The National Federation of Independent Business is generally treated in the press as the official practically apolitical voice of American small business (and the press treats the word of "small business" with almost as much reverence as that of military generals) but it is, in fact, a conservative lobbying organization that has spent decades fighting for anti-labor, anti-environmental and anti-consumer policies, all in the name of protecting our cherished "independent businesses."

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Republicans brought Marshall up 35 times yesterday, with unrepentant racist scumbag Jeff Sessions and Arizona's Jon Kyl leading the charge against that terrible activist liberal judge who hated the Constitution. (Later, asked to name any single Marshall decision or opinion they disagreed with, Sessions and Orrin Hatch and Tom Coburn could not, really. Because that would've given away the game.)

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"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official told Politico. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."

"We are not an arm of the White House or the DNC or a political party," an AFL-CIO spokesman huffed. "We work on issues. And if we feel like someone is standing up for working families, we support them, and if they don't, we won't.”

Halter’s out-of-state Internet backers reacted furiously. Salon’s indispensable Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of Accountability Now, which helped recruit Halter, argued that the "Democratic Party establishment" had abandoned its constituents.

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As originally described, Section 716 was supposed to force banks to "spin off" their derivatives trading operations. As the conferencing process reconciling the varying House and Senate versions of regulatory reform rumbles forward, the proposal is going through a process of "clarification." Depending on who you trust, that means the proposal is either being weakened or made more sensible.

The key aspects of the clarification are that instead of spinning their derivatives operations off entirely, banks will be allowed to move them into subsidiary operations that are required to reserve significantly larger amounts of capital against potential trading losses than before. Community banks -- defined as holding under $50 billion worth of assets -- will be exempted from the requirement. And everyone will get two years of breathing room to implement the provisions.

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Which raises profound questions about Clinton's  dogged campaigning for Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., whose comeback victory in a bitter primary last Tuesday was attributed to his support. Today, Lincoln rewarded him by joining with Republicans in a landmark vote to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Indeed, Lincoln was one of three conservative Democratic senators (along with Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska) to co-sponsor the resolution authored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

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According to Mike Allen, unions suck, and Bill Clinton rules, and also Sarah Palin rules. The mood is not "anti-incumbent," it is "anti-establishment," which means anti-big business and anti-special interests and anti-Congress and anti-White House.

That is why two former representatives of big business won big in California, of course. (Sorry, wait, that is because of Sarah Palin.) Also, apparently "anti-special interests" (unions) trumps anti-Congress (Blanche Lincoln).

TAKEAWAY: "GOP way more divided than Dems," except that Blanche Lincoln barely beat Bill Halter and everyone more or less came around to Whitman, Fiorina and Haley.

Also, USA Today says it was a tough night for political insiders (except, again, Bill Clinton and Blanche Lincoln). (Sarah Palin is an honorary "outsider.")

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First of all, though, maybe we all got a little ahead of ourselves in imagining that Halter had this thing sewn up. He was never ahead by more than a few points in a few polls. So it might be that Lincoln's comeback doesn’t need that much analysis at all. These things happen all the time.

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Lincoln narrowly escaped becoming became the fifth member of a not-so-illustrious club of incumbents who lost primary challenges Tuesday, beating Lieutenant Gov. Bill Halter in a runoff election for the Democratic nomination for the job she holds now. It was a defeat for progressives, who had longed to dump the moderate-to-conservative Lincoln; unions spent millions supporting Halter -- and attacking Lincoln for voting for NAFTA, opposing the Employee Free Choice Act and wavering on healthcare reform, among other perceived heresies. MoveOn.org kicked in another few million, and groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Daily Kos readers sent several hundred thousand dollars each. (The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile -- which almost always supports Republicans -- spent $300,000 on ads for Lincoln, though labor officials noted that the Chamber more or less let Lincoln go once the race went to a runoff.)

