The Crossed Pond

At least it’s hard for me not to read it that way.

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius should stop taking Communion until she repudiates her support for the “serious moral evil” of abortion, the Catholic archbishop for northeast Kansas says.

Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann, of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, also criticized the governor Friday for her recent veto of a bill imposing new restrictions on abortion providers.

Naumann said he wrote to Sebelius in August and asked her to refrain from Communion but learned recently that she’d participated in the sacrament at a church in Topeka. He said he again wrote and asked her to respect his request and “not require from me any additional pastoral actions.”

Naumann is, of course, in a position of direct authority over me, so I will refrain from commentary on the matter. Except to say that the timing of it absolutely could not be worse for her VP prospects, and that it’s impossible for me not to see that as the product of, shall we say, intelligent design.

Anchor: “It seems you have made your decision, you voted for a candidate, and you’re saying that this candidate you voted for will be the candidate you potentially will endorse that looks…highly likely? If I can use your words?”

Edwards: “I’d say that’s very likely”

Anchor: “Okay. But I’m close. I just gotta find out…”

Edwards: “I just voted for him on Tuesday.”

Oops. Careless pronoun there, dude.

Busted.

Wish the anchor would have caught that. It would have made for brilliant television.

Mitt Romney, on not mentioning atheists or agnostics in his religious address:

“Upon reflection, I came to understand that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity … an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty… If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God.”

Amen.

I have been thinking about this as I have watched Mrs. Clinton’s slow burn amid her husbands purple-faced tirades and gaffs. I did a little looking to see if anyone else was pondering this notion and didn’t readily find anything too recent, but I ran across a somewhat prescient piece from back in January at Binder’s Blog. While Mr. Binder’s admonition was based on Hillary winning, which is about as likely as Ted Kennedy becoming proficient at Parkour, he does describe what many see as perhaps her biggest flaw: her husband.

I had lunch a few days ago with five women. Two were liberal Democrats and two Republicans. The two Democrats said they could not support you. The reason was Bill. The ABC’s of politics came into view: “Anyone but Clinton.”

His presence might be your biggest handicap in November. The public, rightly or wrongly, currently wants a change from Bush, but that does not mean they want a Clinton Restoration.

Well, she isn’t even going to be invited to the election, let alone win it, Denis, but your point is well taken. Now that her destiny train has gone off the tracks on a trestle spanning the cauldron of a live volcano and her daughter is no longer a child, will she face the inconvenient truth of her marriage of convenience?

And I found this post on Daily Kos from about a month later.

Think about it. Everything with them has been premised on this sort of political partnership where they’re bound solely by mutual ambition. When HRC loses, that ambition is for all intents and purposes frustrated forevermore. HRC no longer gains much political advantage from her association with Bill, and Bill’s interests in regaining presidential power on HRC’s coattails would be forever thwarted. They’d have to ask themselves, what’s the point.

Clearly people were thinking about it back then; what about now? Not to stoop to Rojas’ fescennine level or anything, but what do you think? With Hillary getting the smackdown of a lifetime from all quarters, and the glue of ambition that seems to hold things together in Chappaqua melting with each passing day, will Hillary Clinton give Bill the boot?

I think that, barring being tapped as VP by Obama (which, by the way, has about the same odds as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sitting down at a Seder with Jackie Mason) she has to be at least seriously considering it.

Rasmussen Reports has been tracking the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination daily for nineteen months…

However, while Senator Clinton has remained close and competitive in every meaningful measure, she is a close second and the race is over. It has become clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. [...]

With this in mind, Rasmussen Reports will soon end our daily tracking of the Democratic race and focus exclusively on the general election competition between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

Ouch.

On health:

Good sex, scallions, and dandelions are the best medicine for our lungs.

On the Democratic primary:

Whom did the donkeys not help? The donkeys did not help the money. The donkeys did help the world.

On the fluoridation mind control conspiracy:

21st century, I hope I am not asking you too late, but before I die, my last wish will be to have a drink of pure water.

On…???:

What is POOR? Poor took the first step, and will make the first step.

And on life:

Why is the word SMART unable to help NATURE?

Why indeed.

Why indeed.

http://ravijaundoo.com/rfanuka/

The new law of the internet: if you do ANYTHING badly enough, it eventually goes viral. And to that end…

Pretty cool.

George W. Bush is at a 60% approval rating.

Among Republicans.

So finds Gallup.

I’m glad to see John McCain starting to tune his message more to reflect that. I think his performance on the Daily Show last night was a very good handling of this issue. When asked point blank if his closeness to Bush will pose a problem, he didn’t chose to throw any bones to the Republican masses, didn’t throw in a half-hearted defense of Bush’s presidency, but he didn’t throw it under the bus either, he just very lucidly said he understands that he’s running his campaign from President, and Americans are looking for change. It was deftly handled, I thought. And, I expect it to become his staple response (even better, it may be true).

Still, I know he’s a lame duck, but there appears to not even be a fleeting nostalgia for Bush as he passes into history. I’ve said all along that Republicans are less enamored of Bush then most of their self-appointed spokespeople give them credit for.

Oh yeah, and one more great find from the Gallup poll.

PRINCETON, NJ — Barack Obama’s current level of support among white voters in a head-to-head matchup against John McCain is no worse than John Kerry’s margin of support among whites against George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

Much of the talk following Tuesday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries has focused on just how electable Obama — now the highly probable nominee — will be in the general election. The Clinton campaign has argued that Obama’s weaknesses among white voters and blue-collar voters will hurt him against McCain in the fall.

But it appears that the way Obama stacks up against McCain at this point is similar to the way in which Kerry performed against Bush in 2004 within several key racial, educational, religious, and gender subgroups.

And anyone want to argue that Obama doesn’t have much, much more room to expand than Kerry?

Did you see what I did with the title there? Is it a review of a crappy book or merely a crappy review of a book? Or (drumroll) maybe both?

Allow me to explain. I read bad books. That is, I read fantasy books, most of which are, alas, terrible. As if that’s not bad enough, I also read the fantasy fiction based on Dungeons and Dragons, which is what’s left after you’ve scraped the bottom of that deep fantasy barrel.

For the uninitiated reader, I should provide some background to the particular crime against literature that is the majority of this particular genre.

There is a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons called Forgotten Realms, that has been around since first edition AD&D after Gary Gygax got the boot and TSR (the former producers of the game) de-emphasised the World of Greyhawk (Gygax’s campaign world, also the setting for some truly horrible novels written by Gygax himself). Forgotten Realms is an improbable potboiler of a world, full of opportunities for regular adventures on which your party of nerdly adventurers can embark. It is also the setting for a remarkably large number of bad fantasy books, too numerous to mention although I will give my normal shout-out for R.A. Salvatore as the dodgiest producer of fantasy fiction this side of the apparently self-adoring and inexplicably popular Terry Goodkind (purveyor of “Wizard’s First Rule” and other snorefests).

Anyhow, perhaps I am imagining it, but there seems to be a strain of Forgotten Realms literature which attempts to paint the Realms in a more ‘realistic’ light, with morally ambivalent characters and more sophisticated political issues. I could be imagining that, however; when one has read enough of this sort of material, a creeping numbness (arguably an essential prerequisite for intellectual survival) could be responsible for hiding emerging themes or, alternatively, for creating phantoms. In any case, this book is in that, albeit possibly imaginary, tradition of creeping Forgotten Realms fantasy realism.

It’s not that all the Forgotten Realms books are bad. One of the earliest of the readable ones was “Azure Bonds” by Jeff Grubb and Kate Novak which, although it loses its way somewhat, was enjoyable enough for the AD&D player with an interest in the Realms. For that matter, “Cormyr” by Ed Greenwood (Realms creator) And Jeff Grubb (again) also has a certain charm for that same reader (to wit, me). Other Realms authors — Lisa Smedman, for example — whilst giving the impression that the payday is not sufficiently large to merit the A-game effort, do manage to at least pique the interest, and lessen the bank balance, of that Realms-interested D&Der.

