Yet another interesting piece, separating fiction from facts by By Al Giordano. 
I turn on the TV, read the political columnists (and a significant number of analytically-challenged bloggers, too) and all I hear is a bunch of white folk prattling on about their favorite narrative: “Obama’s losing white voters!”

They’ve swallowed the Clinton racially-obsessed spin, hook, line and sinker. Some, because they are gullible, haven’t an original idea in their little pea brains, and follow the pack of what everybody else is talking about. Others, because they like to toss around knowing falsehoods. Nary a superdelegate can go on Fox News without being berated by an anchorperson screeching (this is pretty close to an exact quote): “But your duty as a superdelegate is to select the most electable and that’s Hillary Clinton!” That these anchorpersons are Republican partisans openly cheering for Senator Clinton is our first clue of the game afoot. One of the major successes of Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos is that it has got all the right-wing pundits and reporters marching lockstep behind the effort to give Clinton enough oxygen to keep slashing away at Senator Obama, who remains the prohibitive likely Democratic nominee.

Read more here

To be fair, mcc doesn't ever really talk about lasers (although he/she does talk decent science).  Here is what a laser really does...and it's consequences. 

http://www.chem.purdue.edu/Dian/research.htm

It's a little long but I'm a scientist, not an

auteur.  Enjoy.

Obama captures the coveted Tom Hanks endorsement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68CKnirCxak

Hanks does a nice job with this. It looks like he produced it himself. It's been a good day for pro-Obama video clips.

I'm only sorry that my "Is Tim Russert the Reincarnation of Heat Miser?" video post died an early death. Will you ever look at Tim Russert the same way again? You decide:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqMrKuTZtNg

Everyone knows "speak softly and carry a bit stick", as people remind me on Hillary's Iran comment, but here are a few others worth noting. (There are more, Google them. Better yet, read his speeches and ideas).
------------------------------------------------------------
Teddy Roosevelt:

"The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly."

"Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace. "

"I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also."

"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things."

"The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice."

"The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer."

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. "

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer "Present" or "Not guilty."

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.

Every now and then I find myself discouraged with the state of the nominating process. The side issue distractions, the polls, the surrogates, the media coverage, etc..

I have to remind myself of the big picture. In reality the nomination has been settled for some time.

Super delegates are just trying to figure out how to address this fact without alienating voters, supporters and contributors. So many news sources have been portraying  this race as still a close contest, many are unwilling to admit even the possibility of defeat. It's understandable.

It can be easy to succumb to the petty and just plain wacky political coverage.  Just when I'm ready to throw up my hands in indignation I come across something honest. This has happened to me twice recently. Today it came in the form of this article:

http://www.slate.com/id/2190556/pagenum/all/#page_start

An honest assessment of the state of the race was just what I needed after a long and tiring week.

99% of the vote in and Cazayoux has a 3000+ vote lead!!!!!
Congratulations!!
Looks like the sleazy attempt to link him to Pelosi and Wright failed!!

       http://www.myspace.com/tomhanks

Inspired by the awesome debate in Healthcare as Good Business, linked here,

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/05/universal-health-care-is-good.php

I wanted to continue the discussion about liberal ideals as good business.  Moreover, I want not only to market liberal policies as common sense, and appealing to the right, but all liberal values as such.  I want to take “liberal” back, we are much stronger than the current perception.  The Left is stronger on almost all topics, and agrees with the vast majority of American people on important supposedly weak Liberal issues including security, foreign policy and religion, than the Right.  Despite what the media tries to tell us, Liberal values are the real reflection of the majority of Americans.  I will blog on these topics later if people like this post.

But lets talk the economy.  Im a converted republican leaner and CPA, so this is a topic that kept me in chains with the GOP until events called on me to educate myself on realities behind the hype.  Good business is a powerful marketing concept for any Dem platform, as Desidero saw with the well received post. 

So to begin, we all know the economy has done better under Democratic presidents in recent memory, deficits have grown less fast and stock markets done better.  But even on traditional issues of Liberal concern, Dems have very persuasive arguments for fiscally conservative counterparts that they in fact have the stronger position, one that is more economically beneficial.  Consider:

 
Universal Welfare.  Healthcare makes us more able to work, helping the economy.  Child welfare is important to our economy, up to 25% of our country’s children live in poverty.  
 

http://www.heartsandminds.org/articles/childpov.htm

Your income and neighborhood are some of the biggest determinants of how well you will do in life, so more money invested means more productive future workers.  Yet we invest in children’s financial well being shamefully poorly.  Our poverty rates are among the world’s best for seniors, terrible for children.  Why?  After welfare reform, people got left out, whereas social security is universal coverage and beyond “Liberal” labels.  People feel less angry about senior free rides, after all we will all be less able older citizens someday and will hope to depend on the good nature of younger citizens to care for us, even though we can’t pull our weight as much as before.  But this justification is just marketing.  Considering the amount of a welfare check is hardly enough to live on, much yet to incent people not to get a job, there is much less free riding than there is resentment of the possibility.  But Liberalism has solutions good for business there too- make them work, like in Holland.  They create jobs just to employ people.  Such a program would add another $2 billion to our tax burden, but hey, get out of Iraq and we can fund that in one week.  Plus, don’t forget workers actually contribute stuff…
 

Deregulation.  Oh the burdens of laws.  Sure, they can go overboard and restrict progress, but much of the deregulation we have seen in the past few decades has its most major societal impact not on heightening progress, but restricting it.  Consider the relaxation of ANTITRUST laws.  These laws don’t help foment competition- we can all agree competition helps the economy right?- it helps crush competition, innovation and progress.  Further, relaxing pollution laws doesn’t help the economy overall, it helps owners of corporations make money, and passes on a bigger bill to the public to clean up.  Yes, Big Pharma may benefit from medicine sales to treat those poisoned by pollution and additives (all of us), but the cost we bear has increased as a result, overall bad for business, but good for owners of polluting corporations and other entrenched interests.  And we haven’t even begun to talk about the last three recessions are directly correlated to the Right’s deregulations in housing (2008), financial sector (late 1990s Asian monetary collapse) and the S&L crisis (early 80s).  Of course, if you ask Joe Scarborough, or McCain, it was due to greedy speculators flipping houses.  
 

Environmentalism.  The Right has been blocking solutions to global warming since the day it began.  They claim its bad for business.  No.  Innovative solutions are good for business and help fuel the economy and our economic leadership in the world.  It is bad for Big Oil and The Big 3 automakers though, for example.  Not because they cant make money selling things like the electric car (someday), but because its RISKY.  They have a good thing going with the whole oil thing, they have the market controlled, game theory says milk that until its gone.  Sure, they could jump to making innovative cars running on saltwater (yes someday this could be possible!), but your company isn’t made up of creative Silicon Valley types.  And if they do develop the market and the right technology, the new market will attract competition and making additional profit from the risk over the long haul.  Environmentalism is better business overall, just not for the companies making money killing the planet.  We don’t need to kill whales to have a thriving economy, sorry Dick.

Taxes.  Thanks to the Iraq War, Dems don’t have to defend an increase in taxes to fund many programs, such as infrastructure relief, education et all.  Whether it’s a reduction in the deficit or increase in current taxes, the overall burden on the average American would be lower post war.  Most of the tax controversy has been and will be, war or not, that the richest Americans basically lie about the middle class impact to get the support needed.  See the Death Tax discussion of 2003.  Notice today how the talk about taxes centers on capital gains, yet McCain’s more regressive tax plan is left unfettered.  The truth is the Left’s tax plan has been more fiscally responsible, the Right’s propaganda about tax and spend Liberals more effective.  But we are factually better on this issue that the GOP.  Yes, higher taxes haven’t stimulated the economy since the days of FDR, but Liberals championing rollbacks of tax cuts for the richest Americans is good business, lest we overburden future generations with more irresponsible debt.  Unpopular for Rupert Murdoch, but better overall.  Thank God we can prove that trickle down isn’t good for the economy, but, as George Senior said, it is voodoo economics after all.  

If you liked this discussion please recommend!

 Today, I worked as a monitor for Obama at an early voting site here in the ol North State.  Last day of early voting, last day to register and business was expected to be good, which it was.   

They state campaign is focusing its efforts on getting its volunteer lawyers properly credentialed (i.e. inside the polling place) on Tuesday, so those of us who also volunteered for extra duty this weekend were told to charge up our cell phones, slather on the sun screen, grab a handful of fliers and, unless something untoward happened, plan on spending most of the day  the legally required distance from the door outside the polling places. 

Nothing like getting off the net and out among some real people--both in the corporeal sense and in the not politcal junkies getting upset over every poll--to restore your perspective. 

Last night, I zinged a few barbs around here, did my post about Hillary's gas tax thing and watched the NC Jefferson Jackson "dinner" (Dinner indeed.  I didn't see no food.) on CSPN.  I had to mute Hillary because I couldn't stop imitating her speaking style every other minute and it scares the bejesus out of the cats when I do that.  Because of that, I also missed the booing at the mention of Easley's name, Hillary being taken aback by chanting for Obama and Hillary's supporters walking out before Obama spoke (and, hell, maybe they were just lining up for the bathrooms--it did drag on a bit).  Obama seemed to have caught Hillary's laryngitis, a common campaign trail malady but he got em wound up by the end. 

So basically, I had a good wallow in the acrimony last night, read my monitor manual and some memos from the state board of elections sent by the campaign and hit the sheets. 

And worried about the acrimony. 

That acrimony's like "sword fighting" with sticks when you were a kid.  All good fun until somebody gets hurt, as someone inevitably does.  And lately, as much fun as I've been having with the acrimony, I have been increasingly worried that the party and, more importantly, that realignment election I'd been hopefully predicting, were going up in smoke.

So today, I got to see some real voters, lots of them, actually, and I think maybe we're still going to be okay. 

My early voting location was a county library extension in one of those communities that likes to think of itself as still being rural and Mayberryish, but has really been a bedroom community for the city for about thirty years. For an Obama supporter, there were lots of things you could see as encouraging.  A long, yet cheerful, line.  A good, strong, enthusiastic turnout by African Americans and a lot more young people than I'm used to seeing. There were also a surprising number of those famous working class white women  who were firmly in the tank for Obama.  Surprising, that is, if you didn't know North Carolina and the endemic antipathy for Hillary among its women.  And, by the by, as a point of interest, if Hillary's got any ground came in North Carolina, I saw no evidence of it in my little microscopic slice of the election today.  

While I was passing out my pamphlets  and answering (often correctly) questions about registration, I had a nice chat with a lady from the teacher's union who was handing out their endorsements in the down-ticket races.  She was a middle aged Republican mom who's switched so she can vote Democratic but is torn between Obama and Hillary.  She asked me to talk about why I was for him and I did.  She's not crazy about Obama's preacher, but she just doesn't feel like Hillary can be trusted.  But on the other hand, she doesn't care a lot about the preacher, she says she disagrees with her own pastor all the time. Later, her relief, an older lady with whom I shared my cooler of drinks--of course I brought one, it's May in North Carolina--allowed as how that she'd voted for Hillary but her husband's vote for Obama had canceled it out. 

I also met several actual Obamaicans today.  Flinty-eyed mustachioed Dale Earnhardt worshiping Republican white guys who like Obama a lot. They weren't changing their registarations, and were there to vote down ticket races in the primary, but thery're in the bag for Obama in the fall..  This is a real phenomenon, not just a PR thing.  Their disgust for Bush was palpable and it has rubbed off on McCain.  The Republicans truly have absolutely no clue regarding the extent to which the ground has shifted beneath their feet.  (Heh heh heh.)  I was worried that they would be the first people we lost, but they're holding fast.  They're not going to get fooled again. 

Above all, though, I was reminded that most people don't have time in their lives for the acrimony between Obama and Clinton supporters online.  If Obama is nominated, the Hillary supporters in the real world will get over it and vote for him. I only met one women who gave the impression of someone who'd be too angry to do so. 

My two best moments were these: 

First, a tough, tough looking short haired lady in a rodeo buckle and cowboy boots wearing a shirt that said "Are you going to COWBOY UP or just lay there and bleed?" took my literature despite looking to be squarely in Hillary's prime demographic.  I told her I want to buy one of those shirts for every damn person in the Democratic Party this year and she understood what I mean. 

