More Monday links! More!

* Jacob directs my attention to the Spider-Man lizard. As Jacob says, you won't be disappointed.

* Amanda Marcotte says last night's explosive office hijinx on Mad Men were a quiet reference to the Kennedy assassination. I think she may be right.

* Japan's real-life Dollhouse.

* The mother of all Infinite Jest ending theories. (Thanks, kate!)

* Last words of the executed in Texas. Found poetry.

Cathy, you know I never meant to hurt you.
All my life I have been locked up.
I am tired.
I’m ready, Warden.

Wednesday!

* Reports that Justice John Paul Stevens has hired fewer-than-usual clerks for the 2010 Supreme Court term are now confirmed: he's only hired one clerk, signaling a likely retirement in the near future.

* Seinfeld nostalgia is in full effect; FlowingData has your map of character connections.

* How to Talk to a Wingnut: Decoding Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

* Today's must-read op-ed: Bob Hebert on Texas's apparent execution of an innocent man. Even more striking than the fact of the terrible error is the look at the basic cognitive biases at work in the criminal justice system:

When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

In short: "If he were innocent, they wouldn't have arrested him."

* Behind the scenes of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

* Harlan Ellison and Terminator.

* And the Hartford Courant has your photo of the day. Our public servants hard at work.

It's Tuesday and I'm feeling just a little bit feverish.

* It's come to this: they're going to remake Drop Dead Fred. Don't ask why.

* Oh, the wisdom of markets: Stephen Dunbar demonstrates that Peak Oil has "peaked" by citing the temporary crash in demand due to the financial crisis and speculative recovery technologies as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Crisis averted!

* Meanwhile, the climate is still totally screwed. See also: The 340 residents of Newtok, Alaska will soon be among the first “climate refugees” in the United States. What's their governor have to say about this?

* Superpoop messes with Texas.

* David Kurtz comes through with your daily dose of swine flu commentary, the first on the rhythm of pandemic and the second on the deep, pervasive rot throughout the global meat industry.

* Science has proved that conservatives don't get Stephen Colbert.

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

Whenever I hear about this sort of thing I'm just shocked. Not only is the parody on The Colbert Report completely unsubtle—it's so unsubtle I even wouldn't say it counts as satire—but it's not as even as if Colbert is trying to fool anyone. If you didn't get the point just from reading the sidebar during "The Word," he breaks character, both deliberately and undeliberately, all the freaking time. Multiple times every show. He's practically holding the audience's hand.

Let's hope "more likely" still represents a rather small part of the sample...

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who was last making headlines for suggesting that Texas may consider seceding from the Union, is requesting help from the federal government to deal with a possible swine flu pandemic.

I have a ton of tabs open representing the blogging I intended to do this week but never did. Let us begin with the ongoing implosion of the Republican Party.

* Secession! It's everyone's favorite new fantasy. Polls show a quarter of Texans like Gov. Crazy's crazy idea, though said governor is now backpeddling. And if Texas does secede, some people are saying this time we should just let them go.

It would be the world's thirteenth largest economy -- bigger than South Korea, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia. But its worth would crater precipitously, after NAFTA rejected it and the United States slapped it with an embargo that would make Cuba look like a free-trade zone. Indeed, Texas would quick become the next North Korea, relying on foreign aid due to its insistence on relying on itself.

* In less hilarious eliminationist wingnuttery, an Illinois state senator has repeatedly suggested that "Illinois residents 'are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes' as much as Gov. Pat Quinn is proposing." This talk never should have started back during the election, and really needs to stop.

* The ante's likely been upped for forthcoming Republican antics because the teabagging parties were such a bust while Obama's popularity remains consistently high, no matter what sort of shit they fling at the wall.

* How to become the Republican candidate for vice president. It's easier than you think!

A.B. Culvahouse, a powerful Washington lawyer and former counsel to President Reagan, told an audience of Republican lawyers that for McCain, selecting a vice president came down to three questions: Why do you want to be vice president? Are you prepared to use nuclear weapons? And the CIA has identified Osama bin Laden, but if you take the shot there will be multiple civilian casualties. Do you take the shot?

