ANOTHER FEMALE TEACHER FIRED for having an affair with a male student. I don’t think this has really become more common — I think that people just used to turn a blind eye.

THE POWER OF political staging. “The rally took up maybe a quarter of the floor space in the arena. Part of running a decent campaign is knowing how big a crowd you might have and planning accordingly so as not to embarrass yourselves with a woefully understuffed venue.” Check out the photos.

NEW MATH: “The campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has begun urging party officials and news organizations to include the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations when figuring the number of delegates needed to win the nomination.”

“I WILL NEVER STOP FIGHTING FOR YOU:” Hillary’s speech sounds a bit Shrummy.

UPDATE: Ouch: “What do Americans care most about this election season? The troubled housing market, and the short supply of oil. That’s why HIllary is here with a plan. Specifically, a plan to discourage investment in the oil industry through a windfall profits tax, and to destroy the mortgage market by freezing foreclosures and interest rates. That way, no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won’t be any to worry about. That’s just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.”

CBS EXPLAINS its early Indiana call. Meanwhile, what’s taking so long on that Indiana vote-counting?

D.C. SNIPER UPDATE: “Convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad asks prosecutors in a letter for help to put an end to his legal appeals from death row. Muhammad says in the letter released Tuesday that he is waiving all rights to appeal his 2003 conviction and death sentence for the sniper killings in 2002 that terrorized the Washington, D.C., region.”

DAVE WEIGEL: “If Rev. Jeremiah Wright had greeted the new year with a self-imposed exile to Tibet, or if—even better—he’d turned off the cameras in Trinity United Church and never recorded himself saying ‘God damn America,’ Barack Obama would be knocking Hillary Clinton out of the race today.”

Plus this: “The Daily Kos has the only early exits that are ever any good: racial voting. Blacks went against Clinton in both states by about 85 points. That’s nightmarish and much worse than in the polls that showed her closing strong–they showed her climbing back into the teens.”

UPDATE: “Take that, Jeremiah Wright!” Obama blesses America, instead of damning it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Prelude to the convention?

MORE: Megan McArdle wasn’t that impressed with the Obama speech: “Gack. Now Obama is ranting about how he’s going to make the corporations give us super fuel-efficient cars, find awesome new sources of oil, make renewable energy affordable, and invent a really delicious fat-free ice cream. However did we manage to get through the first 200 years without Barack Obama to beat some progress out of the corporations that have been holding us back?” And she’s an Obama supporter. . . .

STILL MORE: Rapture!

CBS HAS CALLED INDIANA FOR CLINTON, but other networks are holding off.

MARKOS CALLS HAROLD ICKES a “scumbag.” Hmm. Maybe Ambinder’s right. (Via NewsAlert).

IT’S ALL MY FAULT. Well, not quite . . .

MARC AMBINDER: First Glance At The Exits: Democratic Party Cracking Up?

Obama supporters really don’t like Clinton, and vice versa. Some of that will fade by election day, of course. But how much?

UPDATE: Dems must be worried, because Obama just addressed this question in his speech.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The CNN folks sent me a transcript from earlier this evening, and here’s a choice bit:

BEGALA: We cannot win with egg heads.

Let me finish my point.

We cannot win with egg heads and African-Americans. OK, that is the Dukakis Coalition, which carried ten states and gave us four years of the first George Bush.

President Clinton — reached across to get a whole lot of Republicans and Independents to come. I think Senator Obama and Senator Clinton both have that capacity. They both have a unique ability — well it’s not unique if they both have it. They both have a remarkable ability to reach out to those working-class white folks and Latinos.

Senator Clinton has proven it; Barack has not yet, but he can. And I certainly hope he is not shutting the door on expanding the party.

Will Obama fix this? So far I’ve seen a lot of talk about unity, but not much actual effort to compromise with people who aren’t already in his camp.

MONEY PROBLEMS for gun-control advocates?

DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECESSION (CONT’D): Heck, this time it’s Where’s My Depression? “Whatever happened to the Great Depression? Not the real one from 70 years ago, the lost decade of unimagined misery and Steinbeckian angst, the worst period in the history of modern capitalism. I mean the replay we were promised this year. . . . Well, it’s early days, to be fair, but so far the Great Depression 2008 is shaping up to be a Great Disappointment. Not so much The Grapes of Wrath as Raisins of Mild Inconvenience.”

STEPHEN GREEN has been drunkblogging the primaries for a while, and he’s still entirely coherent. What a man! What a liver!

“CONVENIENCE VOTING CENTERS” in Indiana. And coming soon elsewhere?

CNN CALLS NORTH CAROLINA FOR OBAMA, but no margin yet.

CLASSIC SPACE FOOTAGE, restored in glorious HD. Cool.

GETTING TOUGH ON PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT in the Ninth Circuit.

A LOOK AT SADDAM AND TERROR: “The lasting value of the IDA report will be as a portrait of a certain type of Middle Eastern state, for whom terrorism is a normal instrument of policy. Although the report is about Iraq, it could just as easily describe the basic structure of statecraft in Iran, Syria, Egypt, ‘Palestine’ and Saudi Arabia. . . . But since terrorism was a typical tool in the region, as much in use by other countries as himself, a large measure of Saddam’s efforts were devoted to using his terrorists to infiltrate other power’s terrorists or to keep tabs on powerful independents. The IDA notes that nearly all the terror outfits in the region, including al-Qaeda, were essentially bidding for the same demographic pool of rootless, violent young men.”

THE POLITICS OF frustration.

MORE ON TENNESSEE’S IPOD TAX, which seems to have encountered some awkwardness. “It looks like the Bredesen administration has been illegally collecting sales tax on music downloads since Jan. 1, 2008, and that Farr is now pushing ‘technical correction’ legislation to amend the tax code in order to make legal the tax they’re already collecting.” If this turns out to be the case, it’s a bit of an embarrassment.

GLOATING A BIT, at E.J. Dionne’s expense.

DAN COLLINS EXAMINES the general victimology premise.

UM, THAT WOULD BE “NO:” When it comes to saving the planet do celebrities practise what they preach?

Except, of course, for Ed Begley, Jr. Nobody’s knocking him.

CANADIAN INVASION: “The United States and Canada share the longest unprotected border in the world, and Toronto’s Globe and Mail has a story illustrating why that is so dangerous.”