I’ve been checking in on the Obama counter that’s measuring the money his campaign has taken in since the close of the polls — now at $5.8 million. And it occurs to me that he can now afford to hire Mark Penn.

The Obama campaign now says they’ve raised over $7 million since the close of the polls on Tuesday. But the Clinton campaign is now saying they’re up to “approximately” $4 million during the same period.

Given the lemon of an unintentional disclosure about waterboarding from its former intel chief, the White House has been trying to make lemonade.

There was a big stimulus bill vote last night. And the senators still in the presidential campaign were back in town to cast their votes. All except John McCain (from the AP, emphasis added) …

Senators in both parties prepared to greet the presidential race’s front-runners Wednesday, as McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., left the campaign trail to vote for a proposed $205 billion economic stimulus package. McCain returned to Washington but made an eleventh-hour decision to skip the vote, aides to his campaign said.

Eleventh hour decision not to show up for the key vote even though he was actually in Washington?

Tapper, at ABC, says that his vote wouldn’t have changed the outcome and that McCain supports the Pelosi/Bush bill from the House. But it’s still not clear to me what the ’11th hour’ decision means. He’s in the city; why not vote?

Late Update: Here’s the story on just what issues were at stake. My hunch is that looking toward the November election didn’t want his hands on the Republican blockage of the expanded bill.

Reports swirling that Romney is dropping out of the race–as soon as today.

Mitt is getting ready to address the CPAC convention. CNN is reporting that three GOP sources are confirming he will suspend his campaign.

As we’re here waiting for Mitt Romney to come out and declare his flat-lined presidential campaign over, there was one point that I think may not be completely clear, or deserves restating. Romney certainly fought a better campaign than Rudy or Fred. But what stands out is that Romney wasn’t able to win a single stand up fight in the whole campaign. Caucuses, I think are fundamentally different than primaries. And Mitt’s caucus wins were each largely uncontested. Michigan was lightly contested by McCain. But Mitt pulled out of South Carolina and temporarily pulled resources out of Florida to focus on that single race and McCain, as I said, only lightly contested it. There were three real primaries in the Republican race — New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. McCain beat Romney in every one. The fact that he was in contention in delegate terms as long as he was was largely a mirage.

Mitt: Making it more likely that Hillary or Obama would win would mean “surrender to terror.”

So we have Mitt’s angle: He has to drop out of the race because we’re at war.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is back on the Hill today, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee. Paul Kiel is covering it at TPMmuckraker.

So far, he’s dropped two big bombshells. DOJ will not be investigating:

(1) whether the waterboarding, now admitted to by the White House, was a crime; or

(2) whether the Administration’s warrantless wiretapping was illegal.

His rationale? Both programs had been signed off on in advance as legal by the Justice Department.

Cynics may argue that those aren’t bombshells at all, that the Bush Administration would never investigate itself in these matters. Perhaps so. But this is a case where cynicism is itself dangerous.

We have now the Attorney General of the United States telling Congress that it’s not against the law for the President to violate the law if his own Department of Justice says it’s not.

It is as brazen a defense of the unitary executive as anything put forward by the Administration in the last seven years, and it comes from an attorney general who was supposed to be not just a more professional, but a more moderate, version of Alberto Gonzales (Thanks to Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer for caving on the Mukasey nomination.).

President Bush has now laid down his most aggressive challenge to the very constitutional authority of Congress. It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical. His cards are now all on the table. This is no bluff.

Late Update: TPM Reader RF:

David Kurtz’s “Mark This Day” blurb misses the most important point — it’s not just that the Attorney General’s position is that a DOJ Order makes the subject activity legal but that, as Nadler brought out, there is now no recourse to a judicial test, either criminal (through refusal to prosecute) or civil (through the state secrets privilege based solely on a DOJ affidavit). The DOJ is entitled to take whatever position it wants, however self-serving and unitary, but now there is no avenue for judicial review and so that is the end of the story. That is the important point here.

Emily’s List using Chris Matthews’ buffoonery as fund-raising tool for Hillary.