Hillary Clinton? Bob Lonsberry? Are you taking notes:

Ben Smith’s Blog: Obama apologizes to Muslim women; apology accepted - Politico.com

Sen. Barack Obama today called the two Muslim women who were barred from sitting behind him at his Detroit rally to apologize, one of the women and two other sources said.

“Sen. Obama called himself and he apologized to each of us,” one of the women, lawyer Hebba Aref, told me just now.

Senator Obama’s campaign screwed up - it was a couple volunteers at a local event, but it was still technically his campaign - and they refused to let a few Muslim women in hajib, or traditional headscarfs, sit behind Obama at a rally. Most likely, the volunteers objected for fear of eliciting more “Obama is a Muslim” rhetoric from the fringe Right. Whatever is the case, it’s still wrong.  And Senator Obama called each of the women to apologize because he knew it was wrong.

He could easily have dodged the problem by “firing” the volunteers.  He could easily have made excuses for why it didn’t happen the way the reports said it happened.  He could have blamed the volunteers and said, “that’s what happens when you use volunteers.”  He chose to do none of these things.  He assumed responsibility, took three whacks, and got it over with like a decent human being.

I’m not saying it’s easy, but its the right thing to do.  Especially for a leader.

Now that Hillary is making plans to concede the Democratic Primary race on Saturday, there’s a lot of talk about how she should go about that - whether to simply suspend her campaign or end it outright.  Many people on the Obama side are clamoring for her to end it outright, fearing that she’s just laying in wait for some reason to turn her campaign engines back on again.

Well, suspending now wouldn’t leave much wiggle room for that type of thing, even if that’s what she’s considering.  But ending the campaign rather than suspending it is probably the worse choice for Barack Obama.  Because, of course, once she ends the campaign, all those delegates become free agents again.  They can fall in line with Obama or not.

And since there are likely to be die-hard Hillary fans and anti-Barack votes in their midst, it would make for a lot of unpleasantness if the Obama Campaign had to answer for every delegate who chose not to join his campaign when there is no other rival.  It’s not the kind of question he really wants to answer in the media, nor is it the kind of situation that’s going to breed much party unity.  All of this would be fodder for the Republican attack machine.  Better that Hillary concede the race, endorse Obama and quietly encourage her delegates to switch over to Obama if they want.  There’s nothing really wrong with delegates voting their conscience at the convention, as long as they accept the results and come together.

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There is also a fair amount of discussion about the role of the Super Delegates and whether that position should be eliminated from the Democratic Party’s primary process.  My view is that the Supers ultimately contributed very little to the race and thus the role is really the beauty contest prize we all thought it was.  Keep ‘em or get rid of ‘em, I don’t think it really matters.

It *was* Super Dels that put Barack Obama over the top.  However, that only happened once the elected delegates put him over the top.  In point of fact, Barack Obama won the Primary according to conventional count, and nothing short of a complete defection of Supers would have altered that outcome.  To put it another way, the only thing the Supers really contributed was four hundred extra votes in the “magic number.”  Instead of 2100+, the number could have been 1700+ and the results would have been the same.  The only time that the Supers *would* or *could* matter is in a primary at least as close as this one - and as it’s been deftly proven - in such a case the pols that are Supers would be entirely too fearful of negative reactions at home to bother declaring anything until the matter has been decided by the normal process.

So, here’s what I propose: keep the Super Delegates, but instead of getting an extra vote at the Convention, let’s just give them free car washes at Delta Sonic and nice, up-close seats at the Convention.

Now that there seems to be a relatively high degree of satisfaction amongst the Democrats and the media that Barack Obama is going to be the nominee - though we are constantly reminded that there is not a guarantee of anything - the discussions of whom shall be the vice presidential running mate of Obama and McCain can finally begin in earnest.  Oh, joy.

These are always discussions that, like a great many in the talking head media, stroke the egos of journalists more than enlighten the public; naming possible veep nominees is a great way to show you know a whole lot of crap about party politics that the rest of us don’t have time for.  Its a way to show you know every second-stringer and governor from fly-over country that matters, but none of it matters even as much as the discussions during the primaries, which wasn’t a lot either.

One trend that has proven somewhat interesting in the last week and a half has been the media’s setup for how they plan on covering the Clinton defeat.  They seem to be relishing it.

One track of the discussion has been whether or not Hillary will be a “sore loser.”  You hear that phrase quite a bit from a great many talking heads.  Where the discussion previously turned on whether or not Clinton would go to the convention floor and yank the nomination at the last minute, now it’s just a case of how nasty she looks when she loses.

The other major track has been the “Democrats don’t suffer losers” discussion.  Here, it is pointed out that while many Republicans have lost the nomination in one primary only to gain it back in the next, Democrats have never rerun a nomination.  The implication is that Clinton will not get a second chance at the presidency in the likely event that she loses the nomination this time.

So if you haven’t noticed those two themes, look out for them and how they evolve over the next few weeks. Like the Jeremiah Wright story and the noticeable lack of a Pastor John Hagee story, it will be these themes that dominate how the media attempts to shape our opinions.

Any Clinton supporters going to be takers for defending this? Like I said: asshole wing of the party. Deny it.

Clinton Supporters Send Last-Ditch Obama Attack Emails To Supers - Politics on The Huffington Post

Added another: “Obama, in my opinion, will NOT survive the general election against McCain.”

