Lawrence O'Donnell has the scoop on what seems to me the most likely scenario for how this finally plays out:

[T]he Clinton campaign plan is to collect as many votes and delegates as they can right through June 3, then take no more than a week or so to make their case to the superdelegates. Nothing he said indicated that he actually expected the superdelegates to move to Hillary in the week after the final election. The Clinton campaign has not lost its grip on reality. Yes, Clinton spokespersons publicly seem to be lost on gravity-free planet Clinton, but privately they know the end is near.

Having come this far, and withstood for months now the critique that her campaign has been moving the goalposts, it doesn't seem too far a stretch to believe that with a mere 3 and a half weeks until the final votes are cast, Clinton will stay in. Since March, after all, her strategy has been primarily to be the person Democrats can turn to when the Obama locomotive goes off the rails. That strategy is running out of time, to be sure, but why not stick it out for one more month and see if it pans out?

Last night's presidential "debate" truly was a low point in American politics.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who turned it off in disgust after watching 40 nauseating minutes in which not a single issue -- not the war, not the economy, not gas prices, not global warming, not health care, not the collapsing dollar -- was brought up.

Apparently, in the minds of Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, such issues are of less import than a flag lapel pin or whatever the latest specious complaint making the rounds of the idiotnet happen to be.

Of course, it seems pointless to add to the braying chorus of complaints about our media -- which, if there is an objective behind the vapidness, one sometimes suspects must be exactly the point.

Watching Gibson and Stephanopoulos, it was clear that the template for modern journalism has been set by what Matt Yglesias has called the Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert:

[T]he balls Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless. Russert has created a strike zone of his own where toughness meets irrelevance.

Substitute Gibson and Stephanopoulos ("who's more patriotic?") for Russert, and you've pretty well captured last night's debate -- not to mention most of modern punditry.

Check out these comments on the ABC News website to get a sense of the depth of betrayal felt by many Americans who tuned in last night. Or watch this video of the audience jeering Charlie Gibson at the end.

By far, one of the most depressing things I have ever witnessed in this hollow farce we now call politics.

As understood by an anonymous commentator over at the Cunning Realist:

At this point it seems the sack of flour in my pantry has out performed my stock portfolio in the last 6 months.

Regular readers know that I've been involved in iLoveMountains.org, a project of Appalachian Voices, for almost two years now.

The website has won numerous accolades for its effective use of Google Earth and Google Maps in the field of advocacy.

More to the point, however, is that we've recruited nearly 30,000 people who are committed to stopping mountaintop removal coal mining.

This week, 125 of those people are in Washington, DC, lobbying their representatives to pass the Clean Water Protection Act, which would sharply curtail the ability of coal companies to fill valleys and streams with the tremendous waste that results from mountaintop removal coal mining.

Here's a video of our volunteers in Washington, who came from all over the country to convince Congress that now is the time to act to stop mountaintop removal coal mining:

Please consider taking a moment today to call your representative and ask them to support the Clean Water Protection Act. Click here to call your representative or here to email them.

And if you haven't yet joined iLoveMountains.org, click here.