Obama secures another superdelegate on Tuesday morning -- Rep. Joe Donnelly of Indiana:

"At a time when too many Americans have lost faith in their government, Senator Obama can move us beyond the politics of stalemate and gridlock that has kept us from meeting the monumental challenges of our time: our dependence on foreign oil, a health care gap that leaves tens of millions uninsured, the steady deterioration of our manufacturing base, and an economy that is not working for working people."

More unusual: Hillary loses a pledged delegate -- one that was on her slate in Maryland, that she was entitled to from her share of the vote. He's Jack B. Johnson, the Prince George's County executive:

"I cannot in good conscience go to the convention and not support Barack. She ran a great campaign, but she fell short of the line."

Pledged delegates are generally loyalists to whatever candidate has put them on his/her slate, but technically they aren't legally bound to vote for that candidate. In Johnson's case, though -- he had been an Obama supporter, then switched to Clinton. Now, he's switching back. So, maybe it's not as odd as it seems.

One more Obama superdelegate, making it 4-0 on the day: Idaho Democratic chairman Keith Roark.

This one had been anticipated for a week or so -- ever since Bill Clinton attacked No Child Left Behind on the stump in Indiana with this line:

"Every time I say this, it's a guaranteed applause line. You can drop me in the middle of Idaho where there's not a Democrat in 200 miles and an elk would applaud me on that."

It didn't go over big in Idaho.

Here's Roark's comment to an Idaho paper last week:

"If Bill Clinton had done for elk in Idaho everything he did for Democrats, we'd have far fewer elk."

Gallup: "Although Obama did not achieve an immediate bounce in national Democratic support after last week's primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina, it could be that the subsequent political punditry, proclaiming the Clinton campaign is effectively over, is affecting voters."

A good catch from our friend John Rennhack over at Peter King Watch:

Our local congressman Pete King, if memory serves, was quick out of the box and very heavily moralistic when Gov. Spitzer was revealed as a patronizer of prostitutes:

"He's going to have to resign...At one level, it has to do with his integrity and his personal morality, but I don't even want to go into that. Without even touching on that, he has to resign....To leave himself open to blackmail — putting himself and the state in a compromised position like that — it's just awful."

But now, suddenly, with his friend and fellow Republican Vito Fossella faced with calls for resignation, King has gone all wobbly on the morality front. From Newsday:

"Long Island congressman Peter King slammed fellow Republicans for 'posturing' by pressuring his close friend Rep. Vito Fossella about resigning amid revelations of Fossella's drunken-driving arrest and secret love child.

" 'To me, it's putting a knife in the back of a good guy who's made a mistake,' said King (R-Seaford)....

" 'He's entitled to an interval of decency without having this constant pressure coming from his own party,' King said of his friend charged with drunken driving in a Virginia suburb."

So, these appear to be King's rules: A Democrat who patronizes a prostitute is awful, has opened himself to blackmail, and has to resign immediately. A Republican who is Peter's friend has just made a mistake by endangering people's lives driving around with .17 BAC, has not opened himself up to blackmail by keeping a second family on the side that he hides from his wife, and deserves a decent interval to decide if he wants to resign.

Just the kind of principled stance we've come to expect.

It remains to be seen if Cablevision and the Dolans will try to impose their political views on the paper, but if the sale of Newsday goes through there's no question that it will be owned by some politically active folks.

Our Reid Epstein has compiled a spreadsheet of all the political giving by the company and its head honchos, which you can view here.

The giving is pretty eclectic, befitting an operation that has to tend to local franchises, weigh in on federal cable regulation, block stadiums that it doesn't like and sustain tax breaks for arenas that it does like. The total: More than $2.7 million.

It ranges from items like a $350 donation to the Babylon Democratic Committee in 2007 to a couple of $250,000 donations to the Republican National State Elections Committee ( a component of the RNC) from patriarch Charles Dolan in 2000 and 2002. Recipients at one time or another: Torricelli, Schumer, Giuliani, Lazio, Gore, Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Bush-Cheney.

