May 9--U.S. Rep. James Clyburn said sources in the "Obama camp" have told him that U.S. Sen. Barack Obama from Illinois has taken over the lead among unpledged Democratic delegates, the so-called "superdelegates."  During a conference call with reporters Clyburn said Obama has converted a number of superdelegates previously pledged to U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton from New York, and that Obama took the lead in superdelegates this morning. Clyburn could not remember where the information had come from. Many news agencies' latest survey of the roughly 700 superdelegates showed Clinton holding the lead by just a few delegates. The Associated Press had the superdelegate count Friday morning as Clinton with 271.5 superdelegates and Obama 266 superdelegates.

From the Hotline [HERE] Clyburn also said that he and other members of U.S. House leadership had no plans when they would endorse a candidate as superdelegates, but that he, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland and other House leadership would decide together when to endorse.

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn tells NJ Contributing Editor Linda Douglass that any backroom deal that swipes the Dem nom from Barack Obama would devastate young people and blacks. He also argues that Hillary Clinton's pitch that Obama will do poorly with white voters is bunk. Unless HRC believes, too, that her take of the black vote during the primaries represents how she'll perform in the general.

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The City Council discussed its three options for dealing with scandal-plagued Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in closed session Tuesday two could lead to his ouster but seem unlikely, and one would amount to a slap on the wrist.  The council on Monday received a special report by its outside attorney summarizing facts in the text-messaging sex scandal that led to perjury and other charges against Kilpatrick and a former aide.

The report suggests that the council consider removing Kilpatrick from office, asking Gov. Jennifer Granholm to do it or publicly censuring the mayor. The latter two options "are probably being looked at more strongly on the part of council," Council President Ken Cockrel Jr. said Tuesday. If the council tried to remove Kilpatrick itself, "it could result in a new trial which could tie up a lot of money and a lot of time for an extended period," Cockrel said.

State law allows the governor to remove an elected official from office for a number of reasons, including official misconduct, willful neglect of duty or a felony conviction. Granholm has said she wants to allow the legal process to play out.

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As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton made a last-minute trip to West Virginia and declared her intent to stay in the race, aides to Sen. Barack Obama signaled Wednesday that he would move towards a general election strategy over the next month.

Obama has accumulated a lead in pledged delegates that is all but insurmountable – a point that Clinton campaign officials acknowledged Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. That pushes the campaign largely into political backrooms, as both candidates made plans to meet privately Wednesday and Thursday with uncommitted superdelegates in Washington.

Aides to Obama, who spent Wednesday in Chicago with his family, said the Illinois senator would campaign in the remaining primary states and Puerto Rico. He heads to Oregon, which votes May 20, on Friday for a two-day trip and travels Monday to West Virginia, which votes May 13.  When asked whether Obama would campaign over the next month in general election states, Axelrod said: “I guess you can infer that from what I said.”

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Democrats' Clinton Era Said To Be Coming To End.
From the FrontrunnerThe New York Times (5/8, Nagourney) reports that after "16 years, the Clinton era may be coming to an end, presenting Democrats with a historic but potentially wrenching transition and a challenge to" Obama "as he seeks to reconcile a deeply divided party." While the "relationship between the party establishment and the Clintons has always been uneasy at best, an entire generation of Democrats has known no other figures as dominant as the two of them." Hillary Clinton "said Wednesday that she would remain in the race despite her double-digit loss in North Carolina and winning only narrowly in Indiana. But across the party, Democrats - including some of her own supporters - were confronting an increasing likelihood that their tangle of ties to and feelings about the Clintons would be swept aside for now as the party prepares for a new era with a leader, in Mr. Obama, who comes from a different generation and promises a very different style of politics."

Go Bye Bye
The Los Angeles Times (5/8, 881K) editorializes, "Even if Clinton were to win every remaining state by a comfortable margin, she could not amass enough delegates before the convention to pass Obama. Still, it's fair to ask whether there's any harm in continuing. The answer is yes." Clinton has no arguments "left to make. She has run a fine race, but she has lost."  The Washington Post (5/8, A22) editorializes, "Clinton may, as she promised yesterday, fight on through the next few weeks of primaries, but after her disappointing showing Tuesday she has no plausible route to victory."

