Good news for Barack Obama: A district court judge has denied the last-minute lawsuit that sought to shut down caucus sites on the Las Vegas strip for Saturday's Nevada caucuses. The lawsuit was filed by the Nevada state teacher's union, several of whose leaders have been associated with Hillary Clinton, and it came just days after Obama won the endorsement of the powerful Culinary Workers Union, which represents workers on the strip. The Clinton campaign had technically not taken a position on the lawsuit, but Bill Clinton's testy defense of it seems to give a pretty good sense of how they really felt.
The question now is whether this could come back to bite the Clinton campaign. The Culinary Workers Union is already circulating flyers slamming Clinton, and John Kerry offered a pretty forceful statement against the lawsuit. It'd be a fitting irony if this particular effort at suppressing an opponents' anticipated voters wound up bringing them out.
In other news, Clinton surrogate Bob Johnson has now apologized to Obama for his earlier drug innuendo. He'd previously claimed, ludicrously, that his words were a reference to Obama's "community organizing"; he now describes them as "made in haste in an attempt to be funny."
--Christopher Orr