I am going to put absolutely no effort into this diary so as to ensure that it is not recommended.  Instead, please recommend diaries like this one, because while the polling stuff is fun (and so is what comes next), what's happening on the ground in Iraq come November -- and how progressives frame that issue -- is going to be a lot more important in determining the outcome of the election.  

But for the insomniacs among us, comedy gold like this does not come along all that often.  

I was directed today to the writings of Steve O'Hearn, the chair of the National Press Club's New Media Committee who maintains a blog at the National Press Club's blogging website. Suffice it to say that I disagree with pretty much everything that Steve has to say -- from his position on Larry Sinclair to his insistence (three days after the Montana and South Dakota primaries and one day after Clinton announced that she would concede) that the Democratic nomination race was "far from over", to his calling Tom Shales, the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize- winning media critic, a "cretin". And then there's the matter of his preferring AltaVista to Google...

Lanny Davis, annotated:

   Here are two important neutral principles that should guide the Democratic National Committee’s Rules Committee when it meets May 31 to decide whether to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations — and, if so, how to allocate them between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

   One principle is based in law, the second in pragmatic politics. Both principles result in the same solution: in some rough approximation, honoring the results expressed by almost 600,000 Michigan Democrats and more than 1.7 million Florida Democrats, who turned out in record numbers though they were told their votes didn't count, were not responsible for the rules violations, and don't want to be disenfranchised.

Rush Limbaugh has re-initiated "Operation Chaos" after briefly placing it on "pause", asking his listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in the Indiana primaries in order to prolong the Democratic nomination process.  This has been known for several days now.  It is not such an issue in North Carolina because registered Republicans may not vote in the Democratic primary (only independent voters can) and registration changes are due more than a month before the election.

The Louisville Courier-Journal -- the largest newspaper in Kentucky and one which has significant readership in Southern Indiana -- has just endorsed Barack Obama in advance of the Indiana and Kentucky primaries.

The MSNBC evening lineup (especially Road to the White House) gave a fair amount of play tonight to a couple of results from the new NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll. This was sort of like a non-partisan push poll: voters were read a series of nine negative statements -- three for each of the three remaining candidates -- and asked about their level of concern on each one.

MSNBC spent most of their time focusing on two of these issues -- what I call "Obama/bitter" (his recent comments on religion and guns) and "Obama/values" (his associations with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers). You might assume, from having seen the programming, that these were the foremost concerns to their poll respondents. But of course they weren't.

The National Review seems to particularly enjoy blogging about Jeremiah Wright.  I can sort of imagine the gang watching Wright's performance together, as they sip on a morning Chablis and kick their feet up on their desks, showing off their argyle socks.

Jim Geraghty -- otherwise known as the Dude Who Leaks Shitty Exit Polls -- had a particularly harsh critique of Wright and Obama today.

I'd have to say that for all the different ways that the Clinton campaign has irked me over the course of this campaign, for the most part Hillary Clinton has avoided putting out specious policy proposals that might compromise the progressive agenda.  While there have been a couple of exceptions -- I think her proposed mortgage rate freeze, for instance, is terrible economics -- in general I have agreed with the vast bulk of her domestic policy proposals.  For the record, I also think she's in the right headspace on the issue of health care mandates, although if you get into the economic nitty-gritty, I think there are decent arguments that implementing mandates without overhauling privatized medical insurance might not have the desired effects in terms of passing savings along to consumers.

Apologies if this has been blogged already, but I just noticed that Evan Bayh, Clinton surrogate extraordinaire, has declared that Superdelegates should follow the will of their constituents.

The following item is from yesterday's Washington Post:

Let's start by looking at the state of the popular vote, since those are the only metrics that Hillary Clinton has any realistic shot of winning.

Below is a table of the remaining primaries, and Clinton's projected margin of victory (or defeat) in each of them. The margins come from a straight, unweighted average of all polls that were released in April. I cheated in Montana, which doesn't have any polls, and plugged in a +10 for Obama.

http://www.nbc10.com/...

Obama closes gap from 14 points to 6.  Survey USA is now highly consistent with other polls of the state.

The survey concluded that Clinton will finish with 50 percent, 6 percentage points ahead of Obama. The margin of sampling error is 3.8 percent.