Breaking down the totals:

In the last decade, Cablevision and Cablevision PAC have given at least $343,929 to New York State committees and politicians (including both Pataki and Spitzer).

The Dolans personally have given $248,200 in state races.

The Cablevision PAC has given $1,068,873 to federal committees and candidates.

And the Dolan family has given $1,058,850 to federal committees/candidates.

A few cents worth on Cablevision's planned purchase of Newsday:

The big concern here in the newsroom is whether the Dolans will keep their hands off the editorial product. There's no answer to that until it happens, but the concern is obvious:

Local owners with local interests and local pals are more likely to want to massage the coverage than more distant owners. Owners without a history in the news business are less likely to honor traditional boundaries. Owners who started a family business tend to think they can do what they want with it. And the impression you get is that Jim Dolan hasn't really been hands off with the Garden and the Knicks.

On the business side: The Dolans are the latest in a succession of owners who thought they had brilliant ideas on what to do with the paper -- from TV/newspaper synergy, to hyper-local focus, to highly-leveraged tax strategies.

It hasn't been just putting out a really good full service paper for a while, and none of these brilliant ideas have reversed circulation and revenue declines. Now, Cablevision represents a new, but not really tried, strategy accompanied by a rather high price.

In a smart breakdown of the deal, media analyst Alan Mutter at his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog notes that Newsday's 17 percent operating margin -- a mere $80 million or so -- is only half what Cablevision extracts from many of its (monopoly) businesses... which may not bode well for prospects for actually reinvesting in the paper.

He concludes that Cablevision is investing at a premium in an industry severely in decline based on a speculative idea of cross seeding content, circulation promotion and ad sales among cable TV, internet, phone and now print products -- while Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman were both probably better positioned to reap immediate benefits by consolidating print holdings:

"Unless Cablevision goes out and buys a second newspaper in the New York market, it has no opportunity to achieve the revenue gains or cost savings that could have been reaped by Mr. Murdoch or Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher of the Daily News.

"Given the powerful reasons why News Corp. in particular should have purchased Newsday, why did Mr. Murdoch reverse course? Mr. Murdoch most likely concluded that (a) Cablevision is unlikely to pull off a successful quadruple-play with Newsday and (b) there was no need to over-pay for an asset in due course would come back on the market at a lower price.

"Rupe might be wrong. But I doubt it."

It's such an old trick, it's a joke. The politician, pretending to take the high road: "I don't want to get into these rumors about my opponent beating his wife. I want to talk about issues."

For the past month, McCain and his supporters have made much about the fact that a leader of Hamas said that the group would look favorably on Obama's election, while insisting that they don't question Obama's abhorrence of Hamas but really want to talk about Obama's positions on the Mideast and Iran -- and are somehow incapable of doing so without bringing up Hamas.

Joe Lieberman was doing the dance on CNN over the weekend, and today, responding to a Newsweek story about the Republican attack machine, top McCain aide Mark Salter revisits the question again:

"The Senator has never said that Senator Obama shares Hamas' goals or values or proposed a relationship with Hamas different than the one he would propose.... He did note that there must be something about Obama's positions, particularly his repeated insistence that he would meet with the President of Iran (Hamas's chief state sponsor), that was welcomed by Hamas.

"Imagine if a right wing death squad spokesman announced that they welcomed McCain's election. Would (Newsweek) treat that as an illegitimate issue or would they examine which of McCain's stated positions might have found favor with the terrorists? That seems obvious on its face to me."

Two questions:

First, assuming Hamas is not filled with idiots, it knows that its endorsement is not a big plus in a US presidential election. So, wouldn't it be equally reasonable to assume that they are speaking kindly of Obama because they want McCain elected because they thrive on conflict and know he will sustain it? It's like Clinton and Obama arguing for the last four months about who the GOP wants to face -- you can never divine your foe's true motives, so relying on what they purport to think is an aimless talking point.