Night.

* Glenn Beck, lunatic, openly calls for secession.

You can't convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn't allow you to secede.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: `I don't want to go there, because that's suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right -- people have a right to not commit economic suicide...

...Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket...it's about time that somebody says that again.

He's riffing off some similarly histrionic language from Texas Gov. Rick Perry. When is Fox going to pull the plug on this guy?

* New York joins the future: Gov. David A. Paterson on Thursday will announce plans to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriage, according to people with knowledge of the governor’s plans.

* Roasted Peanuts: a blog devoted to the best of classic Peanuts. Via MeFi, which points one I'm rather fond of.

* Barack Obama, great president or greatest president? The president recently sent a video praising Chicago in its bid to hold the 2016 Summer Games. Now he has endorsed the United States’ effort to hold the World Cup of soccer either in 2018 or 2022.

* After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more.

Texas State Rep. Betty Brown has some good advice for our friends of the Asian persuasion. Yglesias points out that South Asians are the real villains here—your Duraiswamies, your Ayyagaries, your Balasubramanians...

Miscellany.

* Republicans have successfully transitioned from passively rooting for Obama to fail to actively sabotaging the economy. Well done, fellows.

* Views from the other universe: Ricky Gervais v. Elmo.

* Lots of people are linking to "the fifteen strangest college courses in America." Maybe this just demonstrates how far out of the mainstream Duke Lit is, but most of these seem perfectly cromulent to me.

* The economics of March Madness: how excessive spending on sports is a money-loser for nearly every Division I school. Marc Bousquet was right!

Whoops, missed a day somehow. (Even grad students get busy sometimes.) Here's a few links I've been saving; scroll all the way to the bottom for your daily dose of Watchmen panic.

* One of our most beloved blog denizens has started up a March Madness blog. Add it to your feeds immediately.

* Executing someone on their birthday may seem hilarious, but actually it's sort of cold. (via Srinivas)

* Same goes for trading your minor-league pitcher for ten bats. Via MeFi.

* All about experimental philosophy.

* The Daily Show's evisceration of CNBC was amazing last night. Also, incredibly well-deserved.

* Forget man-on-dog: will gay marriage start us down the slippery slope to human/robot marriages? It could happen right here in North Carolina. Only Steve Benen sees where this really leads: man/dog/robot/robot-dog polygamy.

* Two games: Linear RPG and Exploit, the second from amateur-game-creator of the moment, Gregory Weir, (The Majesty of Colors, Bars of Black and White).

* “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.” Vanity Fair has a huge feature on the Icelandic financial collapse that really makes for fascinating reading. More discussion at MetaFilter. (via my dad)

Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

* When will voters start blaming Obama for the economy? Nate Silver has the numbers suggesting that will start in 18 or so months, though I bet that timeline could halve or worse that as people grow frustrated with prolonged economic hardship.

* What Obama could learn from Watchmen: Matt Yglesias reports on Ronald Reagan's own Ozymandian scheme for global unity.

* And Jacob sends along your hope-crushing Watchmen reviews for the day.

J. Hoberman in Village Voice: The philosopher Iain Thomson (who valiantly brought Heidegger's Being and Time to bear on his reading of Watchmen) maintained that Moore not only deconstructed the idea of comic book super-heroism but pulverized the very notion of the hero—and the hero-worship that comics traditionally sell. For all its superficial fidelity, Snyder's movie stands Moore's novel on its head, trying to reconstruct a conventional blockbuster out of those empty capes and scattered shards.

David Edelstein, New York Magazine: ...this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Meanwhile, Steve Benen and Adam Serwer take a stand against Anthony Lane on behalf of geeks everywhere.

More catchup, First 48 Hours of the Obama Administration Edition.

