Does Obama have a temper? A story has surfaced in the last few days about an altercation between then Illinois Senator Barack Obama and a colleague shouting on the Senate floor in 2002 over a vote for a child welfare office. The two nearly threw punches when Obama, apparently accidently, voted against a bill that included funding for a project that assisted Senator Rickey Hendon’s district. A biography of Obama entitled Obama: From Promise To Power, released last year, details the incident.

NRO asks today what took the media so long to spotlight the anecdote, given that there’s been a lot of talk about McCain’s hot headedness (not to mention use of the c word in relation to wife Cindy.)

And NRO‘s The Campaign Spot has dug up an article from late February on Obama as a state legislator by Todd Spivak of the Houston Press which asks some valid questions about how Obama’s career path was forged.

Obama’s temper It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage. Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands. — Todd Spivak, The Houston Press

Not liking Hillary doesn’t make me sexist My lady parts do not ache for Hillary Clinton. As The First Viable Female Contender’s bid for the Democratic nomination sputters to its inevitable end, everyone and their mother/sister/daughter has something to say about the poisonous misogyny that’s apparently to blame. — Allison Benedikt, The Village Voice

How to extract Clinton? For the last week, Obama has been debating John McCain and President George Bush over how America should engage with its adversaries. A similar dilemma faces his campaign: How does he diplomatically handle Hillary Clinton’s exit from the race? What leverage does he have? If he doesn’t pressure her to get out, he risks looking weak, unable to win the nomination decisively. On the other hand, if he doesn’t let Clinton leave the race with dignity and grace, he risks alienating some of the women voters who have supported her so stoutly throughout the primaries and whom he needs in the fall.— John Dickerson, Slate

McCain’s pastor John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel. Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.” — The Huffington Post

Poisonous email campaign cuts through What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream, white America. The spread of these e-mails has forced Obama to embark on a campaign to Americanize his image and his biography. Pivoting away from his pitch to a primary election audience uninterested in flag-waving and nationalism, he’s returning to the message that first brought him to the national spotlight in 2004: the idea that his is the quintessential American story. — Politico

She DOESN’T have the popular vote Ok, I come home, check my computer, and my last Black nerve has been snapped. Hillary Clinton and her merry band of lying snakes continue to perpetrate THE LIE that she is ahead in the Popular Vote count. SHE IS NOT. The ONLY way that this is possible is if they count Florida and Michigan – two illegal contests. — Jack and Jill Politics

Canary in the coalmine McKinnon, the Democrat-turned-Republican ad guru who worked for George Bush in 2000 and 2004, became one of John McCain’s most loyal — and most influential — advisors over the last year. (Along with four other senior aides, McKinnon stuck with McCain last summer when the Arizona Senator’s campaign seemed doomed.) But he’d said from the outset that he didn’t want to work on a general election campaign against Obama. Now that Obama is getting closer to winning the primary battle against Hillary Clinton, McKinnon has told the McCain team he’ll be leaving. — War Room, Salon