If you'd like to get energized for a volunteer event, help yourself stay motivated, take a break from debates and relax, play some fun background music that might help convince friends/family/roommates, or just admire creative efforts inspired by this global movement, this is the place to go.

I am a Barack Obama supporter who enjoys finding and listening to original music created by other supporters to help spread the enthusiasm. The current version of my lists, with links and details (and statistics!), are included below in this diary. They are also available as playlists on YouTube at www.youtube.com/ObamaSongs, and as I find more songs, I will continue to add them to my playlists.

The Clinton campaign apparently values celebrity opinions on the Democratic primary.

Just today, the campaign spent a lot of ink and oxygen touting the endorsement of Ricky Martin.  Martin, having tagged along with a former phenomenon (Menudo), and whose crowning professional achievement ("Livin' La Vida Loca") has largely been reduced to parody, may have felt some kinship with Sen. Clinton.

However, a well-known actor has provided yet another bracing bucket of cold water for the Clinton campaign.

From a Puerto Rico radio interview.

I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Senator Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make and I think that is what happened here. Senator Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it and I will take her at her word on that.

It reminds me of her phrasing during the infamous 60 minutes interview where she says she takes Obama "at his word" that he's not a Muslim.  You know the Obama camp is, at this moment, sitting back in their desk chairs, watching the TV, unable to believe their eyes...they don't even have to campaign in the primary anymore, with her imploding in front of everybody...

So there I was, sitting in my car at the Burger King drive-thru this morning, just being my usual self - relaxing to Commodores tunes on the car stereo, and waiting to get my usual morning order of coffee and cheesy tots from the lady working the window register.  She was pleasant enough, and appeared to be in her mid-40s.

The lady handed me my coffee, and said, "OK sweetie, if you could just pull up to the front and I'll get your tots right out to you. OK hon?"

Cross-posted at Election Inspection

If you look at the electoral college map then Texas looks like the largest,
not the smallest, of these 4 states, and Pennsylvania is 2nd largest.
But Hillary Clinton only got 10 more pledged delegates than Barack Obama from Pennsylvania.
Obama got 17 more delegates from North Carolina,
so even though it is smaller in terms of overall population,
NC  is bigger in terms of its effect on this race.
One of the biggest states of all, TEXAS, was reduced to mattering almost not at all
after its caucus canceled out its primary -- Obama netted 5 delegates from Texas.
Some polls have Obama losing West Virginia as badly as 5-23, which means
Hillary Clinton would net fully 18 delegates from it!  Seriously,
18 > 17 > 10 > 5 ??

Nothing much to say other than this is a priceless window into another time, to be precise from 1969, when the empress of soul Gladys Knight along with the Pips asked "didn't you know it's got to hurt sometimes" and that once in a while "your head's a little lower" but "love had another side" among other things "didn't you know you have to cry sometimes"......Even in politics, especially in these times, this tune sings so true for some.....perhaps at least for now.....

CL

Cross-posted on the California Majority Report and Calitics.

Under the collective denial mentality that has hijacked media-types and political observers since the February 5th contests, Senator Barack Obama's decisive 56-42 win in North Carolina juxtaposed with Senator Hillary Clinton's narrow 51-49 win in Indiana shows Senator Obama has successfully rebounded from the Rev. Wright controversy and whatever other manufactured non-policy outrages that he's been forced to address. After all, Obama increased his popular vote lead by over 200,000 votes, and more importantly, his 95 new pledged delegates put him 12 delegates further ahead of Clinton. To borrow a catchphrase from former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, Obama's got O-mentum. However, while O-mentum plays a role at the margins, a few points here or there, the reality is this contest is already over, and these outcomes were largely predetermined.

THIS will surely NOT make the rec list.

In some ways we are still haunted by the bigotry that threatened to destroy this country just two short decades ago. I got all tingly when I saw this diary headline:

 Blacks Continue to Vote Race and Stick with Obama

On a DKos diary courtesy of user bethrsingleton.  You see that short headline implies one thing – that African Americans as a group are incapable of independent thought. We’re held captive by group think.