Looking only at SurveyUSA numbers and ignoring the polls that have been released by 12 competing pollsters in Pennsylvania, Obama gained ground in a week when he was largely on defense and off-message. Last week, SurveyUSA had Clinton ahead by 14 points. Monday, in a poll conducted using the identical methodology, SurveyUSA found Clinton ahead by 6 points.

EDIT: Data excluded Arkansas before and has been fixed.

Yesterday, I presented a case that late deciders in Pennsylvania might be more inclined to break toward Hillary Clinton. This conclusion, indeed, seems to have become something of the conventional wisdom.

However, if we remove things from the context of Pennsylvania, it would be a mistake to conclude that Clinton has some inherent and inevitable advantage with late-deciding voters. Let's do what we always do here, which is to look at the numbers.

This might seem strange coming from someone who runs a website dedicated to the horse race elements of the campaign.  But George Stephanapolous has it wrong in his interview today with TPM's Greg Sargent:

   Asked to defend the fact that policy didn't come up for the first 40 or so minutes of the debate, Stephanopoulos said:

   "We decided to focus at the top on the issues that had been at the center of the debate since the last debate. Everything we brought up in that front section had not come up since the last debate. And they all focused on the same theme -- which candidate would be a stronger Democratic candidate in November."
   "This is the core question for the campaigns, and a lot of Democratic voters right now. That's why we decided to lead with it."

I'm not really sure whether this is a at all a big deal, but I thought it was worth posting.

Apparently, AFSCME organizers staged a series of demonstrations outside Obama headquarters in Pittsburgh, Altoona, and several other Pennsylvania cities today, attempting to stir up controversy around Barack Obama's "bitter" remarks.

This report is from the Scotsman, the same paper that published Samatha Power's "monster" comments.

It is a credible paper, but as a foreign source, it probably deserves an extra level of scrutiny.

Note that all sources in the article are anonymous.  

EDIT: It's also not clear that the Scotsman's sources believe this would happen before Pennsylvania.  In fact, the implication more seems to be that this is how the endgame might play out after Pennsylvania.

Chuck Todd opines that the general election numbers for the Democrats are presently at their floor:

Currently polls show McCain either narrowly ahead or even with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It is impressive considering how poorly the GOP, and specifically the president, are viewed by the public.

   But it is a faux lead. If the de facto Democratic nominee is clear within the next 4-6 weeks, that person will see a poll bounce. And according to GOP pollster Steve Lombardo, it could be one heck of a bounce, like post-convention. He anticipates the Democratic candidate will move up 10 points once the primary race is over. [...]

   The initial bounce will set the polling numbers – the floor and ceiling – for the Democrats, who clearly have the generic advantage this cycle. Those parameters will dictate the morale within the GOP base.
   If McCain’s is hanging in, behind by 10 or so points, then it is clear he will have a shot. If the bounce pushes the Democratic nominee to as much as a 15 point lead, it may be very demoralizing to the GOP.

A week ago, Barack Obama led Hillary Clinton by 10 points in the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll. I asked the readers at fivethirtyeight.com whether they expected today's poll -- it's April 6th -- to show a lead of greater than 10 points for Obama, or fewer.

I was sort of trying to goad people into taking the over. After all, we're all used to hearing about the importance of "momentum" and trendlines. Obama had gone, over the span of about 10 days, from being 7 points behind, to roughly tied, to 4 points ahead, to 10 points ahead. Wasn't it logical that he'd be some number larger than 10 points ahead after another week's worth of "momentum"? Wasn't the headline that Obama was pulling away with the race?

But most people did not take the bait, and said they expected Obama to be fewer than 10 points ahead. Which, as it turns out, was the right answer. In today's Gallup Tracker, Obama is 3 points ahead of Hillary Clinton:

Before we dive into this, let me say what this is not.  It's not any kind of a gaffe, or any kind of a "gotcha" moment.    It's my interpretation of a journalist's interpretation of some conversations he's had with Hillary Clinton and her close advisers.  The journalist is Mark Halperin, who by most accounts is fairly close with the Clintons, even if he can sometimes lapse into douchebaggery. The interview is with Jane Skinner, who is a host on Ed Rendell's favorite network.