Elisabeth Hasselbeck, known for her insane conservative stances on some issues, surprised her View co-hosts and fans by revealing not only her support for Chelsea Clinton, but a “voicemail relationship” with the ex-president’s daughter.

Hasselbeck’s news came as the group discussed a clip in which Chelsea, on the campaign trail for White House hopeful Hillary Clinton in Indiana.

Chelsea responded to a reporter’s query as to whether she thought her mom’s credibility was damaged because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Chelsea Clinton responded to the inquiry at Butler University, “Wow. You’re the first person actually that’s ever asked me that question… in the maybe 70 college campuses I’ve now been to. And I do not think that’s any of your business.”

At first, Hasselbeck opined, “It’s a great question.”

But she then added, “I certainly have not agreed with Senator Clinton on her policies… but seeing [Chelsea Clinton] handle that, I felt for her.”

Elisabeth Hasselbeck: Surprisingly in Camp Chelsea Clinton on this one.

Hasselbeck then shared how she left a voicemail for Chelsea, explaining to the View studio and television audience that “I wanted her to know from my mouth directly that I respect how she handled that with not just wit but dignity.”

Continue reading this article …

Since the moment it became clear that Sen. Hillary Clinton had beaten Sen. Barack Obama in both the Ohio and Texas primaries March 4, all eyes in the political world have been trained on the April 22 Pennsylvania primary.

Here we have a battleground state essential to Democratic prospects in the fall, a state suffering economically in recent years, and one in which the votes of the white working class are turning out to be increasingly crucial.

But suddenly, the Keystone State isn’t all it was cracked up to be. Hillary Clinton has widened leads in polls there, but her prospects for winning the nomination have dimmed, especially with Florida and Michigan off the table.

Now it seems that North Carolina is the new Pennsylvania.

So why is the Tarheel State ostensibly so important? Of the nine states (and Puerto Rico) still waiting to hold primaries, it’s the only one in which African-Americans make up more than 10 percent of the population.

Therefore, it’s the last real opportunity for Clinton to score a major upset against Obama. If Clinton does win North Carolina — as well as Indiana the same day, May 6, she’ll get a boost of momentum that Pennsylvania can’t offer her.

If she pulls off that trifecta, there’s a slim chance she could run the table the rest of the way, though Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota all favor Obama.

Such a feat would do little to change the math, which makes it impossible or really darn close to impossible for Hillary Clinton to finish the primary season ahead of Barack Obama in either pledged delegates or the popular vote.

But it would surely buttress the argument she is making to superdelegates: that buyer’s remorse is setting in among Democrats as they learn more about her struggling rival, and that she is the better bet against John McCain.

In Indiana, meanwhile, something unusual appears to be developing in the Democratic race: a fair fight that both sides concede is a toss-up.

Wedged between Illinois, Obama’s home state, and Ohio, where Clinton posted her critical win yet on March 4, Indiana may be the one state remaining on the calendar where both candidates begin with a roughly equal chance.

Obama’s bases of operation are likely to revolve around the Hoosier State’s three major universities - Notre Dame in the north and Indiana University and Purdue University farther south - and build out into their respective host cities.

The African-American populations that spill over from Chicago are expected to favor Barack Obama, as is Indianapolis, the state’s largest city.

Clinton, meanwhile, has the backing of the popular Sen. Evan Bayh and may have an edge over her rival on the kind of economic issues likely to dominate the discussion before the state’s Democrats vote on May 6.

While both campaigns admit the race is tight, each seeks to portray the other as the leader in the pursuit of Indiana’s 72 pledged delegates.

“We think he has some advantages starting out,” Bayh said, referring to Obama while campaigning for Clinton. “Twenty percent of Indiana households watch Chicago TV. The city of East Chicago is actually in Indiana.”

As a result, Bayh said, a big swath of Indiana is already very familiar with Barack Obama’s message and the messenger himself.

But demographics and some of the Hoosier State’s similarities to Ohio suggest that it’s Hillary Clinton, the senator from New York, has a leg up.

