I sit here with tears in my eyes, just having watched Teddy Kennedy, the old liberal lion, give a loud and rousing roar.  His speech was beautifully set up by the filmed appreciation of his family and his achievements, to remind anyone needing reminding of what a giant the man has been in our nation's history.  Then Teddy himself came out, to remind us that history is today.

On this night when haters have again been arrested with guns, trying to take our future away from us, I watch the Kennedy brother who lived, roaring and fighting and leading like few Americans ever have.  I am reminded of the great Martin Luther King, whose incomparable "I have a dream" speech will be celebrated Thursday night.  The other great speech that should never be forgotten, King's valedictory, supplies the words that come to mind, bringing with them apprehension and deliberation.

Jumping in here because so many comments have appeared on V.

McCain spent ten minutes on his Hanoi Hilton days, which he's so reluctant to mention normally.

Mothership by PLS.
Live Blog II by MTmofo.
Live Blog III by TrueBlueMajority.
Live Blog IV by Scubaval.
Live Blog V by Rena RF.

I've just spent some time reading the various reactions to John Edwards' disappointing admission of his extramarital affair and his lying about it.  I can sympathize with those who remember and honor what it was that led me to support Edwards' candidacy, and I can fully understand the anger of those who reacted to his presumption.

I choose to draw a different lesson from this episode.  All of us, no matter who we supported last year, need to remember that our leaders are mere mortals.  Hillary, Barack, John, Al Gore, Howard Dean ... every politician in whom we place our hopes will necessarily disappoint us, because no human being is an infallible vessel for our highest aspirations.

What this day reminds me is that We must be the movement.  Building the progressive movement to rescue this country from the depredations of Republican rule is my primary interest in being here, not electing Barack Obama (or even Democrats in general.)  We need to form the parade that our leaders can't ignore, so we make sure they scramble in front of it.  Without the parade, we will have no leader.

Remember this when you get your hopes up too high for Obama's presidency, and remember it too when your hopes are dashed.  It's not about him, it's about us.  

Those of us who care about health care reform in America have different goals.  Barack Obama wants to make health insurance more affordable and available.  Johm McCain wants to, uh, cut taxes or something.  Many of us, me included, would like to boot the private health insurance companies out of the business and institute government-sponsored single payer health care.  

The question for single-payer advocates is, how do we get there?  It often seems impossible in today's risk-averse Washington.  Fortunately, liberals have a long-time champion who has provided an answer: Ted Kennedy.  The recent diagnosis of Sen. Kennedy's malignant brain tumor offers Congress and the American people the chance to properly honor this great lion of the Senate by following his lead and passing the most important goal of his political career:  universal health care.

Howard Fineman dropped a bombshell tonight on Countdown.  On the lead story, about Hillary Clinton's decision to suspend her campaign, Fineman reported that figures in Hillary's campaign reached out to strong Clinton supporters in the Senate to talk her into dropping out!  

Fineman didn't identify his source, other than to say it was someone inside the campaign "who would be identified as a hard-core supporter."  People inside Clinton's campaign arranged an intervention by her peers to get her out of the race, knowing she had lost and apparently also knowing that she didn't know it.

Stunning.  Fineman's words below the fold.

StrangeAnimals has posted the latest in the Thursday Night Health Care series, an outstanding contribution on preventing childhood obesity.  This problem is epidemic in our society, and threatens to shorten the lives of millions of Americans who just happen to be shorter than most of us right now.

The advice in this excellent diary isn't just for kids, either.  All of us with a bit more upholstery than we might prefer can benefit from the wisdom Dr. StrangeAnimals offers.

Head on over and check it out.  You and a little person near you might be glad you did.

There's a diary scrolling down you should read.  Our friend and fellow Kossack Scott Kleeb had a debate with his self-funded opponent in the primary race, and did so well even his opponent was full of praise.  

Scott is the very model of the grassroots candidate we pine for everywhere.  He's smart, humble, honest, photogenic as they come.  He's asking us to help him finance and run his campaign so he doesn't have to sell out to politics as usual.  Until we get enough Scott Kleebs in Congress to pass true public campaign financing, candidates like Scott will depend on us, the public, to finance his campaign.

When he's president Barack Obama will need all the progressives in Congress he can get.  Please look in on the Kleeb campaign's diary, and spare some help if you can.

Tonight I'm taking advantage of the privilege extended me by my fellow Movieteers to look back on the decade I was born, the 1950's.  The Fifties have an unenviable reputation among those born later as a time of rigid conformity, stultifying suburban sameness, and Cold War paranoia.  While that reputation is in many respects deserved, the movie scene was SPECTACULAR!

Perhaps no other decade offers such a varied menu of movie riches.  The Fifties are like a Grand Central Station for movie genres and trends.  It featured the emergence of some of the most beautiful women ever on film:  Bardot, Loren, Monroe, Grace Kelly.  It gave us some of the greatest directors ever -- Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut -- and others in their prime, like Kurosawa and Hitchcock.  It's a decade to see the last great flowering of the Hollywood studio system, a glimpse of newer styles, and one of the greatest emergences of foreign films ever.

Follow below the fold for a trip back to the Fifties.  You'll be amazed at what you find.

Congratulations to Hillary Clinton and her supporters on a well-earned win in Pennsylvania tonight.  She's tough and persistent, and she's certainly doing the best she can in a very disadvantageous situation.  She had a respectable win, but not a win that was the game changer she needs.

But with a bad loss looming in North Carolina in two weeks, possibly reinforced by a loss in Indiana, her campaign's days are numbered.  Hillary's in the sudden death round now, with any further loss threatening to unleash the superdelegate tidal wave that could drown her presidential ambitions.  

Despite her current celebrations tonight, I'm reminded of an old Spencer Tracy movie, one that has somehow acquired new relevance in the first Twenty-first Century campaign.

dadanation has just given us an amazing diary about his experience in an HIV clinical trial.  It is a glimpse into the human heart, and a wonderful lesson in the real courage people find facing battles against illness.  It is the latest in the Thursday Night Health Care series, and offers an unique perspective you won't want to miss.

If you're tired of spitting bullets at ABC, and want a break from the latest oscillations in the presidential polls, you won't find a better palate cleanser.  It's worth the read.

Looking at John McCain's campaign figures, it becomes apparent that McCain aspires to be another Ronald Reagan:  a figurehead for the plutocrats who run his party.  Their backgrounds show us what kind of president McCain would be.  Meet Fred Malek, Nixon Administration alumnus and one of McCain's National Finance Committee Co-chairs for the past year.

Tim Noah at Slate recalled a citation about Malek from Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days:

summoned the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, to his office to discuss a "Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The "cabal," Nixon said, was tilting economic figures to make his Administration look bad. How many Jews were there in the bureau? he wanted to know. Malek reported back on the number, and told the President that the bureau's methods of weighing statistics were normal procedure that had been in use for years.

Jew counting was hardly Malek's only service for Nixon, but it did leave a particularly bitter aftertaste.  Malek's services for Nixon, in fact, have a strangely contemporary flavor.

[THURSDAY NIGHT IS HEALTH CARE CHANGE NIGHT is a new series started by TheFatLadySings.  In it we seek to find ways to effect change in the health care system.  Tonight, we observe that change begins at home. This diary is an update of one a few of you old timers might remember.]

"Did you ever smoke?"

That's a common response when I ask my patients to quit smoking.  No, I answer, but I've been trying to get people to quit for more than 20 years, so my experience with the topic isn't that much briefer than yours.  In those decades, I've evolved an approach to the subject which is slightly different than the usual.  I've been able to help quite a few smokers quit who haven't been able to any other way.  

There are many ways of quitting smoking, but there are also a finite number of challenges smokers face and ways of dealing with them.  It helps to look at these analytically, to find your strengths and use them to your advantage, and to take advantage of past experiences in trying to quit.  Please share your experiences and stories to help your fellow smokers.

With Wyoming and Mississippi about to play out, and a six-week interval between these states and Pennsylvania / North Carolina, it seems clear that the Obama campaign needs to take stock and make changes.  The inexorable momentum Obama kept building from Iowa on was seriously slowed in Ohio and Texas, in perception if not in reality.  Obama's message of inspiration, hope and change has carried him into the delegate lead but now it seems clear that message needs to be expanded to meet new realities.

At this point Obama has to consolidate his pledged delegate lead, convince Democratic superdelegates to ratify his nomination, and begin the process of defining himself and John McCain for the general election campaign.  He has to do all this while fending off a Clinton campaign which is daily proving it will say and do anything to stay in the race.  Lastly, he has to manage the inevitable media bias toward looking for trouble among the Democrats and ignoring it with St. John McCain.

