I'm also not exactly surprised by NARAL Pro-Choice America's endorsement of Sen. Obama (interesting that they left their local affiliates uninformed). The day their endorsed Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont was the day I stopped paying any attention to them.

I'd just like to say this to Clinton supporters. The spate of endorsements of Sen. Obama will continue. Every victory of Sen. Clinton's will be followed immediately by high profile endorsements to blunt the impact of that victory - it's called politics. We can't let these things take away our energy or focus in getting people to the polls in the upcoming states to support Sen. Clinton. If you are concerned or upset by the rationale of some of these endorsements, I suggest writing polite emails of disagreement and contributing in some way to Sen. Clinton's campaign. She is at the tail end of a historic race. One of the reasons why pro-Obama forces have been trying to force her to quit is to prevent the possibility of her winning the popular vote. It's in our best interest to be constructive in our advocacy of Sen. Clinton and enable her to win the popular vote. The superdelegates might still tip the nomination to Sen. Obama even if Sen. Clinton wins the popular vote and that is their prerogative and they are allowed to do so per the rules of the primary. However, if that scenario happens, we can make it clear to the entire world that the superdelegates went against the winner of the popular vote. That alone is worth fighting for.

A final request. Let's not respond to endorsements of Sen. Obama by behaving in the same way that we have criticized some Obama supporters of behaving. We can be and should be better than that. You are entirely within your rights to criticize the endorsements but please do so in a polite and thoughtful way.

P.S. Remember the real Fighting Democrat left in this race - "Clinton was brain behind the [Senate] war room".

Virtually all the nation's political attention in recent weeks has focused on the compelling state-by-state presidential nomination struggle between two Democrats and the potential for party-splitting strife over there.

But in the Texas Rep. Ron Paul and his libertarian-minded GOP backers are collecting delegates at the local level and planning a revolt against Sen. John McCain at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in Septembereantime, quietly, largely under the radar of most people, the forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in Minnesota at the beginning of September.

Paul's presidential candidacy has been correctly dismissed all along in terms of winning the nomination. He was even excluded as irrelevant by Fox News from a nationally-televised GOP debate in New Hampshire.

But what's been largely overlooked is Paul's candidacy as a reflection of a powerful lingering dissatisfaction with the Arizona senator among the party's most conservative conservatives. As anticipated in late March in The Ticket, that situation could be exacerbated by today's expected announcement from former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia for the Libertarian Party's presidential nod, a slot held by Paul in 1988.

And speaking of exacerbations, of course, Barr did exactly that. Taegan Goddard even thinks Barr's candidacy could put Georgia into play:

With former Republican Rep. Bob Barr's announcement yesterday that he'll run for president as a Libertarian, he could actually play a very critical role in deciding the next president.

Most people think Barr's candidacy will drain votes from Sen. John McCain. Though Barr says he's not getting in the race to play a spoiler, that's clearly how he'll make the biggest impact. Hiring Ross Perot's former campaign manager doesn't mean he'll gather support anywhere near the levels Perot did in 1992 and 1996. But he can reach single digit support in many states. Ralph Nader was a spoiler in the 2000 election with just 2.7% of the national vote.

The one state to watch is Barr's home state of Georgia, where he could conceivably get five or more percent of the vote. Georgia has long been seen as part of the GOP base. However, when combined with the large numbers of black voters expected to come out for Sen. Barack Obama, Barr's candidacy could possibly tip the state's 15 electoral votes to the Democrats. That could be the difference in a close election.

Goddard goes on to say that because Barr opposes the war, he could drain votes from presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama. I think he twice overstates Barr's impact, as very few Obama voters would switch to a right wing extremist like Barr, but I also doubt Barr can put a deep red state like Georgia into play. Even so, both Barr and Paul may prove to be headaches for John McCain. Already, in recent primaries, roughly a fourth of the Republican vote is going to people who are not John McCain. That could be telling. In what may be a very tight electoral college map, a couple headaches like that could be decisive in true swing states.

