Patrick Healy reports for The New York Times:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.

Fair enough. On the other hand, Texas and Ohio combined have just a bit fewer delegates than do the Obama Weekend Sweep States plus the Potomac Primary states, so it’s not clear that even a Texas and Ohio win would put her over the top. Meanwhile, as I noted this morning we haven’t seen any polls from Texas or Ohio and the idea that Clinton is leading in those places is best on pure conjecture.

Throughout the primary campaign, Faith in Public Life has noted that exit polls have failed to ask Democratic voters if they are Evangelicals, while consistently asking the question of Republicans. On Feb. 5, the group took action into its own hands, commissioning exit polls in Tennessee and Missouri, which found that “one in three white evangelical voters in Missouri and Tennessee participated in Democratic primaries.” The group’s exit polls also found that “evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage.”

In The New York Times Magazine, Fred Kaplan writes that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is counting down the days until the end of the Bush presidency:

When the next president takes the oath on Jan. 20, 2009, Gates will be just 65 years old, but he insists he will retire from public life, this time for good. A friend recently gave him an electronic key chain, inscribed “The Gates Countdown,” with a small screen reading out how many days remain till the end of the term. He carries it everywhere, in part as a joke but not entirely. Told that those screens can be reset, he replied, “Not this one.” When I mentioned that some lawmakers would like him to stay on in the next administration, he replied, “I am very wary of saying, ‘Never,’” but added, “The circumstances under which I would do that are inconceivable to me.”

Today, the New York Times revealed that the Army tried to bury a Rand Corp. post-war study of the Bush administration’s failures to plan for Iraq. “[T[he study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key,” the Times wrote. Today, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) wrote to Army Secretary Pete Geren calling on him to “rectify this mistake” by releasing “the full, classified version of the report” to Congress and “to allow the publication of the unclassified summary of the report.”

A new book by AMERICAblog’s A.J. Rossmiller, who spent two years as a Defense Intelligence Agency Iraq analyst, paints a picture of the dysfunctional agency. CQ previews the book and some of the right-wing “ignorant buffoons and bullies” working for the Bush administration:

That would change when Rossmiller, a lowly GS-9, was eventually transferred to the Direct Action team, whose unofficial motto was “track ‘em and whack ‘em.” There he was an uncomfortable witness to U.S. soldiers screaming in English at Iraqis they’d rounded up. When they didn’t get satisfactory answers — there never seemed to be one — they dispatched their bewildered, hooded and quite possibly innocent captives to the soon-to-be infamous Abu Ghraib prison for interrogation.

More on the book here.

Here’s Hillary Clinton’s take on getting shut out over the weekend:

She said she never expected to do well in any of those contests, even though she had been favored to win Maine. Clinton repeated her criticism that the caucus system is undemocratic and caters mostly to party activists.

As for Louisiana, “You had a very strong and very proud African- American electorate, which I totally respect and understand,” Clinton said.

It’s worth noting that there was a time — a time called “2007″ — when Clinton was expecting to hold her own among African-Americans. Not necessarily win the black vote, but do well enough to get by. For a contrast, women were a majority of participants in every single Democratic primary and caucus, so every time Obama won he had to stay at least somewhat competitive within the women sub-sample. For Clinton, that kind of performance among African-Americans now seems out of reach, but it wasn’t ever thus. Similarly, the idea that caucuses are unfairly disadvantaging the establishment candidate would have struck most people as very odd before the voting began. The truth seems to be that Clinton simply spent more money on consultants and less on organizers, and a paucity of organizers can hurt you badly in a caucus.

The AP reports that a U.S. soldier who was receiving hospital treatment for bi-polar disorder was discharged early for deployment to the Middle East:

A Fort Carson soldier who says he was in treatment at Cedar Springs Hospital for bipolar disorder and alcohol abuse was released early and ordered to deploy to the Middle East with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.

The 28-year-old specialist spent 31 days in Kuwait and was returned to Fort Carson on Dec. 31 after health care professionals in Kuwait concurred that his symptoms met criteria for bipolar disorder and “some paranoia and possible homicidal tendencies.”

Fort Carson sent 79 soldiers overseas late last year who were considered medical “no-goes.” The brigade’s surgeon has said that the 3rd Brigade Combat Team had “been having issues reaching deployable strength” and that some “borderline” soldiers were sent overseas.

Noam Scheiber wonders why Patti Solis Doyle got the ax instead of Mark Penn and puts forward some plausible conjectures. Michelle Cottle ads some insight of her own. But let’s try this on for size: Maybe Hillary Clinton believes Mark Penn is a brilliant political strategist who saved her husband’s administration (and the Democratic Party) in the 1990s, put her in the US Senate, and knows the formula to put her in the White House.

Yes, I think that’s ludicrous but then again I never would have made him chief strategist of my presidential campaign. Clinton obviously hired him because she admires his work, and there may well be nothing more machiavellian going on than that she continues to admire his work.