But is this denunciation too late? The impression that he must have had knowledge of Wright's previous statements over the years, and that he has not been as candid with the American people as he should have been about the matter, has set in. Obama has set himself up for a much more difficult task now to repair the damage that has without doubt occurred to his campaign.

Barack Obama just doesn't believe that ordinary people should be able to use guns:

S-T: As a state legislator, you voted against a bill which would let people with orders of protection [against others] carry guns and another that would have barred municipalities from punishing people who kept guns in their homes. Why?

B.O.: I felt that [the first one] was a precedent for conceal-and-carry laws. There has not been any evidence that allowing people to carry a concealed weapon is going to make anybody safer. [The second one] is relevant to the D.C. handgun issue. I wanted to preserve the right of local communities to enforce local ordinances and this would have overturned municipalities being able to enforce their own ordinances. We can argue about whether the ordinances work or not. But I wanted to make sure that local communities were recognized as having a right to regulate firearms.

S-T: But you don't want to take a stand on the D.C. gun-ban law?

B.O.: I don't like taking a stand on pending cases.

Allowing people to carry concealed weapons hasn't made anyone safer? Really? Obama should come down from his elitist pedestal and talk to the many, many people in this country who have - with a firearm - successfully warded off someone intending to do them grave physical harm.

Then Sen. Obama might want to visit this site for further information.

This comment by Obama is about the most nonsensical one that I've heard come out of his mouth.

I suspect he's not the only one:

A decision by the Bush Administration to release information Thursday about a suspected Syrian nuclear facility — known about for more than a year but withheld from Congress — has angered U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Holland.

“They can’t have an imperial presidency. That’s wrong,” Hoekstra, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Ludington Daily News this morning.

What he’s most upset about is the administration’s resistance until Thursday to brief the full House and Senate intelligence committees in the aftermath of a September airstrike by the Israelis against the Syrian facility linked to nuclear development.

Despite the heavy spin coming from her campaign, little changed for Hillary on Tuesday:

Pennsylvania voters Tuesday gave Hillary Rodham Clinton every reason to continue her campaign for president.

But they did not present any definitive new evidence that would compel Democratic Party elders to step in and anoint Clinton as their White House nominee, particularly when Barack Obama continues to lead in the overall delegate count and in the popular vote.

Instead, despite a grueling and often bitter campaign, Clinton's victory Tuesday left in play the same questions that remained seven weeks ago after her 10-point victory in Ohio, another large and politically important industrial state.

What does it portend for the fall campaign that Obama is not winning working-class whites, a crucial swing voting bloc, in the Democratic primaries? Or that he has lost most of the biggest states to Clinton?

How much credit should the party elders -- the superdelegates who are expected to select the nominee by providing the final votes needed for victory -- give Obama for drawing new voters to the polls? Or for energizing younger voters and for spurring massive turnout among African Americans?

Should party leaders worry that Clinton has been all but shut out of the black vote?

The big-state primary in Pennsylvania failed to bring clarity. Now, while a muddled Democratic nominating process enters its fifth month of voting, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is building his fall campaign, embarking this week on a tour of economically disadvantaged areas that is designed to attract the same working-class voters so coveted by the Democrats.

"She can't win but won't quit," Democratic strategist Jim Jordan said of Clinton. Obama, he said, "is going to win but can't close it out. And meanwhile, McCain skates on, unmolested."

Fox is projecting that Hillary has won it.

More bad news for Hillary, as Robert Reich appears poised to endorse Barack Obama:

The endorsement in question is that of Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labor and a friend of both the former president and his wife for four decades. Around 1 p.m. EST, Reich informs me, he intends formally to declare his support for Obama on his blog.

