, and Ahmad Chalabi? When George Bush ran in 2000, he insisted Karl Rove sell a political consulting firm Rove had founded. Questions to the Clinton campaign: How much was Burson-Marsteller paid by Blackwater? As CEO of the company, Penn will share in the Blackwater revenue, right? Who, exactly, worked on the account and what, exactly, did they do? And memo to Hillary: You know there's a problem when your top strategist's behavior makes Bush and Rove look like paragons of ethics.

We're being told that Sen. Clinton and her staff combine "experience" and management savvy with the ability and desire to create "change." This example of poor judgment casts doubts on both claims.