Politico is reporting that small business owners and vendors as a “deadbeat” with a pattern of not paying bills for months and instead using the cash for ad buys.

A pair of Ohio companies owed more than $25,000 by Clinton for staging events for her campaign are warning others in the tight-knit event production community — and anyone else who will listen — to get their cash upfront when doing business with her. Her campaign, say representatives of the two companies, has stopped returning phone calls and e-mails seeking payment of outstanding invoices. One even got no response from a certified letter.

Their cautionary tales, combined with published reports about similar difficulties faced by a New Hampshire landlord, an Iowa office cleaner and a New York caterer, highlight a less-obvious impact of Clinton’s inability to keep up with the staggering fundraising pace set by her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

Clinton’s campaign did not respond to recent, specific questions about its transactions with vendors. But Clinton spokesman Jay Carson pointed on Saturday to an earlier statement the campaign issued to Politico, asserting: “The campaign pays its bills regularly and in the normal course of business, and pays all of its bills.”

You may not have noticed that 2008 is the first election since 1928 with no incumbent running for either the nomination or in the general election. One of the things that slipped my mind until recently was the historic similarity between our two elections.

During the year of 1928 the worlds economies faced a downturn. On March 4th 1929 Herbert Hoover became president and just seven months later on October 29th 1929 black Friday began the Great Depression.

New York Magazine has reported details on how Senator Obama was unable to secure an endorsement from John Edwards.

According to a Democratic strategist unaligned with any campaign but with knowledge of the situation gleaned from all three camps, the answer is simple: Obama blew it. Speaking to Edwards on the day he exited the race, Obama came across as glib and aloof. His response to Edwards’s imprecations that he make poverty a central part of his agenda was shallow, perfunctory, pat. Clinton, by contrast, engaged Edwards in a lengthy policy discussion. Her affect was solicitous and respectful. When Clinton met Edwards face-to-face in North Carolina ten days later, her approach continued to impress; she even made headway with Elizabeth. Whereas in his Edwards sit-down, Obama dug himself in deeper, getting into a fight with Elizabeth about health care, insisting that his plan is universal (a position she considers a crock), high-handedly criticizing Clinton’s plan (and by extension Edwards’s) for its insurance mandate.

From McClatchy:

When Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, she said she’d found a candidate who “gives us a reason to believe again.”

Obama believed in her, too, donating $10,000 from his political action committee to McCaskill’s 2006 campaign. She received nothing from the PAC of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

And when California Rep. Doris Matsui endorsed Clinton, she said the former first lady had been “a consistent champion and friend” of Asian Americans. Clinton’s PAC had also befriended Matsui, giving $5,000 to her campaign. Matsui received nothing from Obama’s PAC.

Both McCaskill and Matsui are among the nearly 800 superdelegates who’ll have a big say in who heads the Democratic ticket this fall. While both women say the PAC contributions didn’t influence their choice for president, a study by the Center for Responsive Politics concludes that campaign contributions have become a fairly reliable predictor of whose side a superdelegate will take.

And if that’s the case, it’s good news for Obama. Since 2005, his PAC has donated $710,900 to superdelegates, more than three times as much as Clinton’s PAC has. Her PAC distributed $236,100 to superdelegates during the three-year period.

Amid a call by Senator Patrick Leahy to drop out of the primary race Hillary Clinton said she wasn’t leaving and added “I like long movies” after Senator Obama described the Democratic presidential contest as a “movie that’s gone on too long.”

This is the third most asinine thing (thing 1 and thing 2) I have heard Senator Clinton say this week. Not as terrible as claiming she was under sniper fire and facing a full assault in Bosnia, but still pretty bad.

At least she did not say “I want this race to be like a trip to the dentist” or “I enjoy lengthy nightmares.”

Senator Patrick Leahy is calling for Senator Clinton to drop out of the race.

“There is no way that Sen. Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination,” Leahy, an Obama supporter, said in an interview with Vermont Public Radio this morning. “She ought to withdraw, and she ought to be backing Sen. Obama.”

It has been a long time since the Democrats have been this close to tearing themselves apart but thanks to the awesome fundraising and organizing potential of the Internet, it is a position the party could be in every election cycle from this point on. At issue are a series of antiquated party rules that have created a system that seems destined for utter chaos and I hear almost no one talking about the fact that it needs reform.

So with that in mind, here are the top five things I believe the Dems need to do to solve this problem.

1) Enough with Iowa & New Hampshire

Sorry to be a hater here but giving two states that couldn’t be less representative of the nation an unruly amount of power is downright silly. The Iowa Caucus itself is a mess that can easily be influenced by outside forces and demands an obscene amount of attention by candidates a year in advance at the expensive of the other forty-eight states. Not even New Hampshire, home of the first primary in the nation, sees as much personal attention as Iowa and they too take up enough of the candidates time.

This year Michigan and Florida, two obscenely important states for the general election, were snubbed by the DNC, the candidates and the media at a cost that could be measured in November. All to keep Iowa and NH front and center.

Sorry, I know this could come back to haunt me, but at the very least a giant state like NY, California, Texas or Pennsylvania should be tacked onto their early dates to even this out.

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More evidence today Obama’s spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright will not be leaving the news cycles anytime soon.

Slate reports that conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt played excerpts from Barack Obama’s book, Dreams of My Father on his show yesterday. In an excerpt Obama agrees with the pastors sentiment that “Where white folk’s green runs a world in need”

[T]he pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.
“The painting depicts a harpist,” Revernd Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountaintop. Untill you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, aprtheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! On which hope sits.”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpesville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. … [E.A.]

Meanwhile FOX News has the story on a $1.6 Million retirement home being built by Rev. Wright and the interesting land deals that are funding it and a $10 Million line of credit.

My take? I don’t know that either stories will have an amazing effect on the public but like the earlier reported, italian slurs made by Wright now being entered into the public domain, they provide a further push-back against the current move by many to present the pastor as a victim of media influence rather than someone deserving of scrutiny. It is becoming more difficult to defend Wright to the public.

From CBS News and “The Early Show” DNC Chairman Howard Dean says he wants the superdelegates to have a decision made by July 1st so the race can be wrapped up and the nomination set.

Ben Smith has the transcript:

Harry Smith asked if after the nominating contests end with the South Dakota and Montana primaries on June 3, “Do you want the superdelegates to have some sort of vote immediately so that you’ll know months in advance of the convention what the outcome is?”

Dean replied: “Well, I think the superdelegates have already been weighing in. I think that there’s 800 of them and 450 of them have already said who they’re for. I’d like the other 350 to say who they’re at some point between now and the first of July so we don’t have to take this into the convention.”

An aide explains that July 1 is not a drop-dead deadline: “The point is before the convention, ideally in June.”

From NBC5

Wright’s latest controversy comes from a eulogy he wrote for Asa Hilliard. The article appeared in a November/December 2007 edition of Trumpet, a magazine run by Wright’s daughters. He was quoted as calling Italians “garlic noses” and saying Jesus’ crucifixion was “a public lynching Italian-style.”

Why does it matter?

Two reasons. First there has been a push in the last few days to reframe the reverend as a man whose life is not filled with hatred and whose videotaped sermons denouncing white America were the exception not the rule. Revelations like this one doesn’t help.

Second Italians and other “ethnic” or other descendants of Europeans already come this election with a skepticism driven from decades of racial division. Many have begun opening their minds up to the possibility of voting for a black candidate. I don’t know that these comments or undoubtedly those that will be dug up will receive the same amount of media attention as the last ones, especially if there is no video attached, but they don’t help Obama reach out to these groups.