Obama wins Nebraska. Obama wins Louisiana. Obama wins Washington. And Obama wins the US Virgin Islands. It’s a nice haul. Like Andrew, I’m struck by the complete and devastating nature of Obama’s win in Washington, where he appears to have carried every single county in a state where Asians and Hispanics outnumber African-Americans. Ambinder says:

Though Clinton can’t win the small states (unless she controls the machine — think Nevada), Obama cannot win the states where the majority of Democrats reside.

This seems like a mighty gerrymandered “can’t” for Obama. He can win Democratic states like Washington, Connecticut, and Delaware. He can win states the Democrats sometimes carry like Iowa and Missouri. Is the criticism that Obama can’t win big heavily Democratic states? Well, he won his home state of Illinois and Clinton won her home state of New York. So this amounts to saying Obama lost California. Which, of course, he did. And it’s a big state so California gets a lot of delegates. But one can hardly proclaim the winner of California the winner on some “states where the majority of Democrats reside” theory when Obama’s winning more states and winning more delegates and winning them in all regions of the country.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) bragged about the “accomplishments” of conservatives in Congress in 2007, including the blocking of “an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program,” which he complained would “expand from a program for poor kids to a ‘program for more kids‘” (sub. req’d).

President Bush has sharply criticized Congress for its earmarks. Yet The New York Times notes that “buried deep” in Bush’s 2009 budget are similar earmarks:

Mr. Bush has often derided Congressional earmarks as “special interest items” that waste taxpayer money and undermine trust in government. Congress, he said, included more than 11,700 earmarks totaling almost $17 billion in spending bills for the current fiscal year.

But some of those earmarks were similar or identical to ones included in the 2009 budget that Mr. Bush sent Congress last week. For example, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, obtained an earmark of $1.5 million last year to deal with the emerald ash borer, a beetle that attacks trees, lawns and crops. Mr. Bush now wants more money to fight that insect.

The Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage writes, “Lawmakers and human rights activists sharply criticized President Bush yesterday for issuing a signing statement that they said has undermined congressional efforts” to pressure the Sudanese government to crack down on the genocide in Darfur. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) said:

The president was entitled to oppose the bill, the president was entitled to have the State Department lobby against it. He was even entitled to veto it. What he is not entitled to do is, having failed in those efforts, and having declined to veto it, to then unilaterally undermine it by a signing statement which will vitiate its intended effect.

Mike Huckabee wins Kansas decisively. Of course as we’ve learned from Thomas Frank and Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas GOP activist class has become unusually wingnutty in recent years so it’s not exactly a huge surprised. Still, base resistance to John McCain remains striking. Meawhile, it’s a reminder that a candidate launched into the mainstream by his strong showing in Iowa isn’t quite the Dixie regional candidate he’s sometimes portrayed as.