I don't want to belabor or be gratuitous about this, but I think it's important to defend Wes Clark's right to challenge McCain's service record insofar as it is being used as a Commander-In-Chief credential.

To be clear, on a personal level, I have the greatest possible reverence for John McCain's wartime sacrifice and his overall service record. McCain and his fellow brothers-in-arms who survived the Hanoi Hilton hell-hole are heroes in every sense and remain to this day inspiring profiles in human courage.

Because of this, very few people have the moral and experiential standing to comment on McCain's service record. I would go so far to say that not everyone who has simply worn an armed forces uniform has standing to comment. It requires a peer record of combat service. Wes Clark has such a record.

With 99% of precincts reporting, the current tally for the Indiana Democratic Gubernatorial Primary is:

Governor Dem - Primary

5,214 of 5,230 precincts - 99 percent

Jill Long Thompson 564,936 - 50 percent

Jim Schellinger 559,475 - 50 percent

As of Monday, SurveyUSA had the race at a dead-heat 43% JLT, 41% Schellinger.

So, there's been a lot of talk about how much Bill Clinton has supposedly hurt Hillary Clinton. Candidly, there is some polling to support this conclusion. According to a March 2008 Diageo/Hotline Poll, 51% of Democratic Primary Voters viewed Bill Clinton unfavorably. These results were also replicated in an April ABCNews-WashPost poll.

Still, there's an untold tale about Bill Clinton's effect on this primary campaign.

From the AP:

Michael Gableman has defeated Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler in one of the nastiest races in state history.

Gableman had 51 percent of Tuesday's vote compared with 49 percent for Butler with 93 percent of precincts reporting.

Butler is the first incumbent justice to lose a re-election bid since 1967.

He joined the court in 2004 after being appointed by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.
Gableman is a Burnett County Circuit judge.

He built his campaign around the charge that Butler was a judicial activist. Gableman claims to be a judicial conservative.

Republicans lined up behind Gableman in the officially nonpartisan race.

This is awful. Butler was one of the more liberal justices on the WI supreme court. He was also the first African-American justice in the Court's history. Gableman's campaign was financed by rightwing corporate interests and he ran incredibly nasty ads against Butler accusing him of being soft on crime.

Anyone in Wisconsin right now with a local perspective on this?

This is just a quite back-of-the-envelope experiment to gauge perception of political outcomes. Our question:

Which candidate finished in 2nd Place for the Republican Presidential Nomination this year? Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee?

To give as many people as possible an incentive to vote, please recommend this diary.

Just something to keep in mind while John McCain celebrates his family heritage in Mississippi today: his family, admittedly his great-great-grandfathers, owned and ran a north Mississippi plantation with dozens of slaves. You can even find out how many slaves they owned as of the 1860 census here [do a CTRL-F on "mccain"].

When told of this fact back in 2000, McCain replied:

"I didn't know that," McCain said in measured tones wearing a stoic expression during a midday interview, as he looked at the documents before Tuesday night's debate. "I knew they had sharecroppers. I did not know that."

This documentation includes slave schedules from Sept. 8, 1860, which list as the slave owner, "W.A. McCain." The schedules list the McCain family's slaves in the customary manner of the day -- including their age, gender and "color," labelling each either "black" or "mulatto." The slaves ranged in age from 6 months to 60 years.

"I knew we fought in the Civil War," McCain went on. "But no, I had no idea. I guess thinking about it, I guess when you really think about it logically, it shouldn't be a surprise. They had a plantation and they fought in the Civil War so I guess that it makes sense."

By the way, anyone else getting the impression that McCain is a strikingly "uncurious" guy? Anyway, read the whole Salon article about the "real" McCain family history in Mississippi.

Just now watching a replay of Meet the Press where Russert, Eugene Robinson, Jon Meacham, Chuck Todd, and Peggy Noonan are discussing Senator Obama's speech on race. It recalls to mind an old speech of Bill Clinton's I recently read which was very striking for one reason in particular.

The reason? It's remarkably similar to Senator Obama's speech.

It's become pro-forma for Obama supporters (and journalists) to accuse Bill Clinton of all variants of racism, prejudice, and cynicism. It's also become standard for defenders of Bill Clinton and supporters of Hillary Clinton to ignore the quite strong similarities between Clinton and Obama's world views.

Maybe it's time for detente.

Below are key excerpts and links to both speeches.

Just caught this over at Steve Clemons' place, The Washington Note. Brief summary: Clemons -- an admirer of both Obama (although not an endorser) and Carter NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski -- thought it was wrong for Brzezinski to equate Hillary Clinton to Mamie Eisenhower on MSNBC's Morning Joe program:

Brzezinski provocatively compared Hillary Clinton to Mamie Eisenhower in his commentary and suggested that despite Clinton traveling to more than 80 countries during her First Lady tenure (Brzezinski said his travel agent has been to 150), he said that it's basically like John F. Kennedy being faced by a challenge from Mamie Eisenhower.

I like Brzezinski a great deal as well, and I don't have a problem with his comparison of Obama to JFK (myself: not that big a JFK fan, but you can't win 'em all). Comparing Clinton to Mamie Eisenhower, however, seems way out-of-bounds and ultimately out-of-character for Brzezinski. The question that comes to mind: does the Mamie Eisenhower line reflect a newer, harder-edged angle of attack from the Obama campaign? As a matter of political strategy, is this about winning back support among white working class men who may have gone over to HRC in the aftermath of Wright-gate?