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11:27 p.m.: The fun now shifts to Nevada and California. Although California looks academic already; with four percent of the vote in, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman have both opened enormous leads -- more than 100,000 votes -- in their respective GOP primaries. The Nevada GOP Senate primary is the real barn-burner. With 15 percent of the vote in, Sharron Angle is three points ahead of Sue Lowden, who (at least early on) is faring better than most expected. Danny Tarkanian, who had overtaken Lowden for second in some pre-primary polls, is a distant third, with about 20 percent.

11:07 p.m.: As you've probably seen by now, Blanche Lincoln has been declared the winner. (Keith Olbermann actually made the announcement by interrupting a guest who was trying to say that there were still lots of votes outstanding and that Halter still had a chance.) Lincoln will clearly be the underdog in November against Republican John Boozman. But who knows now? No one thought she'd survive tonight.

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With closely watched elections in California, Nevada, Arkansas and South Carolina (and less well-known contests in eight other states), here's a guide -- in chronological order -- of what to watch for as the returns come in.

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The first round of voting last month left Lincoln short of the 50 percent threshold needed to win the nod outright -- as a surprising 13 percent of votes went to D.C. Morrison, seen as a protest candidate -- and set up Tuesday's election. Turnout next week could be far lower than in the first round, though, which probably doesn't bode well for Lincoln. The most committed voters are likely to be the ones who want a change; that probably means they're backing Halter.

A new poll out Friday by Research 2000 for the Daily Kos showed Halter leading, 49-45 -- slightly up from last week's result. Among people who voted for Morrison who plan to turn out again, Halter led by 10 points.

Lincoln's campaign has been pushing harder and harder on the idea that Halter is the candidate of outside interests, not Arkansans, playing up his support from MoveOn.org and big labor unions (which, though they have members in Arkansas, aren't wildly popular there).

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Lincoln was named Tuesday morning to the conference committee that will try to reconcile the House and Senate versions of bank reform legislation. That could give her another shot at keeping alive her tough language on derivatives trading, which most of Washington expects to be dropped before the bill is passed. (Democrats tried to drop it last week, but Lincoln's inability to get to 50 percent against Halter in the Arkansas primary meant they revived it to protect her in the runoff.)

Lincoln's campaign didn't have an immediate statement on the news, though they did flag it on her Twitter feed. UPDATE: Lincoln's camp sent over this statement: "I look forward to working with my Senate and House colleagues to enact much-needed reforms to Wall Street in the coming weeks. As we move forward with the conference negotiations, I will continue to advocate for legislation that will help families save for college, protect retirees, ensure small businesses can get loans and create jobs on Main Street. The Senate passed bill includes provisions that will bring a $600 trillion unregulated market out of the dark and into the light of day, ending the days of backroom deals on Wall Street. These provisions will serve as a strong starting point for these negotiations."

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Take the crucial Pennsylvania Senate contest, where Republican Pat Toomey essentially spent the last year running ahead of Arlen Specter, who had been the presumed Democratic nominee. The Democrats who were propping up Specter insisted he would be the party's best general election bet, even though his 30 years in the Senate seemed to clash with the public's anti-incumbent mood. Specter, of course, lost last week's Democratic primary to Joe Sestak -- and Sestak has, at least in the initial post-primary polling, opened a small lead over Toomey.

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Lincoln was clearly -- ahem -- banking on this idea to shore up her populist credentials. So Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, couldn't shut it down until her primary challenge had run its course, despite the hatred directed at the proposal by Washington and Wall Street's wise men. Otherwise, he'd be pulling the plug on the reelection campaign of a fellow incumbent Democrat.

Well, you know what they say about best-laid plans. Dodd announces that he is, effectively, killing the Lincoln reform on her primary day, and she goes and ends up underperforming expectations and getting dragged into a runoff. So now what?

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But don't read Tuesday night's results as a rebuke to the White House. In Arkansas, where Obama won only 38 percent of the vote in the 2008 elections, he never figured into the race. And in Pennsylvania, Specter -- who spent his career as a Republican -- was a flawed vehicle for the White House's message. A primary election in which only the most dedicated Democrats turned out hardly means a rejection of Obama.