Are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed?  Damn right.  

Second, the best moment of all came as closing time approached.  A thirty something African American woman who had just voted came up to me and sincerely thanked me for what I was doing.  I confess I got a little verklempt.  It made me feel like the simple fact that a lot of whites believe, and are capable of believing, that Barack Obama is the best person for the job of president meant a lot to her, and, by extention to a lot of black folk.  It was a reminder to me that come January 20, 2009, we will all look at each other differently if we elect him.  It was a reminder that, if we elect him, a  slender, desparately needed, bridge of trust will be thrown over the abyss of hurt and mutual suspicion that has separated black from white for decades.

It's not the main reason I'm for Barack, but it's no small thing.  Not a small thing at all. 

And, hey, in closing, I just wanted to give a shout out to Billy Glad for his  "Canvassing For Anybody But McCain" blog today.  He may be one of those People's Front for the Liberation of Judea bastards rather than a Judean Popular Liberaton Front hero, but, somehow, reading his blog just added to my feeling that maybe we're going to be okay after all. 

Because when all is said and done, and the pledged delgates are pledged and the supers have supered, the real question, the important question is, after all, whether we're  going to cowboy up, or whether we're just going to lay there and bleed. 

a diary from someone at Daily Kos who was in Indiana for a new speech by Obama  which, if you're really down from watching MSM, will give you a lift
Obama's Indianapolis Speech: "Where is that America today?"http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/3/14811/66660
and
Check out this really good piece from Indiana  `Observations from the Center of the Political Universe`
http://www.howeypolitics.com/

"Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the favorite, Big Brown. Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter."

Source: Halpern, The Page

From DemConWatch:

• Former state Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum, an Obama supporter, has been selected as the add-on from South Carolina.

• Maryland has chosen former Gov. Parris N. Glendening and former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend as its add-ons. Townsend is a Clinton supporter, and Glendening is backing Obama.
  

• New Mexico State Party Chair Brian S. Colón endorses Obama.

• Louisiana has chosen New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin as its add-on superdelegate. Nagin is uncommitted.

In other news, Guam's pledged delegates split 2-2. There are two special Congressional elections in Louisiana today; if the Democrats pick up either seat (one pickup seems quite possible), that would mean an additional LA superdelegate.

Results from Sec. of State here

It's not looking good for dear Gilda.  With 18 of 505 precincts reporting, Scalise is winning 71-26.  Analyst Greg Rigamer on WWL is declaring that Steve Scalise is the winner of the 1st Congressional District race. But hey, they've been declaring that since the race began.  Self-fulfilling prophecy, much?

I am now officially an Obama supporter.  I voted early for him yesterday (So did the woman next to me who let that admission slip in a conversation with her friend.  Older, white woman by the way).

Anyway, I'm in the college town of Lafayette, and as you can expect there is a lot of support for Obama on campus.  I'm a professor at Purdue University (Chemistry, just so you know I'm not trying to be some policy wonk, just what I see), and while I try very hard not to influence my students with my personal politics, it's also very hard to ignore the student organization for Obama.  This is a fairly conservative campus, but the organization for Obama is fierce.  I haven't personally seen a single flyer, rally, meeting call for Clinton on campus (or McCain for that matter, but that could be justified in that he is garunteed the nomination).  Many for Obama.  I will let you interpret that as you will.

The television ads in this market are just starting to go 2:1 for Obama.  Clinton was following most Obama ads (leading a few) early in the week.  Friday and Saturday I personally haven't seen any.  Please take this with a grain of salt, I'm only trying to report 'what I've seen' as a viewer in IN.

Instead, something more intersting has been cropping up.  Almost half of Obama ads that I've seen have been followed imediately by American Leadership Project Ads.  Most of the early (Thursday and Friday) Obama ads have been hitting Clinton on the gas-tax-holiday.  About half of these have been immediately followed by the American Leadership Project sponsered ads that say that Obama doesn't offer specifics, and they give a number to call to 'force' Obama to give specifics on his policy issues.  The intersting thing is that they give a Washington DC number (202 area code) to call rather than the free number from his campaign web site.  I'll call the number at some point when I can catch the ad (if even can anymore) and see where it leads.

Furthermore, you can see Obama ads pretty much everywhere.  Network channels and cable channels (much of my viewing is on cable channels, take that for what you will)

Now, the above was Thursday/Friday.  Today, things have begun to shift a bit.  The ads are closer (I believe snipits of) to the 'closer ads' Obama has for IN and NC.  So not any immediate ALP follow-ups.  But he has a great line in those ads: "Politics didn't lead me to working people, working people lead me to politics".  That's a great line and it's going to resonant here in IN.

Obama had a big speech today in Indianapolis.  I've read the text, it's a humdinger and getting almost no coverage nationally, or locally (I'm not in the Indy market).  You can read the full speech here:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/amandascott/gGCSJF

It's clear from the Jefferson-Davis speech of last night and the speech in Indy he's going back to the inspirational tone, but with more policy/personal details.  I think this spells trouble for Clinton.

Finally, don't forget that Indiana is an open primary where Democrats, Rebulicans, and Independents can vote for whomever they want.  This is going to favor Obama despite 'Operation Chaos'

As far as the 'Magnequench Plant' goes: Haven't seen anything yet from the local news (help here if I'm wrong).  I refuse to buy the local paper, not because they're crap, but because we have our own 'Scaife' here in IN and he owns not just the newspapers, but TV channels as well.  I won't go into that now.

In summary, I feel really good.  I think the polls are crap and I think it's because they undersample Republicans and Independents (like myself).  From where I sit there is a really good vibe for Obama in this state, and I personally think it will be His New Hampshire.

Thanks All.
cb

It seems that the good people of Guam had better things to do today than vote in the Democratic Party primary/caucus.

Out of approximately 55,000 registered voters, only 4,521 people voted. The winner? Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton by a grand total of seven votes.

Voting is a very touchy issue in Guam. In yet another bizarre footnote to our election process, the citizens of Guam can vote in the Democratic Primary, but they are not allowed to vote in the general election.

Even stranger, Guam gets to send 13 people to Denver for the convention. Five of them are Superdelegates (Guam gets five Superdelegates???). The other eight get a total of four votes. So you have a combination of Superdelegates and Semi-delegates.

To get these 4,500 people to vote Obama and Clinton spent a small fortune in television ads. Flooding the airwaves, they covered pretty much the same territory, making the exact same promises. The biggest promise? Making sure that Guamanians can vote in the next presidential election.

Apparently, it wasn’t just apathy that kept all but 4,500 residents from voting.

It seems that yesterday’s voting coincided with one of the island’s biggest annual events, the Kantan Minagof Song Festival. According to the Guam Visitors Bureau, “the public is encouraged to participate for prizes in Talaya fishnet throwing, Coconut Husking and Grating, and Tuba Drinking.”

While Tuba Drinking evoked images of inebriated brass bands, it turns out that tuba is a potent alcoholic drink made from the sap of coconut trees. Bombed on tuba, the Guamanians weren’t thinking about Reverend Wright, universal health-care or the state of affairs in Iraq. They were too busy tossing fishing nets, husking coconuts and getting blasted to worry about such mundane matters.

But the Guamanians could raise their glasses and drink to democracy. They might not have too many voters, but at least their votes counted. They’ll have more votes in Denver than Florida or Michigan.  

Guam… this Tuba’s for you!

Could anybody explain why it's a huge controversy when the Chinese government puts down violent riots (there's a video of a little Han girl being tortured, so don't question the presence of violence) in Buddhist Tibet and it's a huge controversy, but it can put down a peaceful protest in Muslim Xinjiang without any complaint outside of the rare protester in a middle eastern country (hell, the Times even buried the news on the last page of the international section when it reported the event).

Now, you might say that the "splittists" in Xinjiang are terrorists, but that would be based upon information coming from the same people saying the Dalai Lama was planning to suicide bomb China himself.

Now, the only thing I can see that really differentiates the two is the fact that the Tibetans are Buddhists and the Uyghurs are Muslims, which definitely hurts our image among Muslims, who are probably thinking "what the hell?".

Ya think maybe cable news stations and magazines favor Hillary Clinton or John McCain for President? 

If you had any doubt as to whom they support, all you need do is watch what they've been covering or talking about this weekend - before the Tuesday 'game changer' as Hillary calls it.

CNN has been showing the following stories:

Is it too much to think there was a message for Hillary in the Kentucky Derby outcome today?  That message being that now that the race is over, which it is, she really should probably get out.

You probably recall she was telling voters they should bet on the one filly in the race, Eight Belles, despite the odds.  Well, Eight Belles finished a respectible second, but was euthanized seven minutes after the race was over because she broke both ankles after her jockey was unable to get her to stop after the race.  As the jockey told the courier journal, “I tried to get her to stop,” he said. “I tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn’t stop.”
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080503/SPORTS08/80503027/1002/SPORTSSeriously. 
The winner of the race, a horse named Big Brown.

Last week I posted results of a Monte Carlo simulation I'd done of the general election using data from Votemaster Andrew Tanenbaum's electoral-vote.com.

A week has gone by, and there are new state polls of the general election matchups, so I've rerun the numbers again, running another 10,000 trials of each of a McCain/Obama and McCain/Clinton matchup. The results:
Obama wins 80.2%, averages 292.8 EV
McCain wins 17.0%, averages 245.2 EV
Electoral tie  2.8%

Clinton wins 97.3%, averages 289.5 EV
McCain wins  2.3%, averages 248.5 EV
Electoral tie  0.4%

It's interesting that despite the continuing worry that the continued primary fight is damaging, both Obama and Clinton run much stronger this week than they did last week. new polls in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania both showed large gains for both Democratic candidates, which explains the differences.

I also note that while Clinton wins a higher percentage of the simulations than Obama does, Obama actually averages more electoral votes. This is because Obama is just one point behind McCain in three big states: Ohio, Florida, and Texas. If any of those swing his way, he not only likely wins the election, he wins it bigger than Clinton likely would.

These are simulations using the most recent poll(s) in each state, and assuming a 4% margin of error for the polls, which is standard. It isn't a direct prediction of the race, but it does reflect what current polling data say. Six months is obviously a long time, and much will change between now and November. One way to estimate the possiblity for change would be to widen the margin of error, but that raises the question of how big a margin of error to use - to a point a wider margin of error makes Obama appear more competitive relative to Clinton based on current polls.

This week's data show that both candidates are certainly electable, although based on current polling data, Hillary would be a little more likely to win in November. But a lot has changed in the past week, so I plan to rerun this analysis again as new general election polls are released.

The Weekly Standard's Noemie Emery tells why Senator Clinton has been embraced by the right.

It's because she's "tough".  I guess threatening to Obliterate Iran endears one to  the neo-fascists at the Weekly Standard.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/063kvafy.asp

My wife and I just returned from voting in our Congressional District Convention/Assembly (CD6) in Colorado a few minutes go. Many Obama delegates and alternates didn't show up. We were unable to fill all the Obama seats from Arapahoe county. Campaign organizers were frantically calling missing delegates and begging them to come down to the convention. It was a close thing and the Hillary supporters were out in force.
The Assembly was in the morning and Hank Eng won the CD6 nomination. He will be running against Tom Tancredo in the fall. The Convention for CD6's national delegates, 5 plus 1 alternate, was in the afternoon and that's where we were short. Luckily, many people responded to the calls and jumped in their cars to drive down and fill vacant seats for the afternoon. We did finally get enough for Jefferson county. If they hadn't come, one of the national delegates might have gone to Hillary instead of Obama. 
Many Obama delegates are new to the process and some are missing some of the arcane steps required to actually complete the process of carrying the voter's voices forward. It seems the Hillary folk are more likely to be longtime party participants who know the ropes. In another year, this might have made no difference. This year, we need to keep our eye on the ball and follow through. 
If you are a state or congressional level delegate or know someone who is, be sure to keep in mind that the results from months ago are not always chiseled in stone just yet. It's vitally important to keep in touch and keep doing everything you can to see this through.
A last note, this is not because the Obama campaign isn't following through because they are. We got multiple phone calls and we both got letters reminding us of the upcoming conventions, both congressional and state. It's just that not enough of the delegates are following through.