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WASHINGTON -- The House passed a giant package of measures designed to tackle the housing crisis Thursday, but only after two days of bickering that signal turbulence ahead for the legislation. Democrats and Republicans, abandoning the brief comity that helped them forge an economic-stimulus package earlier this year, argued over the procedures used to bring the bill to a vote. Another flash point was the millions in spending directed toward community groups Republicans said would fund Democrats' get-out-the-vote efforts.

The House voted 266-154 in favor of the centerpiece of the legislation -- $300 billion in federal loan guarantees -- despite a White House veto threat. The battle reflected the package's status as the biggest, most-comprehensive legislative response to the housing crisis likely to pass this year. The heart of the legislation is a program to help struggling homeowners by providing them with new mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration. The guarantees would be provided if lenders agree to reduce the principal of a borrower's existing mortgage. [MORE]

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The House today passed legislation to erase a government-imposed stigma against membership in the African National Congress of South Africa. This bill, authored by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard L. Berman (D-CA), will remove from U.S. databases any notation that would characterize the ANC and its leaders -- including Nobel Laureate and former South African President Nelson Mandela -- as terrorists.

"This long-overdue bill is the direct result of a stunning and, frankly, embarrassing story for the United States," Berman noted. "Despite recognizing two decades ago that America's place was on the side of those oppressed by Apartheid, Congress has never resolved the inconsistency in our immigration code that treats many of those who actively opposed Apartheid in South Africa as terrorists and criminals."

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BATON ROUGE (AP) — Three black state lawmakers say they are weighing whether to run for three U.S. House seats this fall as independents, a move that could splinter Democratic support in the races. Sen. Don Cravins Jr., Sen. Lydia Jackson and Rep. Michael Jackson say the state and national Democratic parties have failed to recruit and support black candidates to run for federal and statewide offices. They said there's disparity between how the party treats black and white candidates.

"For many, many years, the African-American community has been very supportive of Democrats, and many of us feel that has not been reciprocated," said Cravins, D-Opelousas. Louisiana has only one black member of Congress: U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat who represents a majority black district. All seven of Louisiana's U.S. House seats come up for election in November.

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In April 2008 when Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita announced the release of "record high" voter registration rolls, with 4.3 million voters set to vote in the Tuesday May 6 primary, he didn't mention that a whopping 1,134,427 voter registrations have been cancelled. Now, the voter rolls are supposed to be tidied up prior to each election. Indiana's last general election was in Nov. 2006, and they have had a slew of special and general elections since then. So how have 1.1 million voters -- 26 percent of the current statewide list -- escaped the voter registration cleanup squad? Who are these million voters and where do they come from?

One quarter-million of them come from just two northwestern Indiana counties: Lake and Porter. Lake County reports purging 137,164 voters and neighboring Porter County cancelled out 124,958 voters.  Lake County, the home of Gary, Indiana, has spawned the Jackson Five and a great old musical (The Music Man) and has been referred to as "the second most liberal county in America." Lake County also has one of the heaviest concentrations of African-American voters that you'll find anywhere in the USA.

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BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.

What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

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This column isn’t about Barack Obama. Plenty has already been written about him. Certainly, thousands of columnists nationwide have had ample opportunity to discuss his candidacy, and there may be no other topic so thoroughly covered by opinion columnists as that of Barack Obama’s candidacy. His spate of February and March victories has propelled him to frontrunner status, and his fundraising campaign has raised the equivalent of a small Latin American nation’s yearly gross domestic product. But this isn’t another column about the Illinois senator, but rather his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.

This column isn’t about how Barack Obama refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag correctly, sing the national anthem louder than the guy next to him or wear a flag lapel. That sort of talk is a distraction in the dialogue that needs to be taking place in this nomination battle. I’m certainly not going to mention that Barack Obama may or may not be an Ivy League- educated elitist liberal who hates America. I heard some Republicans saying it, but it certainly isn’t worth repeating here.

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• Did Rush Limbaugh Tip Indiana to Clinton? [MORE]
• Gary Mayor Predicts Possible Indiana Shocker [MORE]
• Superdelegates Who Are Uncommitted [MORE]
  

AP Barack Obama swept to victory in the North Carolina primary Tuesday night and declared he was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination. Hillary Rodham Clinton clung to a narrow Indiana lead, struggling to halt her rival's march into history.