This is simply false.  Nobody needs to allege that we're in groupthink
when we vote over 90% one way.  That is objectively, factually groupthink.
The question is, what is causing such unusual unanimity, and (more importantly), is it good or bad?
Well, "Clarence Thomas" is one obvious example of how it was bad,
but he was a race-traitor and Obama is not.  So again , if the person
being supported is pro-black and intelligent, WHY IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG
with black people supporting him, because he is black, VERSUS
any similarly pro-black intelligent non - black person??

OK, I'll pick up Dansac's flag and launch a new one as we come around the backstretch.  

Please be descriptive... we who aren't Indianans or Carolinians are living vicariously through your stories, and in many cases have never visited your neck of the woods.  Add a little political travelogue, a vigniette, what's blooming, traces of conversation.  While we try to be a fact-based diary, we are also word-based diary.

There has been no diarying on what's going wrong at the polls yet, which is a good thing.  I just heard on Ed Schultz, however, that first-time registered voters, particularly in NW Indiana, are being forced to fill out provisional ballots for some unknown reason.  I can't corroborate this.  Can anyone?

Vote, vote, vote!

After the Pennsylvania primary Hillary Clinton has cut into but not eliminated Obama's lead in the popular vote totals for all Democratic primaries and caucuses sanctioned by the DNC (i.e. minus Florida and Michigan). The total below does NOT include Texas caucuses, since Texas held a primary as well, and I believe that all caucus voters had also to have voted in the primary.  Totals (rounded off to the nearest 10,000 because I had to estimate totals for Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington based on total attendance figures and entrance polling or state delegate percentages) are:

Obama   14,180,000 ....51.0% of votes cast for him or Clinton
Clinton 13,640,000 ....49.0%

Obama leads by about 540,000.
This total differs from that offered on RealClear Politics' front page.  RCP does not include estimates for Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington.

Other ways of counting (Florida, Michigan, etc.) below the fold.

In any sufficiently close election, any sufficiently large bloc could decide the vote if they voted together. To say that they did or will decide the vote, however, is to say that they will or did vote together.
The obvious example, today, is the superdelegates. Another I've hated for years regards minority groups of stockholders.
concretions after the jump.

via MAL Contends
Madison, Wisconsin—Frank Rick has a piece in this morning’s Times arguing that Obama and Hillary "are flat-out wrong" in condemning John McCain for McCain's allegedly having expressed a willingness "... to keep this (Iraq) war going for 100 years," as the two Democrats on the campaign trail state their desire for withdrawal, contra McCain.

I don't know if this has already been diaried but I use Politico's Super Delegate Tracker to follow the ins and outs of who's for who and this evening they jumped their number of Supers for Obama from 219 to 222.

Markos, in his brief diary from earlier today,  "Those Poor Florida Democrats",  makes a rather feeble attempt to offset a no-less-than-brilliant piece by highly respected journalist Wayne Barrett posted on HuffPo yesterday, "Could the Republicans Pick the Democratic Nominee? -- The Untold Story of How the GOP Rigged Florida and Michigan."

(IMHO,  history will indicate that Barrett's piece will--I'm sure--be considered one of the quintessential accountings of what really happened with regard to the Democratic Primaries in MI and FL this year.)

via MAL Contends

Many Americans share concern about the transformation of the American electoral process into a rarefied club unresponsive to the people's concerns.

Joan Didion echos this concern in her Political Fictions (Vintage, 2001)

Sen. Hillary Clinton, on Fox News: "I keep beating this drum. We cannot disenfranchise two of the most important states. . .".

Two points.

Point One: "We" didn’t disenfranchise these states. A select group of politicians in each state chose to disenfranchise their voters by holding the primaries when they wouldn’t count.

Point Two: "We" don’t think you should continue to campaign if it means electing a Republican President. So, if you continue this campaign and, for whatever reason, you aren’t the Democratic nominee and that nominee goes down to defeat, then you will have not only shortchanged every Democrat in the country, but you will have shortchanged the country.

Boy, do I hate to say it! I miss the presidential debates, even though they got less and less pertinent (to me) as the number of debaters shrank to two. But the post-debate primary season makes me long for three hours of questions about which kind of rubber chicken is the worst. Now we are parsing Hillary Clinton’s nightmares, as told by Hillary Clinton, and sermons by some obscure preacher, who none of us outside Chicago had ever heard of before March.

So, I have a modest proposal. BRING BACK THE DEBATES!