So according to the pundits, Bill Clinton is a.) sulking, b.) waiting for Obama to kiss his (Clinton's) ass, and c.) demanding that Obama declare to the world that Bill Clinton is not a racist.

Thomas Edsall writes:

The former president and Obama have not talked, and, by all accounts, the man of the Clinton household remains hurt and resentful. Associates provide a variety of explanations for the Bill Clinton dilemma, none of them mutually exclusive.

Some say Bill Clinton not only wants Obama to reach out to him, but to also promise to lift the cloud of alleged racism -- an accusation that continues to eat at the man once dubbed the nation's "first black president." Clinton, these folks suggest, wants Obama to publicly exonerate him of the charge that he played the race card in the primaries.

I first donated to Obama's campaign back in February, 2007, a day or so after he announced.  As a member of the Detroit Economic Club, I attended his speech last year.  You know the one - where he told the automakers just how much their business practices sucked and how they need to focus their technological advances on efficiency and away from power.  It's a standard line in his stump speech where he says that the room was pretty quiet when he said that, and he's not lying.

But then the long drought began.  Our stupid party leaders moved the Michigan primary to January 15th and the rest is history.  Instead of having the national spotlight on our vote, bringing life and energy to a typically grey Michigan February, we sat on the sidelines while all the other kids got to go to the prom.  Even fellow rule-breaker, Florida, got a late-night visit from Hillary Clinton.  We got nothin'.  Until recently.

Obama is in Iowa tonight, giving a speech in the state where it all began.  He's marking the occasion of taking the majority of pledged delegates.  He's on a roll, and bringing the campaign to McBush, no holds barred.

Some of my favorite excerpts below the fold.

First, let me preface this post by declaring that I am a feminist.  I fully believe in equal rights for women, equal pay for identical work, and full reproductive rights.  I recognize the long struggle women have had just to get to the point where I can declare my beliefs without being run out of town or burned at the stake.

That having been said, I don't get how anyone can get very outraged over Obama referring to a woman as "sweetie".  If you didn't hear the story, a reporter interrupted a conversation that Obama was having with the President of Chrysler during his Michigan trip yesterday.  Obama replied to her intrusion with, "Hold on one second, sweetie, we'll do a press avail".  Now except for being impressed with his use of the word "avail", something you don't hear in everyday conversation (is that a media thing, short for available, or did he mean it as in "soon", like they say it at Medieval Times?), I didn't think much of the matter.  But apparently the reporter did, because it's all over the news here in Michigan today.

This diary is a rant with no links and no science.  Deal with it.

According to a CNN analyst, it looks like Hillary owes about 10% of her votes in Indiana to Rush Limbaugh's Operation Asshole, or asshole operation (or whatever it's called).  Makes me mad as hell.

The only good news about this is that it may finally wake up the superdelegates to the fact that it's all over but the shouting and it's time to get down to the business of defining McCain instead of letting his BBQ buddies in the press fawn all over him for another month.  

I just have one question for Republicans:  Do you really think that in 2012, when President Obama is running for his second term, that a few million Democrats won't cross over and play havoc with your nominating process?  Do you really think that what goes around won't come the hell back around?

Quite a few of Detroit’s dysfunctional city government leaders have been making the national news for months now because of their crazy actions.  Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is in a class by himself, embroiled in numerous scandals involving bid rigging, police misconduct, perjury, adultery and the suspicious murders of not one but TWO strippers.  

Criminal behavior aside, City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, the wife of esteemed Congressman and House Judiciary Chair John Conyers may be one of the most disrespectful, egotistical, and inappropriately behaved elected officials we’ve seen around here in a long time and that’s really saying something.  She has gotten into at least one bar fight with a woman after demanding the woman’s boyfriend buy her a drink.  She's had public altercations with other City Council members and even threatened a member of the city's Pension Board with her gun.

So Hillary came to Detroit yesterday to do a little Clintonesque shit-stirring as only a Clinton can.  Her Michigan kitchen sink strategy consists of convincing Michigan Democrats that their right to vote is being infringed upon by the Democratic National Committee and Barack Obama.  She was all over the news saying that the DNC is taking away our right to be counted and Obama refuses to rubberstamp her plan to put Michigan in play again.

Today is the last day Hillary's primary bill can pass the Michigan legislature.  Tomorrow is Good Friday when it will be hard to find anybody at their jobs in Lansing and after that, the House goes on a two-week vacation and the Senate starts their two weeks a week later.  So with both houses out of town for two of the next three weeks, it's now or never, so I'm betting never.  But we have work to do Kossacks!  We can clean up the mess of misinformation that Hillary slung around here yesterday by letting the major news outlets know the truth about our primary.  Read on...

Michigan is in the news this morning, with Hillary coming to Detroit where she'll try to convince the Michigan Legislature to pass the bill authorizing a second a primary.  They'll have to make it quick, though.  After Friday, the lawmakers are on a nice little Easter break and afterwards may be too late to make the cut with all of the county clerks already complaining about the timing.

