And I'll make Ted Kennedy pay; if he fights back, I'll say that he's gaaaaaaay...

Some thoughts on some of the numbers coming out tonight...

Obama won more states. Clinton probably won more delegates, because she won the biggies -- New York and California. I'm tempted to find the preliminary numbers coming out of California depressing, because yesterday there was some crazy Zogby poll with Obama up 13 points or something -- but we should remember that another poll came out the day before that with Hillary up by 12. And back in December, she was leading him by 25. If Obama loses by less than 10 points in California, I'd be thrilled with that. Right now it's trickling in at a 20% differential, which -- ouch. LA's kinda kickin' Barack's butt. Dammit, Scarlett Johansson, did you get drunk and forget to vote or something? Clooney? DeNiro? Helloooooo? (San Fran is being considerably kinder.)

But what really interests me is that the majority of the states Clinton won (New York, California, Massachusetts -- where's that Kennedy bump? --, New Jersey) are ones that will go solidly democrat in the general no matter who the candidate is. She managed a relatively small victory in Arizona, but McCain will obviously get that one in the general election. She also won Arkansas -- if McCain picks Huckabee as his running mate, there goes that. The only swing state she's now proven herself in is Tennessee. Meanwhile, Obama looks poised to upset in the swingiest state of the night, Missouri, and could theoretically (which I never really thought about before) be a threat in Kansas, his ORIGINAL home state. And everybody thinks the south is solid red -- but you get out the black vote and you've suddenly got almost 100,000 voters more in Barack's column than winner Huckabee on the Repug side in Alabama. Barack got TWICE the votes of Huckabee in Georgia. This, again, points towards the potential for the general election.

I was also struck by the margins in the percentages. Hillary only went over 60% in one state -- Arkansas. Her adopted state of New York couldn't give her more than 57% -- Illinois went 64% for Obama, by contrast. He also got more than 60% of the vote in North Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, Idaho (although apparently only 6 people and a three-legged-dog named Joe voted in Idaho -- caucuses are weird), Georgia, Alaska, and, amazingly, Colorado, where more people voted for Obama than all the Republican candidates combined. Like, 20,000 more people. And Colorado is not what I would call a liberal state. This demonstrates an amazing get-out-the vote, 50-state-strategy capacity for Obama. That's what we need in this country -- a real, national election that doesn't write off this or that state to one or the other party. (OK, well, unless that three-legged-dog switches its party designation, Idaho's probably still gonna fall in the red column.)

So, to sum up -- California is making me sad, but I think Obama comes out of tonight with the "momentum" in his favor. How's that for a narrative, Chris Matthews? No one even had to cry or castrate anyone!

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

Every five minutes I hit refresh on the California Secretary of State webpage, and every five minutes Barack's numbers go up by a tenth of a percentage point. By dawn, he should have trounced Hillary Clinton and will be well on his way towards deposing Xenu as our galactic overlord.

I really need to go to bed.

ETA -- 12:14 a.m., 38.1%. 12:19 a.m., 38.2% IT'S SERIOUSLY LIKE CLOCKWORK AND IT'S MAKING MY BRAIN DRIBBLE OUT OF MY EARS.

Decisive. Snowy.

Holy fucking snow! So very much snow! This winter is nuts. I really shoulda bought more groceries when I was out yesterday.

Also -- as I suspected, Clinton's "decisive" 22 point win (they called it when 12% of the votes were in and they were at 33% to 55%) ended up at 42%-52%. I said I wanted Obama to get over 40 and be within 10 points. That he achieved that is huge; that the expectations were suddenly so warped in this state proves yet another example (see: New Hampshire) of why ONE POLL does not demonstrate some sort of unstoppable Obamomentum. And also -- CAN WE PLEASE stop adding -mentum to the end of candidates names? Joementum was kinda funny four years ago, even though Lieberman is a dick. Obamomentum (I have also seen "Obamamentum") at least makes a tiny bit of pronunciational sense. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MITTMENTUM. That is not even close to being a word. Also, the man demonstrably HAS no -mentum of any kind, so I don't ever want to hear it again.

More states that we did not learn a lesson from: Florida 2000. My favorite moment of the coverage yesterday was when the wires called Illinois for Obama with 0% reporting. OK, sure, yes, we all knew he was going to win Illinois -- but at least make SOME attempt to make it look like votes count at all. And then to call California "decisive" (that was the NYT's headline around 1 a.m. -- it's gone now) at 12% of the votes? Something about California that I managed to pick up in the run-up to the vote: the first numbers that come in are the absentee ballots, which there are a gazillion of. This was obviously what was happening, given that when they called it, Edwards was at around 11%. This meant they were mostly counting votes that had come in when Edwards was still in the race -- and Clinton was still up by 20% in every poll. I think we should institute some kind of rule that says the news services have to wait until at least 50% of the vote comes in before they "call" anything. Case in point: Missouri. The networks called it too early, Clinton sent out a press release saying she won it -- and Obama ended up snatching it by a full 10,000 votes. Nice work, guys.