* Obama signed a few executive orders today, including one ordering a reevaluation of interrogation procedures and another ordering the closure of Guantánamo Bay within the year. Glenn Greenwald is pretty happy about it, as are Steve Benen, Ezra Klein, and Spencer Ackerman, who writes:

For all the talk about Obama not governing as a progressive, take a look at his first not-even-48 hours in office. He's suspended the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, a first step toward shuttering the entire detention complex. He's assembled his military commanders to discuss troop withdrawals from Iraq. He's issued a far-reaching order on transparency in his administration that mandates, among other things, a two-year ban on any ex-lobbyists working on issues they lobbied for. And now he's shutting down the CIA's off-the-books detention complexes in the war on terrorism.

* Obama has 62% approval in Texas and 60% in Tennessee.

* And the Senate has passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Yes we can?

A South Texas grand jury has returned multi-count indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County’s federal detention centers.

Random Link Friday.

* Happy 90th Birthday, Nelson Mandela.

* With the passage of a major new wind power initiative, is Texas now the most energy-conscious state in the union?

* Top 10 7 religions you never knew existed. (Who didn't know about Jainism, Falun Gong, and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church?)

* Wikipedia's list of unsolved problems in diverse fields like physics, linguistics, economics, cognitive science, and philosophy.

Day -4 link rodeo.

* John Tierney writes up the Singularity in the New York Times: When do the post-humans show up? Via the Valve.

* The Index of Plagiarists.

* Shelby Knox, star of the Texas abstinence-education documentary The Education of Shelby Knox, has a blog.

* McCain up by only 2% in North Carolina. I've said it before: I really think Obama can win here.

* And, via Drawn!, Zombie Daily.

MSNBC calls Texas for Clinton. So she got both her must-win states after all, albeit by proportions that may as well have been ties for all the good they do her, not that anyone but no-name bloggers cares about such trivialities as "a plausible chance to actually win."

Shankar tells me they're talking about superdelegates and Michigan/Florida on the TV now.

It's going to be a long six weeks.

I'm working on some other things, which is why liveblogging has been a bit slow. I'm not planning on waiting up until Texas is called, frankly. Events have hewed so closely to my initial predictions that I'm not sure what else there is to say. Regardless of how Texas ultimately shakes out, Clinton clearly has the credibility with her Ohio win to go forward to Pennsylvania despite the fact that from a mathematical standpoint she really can't win the nomination, and no matter what it will do to the party to have her slinging mud at Obama until April. Neither a close Obama loss or a razor-thin Obama victory in Texas changes the calculus in any significant way: If Clinton and her people are determined to go quixotically forward, they will, and the rest of us will all just have to live with it.

Despite losing Ohio 58-40 at the moment, Obama is actually ahead in delegates, 32-28. That's a pretty astounding differential, but probably closer in line to what the final results will look like—as I said below, he'll lose the state, but probably not by 18.

Su, my operative in Ohio, called me just a few minutes ago to concede the state and apologize for her colossal failure in delivering Ohio for Obama. And now Hillary Clinton is the projected winner in Ohio by what looks like a good margin, though it's likely to narrow significantly when the cities start reporting. (Cleveland in particular has barely reported anything yet.) I'd guess the final margin will be under ten points, but that's just a guess.

Josh Marshall boldly tries to claim kos's "line of the night re: Huckabee" award for himself:

Can someone get Huckabee off the stage and end the most painfully embarrassing concession I think I've ever heard? I mean, put him out of my misery. Huckabee seems to have forgotten that this isn't the end of a grand, hard-fought race. It was a farce that everyone indulged because Huckabee's sort of a feel-good wingnut and had a good sense of humor. When he started on to 'Victory or Death' riff at the end I thought he might be about to end with a stunning crescendo of a ritual suicide. But apparently it was Victory or Death (or windy concession speech), the lesser known original version of the line.

John McCain comes out to "Eye of the Tiger." This is a good night for him at least insofar as it's the last night for a good while that he'll have his speeches directly up against Obama's. Meanwhile, kos reports that Obama took the under-65 demographic in all four states.

