Not sure quite what it means. But TPM Reader JB dug up this passage from a December 2006 article in the Times about what then seemed the likely prospect that a women and a black man would be competitive candidates in the 2008 Democratic primaries …

“All evidence is that a white female has an advantage over a black male — for reasons of our cultural heritage,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the civil rights leader who ran for president in 1984 and 1988. Still, he said, for African-American and female candidates, “It’s easier — emphatically so.”

Ms. Ferraro offered a similar sentiment. “I think it’s more realistic for a woman than it is for an African-American,” said Ms. Ferraro. “There is a certain amount of racism that exists in the United States — whether it’s conscious or not it’s true.”

“Women are 51 percent of the population,” she added.

The Pentagon has nearly 50 videotaped recordings of its interrogations of terrorism suspects.

Yesterday we reported at some length on the departure Adm. William Fallon, commander of Centcom. Then yesterday afternoon a reporter colleague told me that the real issue with Fallon wasn’t Iran but something called “the pause.”

With ‘surges’ and ‘pauses’ and various other bits of jargon floating around, it’s a little hard to keep track. But essentially the ‘pause’ refers to how long we’re going to put off drawing down our forces in Iraq. Fallon wanted a short pause, this colleague told me, and Petraeus wanted a long or (I think more likely) an indefinite one. Now Fred Kaplan at Slate and David Ignatius in the Post bring reports confirming that this was indeed the key issue.

So, not about Iran but Iraq — and specifically whether we stay there indefinitely waiting on the El Dorado of political progress. Fallon wanted to start drawing down. His bosses disagreed. And now he’s gone.

Retired Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) dies at age 90.

Retiring Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-VA): “The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they’d take it off the shelf.”

“Stop playing politics with the past,” President Bush cried this morning, as the House prepares to vote later today on the Administration-unfriendly version of the surveillance bill — which offers no telecom immunity.

TPMCafe Reader CSCS: NY Gov-in-waiting Paterson is “lucky” he’s black and blind.

This morning Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright is in the news again. They did a segment on him on Good Morning America. And the main attention is to a video that has surfaced of a sermon Wright gave in January. Fox News got it and here you can see it on Ben Smith’s blog at The Politico. It’s racially charged and will certainly get a lot of play, though I’m not sure there’s much in it that doesn’t come out of the sermon tradition of African-American Christianity with a 60s twist. Last week, Obama, who has denounced various of Wright’s statements, told a Jewish audience, Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” Watch it yourself and make your own judgments. For myself, when watching something like this, it is often difficult to distinguish between what I actually find offensive myself and what it is ingrained in me to believe others will find offensive. He’s certainly not doing Obama any favors by talking like this about Obama in the midst of this campaign. Particulars aside, the political relevance is to show Wright as angry black man; and to tie him to Obama.

If Obama’s the nominee, we will see no end of this kind of stuff. And there’s probably some small benefit of getting a preview. But the simple fact is that we wouldn’t be seeing this stuff now if it weren’t for the fact that this is the kind of campaign Hillary Clinton’s campaign has decided to wage — often directly and at other times indirectly by not reining it in in her supporters when it crops up on its own. Wright is news today because Ferraro’s been news yesterday. Are her comments racist? That’s a loaded, too copious, word. And there’ve been cases where the Clinton team has gotten a bum rap on these matters. What I do know, however, is that Clinton’s campaign and her surrogates have injected the subject of Obama’s race into this campaign too many times now for it to be credible to believe that it is anything but a conscious strategy.

Lincoln’s quote of Matthew 18:7 is instructive here: “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”

It is insufficient to say that Republicans will do this in the fall so there’s nothing to be lost in hearing it now from Democrats. Because by doing this now, as a Democratic campaign, they are mainstreaming the message. If Obama is the nominee, when this emerges again, no doubt in a harsher, more rancid incarnation, it will come pre-approved by dint of a Democratic campaign’s imprimatur.

Steven Waldman: What did the founding fathers believe about church and state?

Nancy Pelosi pops the President back on FISA.