Which brings me to Neversfall, an apparently standalone (fantasy is also sorely beset by trilogies and longer series, but that’s for another post) novel from the “Citadels” series and written by Ed Gentry. Let me say first that it’s not a crappy book at all, at least not in a bad way. Why, then, is my post entitled “crappy book reviews: I”? I am glad that you asked. I bought the book somewhat expecting it to be crap, which, coupled with the realisation that the recommendations from other authors on the back of the book appeared to be limited to other Forgotten Realms authors, encouraged me to post a review of the expectedly crappy book. There are some other sites that review these books, but not (at least that I have seen) from my perspective as someone dementedly driven to read many, many of them whilst nevertheless hating most of them and always commencing the reading them with low expectations. A clear gap in the market, I thought to myself. There must be literally tens of other people like me, possibly some of whom aren’t my brother or Rojas and who, thus, might be attracted to the groaning smorgasbord of godness that is The Crossed Pond.

So the thing is that the book’s not all that bad. That’s a potential problem when you’ve already decided that the series will be entitled ‘Crappy Book Reviews’ but, to be fair, I suspect that much of the book-buying public that isn’t locked in a desperate embrace with disappointing fantasy literature whilst also being lamentably unfamiliar with the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign world would consider every single Forgotten Realms book to be crappy. We are, after all, grading on something of a front-loaded curve. Consequently, this one, at least in terms of the post title, is for you, people that like to be seen reading Booker Prize nominees.

Well the book is shortish, so Gentry doesn’t get to spend much time establishing things. Spoilers follow.

We have prim and proper elite force leader, assistant elite force leader with tortured family past for which he (justifiably) feels considerable guilt as his own primness effectively caused it and we have capable mercenary leader who once wanted to be in that elite force despite her father being a rich and important merchant but realised she wasn’t eligible because of her nationality so became an ass-kicking mercenary instead. There is politics afoot. There’s a strict religion to which they all belong. They are all sent to secure a great Keep, Neversfall, in the middle of scary nowhere, from which reports have gone mysteriously quiet.

There are antmen. They are creepy unemotional slavers who use mind control to do the slaving. The Keep is deserted. Our heroes occupy the keep but are attacked by masked men who are steadily killing them off. Reinforcements are summoned. People keep getting killed. Treachery is afoot! It’s OK in the end, other than for the people that got killed, who probably aren’t too happy.

The problem is that it’s hard to engage in the story and there’s no time for Gentry to develop the themes anyhow. The uncertainties of the main characters are somewhat uninteresting because they’re not developed enough for us to care. The tortured assistant commander of the elite troops and the mercenary leader could have plenty of other stuff to do afterwards, but there is no afterwards in the book, no Scouring of the Shire (but hopefully if it had happened it would have been more interesting than the Scouring of the Shire was in Lord of the Rings, which was second only to the endless tedious trek of Frodo, Sam and Gollum to Mordor for boredom). Sure, we can fill that stuff in but we could just not have read the book at all and filled in an entire story of our own choosing, instead. Furthermore, it doesn’t sound like a very interesting place in which to conduct future Dungeons and Dragons adventures either, nor is there a great deal of regional flavour to add to future adventures in the Shining South (the part of the Forgotten Realms where the book is set).

So, in summary, not the worst Forgotten Realms book but not good, either, nor interestingly bad. A solid 3/10 by conventional standards and a 6/10 by Forgotten Realms standards.

golf clap

House rule #757: When driving to visit your illegitimate daughter who is the product of an extramarital affair, don’t get drunk first.

Rep. Vito Fossella of New York acknowledged on Thursday that he fathered a child from an extramarital affair, answering questions that arose from his arrest on drunken driving charges last week.

“My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry,” said Fossella, a Republican, who has three children with his wife in Staten Island, N.Y.

Fossella’s private life came under scrutiny after he was arrested last week in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Police said his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and he could face a mandatory five days in jail if convicted.

When Fossella was pulled over, police said he told officers that he was going to see his daughter in the area. That prompted questions about who the daughter was.

“I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a 3-year-old daughter,” Fossella said in his statement. It was Fay who got him out of jail after the arrest.

The rest of the story.

Family values, don’t ya love ‘em?

Meghan McCain’s blog still rocks.

The last two updates (can’t link to them individually) are unabashedly adorable (and interesting, actually).

It remains by far my favorite thing about the McCain campaign, and one of the more interesting uses of “new media” to come along.

The Derb over at NRO pointed me to this gem of a story from some lit mag, pertaining to the use of time travel to kill Hitler. Good stuff.

On the one hand, I fully understand that a capitalist system will produce winners and losers, and I don’t resent the winners. I tend to be very, very averse to class warfare rhetoric of the sort practiced by Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, and redistributionist policies of the sort advocated by Barack Obama. I enjoy free markets and most of the byproducts thereof.

But on the other hand…Jesus, executive compensation is WAY, WAY out of control. Furthermore, it appears to bear no relationship whatsoever to job performance. It seems like every new month brings stories of some corporate nimrod on a $2 million dollar salary running his company up on the rocks and then being rewarded with a federal bailout–because his company is “too big to fail”–and then being “punished” with a $10 million severance package. I find myself daily pulled in the direction of full-throated Jacobin mayhem, wanting to slit the throats of hereditary aristocrats and burn their mansions.

In some cases, this instinct pushes me in the direction of anti-libertarian policy. Adam and I have gone on at some length about our neo-socialist instincts regarding federal provision of public education; Joyful Cynic and I have had some spirited arguments about my advocacy of a sizable increase in the estate tax. On the other hand, I can’t quite bring myself to feel like my apostasy on the matter of executive compensation somehow makes me anti-capitalist, because there is nothing market-driven about the way the existing system seems to work. Executive compensation packages seem to be governed not by the desire to secure a skilled CEO in a competitive marketplace, but by a culture of mutual backscratching and an eagerness to do whatever the shareholders will let the company get away with. At BEST one could argue that the system creates incentives for short-term shareholder profit at the cost of long-term ruin for the company as an institution–by which time the shareholders will have jumped ship and moved on, leaving everybody else to pay the price.

Which brings me to George Will’s radical proposal of a month back. Apparently it was Bear Stearns that drove him over the edge:

Republicans and Democrats promise cooperation, compromise and general niceness using other people’s money. If Congress cannot suppress its itch to “do something” while markets are correcting the prices of housing and money, Congress could pass a law saying: No company benefiting from a substantial federal subvention (which would now include Morgan) may pay any executive more than the highest pay of a federal civil servant ($124,010). That would dampen Wall Street’s enthusiasm for measures that socialize losses while keeping profits private.

Indeed. There isn’t any libertarian reason I can think of to object to what Will is proposing. If a company is going to opt out of the constraints of the free market by demanding a public bailout, the nimrods running it have no claim to an absence of federal salary regulation.

In fact: why not take things to the next level? I’d propose that no company receiving ANY form of direct federal handout–market promotion subsidies, R&D support, financial bailouts, agribusiness subsidies–be permitted to compensate its highest-salaried employee more than ten times the salary of its lowest-salaried employee. If your janitor makes $10k a year, and you demand that the public prop up your business, the CEO gets $100k max, including stock options.

We’ve already imposed this sort of measure on LDCs through the World Bank’s “austerity” approach and on America’s poor through Clinton-era welfare reform. If corporations are going to go on the dole, too, let’s at least require of them the same sort of responsibility as we require of the less fortunate. The liberals will see this as an enlightened and highly progressive reform, I suppose; but I can endure such insults. I prefer to see this as a mechanism to wean corporations from the public tit, restore sanity to federal commerce policy, and impose a direct cost on those who make the decision to opt out of capitalism.

Let those executives who really DO deserve elaborate compensation demonstrate their fitness for it by flying without a net–and if they succeed and grow obscenely rich, more power to them.

