I've got news that is going to shock you so hard your spleen will evaporate. It's going to make Michael Phelps's 8 gold medals look as stale as an 80's cereal commercial and eradicate the remaining follicles of Joe Biden's hair. You WILL REMEMBER where you were when you heard this window shattering, firmament shaking, oceanic tidal wave of an announcement. You will feel tingles all over your body like you haven't since the last time you slept sitting up on a greyhound bus. No... this is it folks.

H/T to the commenters in Setrak's diary, especially Paul Anderson

Pardon me but the only words I have upon seeing this are WTF?!?!

Over at Time, Swampland contributor Jay Newton Small has an article up about the effects of Obama's candidacy on Oahu. It's a pretty interesting article with a lot of amusing side notes (like Japanese tourists visiting Punahou and taking snap shots of a tree Obama may have climbed). It brought my attention to something I hadn't thought much about - that if elected, Obama would not only be the first black president but also the first native Hawaiian. Hey, pretty cool.

There were several diaries written on Hiroshima yesterday, some condeming the attacks, some defending them as an ugly but necessary tactic to end the war. In particular, this diary offered a detailed and well sourced analysis of claims that Japan was on the verge of surrender.

Let me start off by saying this is not a conspiracy theory diary. It is simply me introducing some questions into the debate that I feel are worth asking.

I am outraged. Outraged!

About what, you say? At the fact that our great American values of democracy, christian realism, and freedom are being sold out by George W. Bush. Talk about a Manchurian Candidate.

It seems like every morning these days I wake up to some storm or other hitting our lovely little virtual home. See, I live in a time zone at least 12 hours ahead of most of you. By the time I turn on my computer, there are already well over 300 comments in every recommended diary.

So I arrive late to a lot of the arguments and I always find myself watching both sides and thinking "if only someone had offered a third option."  Something in-between. Maybe we could have turned the storm landward. Dissipated its strength. At times, I try to do this myself but in general the damage has already been done.

These are dark days to be a liberal blogger.

If you're not pissed off about FISA or any other of the numerous controversies that have been swirling, than you're pissed off over the uproar. You know things are getting bad when you find yourself nostalgic for the primary campaign or at least the one week window where unity not only seemed possible but actually seemed to be occuring.

Senator Obama is in a bit of a hole right now, some of it of his own digging. There is no quick, easy fix for his problems with the progressive wing of the party but there is something he can do as a gesture, a symbolic tip of the hat in their direction

Follow me below the jump.

Am I a flip-flopper? Let's look at the tape.

Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you.

You're talking to a friend and they casually mention that they saw your significant other talking to another man/woman at a restaurant the other day. Your friend didn't get a good luck and wasn't really sure if it was them or not but they thought they'd tell you anyway. You calmly tell your friend that they must be mistaken because you were both at home at the time and forget about the whole thing. But then on your way home, you start thinking. You go through your memory of the last week and start cataloguing all the hours of the day that the two of you weren't together. Then suddenly you get a call on your cell phone. It's your SO saying they'll be home work from late today. Hey it's nothing new, in fact it happens pretty often, but as you hang up the phone your mind is racing. Scenarios run through your head and you start thinking "Hey, he/she's late a lot, but they've never been late on a TUESDAY before. What gives."

I apologize in advance for the length of this diary. I don't usually have time to write long entries so when I do it kind of bubbles out.

Here's a little game to help us breathe easier around here. Fill in your own answers and post them in the comments. I'll also include mine.

It's late here and my wife's asleep but I'm stayin up to watch the match anyway. I fully expect this to be a very lonely diary but if anyone else likes soccer/football and is watching, share your thoughts.

Remember this lovely lady?

I'm feelin a little fired up today and I wanted to use this space to take some people to task. Over at TNR, Noam Scheiber has a post up about how Obama should refuse Mccain's offer for  open debates and joint town halls. Noam's main line of reasoning is that unmoderated debates before a large audience will undermine the effort to tie  Mccain to Bush by allowing him to showcase his more moderate side. While I can understand his concern, I think what Noam is missing here is that to the extent the debates will show that Mccain is not a crazy, senile chicken-hawk, they will also show that Obama is not a scary, socialist crypto-muslim. It works both ways.

Barack Obama has won the Democratic Party nomination and the Republican establishment is scared.

I can say this confidence. Why, you ask? Well, don't worry, this is not gonna be a rehash of electability arguments, or who or what played the race card, or what kind of shoes Barack's campaign bus driver wears. No, my metric is a simple one. Ratf***ing.

The urban dictionary defines ratf***ing as thus:

Politics: Formerly known as "the double-cross," it refers to infiltration and sabotage of the opposition party, particuarly during (but not limited to) an election campaign. The second half of "All the President's Men" describes ratfucking done to 1972 Democratic presidential candidates by employees of the Committee to Re-Elect Nixon.

Ken Clawson, Nixon's communications director, confessed to a ratfuck when he told how he forged a letter making it look like a Democratic candidate was a racist.

I asked a Clinton supporter tonight for a metric to calculate popular vote numbers from caucuses because I don't think the popular vote is a legitimate metric unless you can incorporate the caucus totals somehow. Anyway, this is what they said: