CNN has updated the Indiana totals, and it's basically 99.99% complete.

A minor irritation, but still ... because CNN (and also The New York Times, among others) insists on rounding the percentages to 51% versus 49%, you don't get an accurate picture of the margin of victory.
If you do the math, you'll see that Hillary got 50.55% of the vote, and Obama took 49.44%, so the margin was actually 1 percentage point, not 2.

It's obvious Hillary Clinton cannot snag the Democratic presidential nomination away from Barack Obama at this point in the game. Maybe, just maybe, there's a small chance she can convince enough superdelegates to switch up during the convention in August. But why tear the party to shreds -- and why go so negative against Obama to the point of practically towing the Republican line?

Consider this: If the Dems lose this one (meaning Obama is so damaged by this long-winded nominating process that he is unable to beat McCain), in just four years Hillary can be "tested and ready" to realize her dream of becoming president. Contrast that to losing the nomination to Obama and then having to wait eight years or more.

As the years tick by since the
misguided, calamitous invasion of Iraq, it's important not to let the
history of the run-up to war be stealthily revised.



In comparing
the two remaining Democratic candidates for president, Iraq has, of
course, always been the colossal dividing line: Hillary Clinton voted
to authorize President Bush to use pre-emptive military force; Barack
Obama (then a state senator) spoke out passionately and presciently
against it.

For those of us who took to the streets in thunderous protest
before the bombs began falling over Baghdad, it is a slap in the face
to have Hillary Clinton now justify her vote in 2002 as some sort of
wool-over-the-eyes trickery by the Bush administration. We were duped
into this war on trumped-up WMD evidence, she says; and furthermore, she adds, we had no idea that
a war authorization would, you know, actually authorize a war. Her vote
was "misused," she claims, when all she had wanted in the first place
was continued diplomacy and for "the inspectors to finish the job."

Hillary Clinton is not dumb, and the fact is, no intelligent
legislator voted for the authorization thinking that Bush was going to
further negotiate with Saddam Hussein or that Bush would skip back to
Congress for a more specific and formal declaration of war. Hillary
Clinton and the others were keenly aware that the president had gotten
the piece of paper he needed giving the green light for an upcoming
invasion, well before Bush finally gave up the charade and kicked out
those meddling U.N. weapons inspectors altogether.

And if her vote was indeed "misused," then why didn't Hillary
Clinton speak up at the time, loudly, clearly? As millions of enraged
citizens of the world marched in lockstep protest of an utterly
preventable war, her lips were zipped (like many sets of lips among the "party of opposition"). The silence was politically
expedient but did not go unnoticed by the masses. A letter to the
editor in The New York Times warned:

"New York's senators, having voted for the resolution last year
authorizing the use of force in Iraq, appear to have lost their voices
entirely. History will record that when the country effected a sea
change in its posture toward the world, Senators Hillary Clinton and
Charles E. Schumer were nowhere to be found."

And here we are, heading into March 2008, entering the sixth year of our
occupation of Iraq, nearly 4,000 of our men and women in uniform dead,
tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead -- all "collateral damage" in
a war with no end in sight.



Former Senator Lincoln Chafee, who
was the only Republican in 2002 with the backbone to stand up to Bush and Cheney and
their neocon cronies and vote "no" to the war resolution, thinks no Democrat
who voted "yes" should be forgiven by voters. Chafee writes in his upcoming
memoir that some "argue that the president duped them into war, but
getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a
rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending
lapse of judgment.''

Hillary Clinton still has her career. But are we going to give her a promotion?



Even though we're not reading about it much these days, the war rages on...

Barack Obama is hitting his stride with a slew of recent caucus and primary wins. A February 11 USA Today/Gallop poll shows him leaping ahead of Hillary Clinton in a national matchup of the two Democratic candidates.

If you want to see just how much momentum the O-Man has gathered over the weekend, look no further than Pollster.com's graph of the national polling trend: here. Check out the sudden upward trajectory; as you can see, these are the highest numbers Obama has polled so far in the Democratic primary.