In the meantime, Obama's chief lawyer is raising questions about the plan that Hilllary's superdelegates, er....I mean the Michigan Democratic party leaders have put together.  

More on the news from Michigan below the fold.

Do you remember those halcyon days when we Democrats reveled in the sure win that was guaranteed in the 2008 presidential race?  It didn’t matter which candidate was selected to run as our nominee, we knew this was our year.  This was going to be a fun campaign season, ending in a cakewalk to the White House no matter who we nominated.

But it wasn’t just about putting a Democrat in the White House and partying in DC in January.  It was about ending an unnecessary war that so far has taken almost 4,000 American lives and untold numbers of Iraqi civilians.  It was about focusing economic growth in areas that helped average American workers navigate the global economy and not putting another $10 million in some CEO’s pocket.  It was about truly honoring our men and women in uniform by properly equipping them abroad and giving them platinum-level care when they returned.  It was about making sure every citizen had access to affordable healthcare.  It was about focusing on Afghanistan and finally capturing the mass murderer whose organization killed over 3,000 of our citizens and residents on American soil almost seven years ago.  It was about redefining American patriotism away from wearing lapel pins to actually valuing the lives of Americans.

Last weekend when I pulled into my driveway at 11 PM, my next door neighbors were pulling out of their driveway in an extra-large U-Haul truck.  Out of respect, I didn’t go over and say goodbye to a family that had lived next door to me for the past eight years.  When a family moves out like that, it’s awkward and you know the last thing they want to do is talk to their neighbors.  By Tuesday, the tell-tale neon orange sticker was on their door.  Yet another foreclosure in a state full of them.  

Michigan used to lead the nation in a standard of living largely earned by labor unions, including high rates of healthcare and home ownership with a public university system second only to California.  Now my state leads the nation in unemployment and foreclosures.  It’s worse than I remember growing up during the economic crises of the early ‘80’s, when grown men and women spent their time in blocks-long lines all day, first at the unemployment office and then waiting for cheese and other free government surplus food.  

I only have anecdotal evidence of it, but I'm afraid the Great Lake State won't be blue come November - more below the fold.

For the dozen of you who haven't heard yet, Detroit's Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is embroiled in a career-ruining scandal, involving lies, text messaging, and sex, with a couple of murdered strippers to add spice to the mix. But his scandal may have an adverse effect on Hillary Clinton's efforts to have the Michigan delegation counted.  The full story of the scandal is worthy of any Tom Wolfe novel or an entire season of The Wire, but here's a summary:

Kwame Kilpatrick was elected mayor of Detroit at the ripe old age of 31 in 2001.  Shortly after his election, rumors started circulating around the city that a wild party at the official mayoral residence had ended when the mayor's wife beat up one of the two strippers at the party.  Attendees talked about the party openly on local radio stations until that is, the two strippers in question ended up dead, both shot by the same type of gun in drive-by shootings (one of them in Detroit, the other in Atlanta where she had fled for safety).  

It gets even worse below the fold.

Just watched Obama's speech at the VA Jefferson-Jackson Dinner and the analysis afterwards wasn't that great.  One thing that Chuck Todd said though, confirmed one of my beliefs (or hopes, as it were):  that the Democratic superdelegates will read the polls and not stand in the way of an Obama win.  Oh, Todd didn't say it like that, exactly.  What he said was that the superdelegates are politicians who read polls too and if the nominee with the most pledged delegates and the nominee with the best poll numbers against McCain are one and the same, the superdelegates will throw their support behind that nominee regardless of their previous endorsements and get the national election started as soon as possible.  This theory makes total sense to me.

Of course if Obama fits only one of those descriptions and Clinton the other, all bets are off.  So let's all hope (damn, there's that word again) that Obama continues his amazing surge (the only surge I know that's actually working, by the way) and we don't end up with blood on the streets of Denver.

Dear Chairman Dean:

As a resident of Michigan who was assured by party leaders here that the sacrifice of our presidential primary was necessary for the long-term goal of making Michigan's economic woes relevant to the national discussion, I am extremely distressed by Hillary Clinton's call to seat our (and Florida's) delegates at the convention.  The DNC made the rules and determined the penalty for violating them well in advance of the primary season.  The Michigan Democratic Party chose to violate the rules with their eyes wide open, thereby nullifying my vote and the vote of every other participant in the Michigan Democratic primary.  

Even though there was an agreement among the Democratic candidates not to run in Michigan, some candidates, most notably Clinton, remained on the ballot.  At the time, it was reported that the Clinton campaign missed the deadline to remove her name from the ballot.  Later, new reports surfaced that Clinton had only agreed not to campaign in Michigan but that she never actually agreed to take her name off the ballot.  Regardless, neither Edwards nor Obama were on the Michigan ballot and Clinton was.