(H/t Fort Wayne Observed) Anne Kornblut, writing for the Washington Post, says that Indiana is shaping up as fair fight.

In Indiana, Obama has a home-field advantage, while Clinton has the backing of the popular Sen. Evan Bayh and may have an edge on the kind of economic issues that are likely to dominate the discussion before the state’s Democrats vote on May 6.

“If I had to pick — and I’m not usually shy about saying who’s going to win — I couldn’t tell you today,” said Rep. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat who represents Indiana’s 2nd District and has not committed to either candidate. Others entrenched in Indiana politics put Clinton ahead, if only slightly.

After Pennsylvania, the campaigning should get especially intense. Right now, I look forward to it. After about 3 or 4 days, I suspect I’ll be tired of the campaign commercials and whatnot.

My wife went to see Bill Clinton in West Lafayette and lived to tell the tale. Being the Parent of Family Values, I stayed home and took care of my kids.

The Journal and Courier also has coverage.

Apparently Senator Clinton has been trotting out a story about how she had to evade sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 when she was First Lady. This is not, as it turns out, a strict representation of reality. In fact, when she says that she had to evade sniper fire on the tarmac and had to run for her car with no greeting ceremony, what she should have said was that she did *not* have to evade sniper fire, there *was* a greeting ceremony, and she did *not* have to run for her car.

As it turns out, she was accompanied by Sinbad, Chelsea Clinton, and Sheryl Crow.

Sinbad [has said] that Clinton’s version of the trip is bunk. He described it as a feel-good USO tour. “I think the only ‘red-phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place,'” Sinbad told Akers recently.
. . .
Sinbad said the whole description is ridiculous. “What kind of president would say, ‘Hey, man, I can’t go ’cause I might get shot so I’m going to send my wife,'” Sinbad told Akers. “‘Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'”

Again, my point is not that Sen. Clinton is unqualified to be President or that her experience as First Lady is inconsequential. I firmly believe that she kept up to speed with political issues during Bill Clinton’s Presidency and that her advise was more influential to him than that of your average First Lady. However, she was not President and her experience was not that of a President. She’s trying to encourage a vague conflation of her candidacy with Bill’s Presidency. And the conflation is intentionally kept vague so that she can embrace all of the good stuff about Bill’s Presidency while side-stepping the bad stuff. Furthermore, she’s being somewhat evasive about her actual experience as First Lady so that she can get the extra cred that would’ve come with having been President. In other words, she got greedy; and, so, she gets burned on her sniper fire flight of fancy.

Indiana Senator Evan Bayh apparently said this with a straight face:

Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who backs Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, proposed another gauge Sunday by which superdelegates might judge whether to support Mrs. Clinton or Senator Barack Obama.

He suggested that they consider the electoral votes of the states that each of them has won.

“So who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes is an important factor to consider because ultimately, that’s how we choose the president of the United States,” Mr. Bayh said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Translation: “If you sort of cock your head, just like so, and squint a little bit, Hillary Clinton isn’t *really* losing.”

Come on Evan, the point of being a Hoosier is to be something of a no-nonsense realist, not given to flights of fancy. If the rules were different than what they were, strategies would have been different, resources would have been allocated differently, and you can’t just flap your arms and hope people forget what the rules of the game really are and were at the time the game was played. As Josh Marshall suggested, it’s kind of like losing a game of chess and saying, “well, if my rook could move diagonally, I would’ve won.”

I’m hoping for a McCain-Lieberman 2008 ticket:

Those guys were awesome back in the 70s.

I used to like James Carville, then I switched to neutral when he was making noises against Dean’s 50-State strategy in favor of the losing, defensive DNC strategy of the previous 10 years. Now, I’m pretty sure the guy is just a tool.

Bill Richardson made what by all appearances was a tough decision for him to endorse Barack Obama. Basically, he put what he thought was best for the country over his personal friendship and gratitude toward the Clinton family for their assistance in his political career. Richardson recognized that there is something special about Obama that will ultimately be better for the country than second Clinton presidency. Clinton-ally James Carville’s response:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

This is a guy CNN let on the air as a “political analyst” for the Democratic primary without forcing him to disclose that he was a Clinton partisan when offering up his “analysis.”

The Agitator has a good collection of pre-War quotes showing, in part, how the War in Iraq was sold to the American public. I hadn’t seen this one from our own Gov. Daniels:

“The United States is committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid.”

–OMB Director Mitch Daniels, quote in the Washington Post on April 21, 2003.

According to Donald Rumsfeld, Mitch Daniels’ Office of Management and Budget came up with this wildly inaccurate projection:

“Well, the Office of Management and Budget, has come up come up with a number that’s something under $50 billion for the cost. How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question.”

–Donald Rumsfeld, January 19, 2003.

(Just, fyi, we’re over $500,000,000,000 and heading northward at a pretty good clip.)

And, there are other classics, including:

“Some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.”

–Wolfowitz

. . .

“Bring ‘em on. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”

–President Bush, when asked if the insurgency and resulting U.S. casualties might cause him to ask for more help from U.S. allies, July 2, 2003.