John McCain has been engaged in the fight against global warming for years, even at the expense of breaking with Republican orthodoxy and with President Bush on the issue. But it was still an important moment this week when Mr. McCain, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, decided to raise the profile of climate change in the 2008 campaign. We have clearly entered the post-Bush era of policy and politics on climate change. However this election turns out, the United States will have a president who supports mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases. It is possible to begin to believe in the prospect of serious Congressional action.

The "post-Bush era" is not exactly a high bar. One could step over it without one's feet leaving the ground. Being better than Bush on environmental issues is like being smarter than Bush- most sentient beings are. Most non-sentient beings, too, for that matter. But as Joseph Romm recently pointed out in Salon:

While McCain may understand the scale of the climate problem, he does not appear to understand the scale of the solution. He understands the country needs to put in place a mandatory cap on GHG emissions and a trading system to energize American innovation. But in a recent Republican debate, he denied that a cap and trade system is a mandate, even though it would arguably be the most far-reaching government mandate ever legislated.

Moreover, like most conservatives, he doesn't understand or accept the critical role government must play to make that system succeed. Besides initiating a cap-and-trade system, the next president must:

1. Appoint judges who won't gut climate-change efforts.

2. Appoint leaders and staff of key federal agencies who take climate change seriously and believe in the necessary solutions.

3. Embrace an aggressive and broad-based technology deployment strategy to keep the cost of the cap-and-trade system as low as possible.

4. Lead a change in utility regulations to encourage, rather than discourage, energy efficiency and clean energy.

5. Offer strong public advocacy to reverse the years of muzzling and misinformation of the Bush administration.

McCain, of course, would appoint industry lackies such as Alito and Roberts to the Supreme Court. His pool of candidates to appoint to federal agencies who both believe in global warming's existence and are Republicans could fit in a thimble. Furthermore:

Yet when Grist asked McCain, "What's your position on subsidies for green technologies like wind and solar?" he said:

"I'm not one who believes that we need to subsidize things. The wind industry is doing fine, the solar industry is doing fine. In the '70s, we gave too many subsidies and too much help, and we had substandard products sold to the American people, which then made them disenchanted with solar for a long time."

Incredible. Nuclear power, a mature technology that provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity, must be heavily subsidized -- even after more than $66 billion in federal subsidies since World War II (five times what was spent on renewable and eight times what was spent on efficiency, according to the Congressional Research Service). But subsidize solar photovoltaics, a rapidly evolving technology that comprises 0.1 percent of U.S. electricity? No, we can't help them.

Like most Republicans, McCain also opposes the very concept of government regulation, so don't expect any leadership with the utilities.

The energy plans of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seek to change electric utility regulations and toughen appliance standards. Both would set standards for renewable power and fuels. Both would spend $150 billion over 10 years on developing and deploying clean technology, green buildings and advanced electric grid infrastructure.

McCain believes the most important strategy is a "cap and trade" system that creates a price for carbon dioxide in the form of a tradable emissions permit, with the goal of mobilizing the marketplace to solve the climate problem. Yet while a cap-and-trade system is necessary to solve the climate problem, it is not sufficient. Indeed, if you adopt a cap-and-trade system without an aggressive federal effort to encourage the deployment of clean technologies, you are almost sure to fail politically, probably sooner than later.

To anyone paying attention to anything other than McCain's lip service, he would be a complete failure on the most important issue humanity has ever faced. The Times Editorial Page wants you to believe that McCain is nearly as good as the Democratic candidates:

At this stage, it would be a mistake to make too much of these differences, including the overall targets. With emissions continuing to rise, and the demand for energy expected to grow, any plan that calls for a big downward wrench in emissions will demand huge investments in cleaner ways of producing energy and far more fuel-efficient vehicles. Above all, it will require determined and courageous leadership from a president capable of conveying hard truths and asking a lot of the country.

