Thursday:

Sen. Clinton repeated her desire for the filly to be victorious – saying to a crowd in Jeffersonville, Indiana saying she was sending in her daughter to place her bets. "I hope that everybody will go to the derby on Saturday and place just a little money on the filly for me. I wont be able to be there this year – my daughter is going to be there and so she has strict instructions to bet on Eight Bells."

Saturday:

Big Brown hit the wire nearly five lengths ahead of Eight Belles, but moments later, there was heartbreak. While Kent Desormeaux was galloping out Big Brown, Eight Belles fell.
She had fractured both of her front ankles, said the Derby’s on-call veterinarian, Dr. Larry Bramlage, and was euthanized on the racetrack.

both via the Washington Post. Post more if you have them

Since the 3 possible Republican candidates are all running on platforms made up of slightly varied amounts of limiting civil liberties, war, torture, and pigfuckery they're all out of consideration for this endorsement. The one Republican I agree with on several issues is likely a racist nutbag and so he's out also.

On the Democrat side of things, the candidate I most agree with (according to several online tests) has already dropped out and was not going to get many votes anyway. So that leaves Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and between the two I definitely choose Obama.
[more inside]

Cheering supporters? Check. Election returns on the projection screen? Check. Andrea Mitchell and Candy Crowley doing stand-ups? Check and check. In fact, the only piece missing from Hillary Clinton's Florida victory party here Tuesday night was a victory.
[...]
"There are more voters in Florida alone than there are in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina combined," Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle argued in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. This was the same Solis Doyle who last summer committed Clinton to signing the Florida boycott pledge, saying, "We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process, and we believe the DNC's rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role."
[...]
Clinton announced plans for the Florida celebration on Sunday, the same day she held a trio of fundraisers in Florida and accepted the endorsement of the Miami mayor while pressing some flesh for the cameras. On Monday, her campaign claimed the endorsement of Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, while pro-Clinton unions continued sending out mailings in her support.

All of this sounded suspiciously like campaigning. But aides said they were merely trying to protect the people of Florida who, despite the campaign's "scrupulous" refusal to campaign in the state, showed up to vote for Clinton anyway.

I know it's short notice, but our Obama group (The Knoxville Obama Movement) is hosting a SC Watch Party at Green Hills Grille in Western Plaza at 7pm, Saturday January 26. We've reserved the upstairs ballroom, and we'll have Obama signs, stickers, ect. It's basically just a low key watch party to get with other Obama supporters, and some undecided voters. Access to the Green Hills Grille menu and drinks. We'll be there until the returns from SC are posted and the speeches are given.

Of all the right-wing figures who have promoted Mike Huckabee's extraordinary political rise from a backwater church to the national pulpit of a presidential campaign--and there are many--perhaps none know the former Arkansas governor and current Republican presidential front-runner better than Jay Cole. A Baptist minister based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with a right-wing radio talk show of his own, Cole has been instrumental in inspiring Huckabee's rise over more than two decades. Indeed, when Huckabee was the governor of Arkansas, it was Cole who persuaded him to arrange the release from prison of a convicted rapist, Wayne Dumond, who had become a born-again evangelical in prison--the most controversial act of Huckabee's career, which still dogs him on the campaign trail.
[...]
Cole, a vitriolic Clinton critic who calls the former president "trash" and says he helped produce the infamous anti-Clinton propaganda video The Clinton Chronicles, immediately embraced Dumond's cause, taking to the airwaves to paint him as the victim of a dark conspiracy. Cole claimed without evidence that a vindictive Clinton and his surrogates had framed Dumond and had possibly orchestrated his castration as well.
[...]
Huckabee routinely warns of the threat of "Islamofascism" at campaign rallies and is perhaps the first major presidential candidate in American history to essentially call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Huckabee declared during a New Hampshire fundraiser in October that a Palestinian state should only be established outside of biblical Israel, possibly in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, according to the Jewish Russian Telegraph. He reiterated this position during an appearance on Face the Nation in November.

Most of the batshitcrazy in the article is not directly attributed to Huckabee, but that doesn't change the fact that Mike Huckabee is not a sane man

I'd come to get my first up-close glimpse of the man Arkansans call Huck, about whom I knew very little -- beyond the fact that he was far behind in the polls and was said to be very religious. In an impromptu address to a small crowd, Huckabee muttered some stay-the-course nonsense about Iraq and then, when he was finished, sought me out, apparently having been briefed beforehand that Rolling Stone was in the house.

"I'm glad you're here," he told me. "I finally get to tell someone who cares about Keith Richards."
[...]
But all the attention on his salesmanship skills obscures the real significance of his rise within the Republican Party. Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. Rather than employing the patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-income Christians into supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely new -- a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the working poor.

But Huckabee is also something else: full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from "primates" and thinks America wouldn't need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce.