Last month, MotherJones.com broke the story that a private security firm, Beckett Brown International, had spied on Greenpeace and other environmental groups while working for its corporate clients. In today's New York Times, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser cites the Beckett Brown story and others like it, arguing for congressional hearings on corporate espionage. Doesn't seem hearing-worthy? Maybe you don't know the full story of Beckett Brown. From the piece:

BBI, which was headquartered in Easton, Maryland, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, worked extensively, according to billing records, for public-relations companies, including Ketchum, Nichols-Dezenhall Communications, and Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin. At the time, these PR outfits were servicing corporate clients fighting environmental organizations opposed to their products or actions. Ketchum, for example, was working for Dow Chemical and Kraft Foods; Nichols-Dezenhall, according to BBI records, was working with Condea Vista, a chemical manufacturing firm that in 1994 leaked up to 47 million pounds of ethylene dichloride, a suspected carcinogen, into the Calcasieu River in Louisiana.

Or what about this, from an internal Beckett Brown document cited in our piece:

Received a call from Ketchum yesterday afternoon re three sites in DC. It seems Taco Bell turned out some product made from bioengineered corn. The chemicals used on the corn have not been approved for human consumption. Hence Taco Bell produced potential glow-in-the-dark tacos. Taco Bell is owned by Kraft. The Ketchum Office, New York, has the ball. They suspect the initiative is being generated from one of three places:

1.Center for Food Safety, 7th & Penn SE

2.Friends of the Earth, 1025 Vermont Ave (Between K & L Streets)

3.GE Food Alert, 1200 18th St NW (18th & M)

#1 is located on 3rd floor. Main entrance is key card. Alley is locked by iron gates. 7 dempsters [sic] in alley—take your pick.

#2 is in the same building as Chile Embassy. Armed guard in lobby & cameras everywhere. There is a dumpster in the alley behind the building. Don't know if it is tied to bldg. or a neighborhood property. Cameras everywhere.

#3 is doable but behind locked iron gates at rear of bldg.

Want more of the dirty details? Read the full story.

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"We've let states like Kentucky and West Virginia slip out of the Democratic column for too long... [it is] so important that we count the votes of Florida and Michigan. It would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states."

In Clinton's speech in Indiana moments ago, she made it clear that she isn't quitting the Democratic race in the face of tonight's disappointing results. (The fact that the Clinton press office blitzed out an email to reporters spinning the night's results suggests the same.) West Virginia's primary is May 13, Kentucky and Oregon are May 20, Puerto Rico is June 1, and Montana and South Dakota bring up the rear on June 3. Obama will likely get beat badly in West Virginia and Kentucky (polling shows him getting murdered in both states). If you accept the conventional wisdom forming by the minute that Hillary Clinton has no path to the nomination, and if you accept the idea that the superdelegates' primary role is to officially hand the nomination to the best and most likely candidate, in order to protect him or her from dangerous primary challengers, the logical time for the superdelgates to step in and start endorsing would be... now.

That said, Hillary Clinton's supporters have shown time and time again that they are most willing to step up for their candidate when she is in trouble. The post-loss fundraising appeals from Bill and Hillary really open up the pocketbooks. Furthermore, as I've said before, the Clintons are at their best when their backs are against the wall.

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If you're following the primary tonight, you've probably seen the news on TV: Obama has won North Carolina, in what appears to be a decisive victory, and Indiana is too close to call.

Here's what the exits are saying. In North Carolina, Clinton won white women 64-32 and white men 54-40. In Indiana, she won white women 61-39 and white men 58-41. Those numbers are roughly equivalent, and would suggest that the results from both states ought to be the same. The reason they likely will not be? The size of the black population. In North Carolina, blacks are 33 percent of the vote. In Indiana, they're just 15. In both states, they went for Obama by over 90 percent. The takeaway: racial voting blocks acted in consistent fashion across states today; it was their size that made the difference.

Comparing today's numbers to Ohio's should give us a fair sense of how the race has changed since March 4. In the Buckeye State, Clinton won white women 67-31 and white men 58-39. That means that Obama is doing slightly better nowadays with white women and roughly the same with white men. It's hard to read too much into these numbers, because the differences in question are probably just barely outside the margin of error, if they are at all. That said, the fact that Obama is doing as well with white voters as he did before the Reverend Wright situation really took off (he may even be doing slightly better!) is a sign of good things for Obama.

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The White House acknowledged in a court filing last night that it no longer has backup tapes of email from between March 1 and May 22, 2003, a period that includes the beginning of the Iraq war.

Yesterday's filing (PDF) is the latest development in the ongoing White House emails lawsuit, in which two non-profits, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA), are suing to force the administration to recover any missing emails and institute a more effective email archiving system. (For the full story on the missing emails, check out our missing White House emails index.) The filing comes on the heels of several seemingly contradictory statements by administration officials about whether the allegedly missing emails are available on backup tapes. The court had asked the administration to clear up the confusion by clearly stating which backup tapes it does and does not have for the period between March 2003 and October 2005.

In their filing, administration officials claim they have 438 backup tapes for the period between May 23, 2003 and September 29, 2003. The White House stopped its foolish policy of recycling backup tapes in early October 2003, so all the backup tapes made after that date are supposedly preserved—some 60,000 of them. But even the emergency recovery backup tapes the White House does have are far from a fool-proof source for recovering missing emails. Any email that arrived and was deleted in between backups wouldn't be preserved, since backup tapes take a digital "picture" of the data on a drive at a given time. And while that problem applies to all the backups, it's especially concerning for the period between May 23 and September 29, 2003, for which the White House says it has 438 backup tapes. That is a low number of backup tapes per day for an entity as large as the Executive Office of the President, so backups may not have been made for all offices in the EOP on all days during that time. Even if backups were made every day for every component of the EOP, emails could still escape archiving if they were sent, received, and deleted in between backups.

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