Politico reported today that the Clinton campaign has been neglecting the health care payments for its entire staff.

the unpaid bills to Aetna were at least two months old, according to FEC filings.

They show the campaign ended last year owing Aetna more than $213,000 for “employee benefits.”

During the first two months of the year, the campaign did not pay down any of that debt. In fact, it accrued another $16,000 in unpaid bills last month, and it finished the month owing Aetna $229,000.

Yesterday it was reported by Politico that the Clinton campaign has a habit of not paying vendors so they could instead buy more advertising. Today’s news seems utterly dumbfounding considering Clinton’s constant charge against corporations who do not provide adequet benefits for their employees and her use of Universal Health Care as a central issue to her campaign. An issue on which she claims unparalleled expertise.

Not long ago a young girl who was in stock footage used in Hillary Clinton’s 3AM attack ad announced she supported Barack Obama. Now the little girl seen reading poetry to Clinton in a 1996 video of her trip to Bosnia has come out against Clinton for lying about her visit.

From the New York Post:

“It is an ugly thing for a politician to tell lies,’ she said. “We had problems for years, and I don’t like when someone lies about them. It makes us look bad.”

Incase you forgot Clinton described the scene as a harrowing one filled with sniper fire and ominous danger in every corner. Here is video of her harrowing escape which was, of course, not at all harrowing or an escape or filled with sniper fire.

The latest polling shows Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. Hillary Clinton, 54% to 36% in North Carolina. With voters who have never voted in a primary before he leads 60%-32%.

Meanwhile Clinton is leading Obama 58% to 29% in Kentucky.

A few months ago Politico uncovered a survey filed under Barack Obama’s name that revealed the candidate had very liberal positions on a number of important national issues. The campaign claimed a staffer had filled out the survey and the Senator had not seen it. New details, including a second copy of the the survey, this one with Senator Obama’s handwriting explaining and the revelation that Obama sat down for a full-length interview with the group sponsoring the survey, have been unearthed suggesting the campaign was not entirely truthful.

From Politico:

Through an aide, Obama, who won the group’s endorsement as well as the statehouse seat, did not dispute that the handwriting was his. But he contended it doesn’t prove he completed, approved — or even read — the latter questionnaire.

“Sen. Obama didn’t fill out these state Senate questionnaires — a staffer did — and there are several answers that didn’t reflect his views then or now,” Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama’s campaign, said in an e-mailed statement. “He may have jotted some notes on the front page of the questionnaire at the meeting, but that doesn’t change the fact that some answers didn’t reflect his views. His 11 years in public office do.”

But the questionnaires provide fodder to question Obama’s ideological consistency and electability. Those questions are central to efforts by Obama’s presidential rival Hillary Clinton to woo the superdelegates whose votes represent her best chance to wrest the Democratic nomination from Obama.

Washington Post has an insider story of the first and only time Senator’s Obama & McCain worked together. It was early on in the Illinois Senator’s career, McCain saw a potential reformer to join his cause but the relationship quickly fell appart.

I like him; he’s probably got a great future. We can do some work together,” McCain confided to his top staffer.

Instead, what began as a promising collaboration between two men bent on burnishing their reformist credentials collapsed after barely a week. The McCain-Obama relationship came undone amid charges and countercharges, all aired publicly two years ago in an exchange of stark and angry letters. Obama questioned whether McCain sided with GOP leaders rather than searching for a bipartisan solution; McCain accused Obama of “typical rhetorical gloss” and “self interested partisan posturing” by a newcomer seeking to ingratiate himself with party leaders.

“Please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again,” McCain wrote Obama on Feb. 6, 2006.

It is pretty clear how the McCain camp and the Republicans viewed the failure and their recollection of the event gives a wonderful insight into how the election will be framed:

McCain’s backers view it as emblematic of Obama’s ability to talk grand ideas and aspirations, but also of his ultimate failure to produce substantive results. Obama’s supporters contend that the moment was vintage Obama, with the newcomer defusing the feud with a cool demeanor that allowed him to claim the high ground while rolling up his sleeves to eventually help pass a broader ethics overhaul bill in August 2007.

With calls mounting to quit and superdelegates jumping aboard Senator Obama’s campaign because of Senator Clinton’s statistically inability to reach enough pledged delegates, she has pulled out what many believe has been her trump card throughout the campaign, gender.

From the Telegraph:

n comments leaked to the New York Times, Mrs Clinton is said to have told aides that she would not be “bullied out” of the White House race and in a conversation with two allies compared her plight to “big boys” trying to bully a woman.

During a weekend interview with the Washington Post - arranged at her request - she was asked whether Mr Obama could beat John McCain, the Republican nominee.

She responded: “I’m saying I have a better chance. You cannot as a Democrat win the White House without a very big women’s vote. What I believe is that women will turn out for me.”

The Wall Street Journal reports Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar will endorse Barack Obama today. In addition the paper reports “North Carolina’s seven Democratic House members are poised to endorse Sen. Obama as a group — just one has so far — before that state’s May 6 primary, several Democrats say.”

This is just a note for anyone who went to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 and suddenly saw a “call to undefined function” error spring up. You need to go into wp-includes and delete plugin.php

Then grab a fresh copy plugin.php from the installation package and upload that to wp-includes

For some reason, that solves the problem. I don’t know why, but it did for me.

Just a word on the install I HATE the new interface. Literally want to throw this thing against the wall, sorry but its true. 2.5 is an upgrade that actually changes some things so you may want to wait and look more into it before upgrading if you like everything working as is.

The Washington Post has a great article about the strategy behind Barack Obama’s online fundraising.

Obama’s unprecedented online fundraising success is often depicted as a spontaneous reaction to a charismatic candidate, particularly by young, Internet-savvy supporters. But it is the result of an elaborate marketing effort that has left Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, and Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, struggling to catch up.

Obama aides say their goal has been to “build an online relationship” with supporters who will not only give money but also knock on doors and help register voters for the candidate. To do so, they have spent heavily on Internet ads — $2.6 million in February alone, more than 10 times as much as Clinton and more than 20 times as much as McCain.

Ads for Obama pop up on political Web sites, such as the left-leaning blog Daily Kos, and on more general ones, such as those of newspapers. Anyone visiting the Dallas Morning News in the weeks before the Texas primary, for instance, was likely to see an Obama appeal stretched along one edge of the screen. The campaign has also attached ads to certain search terms, such as “Iowa caucus locations” or “Ohio primary,” on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft search engines.

Obama has targeted unlikely sites, such as the conservative Washington Times, where an ad for the candidate appeared yesterday on the same page as a story about an economic speech he gave that morning. But a click on the ad did not lead to a request for donations; instead, it took users to a page where they could sign up for invitations to campaign events.

This approach — not directly asking for donations — has been part of the campaign’s strategy of slow-walking its way into supporters’ wallets. Newcomers are led to a blog and an online store and are offered a chance to join local Obama groups.

The approach is contrasted in the article with Senator Clinton’s very blunt, “give us money”, approach to e-mail writing. The article also offers some numbers on what the success has cost:

Obama’s online investment has not come cheap. In January, he spent $768,000 on Web ads, while Clinton spent $171,000 and McCain spent $151,000, campaign finance records show. In February, when Obama spent $2.6 million on ads, Clinton spent $198,000 and McCain spent $111,000.

Hillary Clinton’s promotion of Maggie Williams to the campaign manager post a few weeks ago was heralded as a much needed changing of the guard. The Chicago Tribune finds that before Williams his the campaign trail for Ciinton she earned about $200,000 sitting on the board of a Long Island sub-prime lender that was in the practice of changing repayment penalties, something Clinton has repeatedly come out against.

Williams, who took over the reins of Clinton’s campaign in early February, served as a director on the board of the Woodbury, N.Y.-based Delta Financial Corp. from April 2000 until the firm declared bankruptcy in December, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records.

She was originally recruited by former New York City Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch, a Delta consultant. Her assignments were to create a new code of “best practices,” and to improve the company’s crisis management operation in the wake of state and federal predatory lending probes that resulted in a $12 million payout to borrowers.

Her hiring coincided with stepped-up Delta outreach efforts in minority communities, where the company made a large number of its loans, an initiative that included parties for homeless children and mortgage seminars in Brooklyn and Queens.

Williams, 53, isn’t the only Clinton insider who made money from an industry the candidate has demonized. A month ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton ally and former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros grossed more than $5 million in stock sales and board compensation from Countrywide Financial, one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders.