With two months left and almost half of voters still undecided, Brian Moran has taken a small lead in the Democratic primary race for Virginia governor, according to a new PPP poll (March 27-29, 740 Dem LV, MoE +/- 3.6%). The former state delegate leads former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe and State Sen. Creigh Deeds, though all three are separated by just 7 points.

Moran 22
McAuliffe 18
Deeds 15
Und 45

All three candidates have similar favorable ratings (31%-34%), while McAuliffe -- whom more people seem to know of than the other two candidates -- has an unfavorable rating (29%) twice that of either Moran or Deeds.

In a potential 2010 Senate race in New Hampshire, Rep. Paul Hodes (D) leads former Sen. John Sununu (R) by 6 points, according to a new ARG poll (March 27-30, 535 RV, MoE +/- 4.2%).

Hodes 42
Sununu 36
Und 22

Hodes' path to the Democratic nomination was cleared two weeks ago when Rep. Carol Shea-Porter announced she would not seek the Senate seat.

En-route to Europe, Secretary Clinton lambasted the aid programs inside Afghanistan for the past seven years as being "heartbreaking" in their futility. To which one might reasonably ask, as compared to what?

If the purpose of the American effort inside Afghanistan is to build a better Afghanistan, then yes, that aid has been wasted. If the effort is designed to uproot the al Qaeda network, then it has evidently succeeded, as that network is now in Pakistan.

It's fairly amusing to listen to the howls of outrage in Washington about the rampant corruption inside Afghanistan. What exactly did we expect to happen when we suddenly dump billions of dollars on a subsistence-level economy? (Dump a few million in Illinois and ask me how the former Governor would have handled it.) Now, we're supposed to believe that because it's Ambassador Holbrooke and Secretary Clinton doing the dumping - and promising vague benchmarks - that somehow this corruption will vanish?

It's no knock on their evident skills or intellect to acknowledge that social engineering on this scale is extraordinarily difficult. What's more, we have put ourselves in what looks like an untenable situation. Even if we succeed in Afghanistan, al Qaeda appears capable of moving elsewhere. Then what? A similar effort in Somalia? Yemen? Sudan?

We need to think about the problem of Islamic terrorism differently, not pretend that different bureaucrats have unlocked a heretofore unknown combination of bribes and combat power to make Afghanistan whole again.

(Cross-posted at RCW's The Compass.)

The automakers aren't the only ones from Detroit making the news.

While GM and Chrysler wrestle with their own survival, the two newspapers in Detroit began their own struggle to stay afloat. On Monday, the Free Press and News became the first major U.S. metro dailies to cease daily delivery to subscribers.

This move was planned and announced in December last year. The papers now will be delivered to homes on only Thursday, Friday and Sunday. The rest of the week, a condensed 32-page printed paper is available only at newsstands.

Or off a subscriber's own computer. The papers now may be downloaded and printed, in its entirety, along with click-screen capabilities, from a specially-designed web site. Yes, instead of having your dog fetch the paper off the driveway, he may now go get the e-edition - a stack of letter-size paper - off your printer.

The frenzied first day crashed the paper's server for the digital edition, forcing long delays and complaints. Management dashed off a quick memo to the papers' staffs to deal with irate callers. The short memo, obtained by Media Watch:

OVERWHELMING DEMAND FOR ELECTRONIC EDITIONS OF DETROIT FREE PRESS AND THE DETROIT NEWS CAUSE SOME DELAYS

DETROIT, Mich., March 30 - Users of the electronic editions, exact copies of today's printed Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, are temporarily experiencing longer wait times for information to load. This delay is being caused by higher than anticipated demand during this peak time. The Detroit Media Partnership is working with its vendor, Tecnavia, to rectify this situation and broaden digital capacity.

More than 500,000 print copies of both newspapers are available for free at more than 18,000 retail locations where the newspapers are usually sold.

The timing of the new initiative, while it was pre-determined well in advance, also worked out to the papers' detriment. Besides the ongoing battles of GM and Chrysler in Washington, Michigan State's basketball team won on Sunday to advance to the Final Four - to be hosted next weekend at Ford Field in Detroit. The event is anticipated to be the biggest in Motown since the Super Bowl in January 2006, as crowds of 72,000 are expected at each of the three games.

The papers put on a full-court press of its own Monday, sending out scores of people to hand out free papers all over Detroit. But some of their older readers weren't quite prepared for the revolution:

To Carol Banas, a retired city planner and longtime Free Press reader, the idea of not having a printed paper is unimaginable. "I'm at the age where I like my newspapers in hand," said Ms. Banas, 56, who read a hard copy of Monday's abbreviated Free Press in an Einstein Brothers Bagels shop in Royal Oak. "I know that's English online, but it's not the same."

Ready or not, the Detroit papers are pressing on with their new digital initiative, one that will be observed closely by everyone in the industry from coast-to-coast. David Hunke, CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership, said during Monday's luncheon at the Detroit Economic Club that the e-edition is merely the first stop on the digital super highway for newspapers. The next is e-Reader, a Kindle-like device the papers plan to push out by 2010.

The illustrations accompanying two new articles in Vanity Fair - one by Michael Wolff on Rush Limbaugh and one by James Wolcott - are worth a thousand words a piece and pretty much speak for themselves:

"The number of Americans who believe that the nation is headed in the right direction has roughly tripled since Barack Obama's election, and the public overwhelmingly blames the excesses of the financial industry, rather than the new president, for turmoil in the economy," according to the Washington Post/ABC News Poll (March 27-30, 1000 A, MoE +/- 3%).

The poll finds that 42% of Americans now feel the country is headed in the right direction, which is the highest mark in five years and up from 15% in December, 19% in January and 31% in February.

