Midday open thread

• $10 million from 50,000 new donors for Clinton? Impressive if true. It appears that turning her website into an ATM machine worked. It also does mean that her supporters don’t want her out of the race. Fair enough.
• The National Association of Secretaries of State have a proposed primary calendar that keeps New Hampshire and Iowa at the front because of “their tradition of encouraging retail politics”. Excuse me? Haven’t we seen this year that just about all states encourage “retail politics”? Even Pennsylvania, for chrissakes! No plan is acceptable unless that unmerited monopoly is broken up.
• Vote for your favorite Obama in 30 Seconds ad!
• Daily Kos faithful diarist “faithfull” can be heard on this NPR story advocating for the end of Mountaintop Removal and the passage of the Clean Water Protection Act.  And they’re making great progress.
• The virtual border fence project is failing, apparently because of Homeland Security’s inability to figure out something so complicated as forwarding an email.
  

  A glaring shortcoming of the project was the time lag between the electronic detection of movement along the border and the transmission of a camera image to agents patrolling the area, the GAO reported.

  Soon to be replaced with the kind of concrete and razor wire fence that the less well-informed might mistakenly call a big honkin’ wall.

• Since the media has established that what your pastor friends say is EXACTLY what you believe, it’s really horrible that McCain thinks Katrina hit New Orleans because of the gays.
• LA-06: The NRCC darkens Obama in their new ad against Democrat Cazayoux. I’ll have more on this later today.
• The latest on the Pennsylvania delegate count, for those quaint enough to think that delegates should still decide an election based on, well, delegates:
  

  two different districts just had (opposite) delegate-split changes thanks to the new numbers: CD 7 flipped from 4-3 Obama to 4-3 Clinton (though it’s still in play, with 8% of precincts yet to report and Obama with an INF+2N number of only 3.72%). Meanwhile, CD 13 behaved the way commenters jpmassar and jlkenney have been arguing for several hours that it would: that district has moved from 5-2 Clinton to 4-3 Clinton, erasing her net gain from CD 7. (And with 99% reporting, CD 13 is pretty much finished.) So we’re still at Clinton +10, but with the CD 7 uncertainty (plus live contests remaining in CDs 10 and 12) there seems to me to be an outside shot at reducing that to +8 or beyond.

  Meanwhile, as the INF+2N numbers show, Clinton is unlikely to gain any more net delegates from Pennsylvania. Her only slim chance would be turning CD 11 into a 4-1 split for her; to get there she’d need about 75% of the remaining ~70,000 uncounted votes in CD 11 to be Clinton votes.

  If you’re wondering what all that INF+2N stuff is, it’s apparently “math”. It took me a while to figure it out, but it’s pretty cool stuff. But the bottom line — Clinton +10, but Obama still has a chance of picking up three more net delegates as the vote counts finish up. The final spread will be Clinton +7-10 delegates. Not a particularly good night for her.

• dnA:
  

  There’s a the subtext to the whole “God Damn America” thing. People aren’t really reacting to Wright’s “hatred” for America, when they hear “God Damn America” they feel like he’s saying “God Damn White people.” Which is why white preachers can get away with such things.

• The bullshit we face ahead:
  

  Step 1: GOP wingnut (is that redundant?) says something offensive, writes a nasty editorial, creates a vicious radio or tv spot.

  Step 2: Ad receives widespread coverage and national attention.

  Step 3: McCain condemns the ad/editorial/whatever.

  Step 4: Chris Matthews and other bobbleheads in the media show off their man-crush for McCain while praising his integrity AND showing the offending ad/editorial on national television.

  Step 5: I scream at the television and send another 25 bucks to the Obama campaign.

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