Embattled Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick will soon announce that he is establishing a legal defense fund, a spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

Chris Garrett of Impact Strategies, the firm hired to speak for Kwame Kilpatrick’s legal team, said it would be a not-for-profit fund.

He declined to say whether city contractors would be asked to contribute or whether some contributions would be denied to avoid conflicts of interest.

He also said that Impact Strategies - like the mayor’s legal defense team led by Dan Webb, a former U.S. Attorney - would not be paid with city funds.

For his part, Kwame Kilpatrick, 37, says he “looks forward to being cleared” in the perjury case currently pending against him.

He has been charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and misconduct. His former chief of staff and advisor, Christine Beatty, with whom he allegedly had an affair, is also facing perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

The charges follow the publication of sexually explicit text messages between Kilpatrick and Beatty, who may have used the alias Carmen Slowsky.

The pair had denied a romantic relationship under oath during a whistle-blowers’ trial last summer - a claim that could come back to haunt them now.

The second youngest mayor of a major U.S. city, Kwame Kilpatrick could face up to 15 years in prison and be expelled from office.

The Iraq war, as we know, recently celebrated its fifth birthday. Well, in the very same month, the conflict achieved yet another dishonorable milestone…

NOTE: This political cartoon was created by and is property of journalist and cartoonist Andrew Wahl. Visit his blog, Off the Wahl, for more of his work.

Chelsea Clinton was startled by a question about Monica Lewinsky at the end of a Q&A session during a trip to Butler University Tuesday.

A student at the Indiana college asked whether Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s credibility was damaged during the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998.

“Wow, you’re the first person actually that’s ever asked me that question in the, I don’t know maybe, 70 college campuses I’ve now been to, and I do not think that is any of your business,” Chelsea Clinton responded.

The reaction garnered applause from the crowd at the campaign event, and Clinton, who was on her way out, took another question before exiting the stage.

It’s hard to criticize Chelsea Clinton, who we legitimately feel bad for in having to endure the scandal in the first place and face such questions 10 years after.

Yet we can’t help but be a little surprised, given how active she’s been in support of her mom’s candidacy, that this is the first time it’s happened on the trail.

Here’s an AP report detailing the incident…

How can we be expected to pass up the chance to post a George W. Bush photo like this, no matter how irrelevant it might be to the topics of the day?

Below, the President of the United States cozies up to a like-minded creature during an Easter event on the White House lawn. Some deep policy discussions ensued…

  [insert your own George W. Bush quote / punchline here]

“Let me tell you: we’ve had better conversations,” New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said, describing his talk with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

He told her, of course, that he was backing rival Sen. Barack Obama in their tense and razor-thin race for the Democratic nomination.

Endorsements only mean so much, especially at this late in the game, when both Democratic candidates have proven their strength time and again.

But this one is significant for several reasons.

Even more troublesome than the timing of the announcement for Hillary Clinton - who’s chances are eroding amid failures to get new primaries scheduled in Florida and Michigan - was what Richardson said in endorsing Obama:

1. He criticized the tone of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
2. He praised Obama for the speech he gave in response to the incendiary remarks delivered by Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
3. He came as close as any big-name Democrat has in urging the former First Lady to potentially step aside in the interest of party unity.

“I’m not going to advise any other candidate when to get in and out of the race,” Richardson said after appearing in Portland with Obama.

“Senator Clinton has a right to stay in the race, but eventually we don’t want to go into the Democratic convention bloodied. This was another reason for my getting in and endorsing, the need to perhaps send a message that we need unity.”

In many ways, the decision by Bill Richardson, a longtime political ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, was as much a tale about his relationships with them as it was about Barack Obama and his campaign for the presidency.

Bill Richardson looked anguished when asked in an interview if his relationship with the Clintons would withstand endorsing Barack Obama.

In doing so, after all, Richardson was not only taking sides in the most bitter of political fights, but rejecting the candidacy of a close friend.

Yet he chose to do so anyway. Why?

“There’s something special about this guy,” Bill Richardson said of Obama. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, but it’s very good.”

