Both the Clinton and Obama camps expected Hillary Clinton to take Maine — but thus far with 44% of precincts in, Obama is leading by 15 points.

Hillary Clinton Campaign Director Patti Solis Doyle has stepped down. Maggie Williams will now take her place. Mark Penn stays where he is, for the time being. Big news.

(The Neocons: An Illustrated Progression; Graphic by Peter and Maria Hoey) In today’s Washington Post, neoconservative movement chronicler Jacob Heilbrunn outlines “5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neocons“.

Jim Lobe has a great profile piece on the movement of neoconservative sympathies in the Republican race and notes that a number of neocons and their chief pugnacious nationalist ally John Bolton have moved to support John McCain.

Since the polls closed on Super Tuesday, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have raked in huge amounts of campaign dollars. Clinton campaign internet director Peter Daou has reported that Hillary has brought in $10 million from more than 100,000 donors — and ALL of this online.

Yesterday, I saved these turkeys from near tragedy as they were trying to cross Highway 213 near Chestertown, Maryland. I’ve seen a lot of wild turkeys in Maryland and Colorado — but few of them looked as plump and, well, like the turkeys we used to draw in elementary school around Thanksgiving time.

Various delegate count analysts are showing that Obama made some gains in diminishing the gap between himself and delegate leader Hillary Clinton. Matt Stoller writes that on a net basis, Obama may have added 45 net delegates more than HIllary Clinton did yesterday.

Barack Obama owned last night — and he’ll own the rest of the month for the most part until he runs up against the contests in early March in Rhode Island, Texas and Ohio. Despite Obama’s impressive sweep of Nebraska, Washington and Louisiana yesterday, the delegate count remains at near parity between them.

MSNBC’s David Shuster is in some hot water for comments he made about Chelsea Clinton. They were inapproporiate. He knows it and has apologized. But this raises the issue of the flame-outs we are seeing in many quarters of this presidential race.

From Chris Nelson’s insider daily political essay, The Nelson Report: . . .Romney today disgraced himself and his party by charging that a Democratic victory in the presidential race will turn America over to the terrorists. As we said, a new abyss. . .