The Times Editorial Board are not serious people. They do not pay attention to facts. Romm does, and offers a alightly different conclusion:

Given the lost Bush decade, avoiding catastrophic global warming will be one of the most difficult things this country and the world has ever accomplished. Only mandated emissions reductions coupled with aggressive federal tech deployment strategies (managed by appointees who believe in climate change and those strategies) can save future generations from a ruined planet. Only strong and consistent public advocacy by the next president and his entire administration, along with Congress, can reverse the years of muzzling and misinformation of the Bush administration and its conservative allies.

McCain does not appear to be that advocate. He is a conservative who happens to be on the only intellectually defensible side of the climate change debate. But he is still a conservative, and the vast majority of the solutions to global warming are progressive in nature -- they require strong government action, including major federal efforts to spur clean technology. McCain will inevitably appoint to key positions a great many conservatives who are skeptical of global warming and government-driven solutions. And he has promised to oversee the transition to a smaller government -- which will be inevitable if he slashes spending in order to make the Bush tax cuts permanent while funding the Iraq war for the duration of his presidency.

McCain belongs in the Senate, where he is a rare conservative vote for action on climate change. But a President McCain is not likely to be the leader this country and the world needs to maintain the planet's livability for our children and the next 50 generations.

Remember when the media tried to tell us Bush and Al Gore were essentially the same? Eight years later, and they're playing the same game: McCain the maverick, McCain the moderate, McCain the sane conservative. The Big Lie can't be allowed to again succeed.

Political: Sen. Clinton appears to be staying in the race because she really believes she has a much better chance of delivering the White House to Democrats in November than Sen. Obama. I have seen a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about who has a better chance of winning against Sen. McCain and obviously supporters of Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton both have strong views about their respective candidates' electability. My view has been unchanged since December. I strongly believe Sen. Clinton has a much better chance of beating her Republican opponent - esp. Sen. McCain - than Sen. Obama, once the GOP and media attacks begin. The events of the last couple of months have only solidified my view. More importantly, neither candidate will have enough pledged delegates to cross the delegate threshold (more on this below), there is just a slight difference between Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama on the popular vote and she's still got a shot at coming out ahead on this metric when all the races are over (see Jay Cost's spreadsheet where Sen. Clinton just beat his popular vote estimate for WV, and Cost's article from last week "Not Quite Yet"). Moreover, according to the rules of the primary, the role of superdelegates is to exercise independent judgment, and given the other not so minor detail that Sen. Obama has not won yet, there is absolutely no reason for her to quit now. The fact that her chances of winning are low doesn't mean her chances of winning are zero. When you are this close on the popular vote and creaming your opponent by over 40% after he has been crowned the nominee (by the media and big chunks of the blogosphere) then you have every reason to stay in the race. [Fun fact: Nebraska - discussed later in this post].

Don't Let The Media Define the Rules of Elections: One of the fundamental values I have sought to see in Democrats is that they not quit before the votes are counted and certainly not quit because the media asks them to quit. I was appalled at what happened in 2000 when Vice President Gore was hounded in the media and declared a "sore loser" even before a Florida recount. I was very disappointed in 2004 when Sen. Kerry gave up quickly without a proper recount in Ohio, ostensibly because he didn't want to be branded a "sore loser". I am sick and tired of Democrats who refuse to stand up for democracy and who are more concerned about what elitist jokers like Tim Russert, David Broder, Frank Rich or (fill in the blanks) think of them than they care about the Democratic party's ideals - one of which is making sure as many people can vote and another being that every vote should be counted. So, if Sen. Clinton can afford to campaign till June 3rd and she and her supporters continue to fund her campaign (I certainly will), I would consider myself indebted to her if she does exactly that and demonstrates that the era of the media ordering candidates around is effectively over. I want a Fighting Democrat as President and as good as Sen. Obama may be as a candidate, there's only one Fighting Democrat left in this race and that's Sen. Hillary Clinton (also see here). As Emily's List President Ellen Malcolm said recently in her op-ed focusing on the calls for Sen. Clinton to quit - "winners never quit and...quitters never win". In fact, there is simply no other American candidate in modern history that I'm aware of who withstood absolutely unprecedented and sustained levels of hostility in the media and blogosphere, was outspent by huge margins in state after state (even WV), was insulted and demeaned in the worst manner possible - sometimes by alleged progressives, and yet, stayed resolute and focused and revealed the true fighter that she is. Her blowout victory in West Virginia where she amassed an impressive popular vote gain under record turnout follows a series of victories in big states despite calls for her to drop out - this is particularly noteworthy coming as it did after the morale-depressing commentary in the media last week about how the race was over. [Big bonus for Democrats if Sen. Clinton becomes the nominee: She is building a massive base of Democratic voters who don't trust the media to tell the truth about Democrats (like her) and who have deep contempt for the gasbags in the media. This is a dream come true for me because building voter skepticism about the media has been one of the principal failings of the Democratic party for a long time and she's almost single-handedly accomplishing what to me should be one of the holy grails of Democratic and progressive politics, i.e., making voters realize that the media is elitist and often dishonest in how it transmits false, often Republican (and increasingly fake "progressive") talking points about Democrats. Another holy grail that she's on the right side of - she has been long been firmly in support of funding alternative progressive institutions and groups outside the Democratic party apparatus that are critical to ensuring the long term success of the progressive movement; contrast that with Sen. Obama's inclinations.]

