And by totally excluding Florida & Michigan from the convention, the Scream Machine is almost certainly giving Florida to the Repubs, and putting Michigan into play.

For an Obamaniac to call Hitchens “blinkered” is hilarious. Anyone who gives him an even chance in the general now is giving away money.

Reducing real live people to caricatures should be relegated to the cartoon page, and mind reading should be limited to those with scientifically demonstrable mind reading talents.

Hitchens, as an example, is so intelectually corrupt as to give the subject of his main claim to fame, atheism, an undeserved bad name.
Although he does make some salient points about the primaries, they come wrapped in pure blather.

The subject of race is now openly discussed, and as MaryL says in the above comment, its effect can't be understood in simplistic terms.
However, the likelihood is that race will play an even larger role in November, (think of attack ads), and no one knows yet how that will play out. The line between simply trying to calculate the effect and playing the race card is clear only in the eyes of very predisposed judgers. Criticism on that score is highly suspect, IMO, and the whole subject should be dropped when it comes to the Clinons.

Obama's been gaining on the white vote since Ohio, and his large portion of the AA vote came AFTER Clinton lost her 2007 AA majorities over a period of weeks in early 2008. He won whiter-than-white Iowa and continued to do well and looked viable. Add in Bill Clinton's SC comments and Ferraro's (at least partially self-fulfilling) rants, and black Democrats pissed off with the Clintons moved even faster into Obama's column.

And yes, there is the element of voting for someone like you, which drives (to some degree) Clinton's support among older white women and Obama's support among blacks. But he didn't get the black vote in this proportion until he proved he could campaign, appeal to whites, offer attractive policies, and WIN. If this was nothing more than racial herding, then why is Obama the first AA politician to do so extraordinarily well among blacks?

Will he be muzzled by the party, and if not, will he sabotage Obama as he did his own wife?

Then again, as he vents his anger (probably by playing the race card as the reason for her loss) he may drive up black voter turnout- he may officially be stripped of the title of first black president as black voters decide to show him what a real black president looks like. And white voters may join them in sufficient numbers to be determinative of the final outcome, so it's hard to know what the effect will be even if he's off the leash.