...got to give McCain credit: it's hard to believe he was able to hang in there and pull it out. A few months ago we all had him counted out entirely. I'm sure a few Imperial Republicans are happy—bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran—but the social conservatives and the natalists have got to be kicking themselves. I bet they're wishing tonight that they'd run only one Ronald Reagan wannabe as opposed to five or six.

No credit for this speech, though. Dull, dull, dull.

As expected, Rhode Island is called for Clinton, though the margin is quite a bit closer than I expected it would be pretty much exactly as I predicted last night, a little less than the margin of victory in Vermont.

Actually, Huckabee dropped out just now. The real loser in all this, of course, is poor Stephen Colbert.

...kos gets in the line of night re: Huckabee. Where's Chuck Norris? Doesn't like to hang out with losers?

The networks are reporting that John McCain has clinched the Republican nomination. Huckabee to drop out tomorrow; better yet, Bush to endorse McCain tomorrow...

Still not much word on Ohio or Texas, but the results so far don't look half bad. Texas has already reported what are apparently the early voting numbers, and Obama has a lead of over 100,000. That's going to be hard for Clinton to make up.

Ohio said to be too close to call. Given where we were a few weeks ago, that's certainly good news...

Since MSNBC isn't streaming tonight, I'm forced to watch CNN. But Marc Ambinder gives me my Chuck Todd fix:

NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd on MSNBC points out that Hillary Clinton's delegate spread in Ohio, assuming she wins the popular vote narrowly, could be as large as +5 or as narrow as.. -1..if Obama runs up the margins in the Cleveland-area districts held by Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones.

Go on, Cleveland, work your magic. Ambinder also notes that Vermont may paradoxically be the most important state of the night—it's the only state where one of the candidates is likely to gain very many delegates vis a vis the other.

MSNBC projects Vermont for Obama. No big surprise there.

HuffPo has what it describes as "first exits." I'm not sure whether that means they're the first batch of unweighted exits, which would make them almost entirely useless, or if they're just the first exit polls anyone has seen, which would make them only mostly useless. Regardless, here are the numbers:

VT Obama - 67, Clinton - 33
OH Obama - 51, Clinton - 49
TX Obama - 50, Clinton - 49
RI Obama - 49, Clinton - 49

Based on these numbers I would advise Obama fans to brace themselves for possible disappointment tonight. While Obama has consistently outperformed the last telephone polls before primaries, he has consistently underpeformed early exit data. If the exit data is biased towards Obama in the same proportions we saw last month on Super Tuesday, that would suggest he'll lose all three of the close contests by a few percent.

(On second thought, since the early voting in Texas was generally agreed to favor Obama, he may still squeak out a close win there even if this data is biased towards Obama in the way I fear it is.)

Close margins like that won't matter for the delegate math, but they do matter for the spin war, which rightly or wrongly is the important thing tonight...

While we're waiting for actual information, check out "Hillary's Math Problem" from Jonathan Alter at Newsweek, probably the most linked article of the day, which shows how Clinton can go on to win all of the remaining 16 states by huge margins—which she won't—and still not catch up to Obama's current delegate lead. This thing is already over, regardless of what happens tonight; Dean or Gore or someone needs to pull the plug.

Drudge has already called Vermont for Obama despite the fact that the polls don't close there for another half-hour. It's irresponsible and unethical but almost certainly correct.

That leaves Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas, which Drudge describes as "deadlocked." A look at the random and unreliable exit polls shows good news for either candidate depending on how information that is currently unknown shakes out. There were high numbers of independent voters in all four states, including 20% in Ohio and 25% in Texas—beating the Survey USA assumptions, which is obviously good news for Barack. Fox asked voters "which candidate could better defeat the Republican in November" and the results are also quite O-positive.

Among Ohio voters:

Obama: 52 percent
Clinton: 44

Among Texas voters:

Obama: 52 percent
Clinton: 41

However, other signs point to Clinton, including signs of high Latino turnout in Texas. Without knowing how many people voted early, and in what proportions, Texas in particular is impossible to gauge based on this data alone.

