Tonight on MSNBC’s Live with Dan Abrams, guests Pat Buchanan, Rachel Maddow, and Keli Goff discussed the role of race in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Buchanan suggested Obama is winning the black vote simply because he is black. Goff countered that Obama has won states that have small populations of African-Americans. As Goff spoke, Buchanan grew more agitated, ultimately lashing out. “Shut up for a second please!” Buchanan yelled. Watch it:

“Pat, I’ve been on TV with you a million times,” Maddow said to Buchanan. “I’ve never heard you tell anyone to shut up before. That was absolutely, completely ridiculous of you.”

On the heels of a spate of lethal bombings, the city of Baghdad “is feeling the unease of the period before violence eased partly as a result of the U.S. troop buildup, which is now coming to a close,” according to the Associated Press. “Iraqis interviewed said they were not necessarily changing their daily routines. But all said the growing bloodshed was present in their minds, clouding what had until recently been a more hopeful time.” While civilian deaths hit an low of 20 per day in January, “so far in March, that number is up to 39 daily.”

In remarks to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce today, President Bush continued his rosy rhetoric on the economy. He predicted that in the future, people will look back at today’s financial situation and say that “tax cuts work”:

And I want to thank you very much for supporting the tax cuts plans that had good effect on small businesses all across the United States during that period of time. I think when people take a look back at this moment in our economic history, they’ll recognize tax cuts work. They have made a difference.

It’s doubtful Americans will remember this time period as an example of economic success. Yesterday, a government report from Energy Information Administration (EIA) , the statistical arm of the Department of Energy, broke with the Bush administration line, forecasting “for the first time that the country’s economy would enter recession in 2008.” The report reads:

U.S. real gross domestic product is expected to decline slightly in the first half of the year and then start growing again, with growth for 2008 as a whole at 1.3 percent, the slowest annual rate since 2001.

As the Financial Times noted, the EIA report did not specifically say that the U.S. economy would fall into recession, “but two quarters of negative growth is a common definition of recession among economists.”

Reuters said today that many economists foresee a recession “probably in quarter 1.” This assessment drops growth expectations to “none at all” for the first three months of this year, in contrast to the “anemic 0.2 percent they forecast last month.”

Making Bush’s tax cuts permanent won’t help the U.S. economy. They would cost taxpayers $4.3 trillion over the next ten years; Bush has proposed no measures to pay for this. Furthermore, they would increase the after-tax incomes of households with incomes above $1 million by an average of 7.5 percent, compared to a 2.3 percent increase middle-income households and 0.5 percent for lowest-income households.

“Multiple senior EPA officials” have told Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) that since December they “have ceased their efforts” to follow the Supreme Court order to determine the hazard posed by tailpipe greenhouse emissions and to propose regulations. In December, EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson agreed with their findings and “forwarded an endangerment finding to the White House and a proposed motor vehicle regulation to the Department of Transportation.” Since then, the officials “did not know what transpired.”

UPDATE: The Washington Post notes the EPA today “decided to lower the allowable amount of smog-forming ozone in the air to 75 parts per billion, a level significantly higher than what the agency’s scientific advisers urged for this key component of unhealthy air pollution” — at the urging of industry officials.

David Corn reports: “Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a ‘war’ against the ‘false religion’ of Islam with the aim of destroying it.” Since McCain’s managed to get away with not disavowing John Hagee, who can be tagged with anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments, I’m pretty sure that mere bigotry against Muslims isn’t going to bring the heat. The press loves McCain, so it’s hard to tag him with any of this stuff. It’s rendered doubly hard by the fact that Barack Obama’s campaign needs to keep fighting Hillary Clinton.

On Monday, McClatchy reported that a “review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents” captured after the U.S. invasion “has found no evidence” that Saddam Hussein “had any operational links” with al Qaeda. But ABC News reports today that the Pentagon apparently doesn’t want the study “to get any attention” as it has canceled “plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release and will no longer make the report available online.” One Pentagon official “said initial press reports on the study made it ‘too politically sensitive.’”

Harold Ickes says of states Obama’s won:

“Most of those states haven’t voted Democratic in a presidential since the Johnson landslide over Goldwater in 1964, and we don’t see that changing,” said Harold Ickes, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “They’re great states, but Idaho, Nebraska and the Carolinas are not going to be in the Democratic column in November. He’s winning the Democratic process, but that is virtually irrelevant to the general election.”

The converse of this, however, is that Clinton’s delegate count is heavily dependent on states like California, New York, and Massachusetts that aren’t in play either. Meanwhile, though they’ve traditionally gone Republican in presidential elections, I don’t think it’s beyond imagining that Barack Obama could put some of these north plains states — the Dakotas, Montana, maybe even Kansas or Nebraska — into play. There are plenty of Democratic senators from this part of the country many of whom are pretty orthodox liberals. Similarly, border states like Virginia and Missouri that Obama’s carried in the primaries aren’t out of reach in the general election any more than Colorado is and there’s at least some reason to think Clinton would put some marginal blue states (Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, Minnesota) in play for McCain.

Now what’s true is that Ohio was the decisive state in 2004 and Clinton would probably be the stronger candidate for Ohio. There’s not, however, much more to the Clinton argument than that. The whole thing about Clinton winning the states that matter or the “big states” just amounts to Ohio. Which is fine as far as it goes, and certainly leads me to believe that if Clinton does wrest the nomination away from Obama she’ll probably win on a Clinton-Strickland ticket. I just think Obama would probably win too (especially if Clinton can somehow be persuaded to drop out after Pennsylvania thus letting Obama turn his cash and rhetoric against McCain), except with a larger number of states and more Democratic Senators.

On Sunday, the AP reported that contractor KBR has been providing “unmonitored and potentially unsafe” water to U.S. troops in Iraq. According to a Pentagon Inspector General’s report, dozens of soldiers fell sick, suffering “skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea and other illnesses” after using the “discolored, smelly water for personal hygiene and laundry.”

In a press briefing on Monday, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell dismissed KBR’s gross negligence. He responded by joking about how everyone knows the water in Iraq is unsafe, and advised everyone to avoid drinking it:

You know, we’ve all been to Iraq several times. Everywhere you go they make it perfectly clear that you don’t want to drink the water, so I’m a little surprised myself that this is an issue. As I understand it, the bottled water, which is what you’re supposed to be drinking in Iraq, had no issues whatsoever in the testing that was done. Evidently, there was some issue with some of the other water that was, I guess, primarily meant for washing. [...]

But I think our encouragement is always — for journalists and warfighters alike is read the signs and just drink the bottled water.

Watch it:

Morrell’s advice is useless. Troops didn’t drink the contaminated water. They used it for bathing and laundry. Does Morrell also propose that troops use bottled water for showering?

KBR has recently faced scrutiny for dodging paying more than $500 million “in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies” based in the Cayman Islands. Between 2004 and 2006, KBR — previously a subsidiary of Halliburton — received more than $16 billion in government contracts.

(HT: Heather)

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