Now, in one sense, the Reich endorsement comes as no great surprise. For some time, it's been clear to anyone paying attention that Reich favors Obama. Back in December, in a blog post titled "Why is HRC Stooping So Low?," Reich loudly and sharply criticized Clinton's conduct in Iowa and defended Obama's proposals for health-care and Social Security reform. Two days before the race-charged South Carolina primary, he assailed Bill Clinton's "ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks" on Obama, arguing that they were "doing no credit to the former president, his legacy, or his wife's campaign." And all throughout the primary season, he has spoken and written of Obama's candidacy with evident admiration and enthusiasm.

For saying this about Muslims:

"I am fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its acts."

Undoubtably, John McCain was the winner.

Chuck Todd doesn't disagree:

Could tonight's true winner be John McCain? We're betting that's the unanimous pundit scoring tonight.

With the Democrats appearing poised to screw up yet another election, maybe those advocating a draft of Al Gore on the second ballot at the convention are not being so unrealistic. There is little doubt that he could do worse than where either Clinton or Obama appear headed.

That's the percentage of Americans who believe that Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy.

AP:

ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md. (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI arrived Tuesday in the United States to a presidential handshake and enthusiastic cheering, a warm welcome that followed the pontiff's candid admission hours earlier that he is "deeply ashamed" of the clergy sex abuse scandal that has rocked the American church.

On his first papal trip to the U.S., Benedict gave hundreds of spectators a two-handed wave as he stepped off a special Alitalia airliner that brought him from Rome. Students from a local Catholic school screamed ecstatically when the saw the pontiff, who shook hands with President Bush, first lady Laura Bush and their daughter, Jenna on the tarmac.

The pope and the president left in a motorcade a few minutes later.

On the flight to the United States from Rome, Benedict addressed the most painful issue for the Roman Catholic Church in America - clergy sex abuse. The U.S. church has paid out $2 billion in abuse costs since 1950, most of that in just the last six years.

Tries to get out of his mess.

Obama's view on why some in America are bitter:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

These condescending remarks are likely to backfire on Obama's efforts to woo white, middle class voters in Pennsylvania. It's pretty incredible that Obama, who has run a mostly flawless campaign thus far, would make such a stupid remark.

Michael Zeldin:

On a related point, Mrs. Clinton has been arguing to primary voters that she is more electable than Barack Obama because "she has been vetted fully so there will be no general election surprises." Well, the recently released tax returns appear to undermine this argument as well.

Specifically, these returns demonstrate the former President Clinton made tens of millions of dollars on the speaking circuit and by helping to broker business deals or make introductions around the world. This is his prerogative as a private citizen. What the returns do not tell us, however, is who paid for these speeches; who his clients were/are; whether he can unwind his business relationships (he is being sued by one of his clients for fraud in state court in California); what conflicts of interest or appearances of conflict reside in his seven-year, private-sector career. (Remember the difficulty Geraldine Ferraro's husband created for her candidacy?). A lot more openness and transparency will be required by Bill Clinton before it is known just how vulnerable Hillary Clinton is as a general election candidate.

Still, the Clinton Library has yet to provide the list of its largest donors, or explain how their donations were solicited; as well it is not yet known whether Hillary Clinton played a role in President Clinton's pardon decisions including the 11th-hour pardon of Marc Rich. The Republican National Committee and related advocacy groups will surely allege a coverup if all this is not disclosed before the general election.

Unless all this material is released and vetted fully before the primaries come to an end, Mrs. Clinton is asking Democrats to make a leap of faith that nothing will be revealed in the general election campaign that could prove fatal. From what is available presently, Mrs. Clinton may prove to be the most vulnerable Democratic candidate in the last three election cycles.

It has been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. There are warning signs that Democrats may be walking down that same path with Hillary Clinton.

E.J. Dionne:

The most striking critiques of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign have come not from her opponents or her enemies, but from her most loyal friends.

Since December, I have been hearing a steady stream of worries from Clinton partisans who took Barack Obama's challenge seriously from the start. These loyalists felt her campaign was misreading the nature of the political year, the state of the Democratic Party, the organizational requirements of a long struggle for the nomination, and the complexity of the party's attitudes toward both the candidate herself and former President Clinton.

Read it all.