Riffing on an Andrew Sullivan complaint about especially annoying outcomes, I thought I'd throw in a few media-monitoring metrics to set expectations.

We're all impatient to end this primary and get on to the general election. The math, as we've known for months, makes it close to impossible for Hillary to win at this point. She is sticking it out, it seems, just to knock him down so that he'll be unelectable in the eyes of superdelegates, or that he'll lose in the general election so she can run in 2012. But here's my advice to you Barack: Don't take the bait!

Zogby/Newsmax released a... what the... yeah, Zogby/NEWSMAX released a poll tonight showing PA a one-point race. Zogby's had some track record issues. And why is this poll associated with Newsmax? Anyway, it puts the race at virtually dead even.

http://www.mydd.com/...

I'm linking to MyDD because I won't put a Newsmax link up. H/T to mecarr, one of the brave Obama supporters over there for finding this.

Terry Madonna's Franklin and Marshall poll is out tonight and it shows Obama gaining on Clinton since March. He is now down by 6, which is exactly what Quinnipiac has. He trailed by 9 in late March.

http://abclocal.go.com/...

One of the pleasures of living in East Tennessee, other than the gorgeous scenery, is the consistently inspiring play of Pat Summitt's Tennessee Lady Volunteers. Tonight she won her 8th national championship by defeating Stanford.

It looks like at the end of the night Hillary Clinton will have picked up about 15 delegates overall. Considering Obama's 162 pledged delegate lead going into the night, the 15 delegate deficit is nothing - and it will be made up in Wyoming and Mississippi. All things considered, this was a perfectly good night for Barack Obama.

I posted this as a very long comment elsewhere and figured it would make a more appropriate diary entry. Anyway, here is my prognosis of the Texas primary race, based on polling, turnout and demographics. I'd love it if people more versed in Texas politics can respond here.

In an almost comic reversal of Obama's "denounce and reject Farrakhan" moment, Hillary Clinton was faced today with an almost exact mirror image in the form of an openly racist Texas woman and supporter named Adelfa Callejo.

New York Daily News reporter Michael McAuliffe's pool covered a conversation between Clinton and a Dallas TV station regarding the woman's comments.

Buckeye State Blog has some leaked poll numbers from the Obama campaign showing him down only 7 points in Ohio! BSB couldn't provide any further detail on this except to say that movement in the Q-Poll and Rasmussen survey had already shown serious movement for Obama.

I'm certainly no fan of Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter. Nooners wells up with self-importance every week, usually offering some condescending riff on Democrats who "don't get" some "vital American character trait" or some such nonsense. But she often mixes a few good insights alongside the drivel. And in the middle of a column about Obama's race innoculating him from character attacks in the general election (yeah, right), she includes this important but largely forgotten observation:

Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing. It's not one big primary, it's a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor.

I am the first to declare the Florida primary "meaningless." I say that in the basic and definitional sense: the votes will NOT lead to the seating of delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The votes, thus, have no tangible significance in the selection of a Presidential candidate. Yet, voter turnout on the Democratic side was shockingly high for a veritable "beauty contest." Something is going on.

The first vote in the primaries is over. In a small town with 17  voters, Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, has already cast its ballots. There are only 2 Democrats (one brand new this month) voting tonight, 3 Republicans and the rest Independents. And the results:

For the Republicans:
Giuliani: 1
Romney: 2
McCain: 4
Huckabee: 0

For the Democrats:
Edwards: 2
Richardson: 1
Obama: 7
Clinton: 0

Out of 17 votes cast, 7 went to Obama.

So that's it for now. It's on!

BTW, for historical perspective, Wesley Clark won for the Dems in 2004 and Bush won for the GOP in 2000. Neither of those candidates ended up winning those primaries.

In a Fox News poll that tracked voters over the weekend, Democrats lead by 49-36. So add this to the CNN poll over the weekend showing a 20 point lead. When you consider the over-sampled conservatives in the Pew poll, I'd say our prospects for tomorrow look very good. Also, the Fox News and CNN polls included the day of Saddam's sentencing. Clearly that didn't matter.

Ever since somebody noticed that the Saddam sentencing was scheduled for November 5, everybody around here got paranoid that Rove fixed it for that date, or that it would sway the election to the Republicans. Relax. It will have no effect at all on the election, and we don't need to "get in front of it" as if it was some sort of scandal.

I've had it with the quaking-in-the-boots, what's Karl going to do next, Diebold stole the election whining. Karl Rove is a sharp political operative of the Lee Atwater school, but he is not a God. He says things to influence his Republican base, and to get the media to notice. And he tries to spook the opposition into believing that their efforts will be in vain. Karl Rove has no "secret plan" to sentence Saddam to death on November 5, or capture Osama bin Laden, or hack the election machines, or send an army of mutant fundamentalists to double our GOTV efforts. He's just another sad, cynical operative whose supposed "genius" gave us Terri Schiavo, Social Security Privatization, keeping Don Rumsfeld, and pledging to stay the course when the country abandoned Bush on the war.

Iraqi election judges rejected fraud claims made by Sunni Arabs. The UIA, the Shi'ite list, won 59% of the vote in Baghdad according to early returns, and the Sunnis find that result to be preposterous.  Sunnis, especially Adnan Al-Dulaimi of the National Concord Front, demanded a revote in Baghdad because of the fraud. But the Iraqi Electoral Commission rejected that request outright.

According to a new Quinnipiac Poll, the public is not buying into Bush's latest Iraq pushback strategy on either front. Support for immediate withdrawal from Iraq is as high as 40 percent now, with 4 percent asking for a withdrawal deadline of 6 months, and 10 percent supporting a withdrawal deadline of 1 year. Only 34 percent believe there should be "no deadline". In other words, Bush has convinced nobody that setting a withdrawal timetable is a bad thing.

On the honesty front, 49 percent believe the Bush Administration "intentional misled" the US public on pre-war intelligence, while 46 believe the Administration told what it believed to be the truth. Again, the honesty pushback scheme did nothing to sway the public.

Bush's approval rating is 40, with disapproval at 54. Cheney and Congress are much worse. All are historic lows for the Q-Poll.

It seems that public opinion has hardened on these questions. Quinnipiac hadn't polled these Iraq-related questions in a very long time. It's pretty clear that a PR effort on a "Plan for Victory" won't do much for Bush.

I've been an equal opportunity critic throughout this Katrina mess. I really do think there is plenty of blame to go around. The failure of the Feds to follow the National Response Plan was probably the most fatal mistake of all because it denied desperately needed resources for several critical days after the storm. And for that, Chertoff should be fired. But Blanco clearly made several mistakes in deploying the National Guard and streamlining aid to evacuees. With that in mind, it's great to see Blanco take full responsibility for errors made at the state level. If you want to see a genuine mea culpa - and not the weasely Bush version - see what she had to say: "At the state level, we must take a careful look at what went wrong and make sure it never happens again. The buck stops here, and as your governor, I take full responsibility."