America is burning--again.  This time, it's not my coast.  Instead, these fires are ravaging parts of the Carolinas, Virginia and West Virginia, and I feel for anyone whose home is threatened.

It's a feeling I understand well.  During California's most recent outbreak this past October--which included an inferno that nearly took the home of Congressional Candidate and Kossack Ron Shepston--my girlfriend's family was under mandatory evacuation owing to the blaze that broke out in Malibu.

That wasn't my first brush with fire.  In late 2003, my parents' home was severely threatened by the Old Fire, which could have wiped out their entire town but for a freak snowstorm.

Those of us who have lived under the spectre of wildfire know how scary it can be.  How little time you have.  How much damage can be done.  Those of us who know these areas know that the threat will only get worse.

And yet, Bush's latest budget guts wildfire prevention.

More below.

The results are in: Obama won Tsunami Tuesday.  He won more states and more pledged delegates when the original goal of the campaign was to trail Hillary by no more than 100 at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, Hillary's campaign is in disarray.  They are in such bad financial straits that some of her senior staff is working without pay and that she has had to loan her campaign $5 million.

But guess what?  That doesn't mean it's time to gloat.  It means it's time to work even harder.  The primary season didn't end tonight, and while the pundits here and elsewhere may say that Obama has the upper hand, he doesn't have it unless we give it to him.

More below.

A lot of people who want to vote for a Democratic candidate for President in California will receive a ballot with no presidential candidates on it, and will assume they won't be able to.  Why?  Because even though they may wish to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, they're independent, or "decline-to-state", voters.

California has seen a surge in decline-to-state voters as both people in the state turn away from identifying themselves with the Democratic and Republican parties.  But in 2008, the Democratic Party has a much better chance of being able to get those voters back.

In a twist that could significantly affect vote in California in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, the Republican primary is closed, while the Democratic primary is open--meaning that decline-to-state voters can vote for a Democrat in the primary, but can't vote for a Republican.

And both the California Democratic Party and the Courage Campaign are working hard to let indpendent voters know that...yes, you can vote for a Democrat! More below--including an ad featuring Bradley Whitford!

I was just perusing an article on Foxnews.com discussing how McCain and Romney were trading barbs calling the other one a "liberal."

While the back-and-forth between Romney and McCain in Florida is amusing in that the candidates are reviling each other for having potentially supported, at some point in the past, positions on immigration, choice, climate change, campaign finance reform, etc. that the majority of Americans actually support, what's funny is that, in discussing McCain's endorsement of and campaign assistance from Senator Joe Lieberman, they continue to call Holy Joe A Democrat.

More below the fold.

The California Teachers Association is one of California's most powerful unions.  According to their website, they serve over 340,000 education employees in the State of California.

Well, today at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, the leadership of the CTA tried to force through an endorsement of Hillary Clinton in advance of the California Primary on Super Tuesday.

Mind you, the CTA is an extremely powerful union in California.  The endorsement of the CTA is, in my limited experience, nearly as meaningful to California as the Culinary endorsement is to Nevada.  The CTA was widely expected to endorse Hillary Clinton.

And what did the rank-and-file membership have to say about that?  Well, I wasn't there, but I think "Hell No, we want Obama!" would adequately sum it up!

More below the fold...

Just a brief diary that will be pleasing, I'm sure, to both Obama and Edwards supporters:

According to the Chicago Sun-Times today, sources close to Obama are spreading word that if Obama wins the nomination, he will ask John Edwards to serve as his ATTORNEY GENERAL!

More below the fold.

UPDATE: See the actual complaint filed here.

By now, I'm sure you've all seen the diaries about the voter suppression activities benefitting the Clinton campaign at the Nevada caucuses last weekend.  Just to give a brief summary, there were what seemed like systmatic attempts by Clinton partisans to deny Obama supporters the right to caucus through a wide variety of tactics, including telling them they had to go caucus somehwere else, manipulation of voter cards, doors closing early, and a plethora of other complaints.

Well, the Obama campaign has filed an official complaint with the Nevada Democratic Party about the caucus process, saying that they had received more than 1600 complaints of voter fraud and intimidation by the Clinton campaign in Nevada.

But the most scandalous part of this whole thing is what the Clinton manual actually tells its caucus operatives.  It's outrageous.  More below the fold.

I'm Dante Atkins.  I'm a known Obama supporter.  And I've been in Las Vegas for the past 3 days canvassing neighborhoods for Barack Obama after coming out from Los Angeles, where I'm a precinct captain.  For Caucus Day, my election assignment was Precinct 5204 in Clark County.

My organizer told me to prepare for a small precinct that would likely go for Hillary.  That's exactly what I got--but until you actually attend a caucus, much less try to keep one fair and organized, you don't know how stressful it is for the volunteers and the voters.

The full story below the fold, including my own brush with attempted fraud in a neighboring precinct.

This entire brouhaha about whether Hillary's remarks about MLK are racist or not is entirely beside the point.  The fact of the matter is, they're not racist.  It's not racist to disparage Martin Luther King's impact on civil rights in contrast to the mighty signature of Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Racism would be to imply that what either MLK or LBJ did was wrong.  Hillary never said that.

