There is no exit polling data for Oregon as Oregon conducts its primary entirely by mail. Thus a survey of voters in Oregon is done by phone and thus the data is unscientific. That said, there are a few broad conclusions that can be drawn.

As of 8:30 PDT, Obama is leading by 59% to 41% with 39% of the precincts reporting. Most of the precincts that have reported are from Portland and its suburbs down through central Oregon including Salem and Eugene. Eastern and western Oregon have yet to report. As these are the areas where Clinton was expected to do well, I would expect the margin to close to around 10 points perhaps slightly under double digits.

UPDATE
As of 9:45 PDT, 55% of Oregon’s precincts have reported. Obama’s margin has narrowed slightly to 58% to 42%. Eastern Oregon has yet to report fully. That should narrow the margin a bit more. Still right now it looks like a 10 point win for Obama.

Two data points to share. Oregon is atypical in its level of education. Seventy-eight percent of Oregon voters have a high school degree. That’s about 15 points higher than the national average. Obama won this group 59% to 39%. Of the 46% of Oregonians that have a college degree, 64% voted for Obama.

Oregon is also highly irreligious. While Clinton and Obama split both the Protestant and Catholic vote, Obama carried the 31% of Oregon voters that are either athiest or expressed no religious preference. Obama carried this group by 62% to 36% margin.

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I apologize because my server went down this afternoon.

With 100% of the vote now in in Kentucky, Senator Clinton has scored a decisive and impressive win in the Bluegrass state. The margin of victory stands at 35 points.

Take a moment to reflect on the delay in the reporting of results in Lake County, Indiana. The results in Indiana were delayed and not released until well past 1:00 AM EDT. It’s barely 10:00 PM EDT and all of Kentucky is in. The vote in Indiana was manipulated by Obama surrogates and it was a shameful act of tampering with the will of the people. But that’s Obama, tamper he will.

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Geraldine Ferraro is causing a stir today with comments that she may not for Obama in the general election. Ferraro terms Obama “terribly sexist.” And, as a result, she says she may not be able to cast her ballot for him if, as anticipated, he gains the Democratic presidential nod. Good for you Geraldine! It is time to stand up against the misogny. The full story from the Los Angeles Times.

On NBC’s “Today” show, Ferraro said she did not know if she will vote for Barack Obama. “Latent sexism has been around this country for a long time,” she said, citing Obama’s belittling of Clinton as “Annie Oakley” when, reaching out to rural voters, she said her father had taught her to shoot. “In this campaign it was patent.”

Separately, women will today protest in Los Angeles against the presumptive nominee over his sexist campaign and against the media for their continued misogynistic remarks.

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Because some of us do pay attention:

Barack Obama, last night in Portland, on Iran: “They don’t pose a serious threat to us.”

Barack Obama, earlier on the afternoon of May 19th, in Billings, Montana, on Iran: “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

How can you say two very different things on the same day? Perhaps it was the audience? In liberal Oregon, Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat”. In more conservative Montana, the “threat from Iran is grave.” You just don’t sound foolish, you just don’t look foolish, you are foolish.

And foreign policy is the one area where you believe have special competence? Anymore of this and I may just have to start using expletives because this is just unbelievable.

Here’s Obama in Billings:

“Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel’s existence. It denies the Holocaust,” he said. “The reason Iran is so much more powerful than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush-McCain policy of fighting in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran. They’re the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely.”

More on the story at The Chicago Tribune.

Here’s Obama on the Iranian threat in Billings, Montana:

And here’s Obama in Portland. The same day.

Please stop before you give us whiplash and turn what’s left of your campaign into a laughingstock.

You may have attention deficit disorder but I don’t and the GOP has a memory like an elephant. And on video no less. I can see the ads now.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal picks up the story. The New York Times called Obama’s position of Iran insouciant. Insouciant means non-chalant or unconcerned. Well isn’t that Obama to a tee.

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Congratulations to Jon Lester, the Red Sox and their fans!

Jon Lester has survived cancer and pitched a World Series clincher for the Boston Red Sox. Now he can add a no-hitter to his already amazing list of accomplishments. The 24-year-old lefty shut down Kansas City 7-0 Monday night for the first no-hitter in the majors since Red Sox rookie Clay Buchholz threw one last September.

It is a rare feat and quite an awesone spectacle to witness.

By the end of today, you will be able to take a cross country drive with Hillary Clinton from Portsmouth, New Hampshire all the way here to San Francisco crossing states that Hillary has won. You can’t do with that Barack. He’s stuck in the mud. So who’s up for a road trip?

A 150 years ago, it was an ordinary British house mouse out for a sail and with a chance see the world. Today its ancestors are supermice.