Et tu, The Onion?

CHICAGO—The so-called “Kansas rectangle,” a desolate and featureless region covering 82,277 square miles in America’s mysterious Great Plains, has been a source of speculation among paranormal investigators for decades. Though the questions surrounding its existence have never been answered, one thing is certain: The life of former Chicagoan Kevin Corcoran suddenly vanished into the eerie region 30 years ago this week, never to return…

Reports are starting to trickle in of high-profile Clinton supporters going to her and saying “it’s time”.

Americablog broke a story that Wesley Clark was one of those, though his office denies it (of course, they would, whether true or not).

Even George McGovern has apparently decided that it’s become painful to watch.

When George McGovern comes and tells you you’ve lost, it’s time to start packing it in.

Edit: Things like this surely aren’t helping her case either.

As mentioned, Ron Paul has the #1 book in the country. Now, the New York Times Bestseller List catches up to what Amazon already knows. After a week out, it’s #1 there too.

Buy your copy today.

I’m about halfway through it myself. Nothing earth-shatteringly new, but it’s basically a post-facto statement of Ron’s candidacy examined in a more thoughtful and extended fashion. If you’ve heard him speak, you’ve heard a lot of it already, but I’m finding myself taken by just the little things peppered in. There’s a lot of supporting material I didn’t know, and a lot of little touches here and there that manage to make much of it new to me.

If anybody ever asks “Why did you support Ron Paul?” or “Ron Paul? What was that about?” you can more or less just hand them this book.

I don’t watch boxing much anymore, as I don’t pay for the channels that show it, but last week I was in a hotel in the DC area and did get to see the Joe Calzaghe-Bernard Hopkins matchup (as did, apparently, John Hinderaker). Anyhow, it wasn’t a bad boxing match and Calzaghe came back and won it handily (an opinion mysteriously not shared by one of the judges). Most remarkable, however, was Bernard Hopkins’ response after the decision, effectively a denial of the result:

“I just really feel like I took the guy to school,” said Hopkins. “I feel like I made him fight my fight, not his. I wanted him to run into my shots. I think I made him do that, and I think I made it look pretty easy. I think I controlled the pace, and I controlled the fight.”

Rush Limbaugh can also be relied upon not to admit defeat. His ridiculous Operation Chaos has taken an exciting turn as he comes out for Obama in order to push those wavering superdelegates over the edge:

“I now believe he would be the weakest of the Democrat nominees,” Limbaugh, among the most powerful voices in conservative radio, said on his program. “I now urge the Democrat supereldegates to make your mind up and publicly go for Obama.”

“Barack Obama has shown he cannot get the votes Democrats need to win – blue-collar, working class people,” Limbaugh also said. “He can get effete snobs, he can get wealthy academics, he can get the young, and he can get the black vote, but Democrats do not win with that.”

Those grapes don’t get any less sour just because he calls them Maltesers (for the benefit of our American readers, a sort of chocolate-covered honeycomb sphere).

EDIT: John Hinderaker, not Glenn Reynolds. Corrected.

Newt Gingrich wrote some harsh words for Republicans yesterday (I found it via an AJC article on the Louisiana victory of Democrat Don Cazayoux in a red, red, red district). In particular, he warned them not to interpret McCain’s relatively robust (all things considered) poll numbers as representing some residual enthusiasm for the Republican Party and also makes the point that the party is more likely to drag McCain down than he is to drag them significantly up:

Senator McCain is currently running ahead of the Republican congressional ballot by about 16 percentage points. But there are two reasons that this extraordinary personal achievement should not comfort congressional Republicans.

First, McCain’s lead is a sign of the gap between the McCain brand of independence and the GOP brand. No regular Republican would be tying or slightly beating the Democratic candidates in this atmosphere. It is a sign of how much McCain is a non-traditional Republican that he is sustaining his personal popularity despite his party’s collapse.