But, really, what use is it looking at the past; nobody could have predicted things would shake out this way in Iraq:

“Yet no matter how emotionally satisfying removing a thug like Saddam may seem, Americans would be wise to consider whether that step is worth the price. The inevitable U.S. military victory would not be the end of America’s troubles in Iraq. Indeed, it would mark the start of a new round of headaches. Ousting Saddam would make Washington responsible for Iraq’s political future and entangle the United States in an endless nation-building mission beset by intractable problems.”

–Ted Galen Carpenter, January 14, 2002

So, let’s just look forward. In the words of Presidential candidate, John McCain (hilariously sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”):

People working for the State Department committed unauthorized breaches of Obama’s passport file on three separate occasions, but there is totally nothing to see here, the State Department assures us.

The records were accessed on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14. Senator Obama was not notified until yesterday, March 21.

McCormack said it was not immediately clear what the contract employees may have seen in the records or what they were looking for. He said he did not know the names of the companies they worked for.
. . .
The State Department does not check the political affiliation of its contractors, but a senior official told NBC News there was “no political motivation” to the incidents, adding that the three were low-level contract employees doing administrative work when they accessed Obama’s records. This official told NBC News that he does not believe any of the accessed information was sent anywhere.

The don’t know anything, but if they knew one thing, it would be that the motivation was not political.

Obama’s files were first accessed after he defeated Sen. Clinton in Iowa. This look similar to unauthorized searches in 1991-1992 of then-Presidential hopeful, Bill Clinton’s passport file under the previous Bush administration.

The Obama campaign issued a statement:

This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an Administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years. Our government’s duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes. This is a serious matter that merits a complete investigation, and we demand to know who looked at Senator Obama’s passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach.

And, just for the record, it’s entirely possible that nothing especially nefarious was going on here. That’s the beauty of this unpredictable universe: many, many improbable things are possible.

——-
Meanwhile, Sen. Obama points out the obvious – the War in Iraq is costing us dearly:

“When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war,” Mr. Obama said to an audience at the University of Charleston. “When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war.”
. . .
“No matter what the costs, no matter what the consequences, John McCain seems determined to carry out a third Bush term,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s an outcome America can’t afford. Because of the Bush-McCain policies, our debt has ballooned.”
. . .
“The more than $10 billion we’re spending each month in Iraq is money we could be investing here at home,” Mr. Obama said. “Just think about what battles we could be fighting instead of fighting this misguided war.”

Those in favor of staying in Iraq indefinitely resolutely refuse to engage in a cost/benefit analysis of the War in Iraq; preferring instead a Manichean tunnel-vision where there is only “winning and losing” (curiously without a definition of ‘winning’); the only options are “surrender” and, apparently, staying for ever.

The Evansville Courier Press calls Obama a “standup guy” for his thoughtful response to the hysteria generated by the inflammatory remarks by his former pastor. The editorial board notes that the standard response is to “cut that person loose quickly and completely and head on down the road and never look back.” Instead of following the standard play book, Obama took the opportunity to reject the statements but explain that he knew too much more about the man to reject him completely, any more than he could reject completely a member of his family, even if that family member does say loopy things.

I liked this aside in the editorial:

Obama could have been forgiven for a trace of self-pity. It seemed he had only just finished knocking down rumors that he was Muslim and had attended an Islamic school, and now he was being pressured to distance himself from the Trinity Church of Christ pastor who performed his marriage and baptized his children.

Instead, as Jon Stewart noted on The Daily Show, Obama chose to talk to us like adults on the subject of race in America.

From a recent Matt Taibbi column:

Then there’s this whole business of liberals who are accused of “rooting” for failure in Iraq. I’m sorry, but the next pundit who whips that one out should have his balls stuffed down his throat. You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war, and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that. We’re Americans just like you. You don’t have the right to get us into this mess and then turn around and call us traitors. Your credibility is long gone on this issue. Shut up about us.

Beyond that, what you say doesn’t even make any sense. For most of us, if we thought there was any chance this thing could work, we’d have been for it, or at least not so violently against it. Instead, our opposition to the war was based on our absolute conviction that it would end in disaster — which it incidentally has. But according to Klein, if we see a guy step off the top of the Empire State Building, we’re supposed to root for him to nail the dismount. The whole issue is irrelevant and absurd. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. “Rooting” is a kid’s word; grow the fuck up.

Five long years, and we still haven’t found a way to unshit the bed. The standard line is “forget the past, what are we going to do about it now — and besides, we’re turning a corner . . . again.” Step one — remove the clowns who got this thing so colossally wrong. (And no fair making any of them Governor of Indiana.) Once they admit they were really, really wrong; apologize for squandering $500 billion — not to mention 4,000 dead and 40,000 injured; and let other people make the decisions, maybe we can come up with a strategy that minimizes our losses. We’re already too far in the hole for there to be any reasonable likelihood of “winning” — and by “winning,” I mean a result where the benefit outweighs the cost.

And, for any of you out there who want to start throwing around terms like “surrender” or “defeatist” or whatever, by all means, I urge you to articulate a reasonably likely result from this adventure that is worth more than $500,000,000,000, 4,000 American soldiers’ lives, and 40,000 casualties. (Which is actually giving you a deal since that doesn’t include the future costs that will have to be incurred to get to whatever the result might be.) As it is, we seem to resemble a gambler way down at the casino, throwing more money down on the black jack table trying to get even so that the money he’s already lost isn’t “wasted.”