Obama wins! Huckabee and McCain is too close to call. The humiliation factor for McCain has to be huge here. For Clinton, it’s pretty big as well.

UDPATE: Exit polls are showing a huge win for Obama. Fifty-six percent of voters were women, and fifty-eight percent of them went for Obama. College graduates went for Obama. Non-graduates went for Obama. New voters went for Obama. People who’d voted previously voted for Obama. Basically, everyone voted for Obama.

UPDATE II: Obama even won Latinos, 55-45.

UPDATE III: “There’s no solace anywhere in these numbers” says Olberman.

Number of women who have contacted gang-rape victim Jamie Leigh Jones and said that they too had suffered sexual assault while working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq. Jones, who testified to Congress today, says that many of the women “cannot speak publicly due to arbitration agreements in their employment contracts.”

Recent polls have shown that a large majority of Americans think the economy is in bad shape. Indeed, stock markets are volatile, the mortgage crisis has worsened and President Bush recently released a record breaking budget that is expected to cause rising deficits. While the skyrocketing costs of the Iraq war are not helping, job and wage growth are weak, family debt is rising and the poverty rate remains high.

Yet the right wing continues to downplay the faltering economy. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) recently blamed it all on the American people, saying that it’s just “psychological.”

Last night on Fox News, former Bush aide Karl Rove claimed that the economy is partly responsible for his former boss’s record low approval ratings. But according to Rove, the media — not Bush’s disastrous policies — are to blame:

O’REILLY: The negativity toward President Bush is Iraq driven?

ROVE: I think it’s principally. I think the economy — the media has been beating the drum for years and years and years that the economy stinks. And after a while, that begins to color people’s attitudes.

Watch it:

Experts, including Fed Chariman Ben Bernanke, have also concluded that the economy is in decline. And even though Bush recently recognized “uncertainties” in the economy, he continues to paint a rosy picture, saying that a recent White House “report indicates that our economy is structurally sound.”

Digg It!

Last night, conservatives gathered at the Four Seasons in New York City for a Power Line event to honor Norman Podhoretz with a book award. Guests included Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, who arrived with his infamous love interest Shaha Riza. Henry Kissinger also gave a speech:

As Mr. Kissinger said in his remarks, “I don’t know what a blog is. I don’t know how to find a blog.” His computer, he said, is used to read newspapers. [...]

Mr. Kissinger said he was skeptical about the digitalization of media, for if his words and sentences “get shortened for cyberspace, there is no telling what will come out.”

As The New York Times notes, Kissinger should be worried about more than just the digital media getting his words wrong.

I’m happy to believe that the California legislature is dysfunction in some ways, but surely if Joel Kotkin wants to mount an argument for the state’s irrelevance in presidential politics, he might want to at least mention the fact that its governor is constitutionally ineligible to serve. Meanwhile, surveying the states problems, he also manages to completely neglect the anti-tax ballot initiative that’s decimated the state’s public services.

Strikingly, though, I thought this was a better than average Kotkin op-ed since usually he simply reiterates the idea that you can tell nobody wants to live in big cities from the fact that it’s so expensive to buy houses in them.

The largest liberal blogs have generally produced more web traffic than the largest conservative blogs. “Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative megablog RedState, conceded that progressives currently enjoy an advantage over conservatives online — though he attributed it to an asymmetry in free time, since conservatives ‘have families because we don’t abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism.’” (Via Atrios.)