After Clinton's three wins the nomination campaign will go through at least Pennsylvania on April 22. The methods that worked for Clinton in Ohio and Texas will continue - how can a struggling campaign abandon the play that worked?

Meanwhile Obama will continue to raise more money and decisively win "younger" voters - with "younger" extending up near 65 according to some exit polls. Some advisers will be telling him to go negative - not always the same as "dirty" - against Hillary.

Both campaigns will simultaneously be wooing super-delegates. The super-delegates will be looking at what each candidacy would mean down-ticket in local races, and what freezing out either candidate will mean in November, in 2010, in 2012.

There is a recurring theme in the Republican campaign to grant retroactive immunity to telephone companies that apparently broke the law and perhaps their own contracts with customers by not protecting their phone calls and other communications.

We have a leading Congressional candidate using this theme in a newspaper column. The argument is,

What company would ever cooperate again with the government if subject to class action lawsuits that could bankrupt it?

Anyone? Bueller?

Hello, dear. I hope this is a good time.

I've seen you fretting about the nomination process. It occurred to me that you might like to be a superdelegate. I said 'Etageled!' and now you are one.

You have one of about 800 superdelegate votes and you get to cast it however you choose. On the first ballot, on any ballot. For Clinton, for Obama, for Norman Thomas, for Harold Stassen. Your choice!

(I'm told pledged delegates can do that too, ever since 1980. But they don't get called "super.")

In the Executive Branch we have several famous examples of lower-ranking but prominent officials affecting policy by quietly - or maybe not so quietly -  promising the President that they will quit the administration if a particular action which they oppose is allowed to go forward.

The ones that come to mind: Secretary of State George Shultz in the Reagan Administration, in regular battles with the warmonger cabal, seemed to leak a resignation threat about once a month. And it seemed to work.

Under Jimmy Carter, Cyrus Vance opposed the ill-fated attempt to rescue the Iran hostages and quit as promised when the mission was over.

I believe there are important lower-level examples too, in areas from climate change to civil rights enforcement.

It's time for a legislative branch equivalent.

Just under 80,000 ballots have now been recounted. (Note: Weare has not, and the Bedford vote for Richardson should read 183 original, 184 recount. That transcription error appeared yesterday too, and was then corrected).

The recount now includes 14 hand-count towns casting a total of 5,661 ballots.

The total undervote (votes not counted originally then counted at the recount) is 521. The total overvote is 426. Factoring in scatter reallocation, the total miscount rate is 1.17%.

Analysis below.

I wrote about the Wednesday count here.

Last night I downloaded the Thurday count update numbers and crunched them. Still all scanner precincts.

A BIG discrepancy jumped out: Manchester Ward 5 had 64 overvotes (counted on primary night, disallowed at the recount) for Clinton, 39 overvotes for Obama, 38 overvotes for Edwards.

Overvotes are unusual with scanners. Undervotes, where the scanner cannot tell voter intention but a human can, are much more common.

Today the Union Leader explains what happened.

I'd like to have this diary and thread focus only on the results of the recount underway - no discussion of the nobility or foolishness of having one, no discussion of claims of errors caught and fixed on voting day.

Just a discussion of what the recount results tell us about the accuracy of the scanners as used in New Hampshire.

The results are being posted at the end of each day. So far ballots from Manchester, excepting Wards 5 and 7, have been recounted in public. The data can be downloaded to Excel - that's what I did.

The ballots recounted thus far were originally counted as 18,075 votes.

The recount data thus far below.

The central claim of voting irregularities in New Hampshire appears to be that towns using optical scanners - all made by Diebold - voted more heavily for Clinton than towns that used hand-counts.

This appears to be the Black Box Voting list showing which towns use which methods. I assume it was compiled by activists; I don't believe the NH Secretary of State publishes such a list.

This is the list of voter registration by town, following the 2006 election. Republican, Democratic, or Undeclared. You have to click on each county to see the town lists.

I did that. Then I cross-tabulated the registrations by voting method. Note that scanners play no role in party registration: that is strictly a "tell the human" process.

Results below.

Thanks, Howard:

Huckabee Is Really a "Tax-And-Spend" Politician.

The DNC aligns itself with the Club for Growth.

Now that the National Committee is spending its money trying to influence the Republican primaries, what other charges can it make? Here are some ideas, Doctor Dean:

• Charge Ron Paul with "not supporting the troops" and wanting to "surrender to al Qaeda"
• Attack Rudy Giuliani for accepting the "homosexual agenda" and not fully supporting the "rights of the unborn"
• Go after John McCain as a "tree hugger" who will cost American jobs because he believes in global warming

These would be awkward attacks to make if the national party actually had, you know, guiding principles that it believes in.

...is candidates and campaigns that make them necessary.

I fully support the right of college students to choose to vote in either:

• The community where they lived before college and live during college breaks, or
• The community where their college is located.

It's embarrassing to even ask whether a Democratic candidate for President supports the right of a citizen over 18 to vote where he or she lives. But it seems we must.

(By the way - isn't it odd that if I don't go to college at 18 and just rent an apartment in Ames or Berkeley, there's no issue at all. Everyone agrees I can vote.)

So, it's a simple question. Will your candidate take that simple pledge?

There's a debate coming up this week - but since the Des Moines Register is one of the hosts, they may not ask this.

I believe we have a non-functional government that is not representing the public. I'm trying to think through why, and what we can do about it.

This diagram is an attempt to build a context and model to discuss the problem - or even whether there is one.

Comments below the fold.

Senator Biden:

I regret that the confirmation vote was brought up with very little notice. That wasn't fair to the Senators voting or for that matter, to Michael Mukasey.

Senator Clinton:

Michael Mukasey may be a fine lawyer and judge but his answers in his confirmation hearing were unacceptable. I'm disappointed in Senator Reid and my colleagues who were in the Chamber for allowing this to move forward with so little examination.

Senator Dodd:

This move for an immediate vote caught me by surprise. Judge Mukasey should not have been confirmed before we reached agreement on several critical issues - not just waterboarding but also subpoenas.

Senator Obama:

If we are to be a nation of laws, not just a nation of this year's men, we must demand standards of accountability of our leader in every branch of government. Both Judge Mukasey and Senator Reid short-circuited that last night.

(More)

with that secret tap to a river of Internet and voice traffic that AT&T evidently provided without any warrant.

You would have to set up filters to sieve through all that data. But once you filtered you could find out which companies were talking about specific mergers and acquisitions.

The really sensitive stuff might be encrypted: that's okay, if you see a pattern that company ABC just recently started encrypted discussions with company XYZ, that's gold. Have a pal buy up some shares of XYZ, or maybe options if it's big enough.

You could find out how busy the legal divisions of particular pharmaceutical or tobacco firms were this month compared to last.

Senator Feingold cannot decide whether to oppose Michael Mukasey for Attorney General. Since Feingold is on the Judiciary Committee, this is a Big Deal.

His reason for being undecided?

Judge Mukasey is a marked improvement over Alberto Gonzales in many ways, including his apparent commitment to running the Department in an apolitical fashion. He may be the best nominee we can get from this administration in this respect.

Senator Feingold doesn't seem to understand his job.

On other occasions he has spoken about the tradition and value of letting the President pick his team. Then, the question of whether they could get the President to nominate someone better wasn't even on the table. Now, suddenly it is.

Perhaps it's the Stockholm Syndrome.

After caving once already by even holding confirmation hearings without any resolution to the withheld Justice Department documents, the Democratic members including Chairman Patrick Leahy have been praising Michael Mukasey. He made the sort of noble-sounding non-committal statements yesterday that they could applaud. "Torture is against the law - more importantly,it is against our values." That sort of stuff.

But today we find out that this is the same PR stunt that President Bush has been pulling for a couple of years. The "We don't [admit to] torture!" cry. Mukasey hates torture. But waterboarding - roughing someone up so he believes that he is about to die from drowning - might not be torture, says Mukasey.

The recent flurry over the Republican logo for the 2008 convention, which features an elephant in Blue (among many other questionable stylistic elements), should prompt us to start asking what color President Edwards should use for the drapes of the Oval Office.

Blue? Is that too predictable? Red? Is that too "in your face"?

Jesse Jackson might suggest a rainbow of colors. Would that appear to be pandering?

Should it be a pattern rather than a solid color? If so, what sort of pattern? Floral - or does that provide fodder for "Dems are weak" claims? A historical, military motif?

You can read it here. It's by Paul Waldman and it's mostly about Iowa, but he throws quite a few smears at New Hampshire too. Kos loves it, of course.

I'll correct some of the historical misstatements, erroneous data, and logical errors below.

[The voters of Iowa and New Hampshire refuse] to vote for anyone unless they look them in the eye and get a sense of the person behind the politician.

Waldman sarcastically presents that as conventional wisdom. It is not; it is a straw man.

Henry Cabot Lodge won the NH primary against Goldwater in 1964 without setting foot in the state. He was ambassador to Vietnam at the time. The vote was a rejection of Goldwater - who spent lots of time here.

Lyndon Johnson won a slim pyrrhic victory here in 1968 and Carter won against Teddy Kennedy in 1980 - both 'Rose Garden' campaigns.

Yes, it would be much better if halfwitted publicity stunts like the MoveOn condemnation never reached the floor of Congress.

Yes, if a resolution condemning Limbaugh's latest outrage were introduced in isolation I would oppose it.

Yes, the MoveOn ad itself was at least questionable. Regardless of its other attributes, cheap puns on a foreign-sounding name are asking for trouble.

But the idea that any Dems should not support the Udall resolution condemning Limbaugh is entirely wrongheaded. Here's why.