According to CNN.  Don't know the break up.

I just want to compliment the ongoing process by so many TPM regulars (especially Ghengis) for starting a discussion about how the site can be less insular.  I hope that other readers will keep posting.
Also, I think Ghengis might provide some update posts on the process. 

Al Giordano has done it again.

For anyone who cares about the primary season.  If you can't click the link, here are Al's five maxims for all of us who indulge our despair.  The last two are pleas for donations to the Field, but I strongly urge everyone to send even a few dollars to each and every site you rely on in this mad season.  

The Field leans Obama-ward, but I think that this particular blog could be useful  for all of us.

<blockquote>1. Any time you cite a “national tracking poll” as supposed evidence of your candidate’s chances of victory disappearing, you must make 25 get-out-the-vote phone calls on that candidate’s behalf. (Don’t ask me how to do that: consult the web page of your candidate for instructions!)

2. Any time you fret aloud about your candidate losing an upcoming primary or caucus, and worry about alleged grave consequences (in the face of the facts that all remaining candidates have lost some contests and yet they march on), you must make 50 calls to voters in every state you mention.

3. Any time you complain aloud about what your candidate’s campaign or staff is not doing you must give at least $10 to that candidate, to make it possible for them to do more.

4. Any time you ask me what you ought to be doing you must give $10 to support the work of The Field.

5. If I take the time to provide you with an answer, you must raise $100 from your friends and neighbors to support this blog!</blockquote>

Everyone will recall that Hillary Clinton said everyone should root for the filly in the Kentucky Derby.  The race is now over.  Unfortunately, the filly, Eight Belles, placed second in the race, broke her front ankles, and was euthanised on the track.  The winner?  Big Brown . . . .

May 2, 2008 
BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist. Many black preachers I've known - scholarly, smart, and gentle in person -- uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I've known many white preachers like that, too.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of a preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it?

Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".

Alice Walker,. who is supporting Obama, will be the guest on  "In Depth" on Sunday on C-Span2 from 12 noon -3pm EST.

So again, Obama appears on Meet the Press, on NBC from 10:30Am- 11:30 AM, EST

Then
And Alice Walker on C-Span 2 from 12 noon - 3pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnMK1d9xE0.

I think this speaks for itself and is representative of responsible journalism.

From the NY Times:

Obama Solid With White Voters, Clinton Not So Much With Black Voters

The question is this: Have white Democrats soured on Obama? Apparently not. Although his unfavorable rating from the group is up five percentage points since last summer in polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, his favorable rating is up just as much.

On the other hand, black Democrats’ opinion of Hillary Clinton has deteriorated substantially (her favorable rating among them is down 36  percentage points over the same period).

While a favorable opinion doesn’t necessarily translate into a vote, this  should still give the Clintons (and the superdelegates) pause. Electability cuts both ways.

DemFromCT over at DK has a lot more:

Meet the Press Airs on NBC, from 10:30-11:30 EST.

Does Eric go home early on Saturdays or something?

Her trends are down and his are up. I think these new national polls lend credence to the electability argument. For Democrats for whom victory in the fall is of preeminent importance, the evidence speaks for itself.

http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/general_election_match_up_history

He's also moving well ahead in the head to head poll against Clinton

http://www.gallup.com/poll/106945/Gallup-Daily-Clinton-49-Obama-45.aspx?loc=interstitialskip

Everybody is sleeping in except you.  You get up early because you're not sure where the Clinton campaign headquarters in South Bend is.  And that's a good decision.  Google maps wants you to use a cross street that's not there, and you get lost for 10 or 15 minutes trying to find the storefront that houses the Clinton campaign.

The phone bank is working already,  All women.  All over 50.  The volunteer coordinators, a couple of guys and a woman are in their 20s.  You ask them how it's going.  They tell you it's tied for the state and we're losing by a point or two in South Bend.

You pick up a folder of addresses, go over the driving directions with your coordinator, and get out of the office before you get stuck with two people from Ohio who don't want to go out by themselves. 

It's a 15 minute drive out to the suburbs. 

What you're looking for is 79 voters, hidden somewhere among a couple of hundred houses in two subdivisions.  These are voters who call themselves Democrats or Independents and  haven't declared for Obama or McCain.  For all you know, some of them may actually be committed to Hillary Clinton.  With two days to go until the Primary, you're trying to figure out if any of them are going to vote for Clinton.  They'll get a call on Tuesday.  If the rest of them are going to get a call, it will have to come from Obama or McCain.

These subdivisions are not near filling stations, restaurants, fast food or any other kind of place that has a restroom.  When you pass a soccer field, you note the location of the portable toilets for future reference.

As soon as you turn into the first subdivision, you notice two things.  The houses are big and expensive, and there are no kids.  Studying the names and addresses on your list, you see that the average age out here is about 70.  McCain country.

You slap a Hillary for President sticker over the Oracle logo on your cap and slap another one under the Interstate Batteries racing logo on your windbreaker, grab your clipboard, and canvass the subdivision.  This is not an inner city neighborhood that lets you park, then walk down one side of the street and back up the other.  This is a neighborhood of culdesacs.   Long distances between the houses on your list.

Most people aren't home.  Dogs barking behind locked doors.  Flyers wedged in the screen doors.  Neighbors watching from across the street.  And none of the neighbors is on your list.

Four hours later, you've found four people firmly committed to Clinton.  Two firmly committed to Obama.  Four who aren't going to vote, five or six who can't decide if they hate Bill Clinton or Jeremiah Wright the most.  The rest of the people you talk to are undecided.  What's important to them?  Nothing much.  Just undecided.  Going to wait to make up their minds.  You pitch the economy and they agree.  You pitch the healthcare and they agree.  You pitch the supreme court and they agree.  And you suddenly realize you're pitching anything and anybody but McCain.  Hell, you even pitch John Edwards when you run out of things to pitch.  But these people are undecided.
 
The last house is the home of a middle-aged woman. When you ask her for her vote she says:  You've got it.  It's a positive note to end the day on. 

When you get back to the campaign, the phone bank is still working hard.  There are two men making calls with the women now.  The coordinator says:  How did it go?  And two of the women stop talking and look at you like they really want to know what you think about how it's going.  And you know what they want to hear.

If you watched the complete speeches by both Clinton and Obama yesterday on C-Span, you may have noticed that the audience in the bleachers were divided into two sections, Obama supporters on the left, Clinton supporters on the right.
Clinton spoke first. After she spoke, more than half of that section left.
This was a major event for the party in NC. 
I think that the Obama people would have stayed had Obama spoken first.

Al-Janeera cameraman Al-Haj was detained in 2002 along the Pakistani-Afghan border. Absurdly, the American changed the reason for detaining him at Guantanamo, later saying the camerman was smuggling cash for Chechen rebels.
When Americans call journalists "unlawful combatants," all American civilians might be similarly labeled to justify their abuse. The Americans have no legal basis to use retaliatory acts against "unlawful American combatants," to engage in other Geneva violations.

American civilians, legal counsel, policy makers, and contractors could be charged, on accusation alone, without any evidence, of supporting illegal rendition and other war crimes.
American Inaction in re Chechnya Destroys Pretext For Detaining Al-Haj As An "Unlawful Combatant"
Last time we checked, Chechnya is in Europe, but Pakistan is in Southwest Asia. Based on the evidence the Americans supposedly gleaned about Europe, DOJ OLC has no explanation why the American President did not invadie Chechnya. Seeing no invasion of Chechnya, the American's excuse self-evidently fails; seeing no trial or conviction, the American's pretext for Geneva violations evaporates.

Dubious American Detentions Opens Door To Reciprocal Violations Against American Civilians
However, this isn't the end. The pretext for detaining the cameraman for six [6] years was dubious. The problem for DOJ OLC staff is one of reciprocity and retaliation under the Geneva Conventions. Once one power -- the United States -- violates Geneva and detains civilians without charges, relabels then "unlawful combatants," other nations may commit like violations.
DoJ OLC Exposes American Civilians To Like Abuses
DoJ OLC's express policy is to permit -- on accusation alone, without charges -- the detention of civilians as unlawful combatants. The DoJ OLC legal counsel, on accusation alone, could also be charged under the laws of war as being unlawful combatants. This does not advocate violence against the DOJ OLC staff. Rather, it reminds the American public the problem DoJ OLC has created for all American civilians: On accusation alone, without evidence, you may be lawfully detained worldwide as an "unlawful combatant," held without charges, never given access to a lawyer, and abused in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The American military does not have enough resources to provide front-line combat troops in Iraq the required equipment to conduct combat operations. There is no prospect that the American military can defend all civilians outside combat zones.
Americans Civilians, On Accusation Alone, Stripped Of Geneva Protections
DoJ OLC's error was to open the barn door to reciprocal, retaliatory acts against American civilians. The error was for DOJ OLC staff to "legalize" Geneva violations against unarmed civilians. The error was compounded when DOJ OLC "legalized" the detention without trial civilians who were not engaged in any illegal activity, but on accusation alone were classified as unlawful combatants.
As a retaliatory act, any American civilian, on accusation alone, may, under the laws of war, be called an unlawful combatant, held without trial, and detained indefinitely. If this happens, you can thank the DOJ OLC legal staff for authorizing the original Geneva violations against "unlawful combatants". Because of the reckless legal advice from DOJ OLC, all Americans civilians may be charged with being unlawful combatants, detained without trial, never given any access to lawyers, and denied access to evidence to expedite their release.
Reckless Department of Justice Exposes Americans To Abuse
The correct approach would have been for DOJ OLC strictly enforce Geneva. However, because of reckless DOJ OLC legal advice, and the decision of the DOJ AG not to enforce Geneva, the world without notice is authorized under Geneva to continue reciprocal and retaliatory acts against similarly designed "unlawful combatants". 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqMrKuTZtNg

TWO new closing ads from Barack Obama for Indiana & N. Carolina.  They're both TWO MINUTE ads and extremely powerful.

Indiana "Minute" Closing Arguement Ad

North Carolina "Minute" Ad

I'm sure the pro-Clinton propaganda lobbying firm of Kleefeld & Sargent will find something wrong with it.

The 2008 Election this fall will be about National Security -- Not the economy as many are predicting.

I say that because of the news we got this week that the economy actually grew by 0.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, the same as it was during the last quarter of 2007.

I also say that because President George W. Bush is out there in the public pushing that the economy is not in a recession and that we’ve always survived these slumps.

I said back in March that we had a recession; but that the two quarters were the end of 2007 and the first of this year.  We are pulling out of it now.
 
I realize that the Commerce Department says that statistic did not meet what economists consider a definition of a recession, which is a contraction of the economy. This means that although the economy is stuck in a rut, it is still managing to grow, even if slightly.

I can’t count the number of times however, that we’ve only later found out that those statistics have been revised and now show something different.  Sometime in 2009 we will be told that we, did indeed, have a recession.

Meanwhile, while the Democrats are talking about the economy today and planning on it being the number one issue in the fall; the GOP are preparing instead, for a fight about our national security -- again.

By the time October comes around gas prices will have dropped once again to something more ‘acceptable’ to Americans (probably around $3.00 mark – even though that’s almost triple what it was in 2000 when Bush took office).  Heating and air condition bills will also drop because of it being fall.  Food prices will drop because of the lowered gas prices.

General Petraeus (not sure if this will be his replacement instead or not) is supposed to return to Congress to make an Iraq ‘surge’ report in September or October.  He will most likely report a plan to withdraw some more troops. 

President Bush of course, will give a press conference saying the ‘surge worked’.  "We are bringing 20,000 troops home to their families by Christmas time."

Take note however, bringing home 20-30,000 troops will put us back to the level we were at in January of 2007.

The President, the GOP and Senator John McCain will benefit from all of it.  They will be able to claim the economy is getting stronger, tax cuts worked, rebates worked.  They’ll claim the ‘surge’ worked, troops are coming home.  We are winning in Iraq.