Nevertheless, Hillary's comments about it "taking a president" or whatever it was exactly she said that I don't care to look up right now is nevertheless a perfect demonstration of exactly why I prefer Obama to Clinton: it's the authoritarianism, stupid!

More below.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton isn't the only person who wants to pretend that Iowa never happened!  The Republican Party website doesn't even mention that there were even caucuses today!  I dare you to go there and see it.

Meanwhile, if you go to the Democrats.org, the Democratic Party website, the most visible section has to do with getting the caucus results.

I can't think of a better way to prove that the Republican Party is embarrassed by its caucus turnout in Iowa and embarrassed in general by the quality of its nominees, whereas the Democratic Party stands proud behind its nominees--by actually letting you see how the (semi)Democratic process ended up.

Out here in California, we've been organizing to keep pressure up on Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of our "Democratic" Senators who has been most supportive of retroactively allowing the telecom companies to break the law at the behest of the Bush misAdministration.  The Courage Campaign, the Progressive Caucus of our State Party, and many other interested organizations have been peppering Feinstein's office with phone calls and emails urging her not to support amnesty.

Well, a lot of emails sent means a lot of form letters received back.  And I wanted to share with you what Senator Feinstein's perspective on this issue, based on her form letter.

More below.

As you may have seen from my previous diary, I'm a big fan of using visual aids to explain my point.

So let me start out this diary with one more visual aid I would like to see emblazoned back into everyone's memory:

This, my friends, is the retreat from Saigon.  Is is arguably the image most often associated in the American psyche with a humiliating military withdrawal.  It is an image that no American from any party of any generation wants to see repeated.

George Bush and his cabal of occupiers have repeatedly said that a withdrawal from Iraq would constitute "defeat and retreat."  They say it intentionally, because they want withdrawal from Iraq to be associated with the image above.  And they further say that Democrats are actively seeking this result.

The question, then, is: why are we actively concurring with that impression here on this site?

More below.

It seems like Dana Perino has trouble with Aristotelian logic concerning whether she was implying that waterboarding is legal.  Since she, and so many others in the administration, seem to have trouble with basic facts and logic, I've decided to step in with visual cues in the form of Venn Diagrams, which are often used as aids to demonstrate the principles of logic to more...shall we say...visual learners.

So--let's get started with the concept of what is legal:

And let's move below the fold for more, shall we?

(full disclosure: I used to be on contract with the WGA, and I continue to advise the bloggers at United Hollywood.)

As you may have read in yesterday's news, the media conglomerates in the AMPTP--the negotiating "partners" of the WGA on the other side of the labor dispute fence--have hired the supposedly Democratic PR consulting firm of Fabiani and Lehane to do crisis management and damage control.  It's no surprise--the WGA and their friends and allies have soundly won the message war on this strike so far, so it's no surprise to see the AMPTP trying to do something different with their approach to the media and message management.

But--a supposedly Democratic consulting firm?  Are you kidding me?

Apparently not.  Follow below the fold for more.

With all due respect to my good friend and frontpage nominee clammyc, I would like to propose a different explanation for the recent revelations about Iran and the NIE.

What if--instead of Bush being caught lying in his attempt to scare the country into another war against Iran--what if instead, Bush authorized the release of the NIE specifically to prevent a war with Iran?

Curious?  Follow below the fold for more.

And by that, I refer to the California Democratic Party.

As you may know by now, the resolution authored by progressive activists to censure Senator Dianne Feinstein was not heard by the CDP Resolutions Committee.  If you read my previous diary on the subject, you'll realize just how contentious this issue was, and that the end result was exactly as expected.

There will be a lot of complaints about the result, and understandably so.  Nevertheless, an official censure is a huge step, and the end result is no surprise, given the momentous nature of the struggle in question.

But I'd like to share another story with you that might even better exemplify just how much change and reform we still need in the California Democratic Party, as well as give you some insight into how the party machinery works.

At this point, I dare say I've given you a good introduction to the cancerous infestation upon the California Democratic Party that is Bob Mulholland.  He was the insider consultant who accosted me and dday at the e-board meeting previous to this one.  He's the supreme strategist who told us that we just don't get the big picture regarding the censure of Senator Feinstein.

And now, he has just another one in a long line of hatchet jobs against you, the activist base of the progressive movement.  According to Big Picture Bob, you are "fringe" and "pre-nursing home."

"Fringe" we've heard before. "Pre-nursing home"?  I have absolutely no idea what that means.  But I'll try to examine it below the fold.

As you may have seen, yesterday I attended and liveblogged the Presidential Forum on Alternative Energy and Global Warming, co-sponsored by Grist, League of Conservation Voters, and other interested organizations.  I was joined by many other bloggers in the media section who were blogging on several other sites, including Calitics, HeadingLeft, and MyDD.
Cumulatively, the liveblogging threads on the frontpage of DailyKos, as well as the other sites mentioned, generated over a thousand comments and inspired debate about which of the three candidates in attendance had the best plan for dealing with the most critical issue facing our entire world, especially in light of the recent IPCC report detailing how bad things really are.

So I popped over to CNN last night to see if they had anything to say about the Forum.  Find out the exciting coverage below the fold!