The last of our pictures from Michigan and Indiana are now online at Flickr. There's a lot, but keep in mind we had at least two cameras going at all times. Special shout-outs to the Labor Legacy Monument, one of the best monuments to anything I've ever seen, and Ann Lislegaard's SF-centric project "2062" at MOCAD. Oh, and zombies.

The Quinnipiac and Big 10 Battleground polls have terrible news for McCaniacs. We can't really be this far ahead, can we? Via Daily Kos.

The highlights:

Florida (Quinnipiac)
Obama 49
McCain 44

Indiana (Big 10)
Obama 51
McCain 41

Ohio (Big 10)
Obama 53
McCain 41

Ohio (Quinnippiac):
Obama 52
McCain 38

Pennsylvania (Big 10)
Obama 52
McCain 41

Pennsylvania (Quinnippiac)
Obama 53
McCain 40

Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

Matt Y. gives us a taste of when we'll know Obama's won this thing.

Virginia and Indiana close at 7PM Eastern, Ohio closes at 7:30PM Eastern (the portions of Indiana in Eastern Time actually close at 6PM) and then Florida closes at 8PM Eastern with the vast majority of the state (the non-panhandle part) closing at 7PM Eastern. In practice, McCain needs to win all four of those states to have a shot at the election, and he’s currently behind in three of them. It’d still take a while before anyone concedes anything, and political junkies will want to see Senate outcomes in Alaska and Oregon, but it’s very possible that the country will basically know the outcome of the presidential election pretty early.

In the worst case scenario that McCain does manage to win all four—and North Carolina, and Missouri, and Georgia and West Virginia, and all the other states that currently look to be in play—it'll then come down to Colorado, where the polls close at 9 PM EST. If Obama wins there and in New Mexico, he still wins, even if he loses everywhere else.

RCP has a six-point Obama advantage in Colorado.

More politics.

* Obama gave a press conference today, too, coming down hard on the Paulson version of the bailout. An anti-bailout consensus seems to have gelled among both elites (more, more) and the general population, with even GOP foot soldiers refusing to fall in line. (Maybe platforms do mean something after all.) Which is not to say the bailout won't happen—I think it will, if only because the Democrats never met an issue they couldn't sell out on. But it won't be the Paulson version of the bailout, at least and it won't happen at all unless John McCain agrees to sign on and not use Obama's willingness to put country first against him.

* More bailout: Kevin Drum has the single best chart I've seen, while Pandagon points out what I'd suspected all along: poor people and minorities did this to us.

* Schumer, like a lot of people, wants to know what's the rush.

* Kossacks want to know how long this has been in the works.

* Colorado wants to vote for Obama by a huge margin, with strong evidence that the Palin pick backfired there.

* McCain's being forced to defend Indiana.

* Alex Greenberg has your conspiracy theory fodder for the day.

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

* The latest smoking gun on Troopergate is actually fairly damning.

Here's why this is all so damaging to the governor. It's one thing to try to get a trooper fired because you believe he is a danger to the public. But using your considerable power as governor to block the benefits of a former family member you have a long-running dispute with moves this scandal into a new realm.

* And my former candidate for president Howard Dean gave a press conference today, too.

It looks like Obama wasn't quite able to catch her in Indiana, but in politics there's "close" and then there's "close enough." Clinton's been counted out before, prematurely, but maybe this time there really is no coming back for her.

UPDATE: Clinton has added a public event back to her schedule today, presumably to combat the perception that she's beat—but Wolfson also admits this morning that she loaned another $6.4 million to her campaign last month, a much more telling indicator. Meanwhile, Stephanopoulos reports on Good Morning America that the long-awaited superdelegate flood will come today...

NBC now saying that Clinton has canceled all her media events tomorrow, not just TV appearances.

Still waiting on the last 5%, but it sounds as though it's mostly academic at this point.

Chuck Todd: "It may have just ended tonight." He goes on to point to Super Tuesday (and in particular the shock Missouri victory) as another candidate for the decisive moment. Welcome to the party, Chuck. Tim Russert echoes: "We now know who the Democratic nominee will be."

Clinton has canceled all her morning show appearances, per Tim Russert.

Ambinder: Obama's receiving approximately three votes for every one vote that Clinton receives. With 9[0+] percent of the statewide vote out, he's narrowed the gap to within 20,000.

"Let me tell you, when all the votes are counted, when Gary comes in, I think you're looking at something for the world to see," Clay, an Obama supporter, said in a telephone interview from Obama's Gary headquarters. "I don't know what the numbers are yet, but Gary has absolutely produced in large numbers for Obama here."

If Obama is really able to pull this rabbit out of his hat tonight, I'll be so elated I won't even mention how much it looks like Lake County is waiting to see how many votes Obama needs before they report. So I'll just say it now: if Obama wins Indiana, and this then is the night he secures the nomination, in forty years they'll be talking about tonight the way they talk about Chicago and Mayor Daley in 1960.

Although Obama will still probably lose Indiana tonight, Limbaugh's Operation Chaos may be enough to claim the moral victory.

Olbermann says no final results in Indiana until after midnight. We're waiting on Lake County, bordering on Chicago, which apparently isn't releasing any results until absentee ballots are counted...

MSNBC switched Indiana to "too close to call" about half an hour ago, but I refused to believe it was really happening until I saw that the margin had narrowed to 38,000 votes. That actually seems reachable, and it would be a huge upset. Remember Missouri.

I'm the phone with my Indiana correspondent now, and he's feeling good—so keep an eye on it...

I'm hearing that CBS has called Indiana for Clinton. But it looks like the Indiana margin will be significantly closer than the North Carolina margin, and NC was the bigger state to boot; overall, a good night.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but I really think this may be, at long last, the turning point. Watch the supers for movement in the coming week.

I'm also more and more convinced that one of my dark horse candidates for VP, Claire McCaskill, is really the best choice. An old white man, even one like Wesley Clark or Joe Biden who brings a lot of foreign policy "cred" to the ticket, is just the wrong move for this moment—and even though it would be two Senators, I think she brings enough to the table otherwise that it'd be worth it.

UPDATE: Re: McCaskill, it occurs to me now that my neighbor saw her at the Durham headquarters the other day and that she said precisely that a lot of Obama-leaning supers have been waiting for the opportunity to move en masse...

So that's the missing link in the logic of this post.

MSNBC calls North Carolina for Barack right out of the gate, minutes after the polls close. Indiana is still "too early to call," which in TV parlance suggests that they know Clinton has won, it's just a question now of the margin...