Obama receives a 66% overall job approval rating, with 60% approving of his handling of the economy and 52% of his handling of the federal budget deficit.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) responded today to Washington Post columnist David Broder's piece Sunday that stated Democrats in Congress were using "bookkeeping legerdemain" to "perform a cover-up on the most serious threat to America's economic future" -- the national debt.

But the main device the Democratic budgeteers employed was simply to shrink the budget "window" from 10 years to five. Instantly, $5 trillion in debt disappeared from view, along with the worry that long after the recession is past, the structural deficit would continue to blight the future of young working families.

"I really don't think that's the case in this circumstance," Conrad told reporters on a conference call today, "and here's why. I was very critical of the Bush administration for own putting out five-year budgets so that you can't see the effect of the second five years of their tax cuts. But in this circumstance, the Obama administration put out a ten-year budget. And we have full scoring of that ten-year budget. So I just don't think anything's being hidden from anyone.

"Our budget is a five-year budget because that's what Congress has done in 30 of the 34 years that Congress has written a budget. Congress has done five-year budgets largely because the out years are so uncertain. If you look at the forecast, very small changes now make very big differences in the second five years. And since we already had a ten-year forecast... I think a system is running amuck here."

New York's 20th District, which includes all or parts of 10 counties in the Hudson Valley, is one of those districts that proves party registration is not always an electoral indicator. In recent years it's disproved election history, as well, leaving political prognosticators and practitioners unsure of tomorrow's special election outcome.

The race to replace Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's (D) former House seat has been called a referendum on President Obama's economic policies, as well as a preview of the 2010 midterm elections. Both parties have poured resources into the race, though the DNC may be trying to hedge its bets, while the NRCC and RNC are going all-in.

Inside the campaign, Jim Tedisco's (R) years of public service (and voting records) have been the target of Scott Murphy's (D) campaign, while Tedisco has attempted to tie the political novice's career as a venture capitalist to Wall Street's role in the dismal economy.

In the district, Republicans lead Democrats in voter registration by a wide margin -- some 67,500 as of November 2008. And, according to the Almanac of American Politics, this area has been Republican territory since the birth of the party. George W. Bush won here by 7 and 8 points in 2000 and 2004.

However, these stats did little to help Republican Sandy Treadwell, whom Gillibrand defeated by 24 points in November. Nor did then-incumbent John Sweeney, who lost to Gillibrand by 6 points in 2006, gain from the sizeable party-ID edge or GOP record in the district. Obama also won the district by 3 points.

In New York's unique ballot system in which candidates can be placed on mulitple lines, both Sweeney and Treadwell won placement on three party lines: Conservative, Independence and Republican -- giving them an even larger registration advantage. Gillibrand was endorsed by the other two parties: Democrats and Working Families. This time, the Dem candidate will get a third line, as Murphy has been endorsed by the Democrats, Working Families and Independence parties.

The race will come to a close tomorrow night, and the victorious party will surely claim a bigger victory than a sole congressional district. Murphy's poll numbers appear to put him on track for a victory, so we'll also see tomorrow night if polling is any better indicator in NY-20 than party ID or history.

(Cross-posted on RCP's Politics Nation)

The Huffington Post is on a roll. First "reporter" Ryan Grim sleuthed out Eric Cantor's whereabouts during the Obama presser (as if members of Congress have some Constitutional obligation to watch the president in prime time). Now Grim is  reporting more big news, Senators Get Nasty: "You're Good" ... "Your Wife Said The Same Thing," which is being given banner treatment on the Huffington Post homepage:

Except it turns out Grimm and Huffpo are completely distorting the context of the comment to make it appear as if this was some sort of dirty sex talk between two Senators in public. The NY Times' Caucus does the fact check:

The exchange has been picked up all around, depicted — and scolded — as cheesy, sex-laced banter, during discussions about rather weighty issues like, uh, the deficits. But what's missing from the takes at other Web sites — even though the follow-up line alludes to what's going on between the two — is indeed the context.

Senator Grassley's comeback and the ending line close the loop. Senator Conrad responded: “She did, she said you were the biggest hit of all the speakers at the event.”

The event, we're told, was the 20th Annual Legislative and U.S. Government Policy Seminar on Wednesday at noontime, when Mr. Grassley spoke. Senator Conrad's wife, Lucy Calautti, attended and did indeed compliment the Iowa senator's presentation.

It's not like it was a terribly slow news day, either. The President of the United States announced a new strategy for Afganistan this morning, which most consider a fairly significant event. After that, he met with the CEO's of the nation's largest banks to talk about fixing the economic crisis. I guess those subjects just aren't "sexy" enough for the Huffington Post.

Among the many entertaining tidbits in Raymond Keating's interview with Republican Rep. Peter King, is this:

Sentinel: Let's switch to politics. Are you going to run for the Senate next year?

King: I'm looking at. I'm not being cute or trying to be coy in saying that.

If Caroline Kennedy had been the Democratic candidate, I definitely would have run. The reality is that there are two-and-a-half million more Democrats than Republicans in New York. For me to run, I'd have to give up my House seat. I would need some sort of opening to run. Caroline Kennedy would have given that. She would have generated tremendous publicity for the race. I would have been able to get a tremendous amount of financing for the race. And I knew that she was not a strong candidate. It would have made it very competitive, and I think I would have won.

I had my declaration of candidacy all filled out and ready to go. I was going to file within seconds of Governor Paterson appointing Caroline Kennedy to the Senate. (emphasis added)

So much for people being scared of Camelot. King says he's still considering joining the race and will make a decision this summer.

Do read the rest of the interview. King discusses Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, bailouts, his previous support for card check (now rescinded), and whether or not Rudy Giuliani will run for governor.