The passage BTD quoted above is disgusting.  Are only "conservative" Democrats having a hard time paying for gas? Are only "conservative" Democrats having a hard time paying for -- or even getting -- healthcare?  Since when is deterrence a "pugilistic" foreign policy?  And what race-baiting are we talking about here?  Clinton has been quite restrained on the Rev. Wright issue, whatever she's said on that issue has not been even remotely "race-baiting."

Obama's supporters seem to think he's got a glass jaw; there seems to be very little criticism that can be made of him without crossing some sort of line.

Thanks for pointing out that post, which I noticed today, too, but decided to ignore it. Because, well, life is short.

Anyway, since we have been hearing for several months now that Obama has the nomination wrapped up (even though he clearly doesn't), it's easy for people like Matt Stoller to claim that anything, truly anything, that Hillary Clinton does is hurting the Obama candidacy and is therefore "illegitimate" and "destructive."

Things like competing for the nomination, or being critical, or making policy distinctions, are per se wrong because they're being done BY Clinton and being done TO Obama.  And of course, my favorite Daily Kosism, anything that Clinton does, says, thinks or implies is "Rovian," a word which, to the extent it ever deserved to exist, has now been leached of all meaning and significance.  In LeftBlogSpeak, it now means "anything that YOU or YOUR candidate does that makes ME feel bad or MY candidate look bad."

Yeah, whatever.

Note that on Daily Kos, there's a banner running that shows Obama with a 131 delegate lead.  That data was originally taken from DemConWatch, which had several tables, showing Obama with leads of anywhere from as much as 131 delegates to as few as 10.  That's right, 10.  It's still there on the left of the front page.  Kos, of course, cherrypicked the data that made his candidate look the best, excluding/disenfranchising Michigan and Florida altogether (after praising Clinton for staying on the Michigan ballot, but never mind).

If the votes of Michigan and Florida are counted, the lead is 10.  Let me say it one more time:  10 delegates.  If she wins Indiana decisively and stays close in North Carolina, she will be ahead under this latter scenario, with Kentucky and West Virginia still to go.

And I'll say again, what separates the Clinton supporters from the Obama supporters...:

This is also a decidedly Hard Line Conservative way to build narratives.

While I admit there's a shorthand to it, and blogging certainly would be tedious to if you had to re-present your case every time you stated your conclusion the fact is, .... in most cases it is reductive and not deductive, and one is compelled to deride the blogger accordingly.  To counter attack.

1. she has incorporated a means of making it, as much as possible, revenue neutral, by virtue of the imposition of a "windfall profits" tax (and make no mistake, the oil companies are enjoying record profits) on the oil companies.

2. while the 20 odd cents a gallon at the pump won't have a huge direct effect on consumers at the pump, it will have a ripple effect. everything you buy will ultimately be affected; the cost of transporting those goods should decrease, and be reflected in the price you pay at the store.

Same when he went on FOX News, and when he praised Ronald Reagan, and when he called the GOP the party of ideas. He wasn't going after conservatives, he was going after all those liberals who watch FOX, who like Ronald Reagan, and are registered Republicans.

I don't buy into the race baiting stuff but the other 2 points aren't too far off the mark.

Proposing B.S. tax cuts is part and parcel of Conservative political dogma.  You know how we know this?  Because John McCain proposed the same thing as Hillary did a week before her.  The fact that she is couching it in more populist terms, without actually explaining how, doesn't make her tax cut populist unless you think that tax cuts are populist.