Below the fold, I'll look at some of the current realities in the campaign, the challenges going forward, and what Obama might do to manage his campaign.  I have no crystal ball, alas, so I look forward to your perspectives and ideas.  Tell me where I'm wrong and what I'm forgetting.

This morning on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer Howard Dean issued the most hard-hitting attack on John McCain I've yet seen.  Dean used the DNC's complaint against McCain for allegedly violating the campaign financing law bearing his own name to attack McCain's greatest strength:  his perceived honesty.

Blitzer tried to get Dean to opine on the prospect of a divided convention in Denver.  Dean expertly brushed that question aside to bring up what he really wanted to talk about:

But look, John McCain is a flawed candidate. Here's a guy who is a typical situational ethicist. He runs on his integrity, but he doesn't seem to have any. We're familiar with the fact that he got on the ballot in Ohio with what now turns out to be false pretenses. He qualified because he was taking public financing, and now he says he's not going to. He doesn't have the permission of the FEC to do that.

But Dean was just warming up....

Last Sunday night brought us the 80th Academy Awards, or the gay man's Super Bowl as it's otherwise known.  The occasion was enough to settle the writer's strike, because of the importance of one of the premier examples of free advertising the year offers.  Appropriately enough, the movies showcased last weekend were sorely in need of free advertising, because only one of the most nominated movies -- Juno -- cracked the $100 million revenue mark.

But that's tiresome political wonkery:  this is the fucking Oscars!!!  Friday Night at the Movies brings you a chance to talk about the Oscars.  Which movies were you happy to see win?  Which ones got robbed?  Which were unjustly ignored, and which rewarded by idiots who wouldn't know a good movie if it smacked them upside the head?

Tonight's debate represented Hillary Clinton's next-to-last chance to change the dynamic of this primary campaign.  She's lost 11 contests in a row, her long-time front-runner status, the image of a competent campaign organization, and the financial capability to compete.  Hillary needed to beat Obama soundly tonight to begin to counteract Obama's momentum.  She needed to restore the perception that her campaign is still viable.

To this viewer, she didn't accomplish these tasks.  Much of the debate consisted of cordial agreement.  On the issues where they vigorously disagreed, like health care and negotiating with foreign leaders, I thought Obama at least battled Clinton to a draw.  Hillary's attempts to attack Obama, such as the limp plaigiarism charge, fell flat and on one occasion drew boos.  Obama's countercharges, on Iraq and lobbyist influence, left her flat-footed.

Obama was calmer and more assured most of the evening.  His generally weak debating style has improved, and he was a match for Clinton tonight.  Her considerable charm was only occasionally evident.  She missed the opportunity to hurt his growing sense of inevitability, and thus squandered what is almost her last chance.  

Your thoughts?

The mano-a-mano debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has just ended.  Very substantive, thoughtful, and mutually respectful exchange, I though.  Blitzer tried his best to be an ass, but the candidates wouldn't have any of it.

For Edwards partisans only, did tonight's debate win you over to one of the remaining candidates?  Are you sticking with John?  Are you still crying and eating chocolates in front of reality TV shows?  I'm interested in what you're thinking.

For partisans of the other candidates:  no stuffing the ballots.  We'll leave that to the Republicans.

I've tried to dip into the liveblog diaries and the great front page work mcjoan has been doing on the FISA debate in the Senate.  Yet I find myself frustrated by our continuing inability to frame an issue simply and effectively.  Amid all the talk of "retroactive immunity" and "cloture" and amendments, we've forgotten a simple, important fact:  the Republicans are suddenly for amnesty.

Amnesty is one of those hot-button phrases Republicans love.  Amnesty for undocumented non-citizens in this country is their great white hope (pardon the pun) for winning the elections this year.  So why in hell aren't we turning that word against them in the Senate?

If they think hard-working brown people don't deserve amnesty, why do they think law-breaking fatcat CEO's deserve amnesty for spying on all of us before 9/11?  Can they seriously think that President-935-Iraq-lies told us the truth about warrantless wiretapping, when he's been caught in so many other lies on this subject?

Sorry for the short diary.  I'd just like to see the word applied here, so maybe our congressional friends can take it up to hoist these ridiculous Republican senators on their own petard.