Universal Healthcare: Yet another reason why she should not drop out has to do with one of the biggest issues facing the country - something that affects the poor and working class of all races and backgrounds - universal healthcare. As I have said before, Sen. Clinton represents the only remaining opportunity to really get universal healthcare passed in the next 4 years. Granted, the chances of her getting it passed are less than 50% but those odds are much better than the odds that truly universal healthcare will get passed by an Obama administration (0%). To me, this alone is an important enough reason for her to stay in the race to be the Democratic nominee, especially given the other considerations above.

Florida and Michigan: It would be disastrous for the Democratic party to disenfranchise Michigan and Florida. Moreover, as Obama supporter Chris Bowers noted last month in his post "No Objective Delegate Math", the magic delegate number is 2208, not 2025. Since revote primaries in FL and MI were not supported by the Obama campaign, we have no choice but to use the results of the previous elections to decide how MI/FL votes/delegates get allocated. Big Tent Democrat has more on this. The DNC Rules Committee very much has the right to seat these delegates according to the rules of this primary and until they make their final decision on this (and we can be sure that the egregious Donna Brazile will try to not significantly undo what she did), any declarations of victory would be no different than prematurely declaring Mission Accomplished.

Let me stop there and let readers provide more of their own reasons, but a brief note on Sen. Clinton's win in West Virginia - a 41% victory margin and a nearly 150,000 popular vote gain (which would have likely been even higher if Sen. Edwards had not been on the ballot and which erased roughly 70% of Sen. Obama's popular vote gain last week). It has been downright depressing to see some people stereotype lower income working class whites as racists and distort Sen. Clinton's argument about working class voters, when the fact remains that both Al Gore and John Kerry lost white working class voters by huge margins (and lost WV) not because of racism.

Let's close with some observations on Nebraska. Nebraska held a primary yesterday not just for the Republican party but also for the Democratic party - the latter being irrelevant when it comes to delegates but important to assess the impact of caucuses v. primaries. When Nebraska held its Democratic caucus on Super Tuesday (Feb), the turnout was around 38760 and Sen. Obama won the caucus 68%-32%, giving him a popular vote margin of almost 14000 votes. Yesterday, the primary attracted 93161 voters and the result was 49-47% in favor of Sen. Obama, with Mike Gravel taking up the remaining 4%. In other words, a 36-point caucus victory was reduced to a 2-point primary victory for Sen. Obama along with a much lower popular vote margin of just ~2600 votes. This lends further credence to the points I have made previously. Taking no credit away from Sen. Obama for his caucus victories, the fact remains that his large victory margins in caucuses are clearly inflated significantly by the lower turnouts in the caucuses and may not be representative of any unique advantages for him in the general election. This is consistent with previous trends and is important to note because it cuts against the conventional wisdom about the significance of those caucus victories. As Anglachel observed yesterday:

OK, I can see a loss in a state where demographics favor your opponent, but 41%? Of the front-running presumptive nominee? Who outspent Hillary 2-to-1 and has the entire MSM lined up singing his praises?

[...]

In contest after contest, we see him failing to turn out the massive numbers that his allegedly unstoppable movement says they command. We see dominance in highly restrictive caucuses. We see him turning out super-majorities of AA voters. We see him dominating urban areas where you have upper income liberals. We see the college aged children of those liberal families voting in university areas.

What we aren't seeing is any new coalitions for the Democratic Party coming out of his organizing. We aren't seeing his share of the electorate increase. If anything, it is declining, given his defeats in OH, TX, PA, IN and WV, and what looks like a royal shellacking in the works in KY....In a Nebraska primary held today, which was like Washington State's with no delegates awarded, he's barely 2 points ahead. This was a caucus state that went for him 60/40 [Eriposte note: actually 68-32]. Hmm, maybe he didn't have all that much support there? Maybe he won big there because the voters didn't turn out?

It is beginning to look like the main reason for Obama's red state caucus successes is the absence of voters, not the presence of new ones.

Without a doubt, Sen. Obama has a strong and deep following within the traditional Democratic base, but the evidence that he is building a new and broad coalition is much less compelling when we analyze the demographics of the recent races and deflate the results of the caucuses by acknowledging the reality of turnouts. It is also clear that ever since being declared as the likely nominee who has the nomination pretty much sewn up, he has been repeatedly underperforming the scenarios from his own campaign at least since April - in PA, IN, Guam and now WV (NC was the only exception). That says something about the state of this race and what it means for the Fall.

P.S. Andrewwalker08 has more on the Nebraska results and what they mean in the context of the DNC's stated principles - here.

I am also troubled this morning by the news that Team Obama wants to control all the Democratic money this campaign cycle themselves. The campaign has apparently put the word out that Obama doesn’t want his supporters to contribute to the pro-Democratic independent committees that make up the emerging part of a counter-GOP infrastructure. The campaign may be arguing that it wants to ensure a unified message consistent with Obama’s own, and therefore doesn’t want any independent players doing a Tier Two negative campaign against McCain, especially if former Clinton people head those groups. However, a successful Democratic candidate at the national level needs a Tier One/Tier Two effort to win, whereby the candidate stays on the high road pitching voters a positive message himself while Tier Two organizations pin the GOP opponent up against the wall and keep them on the defensive through surrogates that have some distance from the campaign. This is the way successful GOP campaigns have operated against Democrats for years, and Democrats had reached the point of parity with the GOP over the last several years, with better funding. It was supposed to be an essential part of the pushback effort against McCain this year, and Obama just pulled the rug out from under it, because he apparently wants to control the whole message, whatever that will be. I guess I wasn’t aware that the whole party was being taken over by the Obama movement.

Regardless of what you may think about Hillary Clinton's campaign, no one can now doubt that she would have thrown the kitchen sink at McCain using every club in the arsenal during the fall campaign. If Obama thinks that controlling everything himself through a single message from one point of attack is what the primary voters endorsed when he won all these contests, then Democrats have a right to know now what exactly that message will be this fall, and how tough and ruthless his campaign will be in carrying it out. I don't want to find out in September after Obama's defunded the progressive infrastructure through unilateral disarmament that he feels it is beneath him to go toe-to-toe with McCain and fight fire with fire.

California's new Speaker for the California State Assembly is also the first African-American female to hold the top post in any state. Welcome Karen Bass.

The old Republican playbook of demonizing your opponent by associating them with someone negative doesn't seem to be working this year. Maybe demagoguery has a limit when people realize you are the one who's been screwing them. Wonder how badly the Republicans would lose if the only thing they could run on is their accomplishments.

Your turn now.

I'll be out tonight, but here's the CNN Results link. Terrible news network, great election night website. Oh- not that it means anything, but Hillary Clinton won. Big. Very big.

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"

The poor little child. How he suffers.

