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- Finally, after six long weeks of pointless scandals, commentary, meta-commentary, and meta-meta-commentary, we're actually going to have a result. Of course, it's unlikely to end the primary, but it will end some of the speculation. Slate's Chadwick Matlin has a good summary of what effect various vote percentages are likely to have. Also see Mori, Tom, and Holly Yeager on turnout.
- It appears that, as in many other states, Obama will do better in terms of delegates than his popular vote percentage would suggest.
- Much is being made of Clinton's claims that she'll stay in the nomination until the status of Florida and Michigan is resolved and possibly until the convention. That's silly. Of course she's saying that -- to do otherwise would be to admit how unlikely a victory for her is. It's like Wile E. Coyote -- he only falls when he realizes there's no ground underneath him.
- As Dana reported earlier, all three candidates have spread false and dangerous information about a mythical link between vaccines and autism.
- Clinton's favorablity is lower than Obama and McCain's in New York. Ouch.
- Bill Clinton, meanwhile, bizarrely accused the Obama campaign of playing the race card against him and then angrily attacked a reporter for saying he'd said it (even though he actually did).
- As Tom pointed out, this independent anti-Obama ad is a disgusting bit of fear-mongering, but it also strikes me as laughably incoherent. The narrator solemnly intones the details of the deaths of various people -- building up suspense about what exactly they have in common besides gang violence -- and then ends anticlimactically with the fact that Obama voted against the death penalty for certain gang related crimes.
- McCain, the man who showily refuses to use the Phoenix-Washington nonstop flight he helped create, isn't troubled by helping a wealthy friend make millions of dollars at taxpayer expense in return for donations (the friend in question says this explicitly). McCain is very big on displays of ethical self-flagellation, but he's so convinced of his own rectitude that when he actually does face an ethical dilemma he completely flubs it.
- Finally, if you're distressed about Obama's "bitter" comments, take comfort in the fact that it could be worse: he could have called migrant farmworkers "illiterate peasants," like a Colorado state legislator did. (No word on whether the legislator then ordered them to bring him more grapes and keep the palm-frond fans moving.)
--Sam Boyd
