Daily Tidbits: March 18, 2008

• Gallup poll taken after the Wright video hit job shows Obama’s lead over Hillary has grown nationally 52-45%. (I say “video hit job” because there was nothing new in the video, nor Obama’s statements denouncing them. The only thing new was that Fox News purchased DVDs of Wright’s sermons and cherry picked the most offensive lines to produce a greatest hits compilation of out-of-context nastiness.  The objective was first to define Wright as an angry, unpatriotic man consumed by hatred of rich white people, and then to make Obama guilty by association with Wright because he is Obama’s former pastor.  Never mind that the UCC Trinity church is a well established institution in Chicago respected for its good works in the community and that it is a part of the UCC church, which has an overwhelmingly white membership overall.  In addition, the MSM has not made nearly as much of an effort to paint McCain as “guilty by association” with his bigoted religious right endorsers like Hagee, Parsley and Robertson.  The hit job element to this was exposed when right winger Bill Kristol wrote an op-ed in Monday’s New York Times premised on a lie — the false assertion that Obama was deceitful because Kristol claimed, falsely, that Obama had attended a sermon in which Wright had made offensive statements — which when caught forced Kristol to issue a belated correction.)
• Florida Democrats say there will be no “revote.”
• Hillary fails in her effort to “Florida-ize” the Texas Caucus by challenging the process after-the-fact.