Has there ever been a more despicable excuse for a human being inside the Oval Office?

A list by agency of 51 federal health and safety regulations proposed or adopted since 2005 that could make it more difficult for consumers to sue businesses for faulty products:

The meaning of today's results will be spun in the obvious ways by the obvious people. That white working class voters will once again favor Clinton by a huge margin will be, by many, written off as attributable to racism. That Obama wins African American voters by absolutely staggering margins never is. And some will once again ignore the possibility that Clinton is dominating the demographic that dominates the West Virginia electorate because she speaks better to their issues. It's easier for some to denigrate certain demographics than to admit that maybe their candidate just isn't closing the deal on that demographic's meat-and-potatoes issues, while the wonkier Clinton is. And the obvious people who have been making obvious demands that Clinton get out of the race will once again ignore the obvious: if he is going to beat McCain, Obama is going to have to find a way to reach the demographics he is not now reaching. Don Frederick and Andrew Malcolm, of the L.A. Times, were right: by staying in until the end, Clinton is actually helping Obama, whose probably enourmous losses in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico would be all the more glaring, were those losses to a candidate no longer in the race; but that still fails to address the continuing problem. Even with the media having buried her. Even with the shrillosphere having buried her. Even with a cacophony of haka having declared her a traitor to all that is right and good in the Universe, hundreds of thousands of people in a small state are today turning out to vote for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Some will disparage them. Some will ignore them. Some will pretend that their demographic will still do the right thing, come November. But anyone who is serious of both mind and purpose will take today's result as but yet another measure of the difficult and uncertain task that lies ahead.

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll shows that a majority of Democrats across the country don’t want Hillary to drop out. Furthermore, a majority want Obama to unify the party by having Hillary as his running mate. Although this will never happen, what may very well happen is for Obama to select a Hillary supporter from a key state as his running mate, like Ohio’s popular governor Ted Strickland.

Obama has a seven-point lead over McCain in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll out today, 51-44%. The poll notes that Republicans are unpopular among the country, suffering a 21-point disadvantage against Democrats in generic comparisons, yet McCain escapes that damage because seemingly he isn’t being viewed as a Republican. Part of that is successful marketing by his team, part of that is adoring fluffing by his media friends, and part of that is the fact that it’s only May and Obama hasn’t yet hammered him for several months as just another GOP enabler of the worst president in modern times (now down to 31% approval in this poll, and less than that elsewhere).

McCain’s team is now advocating an idea that may doom them: having unmoderated debates with Obama around the country during the summer. I’m sure Team McOld thinks it will be swell for Straight Talk to have multiple opportunities to tell Obama to his face that he is an inexperienced, tax-raising terrorist sympathizer, but I suspect that after he tries this once Obama will mop the floor with him. At least he better mop the floor with him. I don’t want to hear any more crap from him about “respecting” McCain’s service after McCain hits him in the face with a rhetorical fusillade, and Obama better take the gloves off and bury this guy multiple times. Obama may have an easier time now dealing with the expected smears from McCain’s team, with news that Americans now trust Democrats to handle better than Republicans all top ten issues identified by Rasmussen, including terrorism and national security.

Similarly now, McCain is racing to recast himself as a conservative who will do something on global warming. Yesterday, McCain separated himself from Bush's inaction on the issue by saying eight years of neglect was wrong. He supported caps on emissions and a trading system along the lines of what he and Joe Lieberman have touted for years. The only problem with McCain's sudden indignation against Bush's record is that McCain was a member of the majority party in the Senate for much of this decade, and was in a position to be a leader on this issue with broad bipartisan support already in place. And yet never in those six years did McCain take on Bush directly and mount a bipartisan assault on the administration's negligence. He had the right issue, the right pulpit, the street cred, and broad bipartisan support for the taking, and yet he never hammered away on this issue.

And now suddenly, when he is running as the Better Bush, he wants us to believe that this is a major issue that has his attention, when he couldn't be bothered to challenge Bush directly on it for eight years?

Your turn now.