It’s early; it’s just a snapshot; some of the numbers are within the margin of error and all that. But these 50 state polls put out by SurveyUSA are fascinating. The topline is that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton beat John McCain by the slimmest of margins (you can see Eric Kleefeld’s write up here). But they do it in starkly different ways. Barack Obama manages to beat John McCain while losing Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida — which I would scarcely have thought possibly (i.e., that a Dem could win while losing those states). Meanwhile Hillary wins in a more conventional way — judged by the standards of the last twenty years. Most of the blue states are blue and red states red. But where she loses the Pacific Northwest she takes Florida.

Supporters of Clinton and Obama can both take from this that they’re backing solid general election candidates but it does show they’re very different — at least at this moment — in terms of the package of states they’d put together. The maps here are well worth taking a look at.

Hillary Clinton, speaking today:

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with.”

Via Nico Pitney at Huffington Post:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most prominent Catholic serving in the U.S. government, called on Sen. John McCain to reject the endorsement of Texas televangelist John Hagee, who has labeled the Catholic church “the great whore,” a “false cult system,” and linked it to Hitler’s Nazi movement.

“That behavior is outside the circle of civilized debate in our democracy,” Pelosi said during a Thursday conference call. “I certainly think John McCain should reject his endorsement and I’m sure it won’t be long before he does.”

The GOP is struggling to hold onto Denny Hastert’s old seat. The election is this Saturday, and the cash-strapped NRCC has been forced to put more than $1 million into the race.

Atrios makes a good point. It’s not just the media’s slavering adulation of John McCain. Things like the Hagee story also fail to pick up momentum because name leaders don’t chime in on them. In some abstract sense it shouldn’t make Hagee a bigger deal simply because Nancy Pelosi says what a lot of other people are already saying. But in the way news pegs operate, it makes all the difference in the world.

In any case, the anti-Catholicism issue is now rising above the radar. But let me draw people’s attention back to another Hagee claim — that it’s not just the terrorists we have to worry about mounting catastrophic terrorist attacks on American soil. God is helping them. According to Hagee God is going to let the terrorists create “bloodbaths” in American streets because we’re trying to find a peace settlement for the occupied territories which would have Israel alongside a Palestinian state.

So it’s not just better intelligence and border security we need to worry about. God is actually helping the jihadists to come kill us because of our sinful foreign policies. At least according to Hagee, who McCain continues to embrace.

You can find it at the 2:19 mark in our compilation of great Hagee moments.

Obama adviser Samantha Power: Hillary is a “monster.”

I think Hillary Clinton is definitely qualified to be commander-in-chief of the US military. In fact, I think she’d make a strong one. She had a successful legal career. She participated in key decisions during the Clinton administration. And she’s beginning her second term in the US senate. Her husband was qualified to be commander-in-chief too — at 46 and having spent his whole political career in Little Rock.

But just what on earth is Hillary Clinton talking about when she says she’s crossed the “commander in chief threshold” which John McCain has also crossed but Barack Obama hasn’t?

There are two ways of looking at what’s required for this aspect of the president’s job. One school of thought has it that a potential president needn’t be an expert on military affairs or foreign relations any more than he or she needs to be an experts in economics. They need to be informed and knowledgeable. But what’s most needed is temperament, maturity and judgment. Detailed expertise can come from advisors.

Others think it’s precisely the expertise that’s needed. So someone like a Joe Biden is the kind of person you want — someone who’s deeply schooled in every aspect of foreign relations and has been at it for literally decades. John McCain has some of that and he was also career military which gives him, at least arguably, some special grasp of the military components of the job. Bill Richardson had at least some cred on that scale based on his time in the Congress, UN Ambassador and general ad hoc rogue regime diplomacy.

Hillary Clinton seems to think she’s a strong contender in this latter category. But that’s a joke. She’s starting her second term in the US senate, where, yes, she serves on the Armed Services committee. Beside that she’s never held elective office and she has little executive experience. I think she can argue that she’d make and would make a strong commander-in-chief. But she’s pushing a metric by which she’s little distinguishable from Barack Obama. I’m honestly surprised she’s not drawing chuckles on this one.

A lot of people are seeing red that Hillary’s so aggressively pushing the Republican nominee’s credentials to be president. And I can see their point. But I’m more surprised that she’s pushing an argument she doesn’t need to make and frankly can’t make credibly.

A DNC source tells TPM Election Central that Howard Dean has put the kibosh on the DNC paying for a do-over election in Florida.

Samantha Power apologizes for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.”

It seemed as if it took the networks about half a day yesterday to realize that the most newsworthy thing to come out of Hillary’s Washington press conference was, you know, the commander-in-chief threshold comment.

So, belatedly, here it is: