Daily Roundup, 3/12/08: Primaries, Admirals, and Oil

Yesterday was a mixed bag: democracy marched on with another primary and reports indicated that even more (!) people are signing up to vote in these later states, but yesterday also brought us the kind of news that may signal bad things for the future, like the resignation of the only sane man at the White House and yet another record high oil price.

For those last two reasons alone, Tuesday was one of those days when if you threw your hands up and said, "I quit," few would blame you. The oil thing happened pretty early on, with a spike at $109 and then all the way to $110, I believe, before settling at somewhere around $108 for the day. With summer coming on and consumption likely to increase without any change in production levels, your life may change significantly, and soon, due to the 20 minutes you spend at the pump every few days.

The Mississippi primary was another win for Senator Obama, and now both candidates have beat a path to Pennsylvania, which will be the focus of the Democratic political universe for the next six long weeks. I've said before that 24 hours might as well be an eternity in presidential politics, so six weeks may seem like a never ending high-noon showdown come the end of it. There's plenty of time for an unimaginable array of things to happen, and that will either seem like a good or a bad thing to you, depending on your politics.

But then of course there is the possibility that the amount of time between primaries, and what happens on the road to Pennsylvania, may not matter to some voters. The exit polls from yesterday show that people are making up their minds early, and they also showed a widening racial divide: Obama captured 92% of the black vote, and Clinton garnered 70% of the white vote.

Either way, Pennsylvania will be important even if it isn't decisive, especially to the 65,000 newly registered Democrats in that state. The number of registered Democrats in Pennsylvania is close to 4,000,000, so election workers there will have plenty to do both leading up to and following the primary on April 22.

And finally, Admiral William Fallon resigned his post as head of CENTCOM and retired from the Navy yesterday, and the general consensus is that he did so because Bush decided he couldn't work with him after just a year at his post. The two reportedly had disagreements about how to proceed concerning Iran, and you can guess which side of the argument Fallon was on.