Second, there is a grave danger for the McCain campaign that if the generic ballot stays at only 32 % for the GOP it will ultimately outweigh McCain’s personal appeal and drag his candidacy into defeat.

To reinforce the general point, Rasmussen’s tracking of party affiliations has Democrats with their highest advantage in the last 6 years, at 41.4% against 31.4%; that’s not so much a tanking in Republican affiliation in the last couple of years but rather the Democrats taking a chunk out of the unaffiliated voters (presumably in part people have done this to vote in closed Democrat primaries, but I doubt that’s all of it). That’s particularly worrying for McCain, much of whose appeal is to Independents and who won’t want to see them going to the Democrats before the election campaign really starts.

So, McCain’s in trouble and he’s been the underdog all through in any case (even if Clinton had won the Democratic Party’s nomination) but the sheer scale of what might happen to the Republican Representatives and Senators should really be worrying the GOP. An attempt to run local races against the Democrat who won the nomination (again, even if it was Clinton) is likely to flame out at least as much as their campaign against Pelosi did in 2006 (the whole idea that voters would come around at the thought of ‘Speaker Pelosi’ might be one of the stupidest conceits of modern political history).

I’m more a McCain guy than ever, but he’s up against it. I don’t feel sorry for most of the other Republicans.

Tucker Carlson is still supposed to be some sort of MSNBC Senior Correspondent, but he hasn’t been on MSNBC that I’ve seen for some time. Does anyone know?

Oh, and MSNBC executives? Bring Tucker back. If he goes to Fox, I would even have to start watching that (really!).

A few tidbits, much of it from dailykos, that I think are worth re-posting here this morning.

—The first is the Obama campaign’s memo to superdelegates this morning. I think they can afford to take a stronger co-opt line on the popular vote, but they’re apparently not in the mood to give the Clinton camp any more rope, even if it’s just “wait and see” rope. Instead, they’re saying “pledged delegates is how elections are decided, and by May 20th, we will have won.”

There are only six contests remaining in the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. Only 7 percent of the pledged delegates remain on the table. There are 260 remaining undeclared superdelegates, for a total of 477 delegates left to be awarded.

With North Carolina and Indiana complete, Barack Obama only needs 172 total delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. This is only 36% of the total remaining delegates.

Conversely, Senator Clinton needs 326 delegates to reach the Democratic nomination, which represents a startling 68% of the remaining delegates.

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

For the record, the Clinton spin is here, and is pretty limp-wristed.

—Even George Stephanopoulos is saying the superdelegates are getting ready to get off the fence.

More superdelegates will come out today for Barack Obama –they will come three, four, five at a time, and this nomination will be locked up.

—Remember the stories this month about how the Clinton campaign was bursting ahead with new-found fundraising success?

Turns out, not so much.

An aide says Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lent her presidential campaign $6.4 million over the past month.

The money more than doubles Clinton’s personal investment in her bid for the Democratic nomination. She gave her campaign $5 million earlier this year.

—And finally, Newt Gingrich, who has become an astute reader of the tea leaves, is looking at the foiled Clinton plan to render Obama unelectable, and is ready to render a judgment: if Republicans base their November strategy on turning this into a referendum on Obama, they’re going to lose.

The Anti-Obama, Anti-Wright, and Anti-Clinton GOP Model Has Been Tested — And It Failed

The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail.

This model has already been tested with disastrous results.

In 2006, there were six incumbent Republican Senators who had plenty of money, the advantage of incumbency, and traditionally successful consultants.

But the voters in all six states had adopted a simple position: “Not you.” No matter what the GOP Senators attacked their opponents with, the voters shrugged off the attacks and returned to, “Not you.”

The danger for House and Senate Republicans in 2008 is that the voters will say, “Not the Republicans.”

More here.

—The traditional talking heads have this to say. The “new media”, this. The gist is—Clinton’s toast.

As much as this primary has dragged on and on and on and on and on, and has at some points been like nails on a chalkboard, I do have to remind myself that we’re watching the slow-motion implosion of the Clinton dynasty and all it represents, and the ascent of a new kind of Democratic party, and a new kind of American president. And that’s pretty cool.