Clinton Supporters:

The exit polls show I am not alone in refusing to vote for Obama and opting to McCain.

Clinton Supporters:

“How can we elect someone who has never accomplished anything, refuses to take stands on issues, befriends anti-American terrorists, attends a church for 20 years with Wright, and denies ever hearing anything controversial, and then stages a *public fight* so he can finally denounce him, takes credit for bills in the Senate that he had nothing to do with, and is propped up as the candidate of change??” wrote one Democrat.

Well, NY Senate Republicans, John McCain and Hillary Clinton seem to disagree, but even the Rochester Business Journal’s readers don’t buy into the “Gas Tax Holiday” garbanzo that they’re selling:

Rochester Business Journal - Snap Poll

Nearly two-thirds of respondents oppose a gas-tax holiday this summer.

It’s a shame the RBJ is so insistent on selling their papers instead of embracing new media with any kind of gusto. They don’t publish any internals to the polls, which would be helpful.

And not just cool, they’re super popular in the Democratic primaries! I mean, everybody’s trying to get a few on their side:

Clinton makes case for wide appeal - USATODAY.com

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Yeah, white people rock, ya gotta have white people. Especially because they’re such hard workers! Not like those lame-ass non-white people. Why, if you’ve got a big convention in a few hours but you forgot to put up a podium, what you need is some white people! They’ll get that podium up lickity-split, no shit!

Let me just say for what I hope to be the last time this election season that my dad has worked thirty plus years at Xerox, putting in fifty and sixty hour weeks to pay for mine and my sister’s upbringing. His dad worked at Bell and Howell. I learned to cook because my mom was working two jobs and somebody had to put mac and cheese on the table for me. I graduated from Sodus High School, also known as the “Not Quite Ready for Ivy League Players.” I went to school for a year for music. . . it was MCC.

If some southern Republican douchebag with shit on his boots wants to call me a New York liberal elitist, that’s on him. But when my multi-millionaire Senator - who is married to a Rhodes Scholar, for Chrissakes - does it, it fucking pisses me off. I’d like to let it go and vote for her next time she’s up for reelection in the Senate, but she makes it very hard to do. 2000 may go down in my personal history as the last time I voted for a Clinton, . . unless Chelsea runs, and then only because she’s hot.

And yes, goddamnit, I like lattes. The largest one you’ve got, caramel, with drizzle on top, hold the scones. Happy?

What the hell is this?

NYT: Options dwindling for Clinton - The New York Times- msnbc.com

And in Indiana, for example, less than half of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election, while one-third said they would vote for Mr. McCain. About one-fifth of Mr. Obama’s supporters in Indiana said they would vote for Mr. McCain in a general election should Mrs. Clinton get the nomination.

I realize that a lot of this is bitterness - and that there’s a lot of bitterness on the Obama side as well - but to publicly make the statement that you’d consider four more years of Bush doctrine in the world, more Conservative judges in the Supreme Court and the McSame Health Care Plan? I don’t believe it’s true, I don’t think they’ll really side with McCain. If anything, maybe a few will pout at home come election day and feel guilty about it later. But what kind of gaping asshole says things like this to pollsters?

But I think that more than anything else, it’s the Clinton campaign style that brings this out. She’s thrown every nasty bolt she could find his way, she has used every single excuse in the book to justify her campaign, she and her surrogates have used Republican playbooks and even Republican sources while pretending to want to lead us in a different direction, she’s even metamorphosed from Queen Wonk to Shot Slammin’ Anti-Intellectual Diva for the sake of a few Indiana votes. She has whipped up a virulent hatred that is unambiguous in blog posts, comments and now in exit polls.

And for what? A two-percent margin of victory in Indiana that contributes absolutely nothing to her delegate count. A double-digit loss in North Carolina that puts her at least fifteen or twenty delegates further into the hole. A supercharged hate machine that threatens - bluff or no bluff - to ruin the party and probably the country if it doesn’t get what it wants.

And ask yourself this, Electability Monkeys: has Barack Obama won against a good campaign or has Hillary Clinton lost to a lame campaign? Because neither answer bodes well for Hillary’s electability rationale.

Well, well. Looks like there’s a possibility that 3:00am phone call may just be an arguably illegal robocall from Hillary’s attack minions:

Facing South: FACING SOUTH EXCLUSIVE: D.C. nonprofit aimed at women voters behind deceptive N.C. robo-calls

Who’s behind the mysterious “robo-calls” that have spread misleading voter information and sown confusion and frustration among North Carolina residents over the last week?

Facing South has confirmed the source of the calls, and the mastermind is Women’s Voices Women Vote, a D.C.-based nonprofit which aims to boost voting among “unmarried women voters.”

What’s more, Facing South has learned that the firestorm Women’s Voices has ignited in North Carolina isn’t the group’s first brush with controversy. Women’s Voices’ questionable tactics have spawned thousands of voter complaints in at least 11 states and brought harsh condemnation from some election officials for their secrecy, misleading nature and likely violations of election law.

Barack showed up on Fox News’ morning show, and I thought that was probably kinda bad.  But that’s nothing.  Drudge is reporting that Hillary Clinton will be appearing on Fox News’ own Bill O’Reilly show.  To top that, Barack Obama would have to literally bag Ann Coulter on video tape.

Well, if he does, we’d at least know for sure about those Adam’s Apple rumors. . . .