Thank God for Darwin. Okay that is an oxymoron. But you can’t make this stuff up. Evolution is such a thing of beauty and it can be witnessed in spectacular or dreadful fashion. This is more on the lines of the dreadful. The UK Guardian reports that:

For tens of thousands of years, the birds of Gough Island lived unmolested, without predators on a remote outcrop in the south Atlantic.

Today, the British-owned island, described as the home of the most important seabird colony in the world, still hosts 22 breeding species and is a world heritage site.

But as a terrible consequence of the first whalers making landfall there 150 years ago, Gough has become the stage for one of nature’s great horror shows. Mice stowed away on the whaling boats jumped ship and have since multiplied to 700,000 or more on an island of about 25 square miles.

What is horrifying ornithologists is that the British house mouse has somehow evolved, growing to up to three times the size of ordinary domestic house mice, and instead of surviving on a diet of insects and seeds, has adapted itself to become a carnivore, eating albatross, petrel and shearwater chicks alive in their nests. They are now believed to be the largest mice in the world. Yesterday Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation groups, recognised that the mice, who are without predators themselves, are out of control and threatening to make extinct several of the world’s rarest bird species.

Let’s send some of the supermice to the Creationists. The other alernative is this:

This is not some isolated incident, all over the world invasive species are wrecking havoc and birds are taking the brunt. In Guam, the Solomon Islands tree snake has eaten a path of devastation that has already led to many species of endemic birds into extinction.

Here is the Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 of interesting reads from around the world.

German President Calls Bankers “Monsters”
In an interview with the German magazine Stern, the German President Horst Köhler has called upon bankers to confess their guilt for the financial crisis. He is still missing “a clearly audible mea culpa”, Köhler said in the interview. “By now, it must have dawned on everyone who thinks responsibly in the industry that international financial markets have developed into a monster, which must be contained.” Stern only publishes in German. It’s a short interview so here is another short quote for my non-German speaking audience: The industry has “barely any relationship to the real economy remaining. Part of this are also bizarrely high compensations for individual financial managers.” The financial world has “disgraced itself mightily.” Thank God that I am no longer an investment banker otherwise I might feel slighted. The German President while Head of State has only ceremonial duties. Horst Köhler, however, is a man to whom we should listen. He is not exactly some kook in a German palace. As the former head of the International Monetary Fund, German President Horst Köhler is well qualified to comment on the global financial crisis. In an interview last week, he had said that the global financial system “came close to collapse.” Here’s more of this compelling read:

Köhler called for “stricter and more efficient regulation” in response to the market turbulence, which has caused serious fallout (more…) at several German banks. He was critical of the increasingly sophisticated investment vehicles that helped to spark the crisis. “The over-complexity of the financial products, and the possibility of carrying out large leveraged deals with a small amount of capital, have allowed the monster to grow,” Köhler said.

The president had a stark assessment of the severity of the crisis. “I want to hope that the worst is past,” Köhler said. “Nevertheless, we came close to a collapse of the global financial markets.”

The criticism is given added weight by the fact that Köhler is the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). During his illustrious career he has also been a junior minister in the German Finance Ministry, chairman of the association of savings banks in Germany and president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

German Investor Confidence Unexpectedly Fell in May
On the heels of the above, Bloomberg Financial News reports that investor confidence in Germany unexpectedly fell for a second month in May on concern faster inflation, the stronger euro and fallout from the U.S. housing slump will hurt economic growth. At the moment, the German economy has been enjoying robust growth.

Taiwan Has a New President
Taiwan’s new president took office on Tuesday with a historic offer to reopen dialogue with China, which claims the island as its territory, but pledged to maintain Taipei’s existing self-rule and separate international profile. President Ma Ying-jeou urged China in his inaugural speech to move toward democracy and allow Taiwan a larger international role, testing his relationship with a government that claims sovereignty over the island. More on Taiwan’s new leader from the UK Guardian.

The Zimbabwean Crisis
It is time for the international community to deal with Robert Mugagbe in no uncertain terms. Zimbabwe is drifting periously towards famine and genocide and yet African leaders offer nothing but words of comfort to Mugagbe. It is incumbent upon South African President Mbeki to act and to act now. Now just for the sake of Zimbabwe but also for the sake of his own country. There are three million refugees from Zimbabwe in South Africa growing by at a rate of 1,000 a day. There are another million Zimbabweans scattered across Botwsana, Mozambique and Zambia. Mugagbe must go. Yes he is a hero of independence, the last lion. But at this point his pride is on verge of a calmanity that is affecting the whole of the region. If Mugagbe remains in power much longer, the implications for the region could be severe indeed. The riots in Johannesburg aimed at refugees from Zimbabwe are only the tip of the iceberg. More on the riots and the crisis in Zimbabwe from the UK Guardian-South Africa and the UK Guardian-Zimbabwe.