If the Democratic nominee (most likely Barack Obama) is able to pull out a win in November, it will have to be a discussion on the failed policies of the Republican Party, national security failures, foreign policy and universal health care and 'change' in Washington; Somewhat like it’s been over the past 8 years of elections.

In the end, if Barack Obama wins in November, which I think he will, he will need to tread softly with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The Bush administration will be purposely pushing a ‘We are Winning’ message over the Summer and Fall. 

If President Obama should make a few mistakes and things temporally get worse or things don’t improve over the next 4 years – it will be the Democratic Party’s ‘failure’ to ‘win these wars’.  History will say that we were ‘winning in Iraq’ when Bush left office.  Things got worse when Democrats took over.

I personally think we will be forced to stay in the Middle East for years to come. 

The Bush administration put us there for that exact reason.  As John McCain said yesterday – it’s about Oil.

So my fellow Democrats or Independents -- wake up.  It won't be a fight about the economy -- it will be national security.

But you have to fight. Not with pig pen Clinton hooves but you need to declare a sense of urgency and light a fire on national TV tomorrow on Russert. WE need this ended. You are using a collegiate style which is respectful but too often now - ineffective and TONE DEAF against a flamethrowing opponent.

I respect your style and your cool factor but Obama this is the time to show us you can hit back hard. You've tried to land some punches, sure. But they have been jabs and parries. Ridicule works well for you. But you need to land a punch. Not below the belt but a bonecruncher. A punch with some THWACK to get heard around the country.

This is the time. Indiana. Bayh. Magnaquench. You have the facts with you. The timing is with you. Get vocal, get urgent and light a bonfire that the media cannot ignore. Crank up the  noise machine. Get it working for you again.

She made this an issue of fact in a :30. It's on the table. Carve it up.

There may be good reasons for Democratic superdelegates to hold off on making a decision between Senators Clinton and Obama, but the national popular vote is not one of them. Over fifty years ago Jean-Paul Sartre warned us about something he called “bad faith.” We are in “bad faith” when we are free to make a decision but convince ourselves that there is something constraining us, preventing us, from making this decision. For example, those who seek advice can be in bad faith. They say that they cannot decide until they get some good advice, knowing in advance what the advice will be.

How does this relate to the so-called popular vote? Well, if we can believe a lot of pollsters and journalists, the superdelegates really want to know what the national popular vote is going to be before they can make up their minds. Until they know, they cannot choose between Clinton and Obama. But for anyone who has seen some of the (often well intentioned) attempts to calculate the national popular vote, it should be obvious that no such total will be available. There is no evil plot afoot. The simple reality is that states have chosen very different ways to select delegates. The first great divide is between caucus states and non-caucus states. And then there are the different ways in which the caucus states choose to select delegates. But although many have spent many hours focusing on the latter, these differences are really trivial. The bottom line is that any attempt to determine a national popular vote runs into the apples and oranges problem. Caucus states and primaries are different animals, and if you attempt to combine them into a national popular vote, you will short-change all of the caucus states. The caucus system simply involves many fewer participants. One can complain that it is less democratic, although no candidate did so before Iowa. But the Democratic Party did not warn the citizens of caucus states that their systems would mean reduced representation, and this is just what it would mean if pollsters create statistical Rube Goldberg devices for calculating a national popular vote.

Pollsters and journalists are free to go through all of the statistical contortions that their patience will allow. They are free to create formulas, and then more formulas. However, they should know this: they are supporting the bad faith of some of the superdelegates. They are enabling people who have a responsibility to make a decision to avoid deciding. They are giving them an excuse. They are telling superdelegates that there may be an Oz-like “metric” that can help them out of their alleged indecision. I say, let them fish or cut bait.

For more, please se http://msa4.wordpress.com/

Glad someone, somewhere is saying it out loud and looking at it honestly. For a change. 

From Slate.com:

Here's a rule I would like every political reporter, campaign official, TV talking head, and politician in the United States to follow. Go ahead and say, if you like, that Hillary Clinton retains a serious chance of winning the Democratic nomination. If you say this, however, you must describe a set of circumstances whereby this could happen. Try not to make it sound like a fairy tale.

Yes, Obama has dropped a few points in national polls, and Clinton has picked up a few points, putting her in the lead. The Gallup Tracking Poll had it 49-45 for Clinton on April 30, compared to 50-42 for Obama on April 15. That isn't surprising in a week when Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, elaborated on his most controversial statements at the National Press Club (click here for the video), prompting Obama to distance himself more emphatically ("I will talk to him perhaps some day in the future. … Inexcusable. … I do not see that relationship being the same after this") than he had earlier in a stirring speech on race.

The only number that matters, however, is 2,025, which is how many delegates a candidate will need to secure the nomination. Obama has 1,488 primary delegates to Clinton's 1,334, according to the Associated Press delegate tracker. Add in superdelegates and Obama has 1,736 to Clinton's 1,602. Obama needs 289 more delegates to win the nomination. Hillary needs 423. There are three ways to win these additional delegates:

read more | digg story

Worth clicking over and reading the entire thing, especially for the pro-Clinton propaganda lobbying firm of Kleefeld & Sargent. 

Some new pics of the aftermath of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima have come out. They are pretty awful. They are reminiscent of Auschwitz, Rwanda and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. A soldier named Robert Capp found the undeveloped film outside of Hiroshima during the occupation of Japan. I think viewing this should be mandatory for everyone in this nation. The US is a nuclear power. Every citizen should know the power they place in the hands of people like George W Bush. People should know exactly what Hillary Clinton means when she says she would obliterate Iran(a non-nuclear power, they have nuclear energy not weaponry) if they attacked Israel(a nuclear power) with nuclear weapons. Although her statement presented a very unlikely scenario, we should all be on intimate terms with what she talks about so nonchalantly. She has no problem with committing a total genocide on the entire population of Iran, despite the fact that most Iranians do not agree with the actions of their unelected rulers. She draws on the powerless rants of an impotent figurehead in order to score points with the more ignorant or evil amongst us. I would like to see someone show a picture like this to her and ask her if that is what she wants to do to Iran. She throws around murdering 71,000,000 people at 3:00 AM as if it is no big deal for a tough vetted experienced fighter like her.

Just up at Facing South:
 http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/

     Distracted by the fun of watching the Obama/Clinton steel cage, death match in North Carolina this week, I almost missed the opportunity to celebrate the five-year anniversary of "Mission Accomplished."  Five years ago Thursday, George Bush dressed up as a fighter pilot and had a real one set him down on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.  All decked out in his costume, he paraded in front of the assembled crew and press, like a kid getting ready for Halloween, and then stood in front of the now infamous banner and told the nation, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

     Anniversaries being a time to take stock, it seems like a good chance to take a break from the Democratic primaries and remember some of the Bush administration's greatest hits.  All good parties need a game.  Pin the Tail On the Donkey's always fun, but I hardly think a donkey would be welcome at a Republican affair.  Truth or Consequences is always a crowd-pleaser but it might take too long to explain the rules to the guests.  The Bush administration has taken precious little notice of either concept.  Something along those lines, though . . . how  about Corrupt or Inept?  The game is simple.  We'll look at a few of the administration's signature disasters and choose whether each was a result of outright corruption or simple ineptitude.  Ready?  
     We've really got to start with the Iraq War, being as it's pretty much the inspiration for the whole game.  To review:  After toppling the Taliban, we pivoted our focus from Afghanistan towards Iraq in order to remove Saddam, thereby allowing bin Laden to head for the hills of Pakistan and disappear into a cave.  Depending upon who you believe, Cheney or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or Feith ordered L. Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army, loosing a quarter of a million pissed-off, out-of-work young men into the countryside.  We went after these insurgents with helicopters, bombs and missiles, with scant regard for "collateral damage," a euphemistic term for innocent civilians we kill in our determination to present them with the gift of democracy.  That number, by the way, has just passed 90,000 for those of you keeping score.  We misread the role of Iran in Iraqi Shiite politics, assuming their "interference" was negligible.  To the contrary, Iran is providing arms and training multiple insurgent factions and their regional influence continues to grow.  Rumsfeld's determination to do the job on the cheap lead the administration to ignore the advice of Army chief of staff General Shinseki, who testified that several hundred thousand troops would be required to stabilize Iraq.  Shinseki was forced into retirement, years passed, thousands died and Bush eventually ordered a surge in American forces.  The list is virtually endless, but I'm getting a headache and this is supposed to be a party, so let's put Iraq to bed.  VERDICT--INEPT
     Speaking of taking stock, the New York Times reported yesterday on the study that the Department of Education released on Bush's $6 billion Reading First initiative, which he insisted be included in the No Child Left Behind legislation in 2001.  The report stated, "Reading First did not improve students' reading comprehension."  Grover Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, concluded that the program, "doesn't end up helping children read."  To be fair, Reading First does still have its supporters, including Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.  The relative merits of the program in its current form are debatable.  What is not, however, is that it has been headed by hacks who have used their positions to feather the nests of specific publishers at the expense of the students' best interests.  Chris Doherty, the Reading First director, was forced to resign in 2006 when the conflict of interests became public.  He referred in emails to backers of alternative curriculums as "dirtbags" who were "trying to crash our party."  Sen. Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate education committee, accused the administration of putting, "cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last."  VERDICT-- (too close to call, really) CORRUPT and INEPT
     Also this week, Lurita Doan, the head of the General Services Administration, which handles billions of dollars in federal contracts, was forced to resign. Not only did she allegedly use her position to steer government business towards friends, she is also accused of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from taking action that could influence an election.  A Karl Rove deputy gave a meeting at GSA in which he identified specific Democrats the Republican Party was targeting for defeat in 2008 as well as Republicans whom they deemed vulnerable.  Doan has been quoted as asking him at the meeting how her agency could be used to "help our candidates."  VERDICT--CORRUPT
     When Dick Cheney became Vice President in 2000, he left his position as CEO of Halliburton, Co., one of the largest oil-service companies in the world.  He cashed in over $30 million in company stock at the time.  Halliburtonwatch.org details the chronology of the company's truly meteoric rise to their current monopolistic position as contractors to the Iraq War.  Halliburton split its time in the 90's between making billions hand-over-fist and paying comparatively piddling fines levied against them for stock fraud and over-billing practices.  In 2001, Halliburton subsidiary KBR secured a ten-year deal with the Pentagon with no cost ceiling to provide support services to the Army.  Cheney claimed in 2003 he had, "no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years."  Well, except for the $150,000 per year in deferred compensation the company was paying him at the time and the 433,333 shares of unexercised stock options he still owned.  The longer this war goes on, the richer Halliburton gets and the more those Cheney stock options are worth.  VERDICT--CORRUPT
     George Bush's Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, chose Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 2006, to dismiss eight U.S. attorneys without apparent cause.  They were replaced by hand-picked interim appointees.  Several of the fired attorneys claimed they were being pressured to direct, or not direct, their prosecutions in a partisan manner.  A U.S. attorney's job is to police politicians.  When the DOJ tells them who, and how, to investigate, the public trust has been breached.  On August 27, 2007, after months of stonewalling, Gonzales finally resigned amid accusations of perjury in his testimony before Congress.  VERDICT--There's more than a whiff of INEPT here, but, to be fair, Gonzales brought that with him when he took over the DOJ.  His qualifications were always suspect.  CORRUPT
     Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on Monday, August, 29, 2005.  President Bush was on vacation at the time and decided to go ahead with his plans to fly to Phoenix and help John McCain celebrate his birthday.  By the time they got around to cutting the cake, the levees in New Orleans had been breached and the 9th ward was under 6-8 feet of water.  Louisiana Governor Blanco pleaded, "Mr. President, we need your help.  We need everything you've got."  Bush went to bed.  The next day, he visited the El Mirage Country Club in Cucamonga, California, as part of a drug-benefits tour, missing that day's video conference on Katrina.  Mass looting was taking place in New Orleans.  Exhausted police were being used to control the looters instead of engaging in search and rescue.  Bush was pictured playing guitar with country singer Mark Willis before returning to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for the final night of his vacation.  On Wednesday, two full days after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Bush flew over the region in Air Force One to assess the damage.  By now, FEMA staff was reporting that people were dying at the Superdome.  Ex-commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, Michael Brown headed to New Orleans in his new position as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Five of his top eight FEMA officials had also come to their current jobs with virtually no disaster experience.  The top three FEMA officials all had ties to the Bush 2000 presidential campaign or the White House advance operation.  This crack staff was responsible for an inadequate evacuation plan and a relief effort woefully short on planning, supplies, manpower and communication.  A 2006 Republican House select committee investigated the government's response to Katrina and concluded that the response to, "Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare . . ."  They judged Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff "detached" and Michael Brown "clueless."  VERDICT:  CORRUPT (in that FEMA staffing at the highest levels was yet another of the egregious examples of the Bush administration's proclivity for blatant cronyism) and INEPT
     Well, that's all the time we have for our game today.  Join us next week when we'll cover classics like Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Abu Ghraib, Pre-911 Intelligence Failures and the skewed/suppressed scientific research at NIH, HHS, FDA and the EPA.  
     For now, we'll just say, "Happy Anniversary, Mr. President."  Loved the fighter pilot costume.         And now, back to the wrestling in North Carolina.

