Yesterday was a big day in Texas politics - Democrats across the state met for their county and senate district conventions, and the turnout was once again quite high, resulting in some difficulties. The Obama campaign claimed a delegate advantage by the end of the day, but results were still coming in and the Clinton campaign objected, saying that it was too early to call it.

Newspapers have been in trouble for a while, and the idea of just how in trouble they are always bums me out. Maybe I'm a romantic (well, exactly I'm a romantic, but whatever), but I put a lot of stock in what the daily newspaper represents to the development of society and the United States over the course of history. So when I see a story like this, about how newspapers have just undergone the biggest decrease in ad revenues in five decades, I wish it weren't true.

On Wednesday: Mike Gravel became a Libertarian candidate for president, Puerto Rico got in on setting their primary earlier, and several Democrats talked about their (very different) ideas for deciding the Democratic nomination.

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen is starting to feel like the longest and most protracted path to the nomination — the one that ends in a floor fight in Denver — will end in disaster for the Democratic Party. He is pitching an idea for a final deciding contest in June: a superdelegate primary.

...in which the 795 party bigwigs would gather to hear one last time from Clinton and Obama before casting a final vote.

Rather than allow the horse-trading and bloodletting go on all summer, he’d get it over with during a two-day business meeting in a neutral, easily reached city like Dallas.

If you have any interest in who wins the nomination — and just by being here, you qualify — you owe it to yourself to read the article.

Tuesday presented new developments in Iraq, the Antarctic, and Indiana, of all places.

Today conditions deteriorated significantly:

Heavy fighting broke out Tuesday in two of Iraq’s largest cities, as Iraqi ground forces and helicopters mounted a huge operation to break the grip of the Shiite militias controlling Basra, and Iraqi forces clashed with militias in Baghdad. The fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war.

From AP:

A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000. The grim milestone came on a day when at least 61 people were killed across the country.

Over Easter Weekend we had some revelations both interesting and somber, including news about oil prices and production, political interplay, and violence in Iraq.

I noticed something linked from Huffington Post that I don't think I've seen before, and I wanted to share it with you before I get back to my family: a Connecticut newspaper that endorsed Joe Lieberman in 2006 has apologized for it. Seriously.

Yesterday we learned that President Bush's approval rating is at an all time low, that oil prices dropped to surprising levels, and that the first fine was issued by the Texas Ethics Commission in the Rent To Own scandal.