"Tonight we stand less than 200 delegates away from winning the Democratic nomination for president of the United States," Obama told a raucous rally in Raleigh, N.C. — and left no doubt he intended to claim the prize. Obama's delegate haul edged him closer to his prize — 1800.5 to 1,654 for Clinton in The Associated Press count, out of 2,025 needed to win the nomination.

What's Going on in Lake County Indiana?
From BradBlog Polls have been closed in Lake County for some 6 hours, but no results in Indiana's corner county, closely bordering Obama's homestate stronghold of Chicago and home to Gary. Tiny Union County has also failed to come up with any numbers just yet.

As of now, Indiana remains "too close to call", according to all the cable nets, with 92% of precincts (not necessarily votes, since Lake County is the second-most populace in the state) reporting. There is currently just under 20k votes reportedly between Clinton, who is currently leading, and Obama, out of more than 1.1 million "counted" so far. For the record, Lake County uses a combination of the failed, unverifiable MicroVote Infinity DREs and paper-based MV-464's voting machines, according to Verified Voting's database of voting systems.

Union County, on the other hand, you needn't worry about, since our old friend Diebold runs the place with a combination of their hackable paper-ballot systems, and their unverifiable and hackable DRE (touch-screen) systems. But Union also has a tiny population of just more than 7k, whereas Lake has a population of just less than half a million. [MORE]

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Special election-winning Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) will also be his party’s nominee for a full term in November after winning Tuesday's primary in a field of four well-known candidates.

Carson topped former state Health Commissioner Woody Myers 45-24 with 84 percent of precincts reporting and will again face state Rep. Jon Elrod, the GOP nominee from the special election whom Carson defeated 54-43 two months ago. State Rep. David Orentlicher was third with 21 percent of the vote. State Rep. Carolene Mays came in fourth with 8 percent. Carson had the backing of national Democrats in the race, which was crucial in his ability to compete financially with Myers’s $1.6 million in self-funding.

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Ostensibly color-blind, the US “war on drugs” disproportionately targets urban minority neighborhoods, Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project said in two reports released today. Although whites commit more drug offenses, African Americans are arrested and imprisoned on drug charges at much higher rates, the reports find. In the 67-page report, “Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States,” Human Rights Watch documents with detailed new statistics persistent racial disparities among drug offenders sent to prison in 34 states. All of these states send black drug offenders to prison at much higher rates than whites.  
 
“Most drug offenders are white, but most of the drug offenders sent to prison are black,” said Jamie Fellner, senior counsel in the US program at Human Rights Watch and author of “Targeting Blacks.” “The solution is not to imprison more whites but to radically rethink how to deal with drug abuse and low-level drug offenders.”  
 
Key findings in the Human Rights Watch report include:  
 

• Across the 34 states, a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman.  
• In 16 states, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at rates between 10 and 42 times greater than the rate for whites. The 10 states with the greatest racial disparities in prison admissions for drug offenders are: Wisconsin, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Colorado, New York, Virginia,

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Why are the poll numbers showing a certain element of the voter being unreachable, as far as Barack is concerned? Let's get real. Who has been running all of the ads on a regular basis? The bloggers, the right-wing commentators on the radio, who are they supporting? Not Barack Obama. They are literally begging people--and these are Republicans--literally begging people, `Please vote for Hillary Clinton.' They have no intention of supporting Hillary Clinton in November. And why are they doing that? Why is it Barack Obama can reach what some call the elite voter, but he can't reach the others? That's poppycock. There is a concentrated effort to drive those voters away from him and to drive them to Hillary Clinton because many of them think that Hillary will be the weaker.

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Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds' Mercury Mountaineer stands 6 feet high and extends 16 feet stem to stern. It chugs along at 13 miles a gallon in the city, 18 to 20 on the highway. He leases it for $500 a month.

Or, rather, taxpayers lease it for $500 a month. For $411 a month, taxpayers lease Rep. Brian Higgins a similarly sized Ford Explorer rated at 13 to 14 miles a gallon in the city, 18 to 20 on the highway.

For $808 a month, they lease Rep. Louise M. Slaughter a 2007 Buick Lucerne, a luxury sedan that can deliver 15 to 17 miles a gallon in the city, 23 to 26 on the highway.  Gas prices leaping to $4 a gallon have driven up the cost to fill a grocery cart, among other things. Consumers and builders are heeding the cry to save energy. But dozens of members of Congress ride in some gas-guzzling vehicles, which they select at public expense.

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