Today's News--and Maybe Tomorrow's

The Tuzla Doozy--also being called Snipergate--continued to fill up the morning hours Wednesday. Al G. also found a recording of a radio interview with the actual pilot of the flight into Tuzla, who said quite reasonably that if there had been any danger of sniper fire, they simply wouldn't have landed, and definitely wouldn't have let anyone off the plane.

A video making fun of Snipergate became the number 1 vid on YouTube, replacing Obama's speech on race.

But Hillary's bad day was just getting started. While she and Bill pumped up the volume about how she was going to stay in until the convention, and all this fighting was a good thing, and Obama wants to disenfranchise voters in Michigan and Florida, but really pledged delegates as a result of such elections don't really mean anything, etc., the news shifted to a surprising NBC poll that showed in the past two weeks--with the Rev. Wright reel playing on a closed loop on TV, etc.--it was Hillary, not Obama, who took a big hit:

As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it's not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37 percent positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

This poll was taken Monday and Tuesday, as the Snipergate story was getting TV attention. Another poll in just California, that didn't get national attention yet, shows the same trend, only more so. Some 61% have a favorable impression of Obama, but only 45% of Hillary (who won the state primary.) Her unfavorable rating is 52%. The poll also shows another Obama-friendly trend: people want change, across the board.

Other findings in the NBC poll and in a Gallup poll show that nearly a fifth of Obama voters and a fourth of Hillary voters would rather vote for McCain than the other guy. This adds more fuel to the growing Dem party and super-delegate fire. Some uncommitted and Hillary-backing supes who talked to an NBC reporter said they were increasingly upset by her campaign's tone, they don't like her using Rev. Wright to "scare white people," and they were definitely pissed about Bill Richardson being called a Judas. What's a bit different about this report is the end: " But some said they were increasingly in touch with Clinton campaign officials to say their support is in jeopardy."

Still, while restless supes are talking to the media, nobody seems to be doing anything to avert disaster: the bitter, damaging campaign, and the prospect of it going on to the convention. But one guy is stepping up: Phil Bredesen, Gov. of Tennessee, formally uncommitted, who proposes that right after the last primary the supes convene for a couple of days and vote until they put one of the candidates over the top--and his preference is the one who has the most votes from the primaries and caucuses.

So much for Wednesday news. But something may be bubbling up for the day and days ahead. Yesterday when I heard Hillary say that Rev. Wright would not be her pastor, I thought: if I'm a reporting listening to this, my next question is, well, who is your pastor?

In that context, I noticed on Huffington Post today, not one, not two, but three new posts on Hillary's affiliation with a shadowy, scary-sounding religious group called "The Fellowship" and sometimes "The Family." These posts (one of which referred to a new MSNBC report) follow one from a few days ago by Barbara Ehrenreich called "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate" that begins: There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama."

Well, now she's opened herself up to scrutiny on this, and if half the stuff Ehrenreich and the others at Huffpost are saying proves out, we may be hearing more about Hillary and the Family/Fellowship soon, and often. But even if the media doesn't pick up this thread immediately, there's a new book about to be published that exposes The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Publication is for May, which means publicity starts soon--soon enough for the PA primary.

This is potentially pretty dark stuff--an outfit with a long history that reaches back to Nazis, South American death squads and today features such American exemplars as Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, Rick Santorum and former Senator George Allen of VA. All led by Doug Coe, who Hillary has called (in writing) "a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide..." Do you think maybe somebody is looking through his videos?