Michelle Obama

From E!:

No more View from the cheap seats for Michelle Obama.

The potential next first lady of the United States is slated to appear June 18 as a guest host on The View.

No celebrity guests have been booked yet, but we're sure Barack Obama's Princeton and Harvard-educated missus will have no trouble being heard over the most vocal ladies in daytime.

Cindy McCain shared couch space with late-night host Craig Ferguson when she performed guest-hosting duties in April.

But although Mrs. McCain beat Mrs. Obama to the coffee klatch, both have the inside track on how to stir it up—their husbands, who right this second are focusing on going head-to-head in November, have been guests on the morning chatfest multiple times.

"We treat the wives differently than the candidates," executive producer Bill Geddie told the Associated Press, adding that they invited Obama on as a guest but that she requested the same role given to McCain. "We're tougher on the candidates than we are on the wives. We're trying to get to know them."

Cindy McCain

From The Slate:

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, released his 2006-07 tax information in April, but Cindy Hensley McCain, his wife of 19 years and heiress to a lucrative beer-distributor fortune, did not. (The couple files its tax returns separately.) Cindy refused to make public her tax returns "in the interest of protecting the privacy of her children." Last week she relented a bit and the McCain campaign released a two-page 1040 form from her 2006 return (below and on the following page), showing that she paid $1.7 million in federal taxes. The candidate's wife requested and was granted an extension to complete her 2007 return.

Cindy's annual income for 2006 was more than $6 million, including $4.5 million from "rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, [or] trusts" plus over $1 million in capital gains and dividends. Her Schedule B, D, and E forms would shed light on the latter but were not included in the disclosure. Clearly, though, Cindy would benefit from her husband's tax-cut plan, which includes lowering taxes on dividends and capital gains to "promote saving" and to "channel investment dollars to innovative, high-value uses."

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Hillary Clinton

From CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman rejected a report that she will acknowledge that her rival, Sen. Barack Obama, will have enough delegates to capture the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday night.

Sen. Hillary Clinton trails Obama by 159 delegates and is 201 delegates shy of capturing the nomination.

Clinton said she was "absolutely" not prepared to admit Obama has beaten her in the race, according to Terry McAuliffe, her campaign chairman.

Media reports saying she was ready to concede was "100 per incorrect," he said.

Obama "doesn't have the numbers today, and until someone has the numbers the race goes on," McAuliffe told CNN, denying a report by The Associated Press that a concession was near.

Clinton continues to fight Obama in the Democratic primary season. Some 61 contests over five months will end Tuesday as Montana and South Dakota hold primaries.

Only 31 pledged delegates are at stake in those two contests.

Obama is just 42 delegates shy of the 2,118 now needed to clinch the nomination. There are not enough pledged delegates at stake in Montana and South Dakota to put Obama over the top, but a rush of endorsements by the remaining undeclared "superdelegates" could allow him to claim victory when he takes the stage in Minnesota Tuesday evening.

Superdelegates are the approximate 825 Democratic governors, members of Congress, and party officials who each get to vote in the delegate nominating process. Around 200 of them have yet to endorse either Obama or Clinton.

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