What could the rationale possibly be for this move:

The Bush administration plans to shift nearly $230 million in aid to Pakistan from counter-terrorism programs to upgrading that country’s aging F-16 attack planes, which Pakistan prizes more for their contribution to its military rivalry with India than for fighting insurgents along its Afghan border.

The press seems to have latched onto General Petraeus' seeming opposition to Obama's position on withdrawing troops as a rallying cry as to why Obama is wrong on Iraq (despite the increasingly Obvious endorsement of Obama's general plan by the Iraqi government itself).

However, there are several problems with relying so much on General Petraeus' opinion on the matter.

Just a note to the Kossacks: I've actually been doing this on my own blog since the first week of June, but since I've broken my posting embargo here, I've decided to start cross-posting these here.

Here is the map for July 22nd. Notes are below (click map for bigger version):

Methodology

Since Der Spiegel has released the transcript of their interview with Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki, I thought I would go through it and see what al-Maliki thought about various things.  Some of his comments were quite interesting.

I guess McCain decided to go the "we're staying whether the Iraqis like it or not" route:

"His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out," said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The military says 'conditions based' and Maliki said 'conditions based' yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders."

Update 6/5: I've written a tad more about this at my own blog. If anyone is interested.

It greatly pains me to have to write this.  I joined this site in late 2004 because it seemed like an interesting site that shared many of my views.  Since then we've lost one election, and won another, gone through pie fights and numerous other crisis and over 140,000 new members and people here seemed to have always kept a level head.

10:00 PM: Montana polls close. Obama declared the winner.

This might be a late night as South Dakota doesn't close the last of it's polls until 9:00 PM Eastern, while Montana doesn't close until 10:00 PM Eastern.

What if the delegate to put Obama over the top - delegate #2,118 (taking the higher of 2,117 and 2,118) - was Hillary Clinton herself tomorrow night?

Now, I know that some people here of the mind that she'll never concede and all that jazz. We already know your position.  

Having said that, I think it would be an excellent way to start the unification process of the party to execute something like that.

I realize that it may not be the most likely of things to happen - the fact that we just don't know when it'll time for 2,118 is probably the biggest obstacle to this idea.

And the first superdelegate endorsement after Obama claims a pledged delegate victory goes to....Senator Clinton:

In a sign that they're trying to seize some momentum after the primaries last night, the Hillary Clinton camp is first out of the gate with a super-delegate endorsement this morning, coming from Ohio DNC member Craig Bashein.

9:31 AM: Well, I've updated the numbers this morning.  Oregon is still only 88% in, with one whole county not having released numbers at all yet.  We will indeed end up with over 34 million total votes cast after tonight.

7:00 PM: Kentucky polls close.  Clinton is declared the winner.

I think it's about time we do it: it's time to count Michigan and Florida.

Now, I personally had been opposed to counting both of these states before since the primary was still going full force and who the nominee would be was still reasonably in doubt.  However, at this point Obama is so sure to be the nominee that even including Michgan and Florida would make no appreciable difference.

Add on top of this the fact that Clinton appears to be making statements that she'll drop out after the Puerto Rico caucus if Michigan and Florida is counted and, assuming she keeps her word, there is no reason to give her an excuse to keep fighting due to Florida and Michigan still being left out if including them makes no difference.

It also makes moot the point of "what number is needed for a majority."

1:08 AM EDT: MSNBC calls Clinton "apparent winner" in Indiana.

Of course, this is all kind of guess work, but without Lake County, Obama could probably pick up about between 1000 to 2000 votes.  That's not much, but it may end up being the difference.

Since we won't have another results thread until next week, I thought I would appease the masses by having a graph filled post filled with statistics about where the race stands.

Just a few notes to start:

Delegate and popular vote counts are from The Green Papers, while my superdelegate list is from the awesome 2008 Democratic Convention Watch website.

OK, it's still 6 months until November, but I thought I would start the work on creating the spreadsheets to keep track of results in the November election.

So far that's all I have - the spreadsheets.  I haven't created the graphs yet (and boy will there be a lot!).  However, if you wish, people can preview how the data will be organized for (hopefully) maximum readability and editing by the people who I hope will eventually volunteer for this grand project (I'm not taking them yet, but probably do start looking out for calls in September and/or October!)

Wed 8:05 AM: What I said last night basically holds true this morning:  The win is by 10%, the margin is just over 200,000, and the delegate margin is +10 for Clinton based on preliminary estimates.

9:46 PM: Total Democratic Primary popular vote total (including MI and FL) passes 30 million

Last night was a significant victory for Hillary Clinton, at least as far as morale and momentum goes in the Democratic primary race.  And Clinton may have taken the first step in nickle and diming away at Obama's delegate lead.  It's looking likely that Clinton will come away with a net gain of 10 to 15 delegate for the night, depending on how the Texas caucuses end up shaping up.

With the current caucus results (about 1/3 of the results in), Obama is sitting at a 7 delegate lead right now, which would give him a net +3 in Texas, which would pretty much counter Clinton's +2 advantage in the Rhode Island/Vermont exchange.  That means whatever delegate lead Clinton gets from Ohio - right now sitting at 14 10 - should be close the final delegate margin of the night.

8:30 AM ET: Despite what some bean counters were saying last night, this is turning into a huge night for Clinton.  First off, her delegate gain so far sits at 25 delegates, with 75 delegates to go.  If Obama is going to make that up, he's going to have to do it in the Texas caucuses as, despite what some people were saying, Clinton did win the primary delegate count 65-61.

And Obama better hope my caucus projections are wrong, because I actually have Clinton winning that as well, 35-32.  Though half of that is guessing at this point (basically guessing on how many delegates each district gets and applying the current results)

This deal with the McCain lobbyist scandal made me start to wonder: is something like this one reason why a party does and should have superdelegates at nominating convention?

While McCain hasn't formally won enough delegates to win the Republican nomination, he's pretty certain to get there.  And while this story appears big on it's face, I still have doubts about it's ability to actually bring McCain's campaign down.

But what if it does?