Tom Brokaw is reporting that a bloc of 50 superdelegates is ready to announce for Obama, probably being saved to blunt Clinton's victory dance tomorrow. (Video.) If that's really the case, my Prediction 3a yesterday may have been too pessimistic; as a drop-out-now chorus, that's pretty deafening.

A few predictions for Mini-Super Tuesday and after.

1) Obama will take Vermont handily and Texas comparatively narrowly. He'll lose Ohio by about the same margin as he won Texas, maybe a little more, and he'll lose Rhode Island by a little less than his margin of victory in Vermont.

2) Having beautifully managed the expectations game, again, Clinton will successfully spin this functional tie into a big victory. The long-awaited Obama media backlash will begin in earnest: Why can't Obama seal the deal?

2a) As usual, nobody will remember that she was ahead by huge margins in all these states just a few weeks ago; or that everybody, including her own campaign, has said she needs to win both states by big margins to even have a chance at the nomination; or that with these sorts of slim margins there's really no way for her to ever catch up in the delegate count.

3) Pennsylvania will be declared by acclimation to be the final really final Judgment Day.

3a) Accordingly, the now-expected chorus that Clinton drop out won't actually materialize. Gore in particular will remain silent. Edwards may misread Mini-Super Tuesday as "the turning of the tide" for Hillary and decide to endorse her, thereby destroying his last shred of credibility for all time. Richardson may finally endorse Obama now that it can't actually do Obama any good, but I think he'll probably continue to be a chicken.

4) The race will finally come to an end on April 22nd after Obama wins Pennsylvania, most likely by double digits.

With March 4 looking more and more like it could be the definite win for Obama—he's now leading in Texas, per SurveyUSA, and a Rasmussen Ohio poll shows the race there tightening—it looks like a good time for the last of the great primary linkdumps for 2008.

* First up, naturally, is Frank Rich's "The Audacity of Hopelessness," perhaps the definitive pre-post-mortem of What Went Wrong for the once-inevitable candidate. From "Shame on you, Barack Obama" to outright mockery to this nonsense, all indications are that the so-called "moment" from last week's speech did not indicate Clinton's willingness to go out on a high note. Today the New York Times reports an internecine "'kitchen sink' fusillade" against the Democrats' presumptive nominee. I can't wait.

* Matt Yglesias says it never occurred to him that Obama could be assassinated until other people (I'm guilty) started talking about it. I like Matt Yglesias, but to me this indicates a shocking and almost incomprehensible lack of historical memory about the conditions that shaped the country into which we were both born. When I see a story about the Secret Service relaxing security at Obama events, a chill goes down my spine.

* Also via Matt Y., John B. Judis has a good and much-linked piece connecting Obama to a long tradition of American politicians promising us that we can start over.

* 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack, from Internet icon and Stanford prof Lawrence Lessig. I've gotten this in my email a few times and I wanted to put it up before it no longer mattered.

* And yes, I mean that, I think it's over next week, barring a fumble on Obama's part of Giuliani (Clintonesque?) proportions. Of course I said it was all over but the shouting after Super Tuesday, a prediction that I think has mostly been borne out. Chris Dodd has seen the writing on the wall. Even Marc Ambinder, who has been shilling for Clinton without any sense of self-respect for the last few months, has come around. Watch the debate tonight—I'll be liveblogging as usual, if only to see which version of Clinton shows up tonight—but I think Obama closes the gap in both Texas (which I think he'll win) and Ohio (not sure if he'll win, but it'll be close enough that he might as well have), which means he wins it next Tuesday.

Feeling proud of my country for the first time in my adult life: students at Prairie View A&M University in Texas march seven miles to vote in protest of an early-voting location placed too far from the school. Via Boing Boing.

Texas Debate Liveblogging.

Okay, so that's it. Even more clearly than in the last one-on-one debate, Barack wins a pretty even debate with a strong answer on the plagiarism/"silly season" issue. CNN replayed their "people meter" during one of the breaks and you can see Hillary's approval tanking in that moment—it was about ten solid minutes of Obamamania and in my opinion she never recovered from it. He also won the exchanges about how to take on John McCain. I was an Obama supporter early, of course, but I don't see how anyone undecided comes out of this debate deciding to vote for Clinton, and I'm guessing he peeled off some of her support, too.