Second, McCain was embarrassed this weekend by reports that one of his top advisors -- the man he named to run the GOP Convention -- had been employed a few years ago as a lobbyist for the Myanmar junta, followed today by reports that his lobbyist/advisors also do work for Saudi Arabia and China. Has any news organization or political opponent used those ties to argue that McCain has pro-junta policies? Not that we know of.

The media frequently ignores things that seem spurious. And as fine as it sounds rhetorically, it's not particularly obvious that the media wouldn't just laugh off disclosure that a right-wing death squad leader was for McCain -- much less become as obsessed as McCain et al have become with Hamas.

Chuck Schumer, at a Crain's Breakfast in the city, sounds a note of optimism about the viability of an Obama/Clinton ticket:

“At first I thought it wasn’t but I do think it could be.”

About voters: “They’re worried, and they want somebody to come in and say I can help a little bit you with healthcare, and paying for college, and all these things, and a Democratic candidate is more likely to do it. Hillary and Barack have both run very strong and great races, and I think they’d be a strong ticket together.”

It's possible that's what he really thinks. But a lot of things -- the difficulty of selling the first black and the first woman in the same year; the lack of national security credentials; the idea that Hillary would spend eight years with less power than she had as First Lady or Senator; the fundamental disagreement on health care; the risks of Bill floating on the outskirts of a ticket and an administration -- counsel against the idea.

So what else could Schumer be up to?

Maybe the idea that a little flattery, and the ability to turn down the v-p slot, is part of what it'll take to ease Clinton out of the race....

At issue: Frazier, in asking a question about the Sean Bell case, said to Bloomberg "you maintain that you have a dialogue going..." Bloomberg decided that the word "maintain" was not "appropriate" because it "insinuated" that he was lying.

Reporters, of course, are supposed to be skeptical about whether politicians like Bloomberg are telling the truth, and are not required to bow and scrape when they ask questions. "Maintain" is a neutral word. It is not accusatory -- and even if it was, so what? Bloomberg now only takes questions from reporters who show him a deference he deems appropriate?

We have no idea what bee the mayor actually had in his bonnet:

Video via Azi at the Politicker.

Superdelegates continue to trickle in for Obama.

He gets Rep. Tom Allen, a Congressman from Maine (left). And Dolly Strazar, a DNC member from Hawaii. Update: And, he also gets Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii.

Those are added to Saturday's haul -- two from the Virgin Islands, one switching from Hillary; Arizona Cong. Harry Mitchell (right); an Ohio labor leader; and a Utah party official. On Friday, he got nine.

Quote of the weekend came from Don Fowler, a former DNC chair and Clinton supporter: "I always felt that if anybody establishes himself as the clear leader, the superdelegates would fall in line. It is perceived that he is the leader. The trickle is going to become an avalanche."

New polls out today suggest Obama is in for a rough couple of weeks in West Virginia and Kentucky, which he'll have to weather by shaping perceptions in the media that the race is over.

In West Virginia, which votes tomorrow, he trails Clinton 60-24 in a Suffolk University poll. That's 36 points. Poll director David ;Paleologos: "Barack Obama may have to write off West Virginia come November." A plurality of Democrats there still think Hillary will be the next president.

Obama is visiting the state today and will be introduced at a Charleston rally by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, but ... good luck. The state is stacked against him demographically, and will put an exclamation point on Clinton's argument that he can't get white blue-collar votes.

Then, ">another new poll shows that he trails Clinton 58-31 in Kentucky, which votes next Tuesday. Little wonder why he's been campaigning since Friday in Oregon, which he hopes to win on the same day he loses Kentucky. If Oregon pushes him into a majority of pledged (elected) delegates, he will hope for a superdelegate surge that will give him the nomination and relegate Kentucky to the back pages.

Still, a couple of blowout losses on the eve of winning the nomination will be a sobering reminder of how much work Obama has to do.