Midday open thread

• Yo people, Obama isn't beyond reproach or criticism. I want him to win the primary and the general, but I ain't gonna keep my mouth shut and carry his water when I disagree with him. If you have a problem with it, you might want to go elsewhere, because this is the reality based community, not the "Obama can do no wrong" community. The dude is human, believe it or not.

  What's funny to me is that the same people who have criticized Clinton for legitimizing Fox, or who helped fight to kill the Fox News Democratic debates, are now busy rationalizing Obama's decision to appear on the network.

• Electoral-Vote now has a map color-coded for which candidate does better against McCain.

  Clinton does better than Obama in 6 states totalling 92 electoral votes.

  Obama does better than Clinton in 15 states totalling 164 electoral votes.

• Per SUSA, No one likes their politicians in Kentucky.

  President Bush: Minus 34.
  Governor Beshear: Minus 16.
  Sen. McConnell: Even (46% approval, 46% disapproval).
  Sen. Bunning: Minus 9.

• Jerome talks to the authors of Millenial Makeover. Per Jerome's recommendation I bought the book and it just arrived. I hope to start reading it this week.
• I still have a crush on Elizabeth Edwards.
• Is Wright's speaking tour (and his throwing Obama under the bus) good or bad for Obama? The campaign is of two minds about it.
• The political consultants may squawk, but it really is time for sensible restrictions on robo-calling. Self-regulation on these sorts of things doesn't work. The problem isn't the responsible campaigns. It's the irresponsible ones.
• Thanks to the drawn-out primary, voter registration in Oregon soars -- from a 45,537 Democratic advantage over the GOP in 2002, to 117,573 today.
• dnA wonders why white bloggers ignored the Sean Bell decision. I won't speak for other bloggers since, despite popular opinion to the contrary, I don't rule the blogosphere with my iron (Tang-colored) fist. For me, I didn't blog it because this is a site about national elections, and the Bell decision, regardless its horrors, was not an electoral story.

  Much the same vein, I ignored the Jena 6 case. This wasn't the venue. Now in my forthcoming book, Jena 6 plays a marquee role in one of the chapters since the story was relevant to the material I was covering. But for this blog, unless it touches upon electoral concerns, it's generally not going to get covered. That has nothing to do with whether it's "important" or not, and more to do with me covering what personally interests me most and is geared towards what my audience expects. Police brutality and unequal justice are both important issues, but not within my scope of expertise. I'd rather let people who know those issues better discuss them and I can focus on the stuff that I know best.

  We all have different ideas about what is or isn't important. We can't sit around demanding that others cover what we want them to cover. The beauty of the blogosphere is that we all have venues to discuss the stuff that interests us most.

  Finally -- and I saw this quite a bit during the NYC transit strike a few years ago -- there's a feeling from New Yorkers that what happens in their neck of the woods is supremely important to everyone (as dnA admits in a follow up post). But to me, the fact that the NYPD is all f'd up isn't particularly compelling national news. If it's so F'd up, it's up to New Yorkers to fix it. It's their police force, after all.

• Weekend delegate news -- Obama lost a delegate in Iowa to John Edwards per projections. Clinton added an add-on delegate in New Hampshire. In Arizona, two super delegates were announced -- one an Obama supporter, the other undeclared. In New Mexico, Clinton supporters were expected to pick up the add-on seat, but instead, the state party chair gave it to an undeclared Native American activist in order to increase their delegation's diversity. The Clinton supporters are pissed. All in all, the tally is +2 undeclared, +1 Clinton, +1 Edwards, and even for Obama.

  What this weekend showed was that projections of add-on delegates based on the winner of each state aren't valid. Clinton won Arizona and New Mexico, yet failed to pick up any of those three add-on delegates. What should've been a +4 weekend for her fizzled out.

• Swing State Project gets us a handy chart of the top 75 competitive House races based on Cash on Hand. And, since those guys are thorough, there's also a Senate version.