9:40 pm: Rather than a question about the environment, which as we know is not an issue facing America in any way, we get a nonsense question: "Describe the moment in your life when you were tested the most." Obama talks about growing up with a single mother; Clinton, unless I misunderstood her, seems to reference Monica Lewinsky, which the crowd seems to wildly applaud. (?) That was very strange.

9:36 pm: Superdelegates. Clinton refuses to talk about superdelegates regardless of the fact that her entire strategy is banking on them. Obama says the primaries and caucuses should count for something, and ties it to the sense among the populace that government isn't listening to them because they've been "shut out." We're "tired out of a government that is dominated by the connected and the powerful; we want our government back."

9:32 pm: CNN tries another go at tripping Obama up with a question about earmarks. His answer is about his record on transparency. When it's Clinton's turn, she has nearly four times as much in earmarks, compared to St. John who says he has never asked for one. She drives at McCain too, which is a better look for her than attacking her Democratic opponent.

9:28 pm: Obama wound up going after McCain really hard in that answer—and probably as a consequence it was another really good sequence for him. He seemed like he'd already won the nomination. He gets in good lines about both the "100 Years" issue and the "I don't understand the economy" stuff.

9:21 pm: Another Iraq question, this one about McCain and his experience. Yet another question about how great the surge is.

9:16 pm: Now, back to the commander-in-chief thing. She's still saying "Ready on Day 1." Obama says he wouldn't be running if he didn't think he was prepared to be commander-in-chief; the crowd likes this. He segues quickly to Iraq, and lays a lot of emphasis on judgment. The crowd likes this too.

9:11 pm: New question: Clinton, are you saying that Obama is not qualified to be commander-in-chief? She refuses to answer the question and tries to go back to health care. The audience doesn't like it, and neither do the moderators, but she goes on, invoking the ghost of John Edwards in the process. Now Obama demands a rebuttal, and brings up the enforcement mechanism: "going after their wages." Now Clinton demands a rebuttal to the rebuttal. Obama takes a rebuttal to the third power. Obama wins, as usual, on the mandate thing, though Clinton pounds the table a bit.

The moderators have completely lost control of this debate.

9:07 pm: Obama also goes directly to the 1992 health care debacle, which I think was smart. I don't know if he was watching a clock or if he just got lucky, but CNN takes a break with Clinton's 1992 failure the last word.

9:03 pm: Clinton tries to recover with the universal health care issue. Barack starts talking specifics on universal health care, which once again cuts against this all-hat-and-no-cattle issue she insists on bringing up. Again, I ask: did she think he wouldn't? Does she really believe in what Matt Yglesias calls "the conservation of virtues," which is the claim that one cannot be both eloquent and knowledgeable? I think she does.

9:00 pm: Hillary gets nasty and the crowd boos. "That's not change you can believe in; that's change you can Xerox." I think she knew as she was saying it that it was the wrong thing to say after Barack had just been so positive, but she couldn't help using her prepared line.

8:57 pm: Obama the plagiarist? He's clearly been prepped for this one too. Good. "This is where we start getting into silly season in politics and I think people are discouraged by it." He uses the rest of his time to say he's been talking about specifics this whole time, and the crowd is really behind him as he answers. "We shouldn't be tearing each other time, we should be lifting the country up."

8:55 pm: Obama really nailed this question. A paraphrase: "She says that my millions of supporters, and editorial boards all across the country, etc etc, are all delusional." He laughs at this characterization just the right amount. He finishes off with a call to inspiration and a call to that political movement. His best answer of the night and an early contender for "moment of the debate." The crowd drowns out the next question.

8:54 pm: Obama starts listing his accomplishments. Did she think he wouldn't?

8:52 pm: Clinton: Do you really think Obama all hat and no cattle? She backs off from saying so, but then goes ahead and that she offers solutions. She says she has a record and some accomplishments—brings up the infamous MSNBC debacle in which an Obama proxy couldn't name one Obama accomplishment. (And here I thought this thing was going to be cordial all night.)

