I'm just wondering why twice over the course of several months, a clock mysteriously stops with seconds left in a quarter (half). And why, both times, this stoppage ends up curiously favoring the home team.

This happened at the end of the women's basketball game between Rutgers and Tennessee a couple months ago. And unlike tonight's game, it was clear then that the clock stoppage directly affected the result.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago the officials in Atlanta during the Celtics-Hawks series were resorting to "some guy with an air horn" to signal the expiration of the 24-second clock.

Somebody please remind me what century we are in.

Now, there are many large caveats to keep in mind as you hear about exit polls for the next hour or two. First, this first wave of exit polls is notorious for being less than perfectly reliable. Second, in previous primaries exit polls have shown Obama doing about 7 percentage points better than he does in the actual vote. And finally, both Indiana and North Carolina are states that are considered very hard to model for polling purposes.

But I guess we'll discuss these exit polls for a few hours anyway, even though we know going in that they are unreliable, eh?

Begala is simply bashing the brand like the Clintonistas have been doing for the past 20 years. The Begala idea of what the Democratic party should be is...what? It's all about taking the liberal vote for granted and picking up a bunch of "swing voters" by bashing the liberals. It's called triangulation.

It is neither a good long-term plan for a ruling coalition nor is it a plan that carries with it any mandate for how to govern. One talented person like Bill Clinton can win an election by triangulating, but if an entire wing of the party is doing this, the party loses all sense of unity.

Begala's dismissive comment about "eggheads and African-Americans" sounds like something Rush Limbaugh would say. It really is too bad that he thinks well-educated people somehow represent an electoral vulnerability for Democrats. It seems to me that the Republicans never has this issue. Begala has simply fallen into a trap.

I am reminded of something Michael Corleone says in Godfather II.

Never be embarrassed by your wealth. This recent contempt for money is still another trick of the rich to keep the poor without it.

Similarly, the idea that Democrats should somehow be embarrassed for being educated is a trick. The people who toss around labels like "egghead" are not, in fact, more attuned to "average Joes" than well-educated people are. It's a myth. Moreover, it's not a myth that helps Democrats any. Sad to see Begala buying into it.

Thanks for the right-wing talking points, Herb.

I'm curious, does this objection to "making law" apply to any of the current majority of SCOTUS? Does it apply to the Bush v. Gore decision?

Apparently going down on women causes cancer!

Thanks droog!

Next, we'll learn that "getting the beer yourself" causes cancer, too.

they also put the fish into barrels, and lend shotguns to interested anglers. I hear it's pretty easy.

She started with a big lead and lost it.

She started with a money advantage and squandered it.

She started with an advantage in name recognition and, well, that really didn't work to her advantage.

For the past few months, her platform has essentially been "racism is worse than sexism in rural America, so you have to vote for me because Obama cannot possibly win". I've never been convinced that Clinton's pre-existing negatives would be less of a problem than any racist issues Obama will have to deal with, and the constant whining about sexist coverage didn't help this argument either.

Basically, the argument appeared to be: you have to fight sexism, because it's bad, but you have to shrug your shoulders and accept that racism is inevitable. Wow! There's an attitude to rally around!

Obama is not a perfect candidate and was not my first choice (or indeed, second or third for that matter), but I never bought into the idea that Clinton was more experienced than he simply because she had been the First Lady and a guiding force behind her husband's career. It had reached the point where I, a voter who had voted Democratic in every election since 1988, was finding her the least appealing major candidate I had ever seen, and one I thought would be routed in the general election if that was the matchup. If I was having trouble finding a reason to vote for her, hypothetically, then she'd already lost the race.