Barack Obama's a Unitarian?  I thought he was United Church of Christ.

... wtf does "Bible-believing" mean in the context of talking about people who identify as Christian?

"Bible-believing" might mean one who takes a literalist interpretation of Scripture, e.g. many fundamentalist Christians.  

Many Christians, including but not limited to mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, do not officially believe in Biblical literalism.

So, I think that's what this might mean.  I could very well be wrong, however.

... and as I sort of hinted at (and I believe HRC has said this herself), the Caucus system is the least-likely system to allow participation from a demographic such as working-class women.

First, there's the whole issue of being able to attend a caucus at a given time and location.  Many working-class women are working a job at 7 in the evening, taking care of children, etc.  In a primary, you have a 12-hour window to vote, so its less difficult to find a moment to head down to the polling place and vote.

Second, caucuses are kind of foreboding.  They're often very "clubby" affairs dominated by strong personalities and/or party regular-types.  If you don't think of yourself as "part of the club," you're less likely to want to attend.  I'm guessing that a lot of this demographic don't think of themselves as "part of the club" (and often they're probably right to think that).

Third, caucuses can take a long time, or at least a lot of people think they take a long time.  Usually it's all settled in 45 minutes or so, but you never know for sure.  Like my first point, the caucus system's inflexibility keeps a lot of people away.

I don't know if this unaccounted-for group are new voters in as much as they are new primary voters.  Maybe they are new voters.  I bet a lot of this group, however, are self-identified Dems or Dem-leaners who only vote in the general.  

(Of course, this is further hypothesizing upon previous hypothesizing on my part ... I could be way off.)

... probably were way off the mark on this one.  My guess is that a lot of voters for Clinton were self-identified Dems who rarely vote in primaries.  My further guess is that a lot of these Dems-who-don't-vote-in-primaries were working-class women (the very demographic comparatively less likely to attend an Iowa-style caucus due to scheduling concerns such as second-shift employment, child care etc.).

I'm not completely sold on the HRC's "showing emotion" moment as making the difference as I am on the possibility that the likely voter models under-counted a lot of HRC's support.

The "showing emotion" moment makes for a nice narrative, but the daily tracking poll missing a HRC "surge" suggests to me that the likely-voter models were a fundamental problem.

I'm no expert, though.  Perhaps the polling gurus out there could weigh in?

 ... and his unorthodox stategic decision to skip Iowa is vindicated!

Democrats

Obama 38
Clinton 31
Edwards 20
Richardson 6
Biden 2

Republicans

McCain 35
Romney 32
Huckabee 15
Paul 8
Giuliani 6
Thompson 2

Maybe Timmeh will get out his pad and pen in order to calculate second-choice effects a la Florida 2000?

I could see the cable news outlets wanting to hang on for the actual results in order to stoke the drama.

Iowa actually is kind of a "bell weather" state.

Narrowly went for Bush in 2004

narrowly went for Gore in 2000

went for Clinton in 96 and 92.

Missouri.  It was recently enacted.  I hope that the Missouri requirement too will be blocked.

I would like to add one other concern (albeit probably a smalller concern) about the photo ID requirement.  It's been my personal experience that requirements such as these usually are applied unevenly, in that the election judges often will nevertheless let who they deem as the "right" kind of people vote even without an ID while aggresively enforcing such a requirement for those they deem as the "wrong" kind of person.  Kind of like how poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. used to work.  

The deadline for filing the signatures is the day after the primary.  I don't know how many he will need, but I'm sure the Lieberman campaign will go above and beyond the necessary amount.  They'll need to make sure that they have enough signatures that are valid (I don't know the CT election law, but there are rules as to what constitutes a "valid" signature, and often petitions have many "invalid" signatures when they're examined and tallied by the Sec of State).  

Perhaps more importantly, if Lieberman's campaign had been engaging in such a signature drive w/out Lieberman formally announcing such a signature drive, then it would have looked VERY bad.  You can't engage in a signature drive without people noticing, and it would have come out.

for the lousy typing.

IMHO that chance is very slim.  Better for Lieberman to ride out the primary.  If he wins, he's vindicated.  If he loses narrowly, he can play the low-turnout card.  If he loses decisively, ha can play the low-turnout card, and the "party has been hijacked by radicals" card.  (Guess that last one's a two-fer!)

If he wer to pull out 2-3 days before the primary vote, he'd would appear (even for him) to be acting too much in bad faith.  Plus, he'd anger the dem viters who still support him and were planning to vote/work for him to get the dem nomination.

Speaking of 2000, I remember most un-fondly Lieberman's refusal to take Cheney on at that silly sit-down VP debate of theirs.  If there is any time to truly play hatchet-man, it's the VP candidate during one of those VP debates.

Instead we had Joementum cordially talking it over with Darth Cheney as if they were sitting down to Sunday brunch with each other.

Though this wasn't Lieberman's most egregious offense by any means, it certainly was harbinger of things to come.

198 votes for Cuellar a trend does not make.  Don't worry too much yet.