All the support the party establishment gave Specter, after all, was mostly just payback. Specter's switch a year ago gave Democrats the 60th vote they needed to overcome Republican filibusters (after Al Franken was finally seated), and his support before that had helped pass the economic stimulus. By now, though, Specter isn't the 60th vote anymore; Obama didn't even care enough about whether he won or lost to risk a late campaign appearance on his behalf. Sestak -- who stubbornly resisted entreaties to quit the race -- hammered Specter constantly for cutting a deal for the White House help. But he also said he wants to be Obama's "closest ally" if he makes it to the Senate. That doesn't exactly sound like an anti-White House message.

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Polls in Arkansas don't close until 8:30 pm ET, but most observers are already predicting that a June 8 runoff election between Senator Blanche Lincoln and challenger Bill Halter will be necessary. Meanwhile, Lincoln's left-pleasing derivatives-regulating amendment to the Senate bank overhaul bill was supposed to bolster her support with the Democratic base, so it couldn't be killed until she won or lost her primary.

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Lincoln's lead in the most recent polls tends to be in the 10-point ballpark. She was ahead of Halter 46-37 percent in a Research 2000 poll this week and 44-32 in a Mason-Dixon survey two weeks ago. Her real challenge on Tuesday, though, isn't to outpoll Halter -- it's to clear the 50 percent mark, in order to avoid a runoff. (Arkansas is one of 10 states, almost all located in the South, that requires the top two finishers in a primary to go to a runoff if nobody breaks a certain percentge.)

In a two-person race, the winner would, naturally, break 50 percent. However, unbeknownst to many national observers, this is a three-person race: The other candidate is D.C. Morrison, who’s been running to Lincoln’s right and employing a variety of Tea Party-ish talking points. Morrison polled at 6 percent in the Research 2000 survey and at 7 in Mason-Dixon's.

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The five biggest Wall Street banks have had the derivatives market (derivatives are bets on whether the price of certain assets will rise or fall, bets thereby "derived" from asset prices) almost entirely to themselves. Last year their revenues from derivatives trading totaled a whopping $22.6 billion. Their advantage comes from their large size, plus government insurance of their commercial deposits that allows them to raise money more cheaply than other financial institutions.

Derivatives lie at the point where the basic saving-and-lending function of commercial banking meets the private casino of Wall Street investment banking. You and I subsidize the biggest players in the casino who, precisely because we subsidize them, have grown too big to fail. The Glass-Steagall Act once prevented the casino from using commercial deposits, but since 1999, when Glass-Steagall was repealed, the game has exploded. That’s part of the reason the giants on Wall Street could make wild bets that ended up threatening the entire economy, costing millions of Americans their jobs and savings, and requiring a massive taxpayer-financed bailout.

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Word from Arkansas is that private polls continue to show Lincoln flirting with the 50 percent mark that she'd need to win next Tuesday's primary outright, without getting into a runoff. Halter allies hope all the people who say they're backing businessman D.C. Morrison (running as a sort of "pox on both their houses" longshot) in polls actually do show up, because that could help hold Lincoln's total down. But the relentlessly negative tone of the TV ads in the campaign, coupled with Lincoln's realization that she actually had a fight on her hands, appears to have helped her consolidate her base while alienating people from Halter a bit.

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Lincoln's reelection in an increasingly conservative state looks like a long shot. Her negatives are horrible. Halter may benefit from general anti-incumbent fervor, but a more liberal candidate probably won't do much better with the Arkansas electorate than a "moderate" like Lincoln. So are liberals throwing away their only shot at keeping a Senate seat in a conservative state?

I don't know. But the more Halter raises, the better off we'll all be. After she killed the public option and came out against the Employee Free Choice Act, the threat of a credible primary challenge delivered Lincoln's vote on healthcare and even got her to take a hard line on derivatives in financial reform.

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