This is from the blog, Last Kaul.

The United States Attorney overseeing the Wecht Litigiation has allegedly admitted they authorized/directed the FBI to contact the Wecht Trial jurors.

Subsequent disclosures reveal the Court did not permit release of these names. These names were sealed.

The US Attorney's office would have us believe, on chance alone, that they were able to narrow the list of potential jurors to the actual lists of jurors. This defies reason. The US Attorney's office said they only contacted through the FBI one juror.

It is impossible to randomly choose one name form a list of potential Wecht Jurors, and only meet at the home of one of the Wecht Jurors, only interview one jurory; but then explain why multiple jurors report being interviewed. The US Attorney's office is allegedly engaging in misrepresentations which should be investigated by DOJ OPR.

Putting aside the above, the issue also touches on impermissible contacts with Jury Members. 3.5 expressly prohibits post-trial contact by an attorney and a released juror. Also, the attorney ethics prohibit US Attorneys to direct others to engage in any conduct that would otherwise be prohibited by legal counsel.

Based on the US Attorney statements reported in the media, it appers there is a reasonable basis to review:

- Did the US Attorney working on direction of others order FBI agents to engage in communcations which the attorney ethics prohbit?

- Why should we believe that these "post trial interviews" are common, when the attorney ethics rules expressly prohbit this contact?

Someone in the US Attorneys office, DOJ, and White House are creating confusion. The "jury polls" which the court conduct to monitor jury deliberations are different than a post-trial interview.

So what's the mood in North Carolina? Check out this diary and clip at Daily Kos to find out:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/3/15156/60603/86/508416

My first blog here, so excuse the formatting.

But after Obama dropping almost daily, this is the first uptick in several days.

Couple this with his 12 point lead in Oregon and his 9 point lead in North Carolina, Obama has to be feeling good about having weathered another month of manufactured bullshit.
Gallup Daily: Democratic Horse Race Neck-and-Neck at 47%
http://www.gallup.com/poll/106978/Gallup-Daily-Democratic-Horse-Race-NeckandNeck-47.aspx

This is based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking from April 30-May 2, and is the tenth consecutive day the Democratic candidates have been statistically tied in national preferences. (To view the complete trend since Jan. 3, 2008, click here.)

Don't forget to watch BBC-A TONIGHT:  Martin Sheen Endorses Obama on Graham Norton Show.

From a BBC Press Release Link on BBC-America:

The Graham Norton Show episode with Martin Sheen, comedian Ed Byrne and musical guests Will.i.am and Cheryl Cole will premiere on Saturday, May 3, 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on BBC AMERICA.

The Brit talk show kicks off its third season on BBC AMERICA this Saturday, April 26, 10:00 p.m. ET/PT with Tony Curtis, Kevin Bacon and musical guest Robyn. Graham Norton takes the audience and celebrity guests one step further than other talk shows dare and this season continues that tradition.

(Tony looks terrible btw, but when he could remember, told a good story. Kevin was funny, especially when he got Graham to go find the YouTube video some guy made of him that started out nice but ended up with a stick figure of Kevin get it from behind from the guy who made the video. Very funny. Unfortunately, Youtube removed the video already otherwise I would include it).

Now back to the news.  Here's the video:

The Graham Norton Show - Episode 2 24/04/08

Martin Sheen - “It’s unfortunate that they’re beating each other up. I haven’t made a proper claim, maybe I should do it here, I’m an Obama supporter. But you mustn’t reveal it yet, Bill Clinton loved the West Wing and he still calls me his President, so I have to be careful for just a while longer.”

Guest comedian Ed Byrne - “I’m afraid that you’ve done it.”

Martin Sheen - “I’ve done it. I still think the Democrats will win. No matter which one of them comes in, the country’s ready for a change, we’ve had it. It’s just been a disaster.”

Graham Norton - “Even from a distance, we’ve noticed.”

[my emphasis]

Can't you just imagine her dismissive response? "An imaginary president endorses an imaginary candidate. Fitting."

LOL.

Will.ia.am is also one of the other guests, so I thought I'd add the video of his performance from the show as well for those who won't get to see tonight's episode:

Will.I.Am feat. Cheryl Cole - Heartbreaker (Performance)

I guess they will say anything and everything to get his campaign derailed.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/may/02/even-missionaries-botch-their-facts/

Just kidding.  But seriously, if you haven't already seen this, it's really worth a look.  I'm not usually one to write a blog only for the purpose of linking to another blog, but this needs to echo across the blogosphere.  (Can we please come up with a better word than that?)

I found it via Sullivan, and it's over on Al Giordano's The Field. He wrote it up after reading Charles Blow's op-ed in the Times today.  

Blow wrote:

The question is this: Have white Democrats soured on Obama? Apparently not. Although his unfavorable rating from the group is up five percentage points since last summer in polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, his favorable rating is up just as much.

On the other hand, black Democrats’ opinion of Hillary Clinton has deteriorated substantially (her favorable rating among them is down 36 percentage points over the same period).

While a favorable opinion doesn’t necessarily translate into a vote, this should still give the Clintons (and the superdelegates) pause. Electability cuts both ways.

And from Giordano:

So, to sum up: Look at the damn graphs. You can see that Clinton is in a staggering free-fall among African-American voters, her favorability is down 36 points while 17 percent view her more negatively than before, while Obama’s favorable and negative ratings among whites have paired at five point increases. You can even see the small dip - about two percentage points - in his popularity among whites that can be attributed to the news cycles about his ex-pastor, and see that it has leveled out and is now on a straight horizontal line (meanwhile, Clinton’s numbers among blacks continue on an extreme downward precipice). The greater context is that even including Obama’s slight dip, he’s more popular today among white voters than he ever was prior to February.

Not since Ronald Reagan has an American presidential candidate withstood such an assault in the media and seen his popularity not hurt by it, but, rather, galvanized by it. That’s what is meant, in politics, by the term “Teflon.”

A great column from Bob Herbert in today's  NYT that talks about what we should be talking about instead of all the gossip and trivial BS that the media and the candidates have become bogged down in:

May 3, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Overkill and Short Shrift By BOB HERBERT

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no doubt (and regrettably) a big issue in the presidential campaign. But what we’ve seen over the past week is major media overkill — Jeremiah Wright all day and all night. It’s like watching the clips of a car wreck again and again.

We’ve plotted the trend lines of his relationship with Barack Obama over the past two decades. What did Obama know and when did he know it? We’ve forced Barack and Michelle Obama, two decent, hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented Americans, to sit for humiliating television interviews, reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clinton on “60 Minutes” at the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

There’s something wrong with us.

Race is like pornography in the United States — the dirty stories and dirty pictures that everyone professes to hate but no one can resist. But I suspect that even porn addicts get their fill sometimes.

The challenge for the working press right now is to see if we can force ourselves past the overwhelming temptations of Wright and race and focus in a sustained way on some other important matters, like the cratering economy, metastasizing energy costs, the dismal state of public education, the nation’s crumbling infrastructure or the damage being done to the American soul by the endless war in Iraq.

A highly decorated Army ranger named David McDowell, a 30-year-old father of two from Ramona, Calif., was killed in Afghanistan this week. As I read his obituary, I noticed that he had been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq seven times. What does that tell us about our shared wartime sacrifices?

I’d like to hear a lot less about Reverend Wright and a lot more about why the U.S. can’t close the deal in Afghanistan and hardly even seems interested in extricating our G.I.’s from Iraq.

Among the many other important issues overshadowed by the good reverend is a legitimate dispute between the presidential candidates over a proposed gasoline tax holiday, to run through the summer. Hillary Clinton and John McCain favor this dopey, irresponsible proposal, which would save individual motorists a grand total of $28, but which would result in $9 billion in lost tax revenues, much of it targeted for infrastructure needs.

(Senator Clinton says she would recoup the losses with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Don’t hold your breath.)

No one with a serious understanding of the nation’s energy needs supports this foolishness. Senators Clinton and McCain have been assailed by editorial writers on the left and the right for pandering. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City was stinging in his criticism, calling the proposal “about the dumbest thing” he’d heard in a long time.

“Obama was right on this one, and McCain and Clinton were wrong,” said Mr. Bloomberg. “The last thing we need to do is to encourage people to drive more and to take away the monies we need for infrastructure in this country.”

The point here is that this was a tailor-made opening for the press to push the candidates hard on a phenomenally important question: What should we be doing in the short and long term about U.S. energy requirements?

Another issue: Economists were exhaling Friday because we only lost 20,000 jobs in April. After all, we lost 81,000 in March. Nevermind that we need to be creating millions of jobs if we’re ever going to get our economic house in order. With credit cards maxed out, real estate prices falling and enormous amounts of home equity already drained, a good job is the only legitimate way to put real money into the hands of cash-strapped families.

Americans are hurting on the jobs front. Those who are employed are working fewer hours and for less pay. Some sectors are crippled by unemployment. There are big-city neighborhoods in which the real jobless rate of young African-Americans is 80 percent or higher.

Do the candidates have concrete strategies for engaging these problems? Could we hear about them? Explore them? Critique them?

Are we in the news media going to be serious about this election, or is it really going to be all about Wright and race all the time?

Most of the electorate understands that the U.S. is in sorry shape, which is why more than 80 percent of poll respondents say we’re on the wrong track. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has nothing to do with any of that. The idea that his nonsense may shape the outcome of this election is both tragic and absurd.

During the 1950s, the scariest letter you could get was a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) chaired by one Joe McCarthy. 

The worst questions you could be asked was are you a Commie, a Pinko, a Red? Do you hang around with them? Do you know anyone who does? What are their names? 

If you're into the arts, you know those questions led to blacklists; good writers, musicians, painters, playwrights, screenwriters, directors, actors, and others were banished from the world of arts and entertainment. So were engineers and architects, and garbage men and school teachers. 

Thus, some 50 years later, one candidate is asking the same questions of another in an attempt to wrest the Democratic nomination from that candidates grasp. 

We all remember -- even if only played out once again on the local cineplex screen via "Goodnight and Good Luck" -- the seminal moment: "Have you no shame, sir?"

It is time to ask one candidate both of those questions, as she has sought to smear her opponent with the stain of guilt by association. 

First, Hillary Clinton, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Have you ever been affiliated with or employed by, or maintained a friendship with a member of the Communist Party? 

To the first question, the answer is unclear. To the second question, the answer is yes. YES. 

Carl Bernstein, noted author and biographer can provide this insight:

"I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland California, and he soon said he would like to go to California with me."

That is the total verbiage expended on so formative an experience, and the lasting -- but distant friendship -- she maintained for the next twenty-some years with Bob Treuhaft and his wife, the muckraking journalist (and, like her husband) former communist party member Jessica Mitford.

"The reason she came to us," Treuhaft told me [the quotation is in my biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman In Charge] "the only reason I could think of, because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called "Movement law firm at the time. There was no reason except politics for a girl from Yale" to intern at the firm. "She certainly... was in sympathy with all the Left causes, and there was a sharp dividing line at the time. We still weren't very far out of the McCarthy era."

Did that connection continue while you and your husband, the former President, were in the White House?