Continue reading in the New York Times …

About 48 hours after his “A More Perfect Union” speech, Barack Obama went on a sports radio talk show in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Host Angelo Cataldi brought up Obama’s speech on race and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, homing in the part where Obama discussed the white grandmother who helped raise him and the contradictions that she herself embodied.

“The point I was making,” Obama said, “was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction in her that doesn’t go away and it comes out in the wrong way.”

Immediately, the press seized upon this comment, and specifically Obama’s use of the term “typical white person.” So did some sites in the blogosphere.

Why? Why does the mainstream media - and mainstream America - insist on taking imprecise phrases and assigning them the worst possible implications?

It’s an exercise in brainlessness.

It’s also what Obama warned about in his speech, when he noted how easy it is, even using as an example Geraldine Ferraro’s remark about him personally — and how little courage it requires to take a single pull quote or a clip or caricature and to simplify the negative “to the point that it distorts reality.”

The conversation Obama wants requires a tolerance of the imprecise; that public figures and private citizens alike no longer speak in sterile, meaningless language with the primary aim of giving no offense to anyone for any reason.

If polled, most people claim they want this in a public official. Finally, now one of our three remaining candidates for President of the United States offers it.

The result? Public outcry.

Raising the level of debate in this country can only take place if we put a stop to our obsession with pull quotes and begin exploring, instead, some of the deeper context surrounding them. We are all complicit - this site included.

And we must do better.

If we can’t reject the notion that ambiguity is bad, and rise above this disturbing notion that the entire world is (pun not intended) black and white, we will only continue to live in fear of one another, and of our own progress.

For Barack Obama to win the Pennsylvania primary April 22, or even to keep the race close, he needs to pull off an extraordinary feat.

That would be identifying sympathetic independent and Republican voters, and persuading them to register as Democrats to vote for him.

The registration deadline is today.

After knocking on doors at a half-dozen houses, Mardi Harrison, a campaign volunteer for Barack Obama, finally found someone to listen to her pitch.

Anyone who wants to vote for Obama in Pennsylvania’s primary must be registered as a Democrat, she explained to the woman who answered the doorbell.

Did the independent voter at this address want to sign up?

The woman laughed and made it obvious that no one there had any use for Obama. “Yeah, you have the wrong house!” she said. And she shut the door.

Obama trails Hillary Rodham Clinton by a large margin in Pennsylvania, site of the next Democratic presidential contest in this turbulent race. The state has a large number of the older and blue-collar voters who tend to back Clinton.

Time running out, and trailing by double figures in the polls, the Barack Obama camp has engaged in a last-ditch, house-by-house appeal.

There have been struggles, but elsewhere, signs of progress. Statewide, the number of Pennsylvanians switching affiliation to the Democratic Party has boomed, with 57,651 signing up already this year through March 14.

There is no way of knowing whether these voters are jumping to the party to vote for Barack Obama, but his campaign hopes that is the case.

If turnout for the Democratic Pennsylvania primary is 50 percent, as some analysts expect, these new converts would account for about 3 percent of the total vote - and presumably a significantly larger share of Obama’s tally.

The trend has accelerated. More than 22,000 registered as Democrats during the week of March 10, compared with 7,223 in all of January.

Continue reading in the Los Angeles Times …

This morning, the New York Post reported that Keith Olbermann’s 24-year-old girlfriend Katy Tur had just landed a news-anchor job on CW11.

This despite minimal journalism qualifications, which is putting it mildly.

How did Katy Tur the daughter of legendary Los Angeles helicopter reporter Bob Tur land such a lofty job at such a tender age?

The Post reported that Katy Tur had gotten the position “allegedly with [Keith Olbermann's] help.”

But as it turns out, Katy Tur hasn’t landed a news anchor job at all.

The New York Observer caught up with a CW11 spokesperson Jessica Bellucci this morning. According to Bellucci, Tur joined the station several weeks ago as a “freelance reporter,” working on general assignment.

“She got the job on her own merit,” said Bellucci.