8:45 pm: Should the U.S. become a bilingual nation? Clinton says yes but English should still be the unofficial, unifying language. Obama says everyone needs to learn English so we can bind ourselves together as a country, but also says every student should learn a second language. Bashes No Child Left Behind, which the crowd likes as well.

8:40 pm: Obama jumps in with "What she said." Obama brings up the DREAM Act, which helps children who have grown up in the States to go to college; he gets a pop for this too.

8:36 pm: Border fence. Clinton (and Obama too) voted for the border fence—will you finish the fence, or will you stop the fence? She does a nice spin move here and blames it all on Bush. "I would listen to the people who live along the border."

8:35 pm: Immigration. "Would you consider stopping raids on undocumented immigrants?" Clinton says "Yes, except in egregious situations." She would introduce a path to citizenship in the first 100 days of her presidency. Obama takes most of what Clinton said as his base and then tries to go forward. Let's tone down the rhetoric, he says. And let's fix the INS and let's reduce the fees and legal expenses that keep immigrants from applying for citizenship. And let's get Mexico on board and start producing jobs there—gets in a hit on Bush in the process.

8:30 pm: Clinton pulls a "What Barack said" before she gets to her first difference: the foreclosure moratorium and the freezing of interest rates. CNN tries to interrupt Clinton, but Clinton stays in control. That question was a waste of time as no differences were advanced.

8:25 pm: John King asks how a President Obama would be different than a President Clinton on matters of the economy. He gets a lot of crowd pops on eat-the-rich stuff: stop giving tax cuts to companies that outsource, repeal the Bush tax cuts and reduce/eliminate taxes on the elderly. "We need to view trade deals through the lens of Main Street, not Wall Street." He hits the green economy issue. He says he and Clinton, and the now-fallen candidates, generally agreed -- the Democrats have a shared agenda. The question is how do we get it done -- and here's where we need "a working coalition for change." Hits Clinton with the special interest and lobbying issue in the handover.

8:20 pm: Clinton is trying to hang a lot on this distinction about which conditions she'll talk to our nation's "enemies," but it seems to me that she's met Obama nearly 90% of the way from the place where this debate started. The audience likes her knocking on Bush, and Chelsea's in the audience tonight, looking very proud of her mom.

8:14 pm: Univision hits us with a Cuban embargo question. Will Clinton meet with Raul Castro? Clinton says "she hopes so," which doesn't necessarily mean "yes"—Cuba has to prove it's willing to democratize first. "I would not meet with him until there was evidence that change was happening." Obama says he will, but ties it to the same sorts of "evidence"—which he calls "preparation"—but says that the U.S. needs to talk to its enemies as well as its friends. He also calls for the loosening on the embargo, including travel restrictions and renumeration, but not immediate normalization. The host tries to call this a flip-flop—I hate CNN—but Obama explains that the failure of the embargo policy is real and that this is how we need to deal with it.

8:10 pm: Barack leads with the "friends" live we've heard before, before leaping into economic issues: foreclosures, health care, outsourcing. The war, and its costs. "We've both offered detailed proposals to deal with these problems." Trying to get out in front of the all-hat-and-no-cattle issue. "Washington is where good ideas go to die." Obama quotes Barbara Jordan -- "People want an American as good as its promise" -- and the crowd seems to like that.

8:05 pm: No rules! Stay on point and don't take so long. Clinton goes first and begins with the story about her first political job, registering voters in South Texas, dropping names of prominent Texas female politicians in the bargain: Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards. So far it's "nice Hillary," not "kill you to death, this-is-the-fun-part Hillary"—but it's only the first few minutes. She offers a lifetime of experience and proven results—she's sticking with that message.

8:00 pm: The debate is beginning now. It's interesting that it's partly sponsored by Univision, the Spanish-language channel—should be a lot of questions about immigration and the Hispanic community tonight. It's also hosted at the University of Texas at Austin, which you'd expect should inform the questioning as well.