Answer: YES

Have you ever worked on behalf of any person, or group of persons committed to the violent overthrow of the government of the United States?

Answer: YES 

Let's allow Mr. Bernstein's testimony with regard to Hillary Diane Rodham's activities to continue:

In her 2003 "memoir," Living History, Hillary mentions not a word about her role in the Panther trial in New Haven--during which she directed Yale law students monitoring the proceedings for evidence of government misconduct in its prosecution of the Panthers accused of murder. "It meant going in and out of the Black Panther headquarters to obtain documentation and other information," a classmate told Donnie Radcliff of the Washington Post, quoted in Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady For Our Time. "Hillary's job was to organize shifts for her classmates and make certain no proceeding went unmonitored...[for] civil rights abuses..."

So Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton has had long-standing affiliations with persons of the Commie-Pinko persuasion and persons known to advocate for the violent overthrow of the United States government.

She would seek to destroy the candidacy of one man while hiding her own connections to radical elements far worse than a pastor who preaches a brand of theology not to her liking, and a former 60s radical with whom her own alliances and affiliations suggest a natural allegiance.

Have you no shame, madam? Have your craven quest for political significance driven you to this? Have you reached such a nadir that you would lie and manipulate to hide your own trail of shame and concoct one of wholecloth lies about another? Is your secret allegiance to the Communist Party why you do not wear a flag pin next to your heart? If by some stroke of all things unholy you attain the highest office in the land, is it your intention to overthrow the government of the United States? Is your husband also a Communist? Have you ever invited American Communists to the White House?

These are the questions we musst send to George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson. But since they have been so instrumental in aiding and abetting her, can we trust them to be True American Patriots or are they secret communist sympathesizers as well? What do we make of Mark Penn, Geoff Garin, even Chelsea Clinton? Where does this communist taint end?

If we must question the casual acquaintances of Sen. Obama, we must demand even more scrutiny of Sen. Clinton, who has known Communist associates.

After all, she started it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-bernstein/the-shame-of-hillary-clin_b_99912.html

Yes we can...Senator Obama is catching up...
Despite the fact that the media have indicated for the last 2 weeks that his campaign was in trouble, and saying that his candidacy was in trouble, Senator Obama is now catching up, and I have a sense that by either tomorrow or Monday he will be up again...
I suspect that when the Evan Bayh memo will be reported, that will impact the Clinton campaign...
Yes we can 

I've been told that Indiana's electorate is much more educated than some assume and so I've been hoping that Obama's stand against the gas-tax holiday might trump Hillary-McCain's pandering.

Today, Chuck Todd suggests that Obama might be getting some traction from this:

"Obama's gas tax pushback seems to be getting real traction in Indiana..."

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/03/976658.aspx

Julia Louis-Dreyfus posted a statement on Huff Post outlining her concerns about the latest WVWV robocall scandal:

Recently I was part of a group of women who filmed public service announcements for an organization called Women's Voices. Women Vote. The goal of the PSA campaign is to encourage high voter turn-out amongst women, especially single women, 20 million of whom have been known to stay home on Election Day. It is an issue about which I am deeply passionate. However, there have been reports about WVWV which questioned the intention behind my PSA and which candidate I am endorsing for president. For the record, I am proudly supporting Senator Barack Obama.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-louisdreyfus/a-point-of-clarification_b_99915.html

From Friends of the Earth:

Friends of the Earth Action cites senator’s stand for real energy solutions instead of sham Clinton-McCain ‘gas tax holiday’ as key reason for endorsement.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Friends of the Earth Action, a national environmental group based in Washington, D.C., announced today that it is endorsing Senator Barack Obama to be the nation’s next president.

“We endorse Senator Obama because we believe he is the best candidate for the environment,” said Friends of the Earth Action President Brent Blackwelder. “The ‘gas tax holiday’ debate is a defining moment in the presidential race. The two other candidates responded with sham solutions that won’t ease pain at the pump, but Senator Obama refused to play that typical Washington game. Instead, Obama called for real solutions that would make transportation more affordable and curb global warming. He showed the courage and candor we expect from a president.”  [SNIP] Blackwelder cited Obama’s strong pro-environment record, his policy proposals, the profile he has given global warming in his campaign, and the broad mandate he is building for change as other reasons for the endorsement. Obama earned a 96 percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters during his first two years in the Senate. Blackwelder said Friends of the Earth Action plans to inform its more than 100,000 activists in the U.S. about its support for Obama and to campaign for him in remaining primaries.  Friends of the Earth Action previously endorsed John Edwards in the Democratic primary process and engaged in early state independent expenditures on his behalf.

The first video  is his closing statement at the N.C. Jefferson-Jackson dinner. It's great. There's a "watch in high quality" link option once you get to the page.

The second video is a funny clip of Michelle Obama.

And with that, I'm going outside to enjoy the beautiful day. I've been feeling stressed and negative reading so much campaign coverage. There's a lot more to life.

From WaPo:

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina Democrats have elected a supporter of Barack Obama for an open superdelegate slot.

Former state Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum beat out 14 other candidates by a wide margin Saturday for the slot as delegates at the state convention stood to be counted for their choice.

From WaPo:

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina Democrats have elected a supporter of Barack Obama for an open superdelegate slot.

Former state Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum beat out 14 other candidates by a wide margin Saturday for the slot as delegates at the state convention stood to be counted for their choice.

It was discovered recently that the "McCain family Recipes" posted on the McCain website were in fact lifted verbatim from the food network. A tempest in a teapot for sure, but in the aftermath of the flap, a staffer was fired for doing this. Clearly, John and Cindy McCain knew from the start that these were not family recipes because they did not provide them to the staffer in question. So they knew, assuming that they had knowledge of their own web site that the whole thing was a lie to begin with. It is clear that in Washington and in the broader American culture, lying is the business of the day. There is in the whole culture a confusion of truth with PR. The media culture that has honed the art of creating illusion is in fact a culture of lying. Truth has nothing to do with it.
The recent media flap about Hillary and Bill's lie about the events surrounding Hillary's trip to Bosnia underscores again, the pervasiveness of the Culture of Lying. In an AP news article, the headline is "Clinton misstates wife's Bosnia Tale". Note the word "misstates". They didn't say lie. Look around and see how often the word "lie" is used in the media. People "misstate" things, they even "misspeak" at times. They never lie. The word "lie" has been effectively expunged from the national vocabulary. If there is no word for an untruth, there are no untruths and if there are no untruths, there are no truths. It is all a game to see whose propaganda is more effective. The truth is what you can get away with. No wonder the American people have lost their way. We have a culture of national secrecy so extreme, that even the people elected to represent us really have no idea what is really going on. To conceal their own inability to find the truth, they perpetuate the culture of lying.

Watch via the internet

Sorry, my promised post on jobs and offshoring for later.

So far lots of people have managed to pull Hillary's Iran statement out of context: <i>if Iran nukes Israel</i>. And there's a bit about Hillary being confrontational, giving ultimatums, etc.

And I start to wonder, do people have a sense that being a hardass is still part of the President's job description? 2 months after Bush's election, China forced down one of our planes onto Hainan and ended up tearing it apart and sending it back in 1000 boxes. We capitulated meekly and our foreign policy with China has been submission ever since. We meekly asked Putin for help post-9/11 and have watched as he nationalized Yukos, became a billionaire, and now is an extra-legal successor to himself - a far cry from the relatively benign cooperation we had from Yeltsin. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich fought all the way to the closing of the government. In the end, Clinton (and we as Democrats) won. The Sudan remains in bloody genocide despite years of chatting and diplomatic pressure - anything to do there?

So I'm curious about people's opinions - will we still need to act the badass (such as when Europe doesn't want to take a stand in Bosnia), or will matters be resolved in some other way? Let's talk military, global warming measures, health care, reigning in the huge deficit, whatever. Is there still a place for the hardass at the table?

This is a link, via Andrew Sullivan, to a Michael Tomasky post in the Guardian pointing out more to illustrate Clinton as the Bush stand-in.  Do you think maybe the Clintons decided that those of us in the rest of the country wouldn't find out what they were doing? http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_tomasky/2008/05/hillarys_right_turn.html

This is Rasmussen's first Oregon poll:

The first Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of the Oregon Democratic Presidential Primary shows Barack Obama enjoying a twelve-point lead over Hillary Clinton. It’s Obama 51%, Clinton 39%.

Clinton has a statistically insignificant lead among senior citizens while Obama leads among younger voters. Obama does best among upper income voters while Clinton’s strongest support comes from those who earn less than $40,000 annually.

Obama is viewed favorably by 78% of the state’s Likely Primary Voters, Clinton by 71%. Fifty percent (50%) of Obama voters have a favorable opinion of Clinton while 56% of Clinton voters hold a positive view of Obama.

Eighty-two percent (82%) say that if Clinton is the nominee, they will vote for her over John McCain in the fall. An identical number, 82%, say they will vote for Obama over McCain.

Great news for Obama.

How do you uplaod a picture?

Hillary sure is pushing hard the gas tax "relief" issue in Indiana, North Carolina, Congress... But why?

This tax "relief" may well sound convincing to the low information voter, but not to the informed Superdelegate. What is the reason that she is willing to annoy them Supers to death (that is, her own death) with this issue?

It seems to me that up until now she has been courting the Supers heavily; they were her only path to the nomination, as math clearly indicated.

I can only think that at this point, enough Supers have declared their commitments -even if behind doors- and she has become painfully aware that the Supers are no longer a viable path.

The only thing left is to go back to the math and wait for a miracle (Huckabee comes to mind here...) She has to win more delegates than Obama. Could she turn things around? Maybe, and most likely not. She would have to win the remainder States by much.

What are the chances of that happening? I have no clue. But if there was a 1% chance, she may be willing and ready to hold the fort until there is a 0% chance. In the meanwhile, what would help best than to promise anything to voters?

I just cannot understand (somebody help me, please!) why would she alienate the Supers at this point if she still needs them?

(Of course I am assuming that the vast majority of Supers can see through her gas "relief" pandering and do not appreciate her attempt to pin Democrats in Congress to the wall with her "Are you with me or with the Oil Companies?" bull. Am I mistaken here?)

I am proud to be a lifelong Democrat.  We did things differently.  We had morals.  We had conviction.  We had ethics.  That's why it was so hard to live through the Bush/Rove era.  All the things that I believe in were ignored and thought to be "quaint."  

But, in 2006 I felt that spark re-kindle.  It felt like the pendulum had started to swing back to the left.  Could that be?  It had been so long, I wasn't sure I would recognize it if it happened.  

Although originally for Edwards, the day he dropped out I gave my first contribution to Obama.  I began to listen more closely to his speeches.  I began to feel that optimism grow in me.  I started to believe that "Yes we can!"  

Just when I started to get excited that THIS time, THIS time it was different, it started.  The Clinton campaign started to become Rovian.  Instead of rejecting it, the MSM started to lap it up.  It was like a drug to them.  The more negative it got, the more they had to have it.  If Hillary didn't give it to them, they made it up, feeding off themselves.  

I started to wonder, "What made me think that this time was different.  What was I thinking to believe that the corporations who controlled everything were going to give up that power and control to us?"  

The MSM continued to pile on.  "More Wright!  More Bowling?  More Hillary quotes!"  It's as if Obama has been chummed into a feeding frenzy of negative reporting.  

What was I thinking?  Does America really want its country back?  Does America want to keep things as they've been?  Don't they want to move our country out of the depths from where it has been and put it back in the sunlight of world opinion?  

I guess time will tell, but in the meantime, someone talk me off of the ledge.       

During this year's Democratic Presidential primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton has said that she has learned from some of her past mistakes in dealing with Congress, and will use that experience as President to help her pass many of her proposed legislative reforms.

Unfortunately, recent events clearly demonstrate that Clinton has either learned nothing from those experiences, or has learned - and simply does not care. Past behavior is generally an indicator of future performance, and Clinton is certainly no exception.

Read more about this here.

Thing are looking good from Indiana.  Hopefully this weeks 'events' will be countered by not just the early voting, but in areas of Indiana that are tailor made for their Illinois neighbor.

