I doubt many people other than political junkies will find this interesting, but American Public Media’s show Marketplace (if you listen to NPR, you’ll know it) has just launched Budget Hero, a game where you can set the budget priorities and see how it stacks up against reality. What’s nice about this is it lists [...]

Hmmm…something tells me that this new hard-liner stance is a loser from the get-go. Because not only does it represents exactly the type of inflexibility that people don’t like about the current administration, but does anybody think it’s a good idea for McCain to propose turning back the clock on one of the few things [...]

Saying one thing and doing another has been the hallmark of this administration, but the ring is particularly hollow when it comes to Bush’s nonsensical “appeasement” talk.
Take our handling of the Sudan situation for example…
Sometime in the next few weeks, a special envoy of President Bush plans to meet with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, [...]

No significant movement over the past few days. He dipped a bit, but has since recovered, and my guess is we won’t see much difference until after the last primary is over.

The details…
After a string of five days with a double-digit lead over Clinton last week, Obama has held slightly smaller advantages over Clinton — [...]

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics is doing a multi-part analysis of Barack Obama’s voting coalition. The first article is up today.
This is very in-depth, statistical analysis comparing voting regions, races, education and other variables. If you’re a political numbers junkie, check it out. It’s quite interesting.

From his own book My Life comes this excerpt via Political Wire:
He writes: “On April 7, we also won in Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. On April 9, Paul Tsongas announced that he would not reenter the race. The fight for the nomination was effectively over.”
So not only was her reference to RFK’s assassination not a [...]

He apparently has a flood of them set for right after the last primary, so get ready folks…the tide’s a comin’!
From Marc Ambinder:
Neither the Clinton nor the Obama campaign is clear what the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee will do on May 31; depending upon how or whether they re-allocate delegates, Obama could wind up [...]

Oops! Mark Warner broke the cardinal rule of presidential campaigning: NEVER let VP ruminations out of the bag before the official announcement! While all of us news-hungry journalists at Donklephant, VicePresidents.com and elsewhere are avidly speculating, passing around scuttlebutt and trying to promote our iconoclast favorites, there is always an air of ambiguity around the [...]

We both made predictions about how 2008 would shape up back in February 2006, and I think this post could serve as an interesting juxtaposition of inside the beltway thinking vs. outside the beltway thinking.
First uber-tech blogger Robert Scoble shared Trippi’s thoughts…
In the 2008 election he expects that Hillary Clinton will be a lockin for [...]

If you’re a long time reader of this blog, you’ll know I’m a big Mark Warner fan. He was doing the unity thing as governor of Virginia before it became a national meme, but he wisely read the tea leaves and stepped aside in the presidential race after he saw signs in late 2006 that [...]

Former Kentucky Commerce Secretary Bruce Lunsford is actually leading McConnell 49 to 44 in the latest Rasmussen polls.
So how is this possible when McConnell has a favorability rating of 52% in his own state?
Two words: Bush and economy:
While McConnell will try to make Obama a part of Lunsford’s name, Lunsford will emphasize McConnell’s ties [...]

Is it the VP slot? A place in Obama’s cabinet should he win? A Senate Majority Leader position?
My best guess is she won’t get the VP slot. It makes sense for electoral reasons (nearly 35 million votes when you combine their totals), but would really undermine Obama’s change message and may bring the anti-Hillary [...]

Yesterday, E. J. Dionne wrote about patriotism in general and specifically focused on how Barack Obama can move the debate to matters more important than flag pins. Dionne argues Obama should embrace an action-based rather than symbolic patriotism and looks to some recent liberal writing on the matter to make his point:
The reaction of too [...]

The full show. Check it out.

As always, there are many different totals, but Obama has been starting to rack up a lot more superdelegates in the last week and he’s very close to locking this up.
CNN:
Obama – Pledged (1660), Super (309), Total (1,969)
Clinton – Pledged (1500), Super (279), Total (1,779)
57 for Obama to win, 247 for Clinton to win
Real Clear [...]

But it wasn’t an easy nomination process…
Denver — Georgia’s Bob Barr won a long and tense battle Sunday for the 2008 Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination and now faces the daunting task of doing what no third-party candidate has done: Win in November.
It took six ballots and nearly five hours of voting at the Libertarian National [...]

Hopefully all of you Donklephant readers are enjoying a day of rest, eating grilled meats (or veggie patties) and welcoming summer. Hopefully y’all will also take a minute to remember the solemnity of this day. We don’t always agree on the necessity of wars but I think we can agree that those who fought and [...]

Ahhh Jon…it’s almost too easy…

I hadn’t seen those interviews before, but seriously…wow. Gotta love that reasoning!

Her 2006 returns are a good start, but as I’ve said in the past, full disclosure for presidential candidates is becoming a must. Especially since it’s obvious that nearly all of their assets are in her name and she recently sold off mutual funds linked to Sudanese companies.
From the AP:
Cindy McCain has released her 2006 [...]