I guess my math was wrong. Third Party Watch is reporting that Ron Paul has passed the 1,000,000 vote mark.

That’s pretty impressive considering all his candidacy has been through, and the fact that he’s never had much of a shot at the actual nomination. To put it another way, Ron’s now got more votes than all the other “second-tier” candidates of both parties combined.

MSNBC calls North Carolina for Obama very quickly. Clinton ahead in Indiana (57% to 43% with 23% of votes counted).

Even Chris Matthews appears unable to summon any enthusiasm.

Edit: Results so far.

North Carolina with 99% reporting:

Obama: 56
Clinton 42

Indiana with 99% reporting:

Clinton 51
Obama 49

Open speculation now that it’s over for Clinton, and that that message is being received in the dark recesses of Team Hillary.

Paul also picks up another 65k votes, which puts him at 978k total votes not counting caucuses (at least according to CNN’s count).

The FBI just raided it and took computers.

I guess that it’s probably not very exciting, or at least not politically important, but it’s pretty odd nevertheless.

In other news, not long until we get some Democratic Party primary results from North Carolina and Indiana. I’m so excited I can hardlzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Through March.

The tally (January to April, only counting donations over $200):

Paul: 201k
Obama: 178k
McCain: 132k
Clinton: 85k

Overall, military donors still favor Republicans to Democrats, 62 percent to 38 percent, according to CRP. But Ritsch said at the beginning of the war, three-quarters of military donors favored GOP candidates.

Just a drop in the bucket of overall campaign contributions, but still, fascinating. And, I should add, one of my favorite talking points when I was on the trail proselytizing for Paul.

Seems the scalp of executive director Shane Cory might not be enough for some Libertarians.

On the other hand, if this sort of ugly struggle is to be avoided, what needs to be done—and immediately—is for the LP board of directors to hand Cory and Davis their walking papers, and then to publicly retract and apologize for their original anti-libertarian statement. If the board fails with regard to principal in this affair, they, too, should be replaced, at the upcoming national convention in Denver.

Man. Again, I so want to be there.

We’ll have to get the Joyful Cynic a writer’s line here if she’s willing to liveblog it.

And generally goes all Mexican for Cinco De Mayo.

I think McCain not taking the bait on immigration-pandering is among the best things strategically he has going for him. Not so much that it’ll be a big help to him (though it’ll certainly help him on the margins), but mostly that it avoids a very glaring unforced error that, for some reason, most Republicans choose to make. Future Republicans will have, in part, McCain to thank for not totally torpedoing the party brand with an entire generation of the country’s fasted growing demographic. Border security will always have a popular ring to it, but immigrant-bashing will not, and that’s a line that most Republicans seem utterly unable to not regularly cross. But back to the strategy, “tough on immigration” is very high on my list of political red herrings. I’ve yet to see any race where it made a discernible positive difference, and I’ve seen an awful lot of races where a candidate tried about as hard as can be tried to yoke his opponent with being “soft on immigration”, only to have it turn out to be a wet pop of an electoral issue, time and time again. There are some people, to be sure, who care very much about this issue. And they are totally and completely drowned out by the rest whenever it comes to a vote.

Anyway, daveg, I imagine, has a very different take, and for the record, Michelle Malkin agrees.

I’m sort of curious where the people for whom this is a make-or-break issue are going to go this general election.

Indiana and North Carolina vote tomorrow, allotting about half of the remaining pledged delegates. Chuck Todd lays it out:

…nearly half of all remaining delegates will get handed out tomorrow. And the math will be a lot more crystal clear after tomorrow, both in delegates and the popular vote. Following Guam, there are now 404 pledged delegates up grabs, and 187 of them will be decided on Tuesday. Plus, per our count, there are 268 undeclared superdelegates. Here are the basics of what each candidate needs: Assuming he wins half of the delegates tomorrow (93), Obama needs just 38% of ALL remaining delegates to get to the magic number of 2,025.