Via the Huffington Post:

INDIANAPOLIS — Early voting in Indiana could offer some encouragement to presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who needs a victory in its upcoming primary after a tough few weeks on the campaign trail.

[snip]

About 20 percent of the 127,000-plus absentee ballots received as of early Friday were cast in three Indiana counties _ Marion, Monroe and Lake _ that political observers believe Obama is strongly favored to win.

Lake County has a large population of black voters and is in Chicago's shadow. Obama has typically won big among college-age voters, and Monroe County is the home of Indiana University in Bloomington. Obama's campaign sought out IU students with voter registration and early voting drives and a free Dave Matthews concert.

[snip]

Robert Dion, a professor of American politics at the University of Evansville, said Obama has mounted an innovative campaign that's stressed early voting and his supporters appear more energized than those for Clinton.

"In a close race, modest advantages in organization can yield big results, and if Obama out-organizes the Clinton campaign on these absentee ballots, it would be a great boost to him," Dion said.

Keep your fingers & toes crossed.  A Clinton loss would be the end of her campaign.  Period.  Finally.

I doubt he'll win it though.  I think many Republicans are voting for Clinton for the sole purpose of keeping the race going.

Maybe the breaking news today in Indiana will change it all during these last 3 days, but who knows.  The national media isn't interested in pushing this potentially devastating Clinton story since it would mean the end to their ratings bonanza.

When it is all over and done with, no matter who wins the nomination, WILL YOU VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE?

Yesterday's Insider Advantage Poll show Barack Obama's lead in North Carolina rebounding.<P>Obama went from +15 advantage over Clinton just 2 weeks ago, to a -2  disadvantage during the recent Wright episode.

North Carolina<P>The numbers, compared to the last two polls:<P>Now he's back to +5:

05/01   611 LV   49  44  Obama   +5.0<P>
04/29   571 LV   42  44  Clinton   +2.0<P>
04/14   541 LV   51  36  Obama   +15.0

This poll clearly shows the bleeding in N.C. has stopped and Obama's numbers are starting to recover.

I've noticed that over the past two months of this campaign, ever since the announced kitchen sink strategy, the narrative pushed by the press has usually been driven by taking Hillary's latest lines at face value. 

In my mind, the overarching theme of the campaign since Mini-Junior-Micro Super Tuesday 2 has been that Hillary seems to be focused like a laser and outraged about something different every week.  As the father of a daughter, I take each of these personality changes like I expect to react to my little girl's eventual crushes and obsessions in high school - What is it this week?

If this obvious pandering is plain to me, and to those of you nodding right now, why do the "experts" keep taking everything she says at face value, rather than pointing out her constant u-turns?

Seems like the kind of context that might be right up Frank Rich's alley to bring into the conversation.

Please be kind to my first post, I've enjoyed reading all of yours for years now.

Here is a link to the article in the NY Times about Burns Strider whom I mentioned in my last post.  Burns Strider is described as  "Senior Adviser and Director of Faith-Based Operations" in Clinton's campaign.

campaign.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/us/politics/03strider.html?ex=1367553600&en=cb0e05f037968dc5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

And I don’t think there is anything wrong per se in reaching out to particular religious groups.  And I do think it’s fine to point out common links between a campaign and the Christian right, for instance, in order  to point out that we all have concerns in common.  But when you use tactics which imply that you are a candidate OF the Christian right, or the extreme right in general, you've crossed a line. 

And this seems to me to be what's going on with the Clinton Campaign. Strider sounds like an instrument in the Clintons' use of innuendo and subtext and code language, another trick they have picked up all too well from the Karl Rove playbook.

Here's what Strider said at a campaign stop with Bill Clinton in a small town in North Carolina:

“It can be fun and informing or it can be painful when those core, foundational, defining beliefs and ways of seeing things enter into competition. Fortunately, faith and patriotism are generally two forces that pull us all together. Place us in communion as Americans. Their power, though, is also felt during those times when historical and cultural trauma uses them as agents that divide.”

I read this around the same time that I read this post in TPM which picked up a Bill Clinton quote from the AP.  Bill was also talking in small-town North Carolina:

"The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules," he said. "In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it."

And it seems to me that it makes Strider another tool in the Clinton campaign of “triangulating” if you will with the religious/rural right in a way that hasn’t anything to do with  issues of health care or global warming or Iraq, but has everything to do with using the religion, race, and good-ole-boy cards.  To me, this is at least as condescending as using the word “bitter”, and a whole lot more cynical.  I’d expect it from a Bush, but not from someone running in the Democratic primary.

LA-01 Special election for Congress is today, and I know it's tornado-y here, but go vote Reed anyway!

My husband is a republican (the old northeast variety) and doesn't get that they are no longer that party. Fiscal conservatives? Ha! No evidence as far as I am concerned.But the perception continues.  He seriously thinks that McCain is different than Bush and is some kind of independent. That is why I was surprised when he told me about watching  the O'Reilly interview and being extremely impressed. He told me that he thinks Hillary did herself a lot of good. He said that even when O'Reilly threw awful questions at her she calmly held her own and even managed to put him in place and show how wrong he was. He also drew the distinction about how she looked compared to how Obama looked when he was asked the same type of stupid question in the PA debate. There was no whining.  The difference was like night and day he said. I don't know that he would actually consider voting for Hillary instead of McCain but it sure opened up his mind to that possibility. 
That is why Hillary can win in November and Obama can't. Obama won't get those Reagan democrats (or most working class democrats) and we can't win without them. We saw this directly in Texas. Hillary won the general and Obama could come in and take it away only in the precinct conventions where it can be controlled by a few enthusiastic supporters. Obama then won the Wyoming caucuses, but out of 100,000 registered democrats only 8000 actually participated. All the new enthusiasm for registering and voting in these primaries is widely seen as enthusiasm for Obama. It is not. It is because for the first time these states actually count to pick the democratic presidential nominee. Am I dismissing the obvious enthusiasm that Obama generates? No. I am simply pointing out that it will not be enough in the general. 
If democrats want another John Kerry pick Obama. If they want to beat McCain, pick Hillary. It is that simple. 

As I wrote about yesterday, Guam held its caucuses today. The current results have Obama with 1,738 votes and Clinton with 1,599. This might mean that Obama picks up a single net delegate if the delegates split 2.5:1.5 for him, or it might mean he picks up no net delegates. Regardless, the Hillary winning streak (HILLMENTUM™) of 1 is over.

Results are expected around 16:00 GMT, or about noon Eastern.

can't access youTube.

i wonder...
nah.

does the clinton machine have the "juice" to shut down youTube?

I am an American living in Norway for the past 20 years who has been keenly observing the dem race.

I would also admit that I have been a Clinton supporter for many years much as most Europeans. I have read the biographies, auto and unauthorized alike.

The Clintons are politicians. A fact I have never denied or forgotten.

I was also excited by Obama and thought like most back in the fall that he was interesting and compelling as a figure and thinker.

I was quickly let down when he denied in one of the early debates that he said he would bomb another country if they would not act. I think it was Sen. Dodd and Obama said no no what I said was could not act. That was the moment that I personally realized he was well just a politician. Not a bad think as I see it, but don´t brand it otherwise.

I am now puzzled by the sentiment that Clinton is overly negative and even destructive.

I read and hear the comments about would have left the church, Farakon, Ayers, et al.

But how is this difference than say that she is not truthful, will do anything to win, hits her for being on the board of Walmart 25 years ago and constantly supporting the Republican subtext that she is dishonest and cannot be trusted.

Is the difference big? I don´t think it important, but it only becomes important when Obama claims to be something he is not, i.e. a big honking politician.

I'm feeling the allure of the shady name - "Five Twenty-Seven", which makes it sound like some sort of torture procedure, or possibly a soviet-style euphemism for assassination. 

So let's all get together and set up our own 527. I'm not sure exactly what we'd do after we've set it up, but from what I've heard, it seems like we'd be having a whole lot more fun. 

there is nothing new here to see, so lets all run duck cover and pretend that this kind of calumny is not to be tolerated by us dumb arsed white people who are supporting hillary...a doctored video sends the obama nuts, yes, i mean that literally, the ranks of obama supporters clearly support nut jobs who would crassly inject a false issue, cynically, into the national bloodstream, one already inflamed by much talk of racism, most of it having zero, nada, zilch, nil, none, help me here...all this stuff obama is suffering from,...all the unfair crap that little timmy russett potato headboy will throw at him...wright, ayers, bitters...none of it has any damn thing to do with hillary.

thus, to propogate the filth this fake video comes out, setting off the loons into full flight and voice, a loon makes a loony sound, sort of like the pod people, hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil, all is good for obama even making racist taunts and charged almost totally unsubstantiated by any rational human being.

oh, of course, its been shown to be a fake, well, too bad, when you make a racist slander even if you go back later and say, my bad, oops, the damage is there, the poison exists.

this diary will  disappear into the swamps of disregarded and distained, i can live with that, but listen up dudes, when i, as a 60 year old white guy, who pretty much has stood for fairness for all people, everywhere, human rights mean more to me than other crap, when i see people i have supported, in good faith, and still hold in varying degrees of value to society, when they are slandered, i am slandered.

we old codgers value loyalty, at least this one does, and when we see one of us...being slimed in this manner by folks speaking about change...bullshit, this aint change, this is still racism, only now spewed and sold by so called progressives, hey, if this is your "change" please take it, turn it sideways and shove it up...well, i am getting carried away here, but to make a point, you do not destroy a village to change it....you can do that, but you are going to piss those villagers off, and this really pisses me off, nobody likes being called a racist, not obama, wright, cantor, or me....give this crap a rest, run on qualifications not lies, poison and bitter cynicisms

I was shocked to read this article by the New York Times that showed that Fox actually (on average) has the viewership of MSNBC and CNN ... COMBINED!!!!

So I did a little research and what I found stunned me even more.

The top THREE Cable News shows in ALL OF AMERICA ... are Bill Orally,  Hannity & Colmes and Greta Van Susteren?!?!? 
And thats before Olbermann or Cooper even enter the picture ....

wow.

My fault for believing Adam Green of MoveOn when he called Fox News audience "puny". I honestly believed (up till 3 hours ago) that very few people actually watched Fox.

I was just wondering if anyone here can explain what it means that a station as terrible and biased as Fixed News ... commands that kind of audience.

Doesn't that lend credence to the oft-parroted claim by Republicans that America really is pretty conservative?

When the body of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found hanging in a shed behind her mother's home, my first thought was how suspicious the timing and circumstances were in light of her recent conviction.  Why commit suicide if you can eventually obtain a book and movie deal like Heidi Fleiss?  Apparently, I'm not alone.  Fellow TPMers, what's your take on this tragedy?

“There must be some kinda way out of here,” said Obama to his chief. 

There’s too much confusion,  I can’t get no relief.

Journalist, they drink my wine,  admen twist my words,

None of them along the line, know what any of it is worth.”

 

“No reason to get excited,” the chief he kindly spoke.

“There are many here among us, who understand the force of hope.

For you and they, have made this more, and it has become our fate.

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”

 

All along the circus trail, pundits sold their views,

While politicians came and went, public servants, too.

 

Outside in the distance, an elephant turns foul,

November is approaching, and the wind begins to howl.

  Cue Jimmy

I don't watch anyone associated with Fox News - it's not news. They are interested in selling, not news. Wrap your fish in the Wall Street Journal if you still get it. McClatchy is a decent news source - I still think NPR has some value - and the blogs like TPM are very important. MSM manipulates the news and commentary/opinions are constantly given by their no name/ no knowledge commentators.

I'm sorry that this story has political ramifications, but I'm not going to hide from it because -  it IS real, and this is one of the worst cases of illegal assaults cast upon our voters (and our election officials) in North Carolina probably since Jim Crowe days. Book mark Facing South's website to keep up with this quickly developing story. If this non profit had given voters accurate or good advice, and followed the law, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.  Facing South has two updates today:

Center for Investigative Reporting follows Women's Voices' political connections

Facing South May 2, 2008

Will Evans with the Center for Investigative Reporting has compiled a helpful chart documenting in detail the connections between the principals of Women's Voices Women Vote -- the nonprofit we discovered behind illegal election robo-calls in North Carolina -- and the various presidential campaigns.

