It ain't over til it's over.
  - Yogi Berra

Left Blogistan is throbbing to release its pent-up ecstacy after a real Penthouse letter of a Politico story this morning, quoting a single (idiotic) Clinton staffer (who should be taken outside and summarily executed) whose belief it is that Clinton has about a 10% chance at the nomination.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Obama is reeling and his campaign staff is desparately slinging poop in all directions.  I personally am more optimistic about Clinton's chances than I have been since before the South Carolina primary.  Clinton is trading at about 25% on Intrader, IEM, & Rasmussen Markets, and I am going long on Intrader.

I'm a die-hard Clinton partisan, but to you Obama folks, I'm about to offer you the greatest tip in the world if you will just be smart and use it:

ENOUGH With the Math Lectures!  Could anything in the world be less attractive to someone who hasn't voted yet than a sneering numbers lecture on why their vote doesn't really count?  

Are you like me?  Aren't you getting sick and tired of the Obama campaign's state of perpetual outrage over supposedly racist comments--comments that invariably turn out not to be racist at all when you actually look at them?  

Geraldine Ferraro may be wrong when she claims that Barack Obama is benefitting in this campaign because of his race, but she has the god-given right to be wrong.  Nothing she said was racist.  She's just trying to discuss something she believes she is seeing.  If you want to respond to her, then why not say why she's wrong?  Isn't that more constructive than some woeful lament that boils down to the thinly-veiled (or unveiled) assertion that she's a demon who must be burned?

The Obama camp isn't denying it.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, three names linked to Obama, including one person on Obama's campaign staff, appear on a list of 39 names of people for whom Rezko tried to land jobs with the Blagojevich Administration.  The Sun-Times contacted Obama's staff:

"We do not know how decisions were made to fill specific state positions, and we have no records of any individual recommendations we were asked to make or made," says Obama spokesman Bill Burton "But we do know that Tony Rezko, among others, was helping to gather names for the positions coming open with a new administration, and, if it is established any names came through our office, we would have no reason to doubt it."

Burton obviously knows something about the facts of the story, and he's not denying it.  "We have no records," he says, not "Nobody knows anything about it."

Assuming it happened, the next question is who was Rezko's contact?  If it wasn't Obama, did he or she communicate with Obama about the process?  If so, what was said?

First, a little explanatory background: CTV actually went with two Obama-Canada-NAFTA stories last week.  First, on Wednesday, the story was that an Obama advisor had told the Canadian Embassy--which is located in Washington--that Obama's NAFTA talk was just political hot air.  The Canadian Embassy issued a strong denial.

Then, on Thursday, CTV ran either a new story or, if appearances aren't deceiving, a corrected version of an original story that had misplaced some facts.  In the new story, Obama's chief economic advisor Austan Goolsbee had told the Canadian Consulate General--in Chicago--that Obama's NAFTA talk was just political hot air.

From the New York Times:

[A] review of court records, including new details of Mr. Rezko's finances that emerged recently, show that the lot purchase occurred as he was being pursued by creditors seeking more than $10 million, deepening the mystery of why he would plunge into a real estate investment whose biggest beneficiary appears to have been Mr. Obama.

As Mr. Obama and Mr. Rezko were completing the property purchases in June 2005, Mr. Rezko was fighting to keep lenders and investors at bay over defaulted loans and failing business ventures. But he side-stepped that financial dragnet by arranging for the land to be bought in his wife's name, making it the only property she owned by herself, according to land records.

As a result, when the Obamas bought part of the land from Mrs. Rezko seven months later to widen their yard, the money they paid was beyond the reach of Mr. Rezko's creditors, including one conducting a court-ordered hunt for his assets to recover a $3.5 million debt.

Two lawyers involved in the civil litigation against Mr. Rezko said they believed that the property was subject to possible seizure on the premise that Mr. Rezko had been trying to hide behind his wife, Rita, who had little money of her own to complete the $625,000 purchase.

The lawyers, both of whom requested anonymity because they did not have their clients' permission to speak about the cases, said there was little purpose in pursuing it because the legal costs would have outweighed the value of the property, which was encumbered by a $500,000 mortgage.

Lawyers representing Mr. Rezko in the civil litigation declined to comment.

* * *

Mr. Obama has said he did not know why Mr. Rezko decided to buy the lot. Business associates of Mr. Rezko said he gave various explanations, among them that he wanted to help the Obamas expand their backyard and that he thought it would be a good investment to own a lot next to a prominent politician. But Mr. Rezko's involvement was important because the owners of the house and the lot had stipulated that neither could be sold unless a deal for the other closed on the same day.

So Rezko, on the verge of losing his fortune to bankruptcy, laundered the transaction through his wife, in order for Obama to be able to purchase the house where his family now lays their heads at nights.  It was the only such transaction Rezko so immunized.  Here, three years later, the property is in the hands of Rezko's lawyer and not in use, which apparently means that Rezko has yet to reap any fruits from the $625K "investment" he made while in financial extremis.  And Rezko actually told some "business associate" that he did it to help Obama.

No, nothing fishy about this.  Move along, move along.

Hilzoy, the excellent front-page writer at Obsidian Wings, recently wrote a piece called "Lies and Democracy."  "Lies and Democracy" purports to be a piece about how folks are forced to become experts in order to deal with lying politicians, but the bulk of it is focused on the "lies" of Hillary and Bill Clinton.  

I don't think the Clintons are "liars."  I do think they are "spinners."  I also think that every other successful politician is a "spinner," and that most politicians do not stick to the truth so well as do the Clintons.  To take a stab at showing that, I want to take Hilzoy's piece, which is the very best and most detailed piece I have run across in either the blogosphere or the MSM, discuss the "lies" that Hilzoy writes about, and show that in each instance the same kind of statements, and worse, come from Obama and his camp.

From CNN.com:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- One of the three victims of a San Francisco Zoo tiger attack was intoxicated and admitted to yelling and waving at the animal while standing atop the railing of the big cat enclosure, police say in court documents.

Toxicology results for Paul Dhaliwal showed his blood alcohol level was 0.16 -- twice the legal limit for driving, Paul Dhaliwal, 19, told the father of Carlos Sousa Jr., 17, who was killed, that the three yelled and waved at the tiger but insisted they never threw anything into its pen to provoke the cat, according to a search warrant affidavit obtained Thursday by the San Francisco Chronicle.

"As a result of this investigation, (police believe) that the tiger may have been taunted/agitated by its eventual victims," according to Inspector Valerie Matthews, who prepared the affidavit. Police believe that "this factor contributed to the tiger escaping from its enclosure and attacking its victims," she said.

From Robin Roberts' interview with Senator Barack Obama Monday morning on ABC News:

I do think that there -- there should be some standards of honesty in any political discourse. That's part of the change that I want to bring about. You know, if you have something that just directly contradicts the facts and it's coming from a former president, I think that's a problem because people presume that a former president is going to have more credibility. And I think there's certain responsibilities that are carried with that.

Robin Roberts: Anything else you that want to set the record strait that he said one thing about you and you're now saying that's false?

Obama: President Clinton went in front of a large group, said that I had claimed that only Republicans had had any good ideas since 1980. Then he added, I'm not making this up. He was making it up. And completely mischaracterizing my statement.

Anybody see any similarity between these two stories?