As we have already noted, many of the group's top leaders have worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton in some capacity. Founder and President Page Gardner, for example, served as the deputy political director for the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign and worked on his presidential transition team. Executive Director Joe Goode was a pollster for Bill Clinton, and former Women's Voices leadership team member and strategic planner Maggie Williams is now Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.

The Center breaks new ground by showing just how heavily and disproportionately Women's Voices principals have invested in the Hillary Clinton campaign. According to the chart, they have donated a total of $34,800 to Hillary Clinton or HillPAC since 2000. At the same time, they have donated only $3,600 to the Obama campaign and $2,300 to John Edwards.

click here and scroll to the bottom about questions raised by charity watchdogs over the fact that in 2006 Women's Voices paid $800,000 -- 16 percent of its budget -- for phone services to Integral Resources Inc., whose CEO and founder, Ron Rosenblith, is Gardner's husband. The organization also paid several million dollars more to companies run by five other members of the nonprofit's leadership team.
Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy in Chicago, said that's a concern as it gives the appearance of a conflict of interest. Rick Cohen, former executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and a national correspondent for Nonprofit Quarterly magazine, added that such relationships create "the image, if not the reality, of self-dealing."]  
posted by Sue Sturgis at 1:30

Local voter advocacy groups were encouraging voters to take advantage of "same day registration" during North Carolina's early voting period. That makes WVWV's behavior even more troubling:

Facing South. May 02, 2008 Why did Women's Voices use disruptive voter registration approach in NC?
In response to our investigation of Women's Voices Women Vote and their illegal and deceptive voter outreach in North Carolina before the critical state primaries, some have defended their voter registration approach.

No one seems to be defending Women's Voices' use of anonymous, illegal robo-calls in North Carolina, or their decision to do those calls in North Carolina two and a half months after they had told a newspaper in Virginia that they vowed to stop the practice nation-wide.

This strategy -- which Women's Voices conceded could cause problems, in a letter they faxed to the N.C. State Board of Elections on Monday -- is all the more curious given that every organization Facing South spoke to that has been involved in voter registration in North Carolina has been using a much easier alternative: One-Stop Early Voting.

This voting reform, passed last year, allows North Carolina voters to register and vote all at once at over 200 One Stop voting centers across the state. Representatives from Democracy North Carolina, the NAACP, and the N.C Democratic Party all tell us they have been pushing almost exclusively for One-Stop Voting, because of its ability to capitalize on interest in elections created by the primaries, but also avoids the potential of discouraging and disenfranchising voters inherent in Women's Voices' approach.

For example, as Damon Circosta of the N.C. Center for Voter Education said to Facing South:

“Ever since the register-by-mail deadline passed, nearly every voter engagement group in the state has been pushing one-stop early voting, where you can register and vote at the same time without mailing anything in. To be pushing mail-in registration at this time is either a blunder of comedic proportions or a deliberate attempt to confuse.”

...more at the link

Call 1-866-OUR-VOTE if you experience any problems registering, early voting, or voting on Election Day. You will get a live person who can assist you. 1-866-OUR-VOTE is the only national voter assistance hotline staffed by live call center operators trained to provide state specific assistance to all voters.   Call 1-866- MY-VOTE-1 to report your votiing experience/problems or to find your polling place.  

Over the last few days I have seen several posters at TPM comment that they're getting burnt out on all election news, all the time, and a couple people have commented they'd even be interested in hearing about something other than politics for once.

The obvious solution to this, as I see it, is to talk about GIANT SCIENCE LASERS.

So let's do that for a minute. This is actually the perfect time to talk about giant science lasers, because we are very close to the completion of something called the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous science experiment that thousands of people have been working on for years and which finally-- after years of delays-- appears to be on track to get the "on" switch flipped sometime in July. 

The experiment works like this: Dig a 17-mile-long circular concrete tunnel under a mountain in Switzerland. Pump all the air out and freeze the insides to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space. Then, put two giant particle beams inside, and fire them at each other. 

Why on earth are they doing this? Well, the LHC is a kind of experiment called a "particle accelerator", which works on the principle of blowing things up and seeing what comes out. This isn't a very accurate way of describing how it works, but: you know that "E = MC^2" equation, the one that explains energy and mass are really the same thing? Well, the basic idea is that if you put enough energy in one place, that energy can slosh over to the right side of the equation and turn into matter. A slightly more accurate way of putting this is that everything in the universe-- matter, light, everything-- is made of particles, and each particle has a certain energy (which is the same thing as mass) associated with it. When you put a bunch of energy in one place, this energy turns into a collection of randomly picked particles, whose combined energies are equal to the energy you put in. 

This is incredibly useful for physicists, because it means that if you want to know what kinds of particles exist in the universe, all you have to do is do something that releases a bunch of energy, and you'll get a randomly selected batch of particles flying out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is catch the particles and see what they were. This simple trick has basically been the driving force behind particle physics for seventy years: the experimentalists keep building more powerful particle accelerators, giving them the ability to see particles with higher energies than they could before; then the theorists try to come up with a theory that explains why that set of particles exists; and the theories they come up with usually wind up predicting other particles, particles that haven't been seen yet, which means the experimentalists have to go back and build another particle accelerator to look for them. This game of experimentalist/theorist leapfrog has become so central to physics that physicists barely know what to do without it-- so much so that after the particle accelerator that was supposed to have been built in the 90s, the Superconducting Supercollider, got cancelled, the theorists all started getting cabin fever and raving about "11-dimensional membranes" and "the anthropic multiverse".

But now we've got the Large Hadron Collider, so that's okay. The LHC has about 7 times more energy than the last particle accelerator to get built (the "Tevatron" in Illinois, finished in the early 80s) and about 100 times the "luminosity". The LHC makes its energy by taking protons-- which, by the way, are "Hadrons", large ones-- accelerating them to incredible speed, and then smashing them into each other; so here "energy" refers to how much energy released is in each collision, and "luminosity" refers to how often the collisions occur. Luminosity is important because the higher your luminosity the more quickly you can gather lots of data. 

And you need lots of data, because the collisions in particle accelerator don't necessarily spit out the particles you want to see: the particles that come out are, again, random. Worse, you don't actually get to look at the particles themselves, because most of the interesting particles are horribly unstable and only exist for incredibly short amounts of time before falling apart or turning into something else (which kind of makes sense, because if the particles were stable and long-lived they'd just be hanging out all over the place and you wouldn't need a particle accelerator to look for them, right?). So the particle detectors that analyze the aftermath of the collisions don't actually get to look at the particles that were generated, just their aftermath-- the unstable interesting particles instantly fall apart into slightly less interesting but still unstable particles,  which then fall apart into boring stable particles. The detectors then pick up the shotgun spray of thirdhand boring particles that are left over.

So let's say that you get this spray of particles, and the spray of particles is consistent with the spray of particles you'd get from the decay of, I don't know, a top quark. You're then left with the question: Is this the aftermath of a top quark? Or is it just a random spray of particles, noise that coincidentally happens to look like the remnants of an exploding top quark? You can't really tell. The only way to figure out what you're looking at is to gather lots and lots of these little particle sprays and do statistical model fitting to shake the coincidences out.

The main thing the LHC is hoping to detect in its statistical model fitting is something called the "Higgs Boson". The Higgs Boson is the one outstanding item in the physicists' eternal game of leapfrog, the very last thing that the theorists are certain exists but the experimentalists have never found. The Higgs is part of what's called the "Standard Model", which is a collection of different known "fields" that show up in nature and are what particles are made out of-- like there's a field for electrons, and a field for each kind of neutrino and quark. There's one field, though, the Higgs field, that doesn't normally make particles-- instead it's just kind of this flat ocean of Higgsness, identical everywhere. Although the Higgs field doesn't ever do anything itself, though, the fact it's there has a huge impact on things-- particles would act completely different, and in fact wouldn't even have mass, if it wasn't for the Higgs field permeating everything and interfering with how all the particle fields operate.

Although the Higgs field doesn't normally form particles, one of the possible outcomes of a particle collider collision is that the collision could cause a ripple in the normally flat ocean that is the Higgs field, and that ripple would look just like a particle. This ripple is the "Higgs Boson" physicists at the LHC want to find, and if they can trap the Higgs Boson and measure what it's like then a lot of stuff about the Standard Model will start to make a lot more sense. There's also some other, speculative stuff that people are hoping the LHC might find-- like "supersymmetric superpartners" (don't ask) or "WiMPs" (which are the particles that a lot of people think are the cause of "dark matter"). But nobody's sure whether the other stuff even exists, so the Higgs is target #1.

All this LHC stuff is being done by CERN, who are incidentally the people who invented the World Wide Web (which just in case the giant concrete fortress under a mountain in switzerland didn't tip you off, that should prove-- yes, they are supervillains).

So, when's all this going to happen? Well, everything's actually ready to go already except the particle beams. The detectors have actually been running since the end of last year; since there aren't any collisions going on, they've just been sitting there measuring the cosmic rays from outer space that sometimes pass through the LHC's mountain. (Incidentally, if you hear anyone in the news claiming the LHC might somehow create tiny black holes or strangelets or something and destroy the earth, this is how you know to ignore them-- cosmic ray collisions are actually more energetic than the LHC, and those happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If anything that could happen at the LHC was capable of destroying the earth, it would have happened millions and millions of years ago.)

The particle beam, according to the most recent reports I'm aware of, is set to switch on for the first time in early July; but once they turn it on, the first few months are going to be spent just testing it. So the assumption would be that the first "physics collisions" will be happening in September; again though they have to gather a lot of data before they can actually understand what any of it means, so we probably shouldn't expect published results for at least a year after the data starts coming in, probably even longer. But, nevertheless, after years of waiting, the collisions themselves are not far away.

So as the marathon primary finally winds to a close and the general election begins in earnest, as the election itself approaches and we move deeper and deeper into "silly season", remember this, and perhaps it will provide some comfort: Somewhere on the France-Switzerland border, underneath a mountain, things are blowing up.

FURTHER READING: IF ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY INTERESTED YOU, YOU MAY WANT TO TRY FOLLOWING THESE:

The USLHC blog -- This is a group blog where the U.S. contingent among the scientists at the LHC intermittently post about their experiences there

Not Even Wrong -- This blog normally exists just for this guy who works at Columbia University to complain about String Theory, but sometimes he gets distracted and writes startlingly in-depth analyses of up-to-the-minute science news instead

Dorigo -- This is actually a blog by a scientist working at the Tevatron, the LHC's predecessor in Illinois. Although it's not about the LHC, the author's experience with the particle accelerator he works for often allows him to give useful (although perhaps a bit pessimistic) insight into what to expect of the LHC

Over the last few days I have seen several posters at TPM comment that they're getting burnt out on all election news, all the time, and a couple people have commented they'd even be interested in hearing about something other than politics for once.

The obvious solution to this, as I see it, is to talk about GIANT SCIENCE LASERS.

So let's do that for a minute. This is actually the perfect time to talk about giant science lasers, because we are very close to the completion of something called the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous science experiment that thousands of people have been working on for years and which finally-- after years of delays-- appears to be on track to get the "on" switch flipped sometime in July. 

The experiment works like this: Dig a 17-mile-long circular concrete tunnel under a mountain in Switzerland. Pump all the air out and freeze the insides to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space. Then, put two giant particle beams inside, and fire them at each other. 

Why on earth are they doing this? Well, the LHC is a kind of experiment called a "particle accelerator", which works on the principle of blowing things up and seeing what comes out. This isn't a very accurate way of describing how it works, but: you know that "E = MC^2" equation, the one that explains energy and mass are really the same thing? Well, the basic idea is that if you put enough energy in one place, that energy can slosh over to the right side of the equation and turn into matter. A slightly more accurate way of putting this is that everything in the universe-- matter, light, everything-- is made of particles, and each particle has a certain energy (which is the same thing as mass) associated with it. When you put a bunch of energy in one place, this energy turns into a collection of randomly picked particles, whose combined energies are equal to the energy you put in. 

This is incredibly useful for physicists, because it means that if you want to know what kinds of particles exist in the universe, all you have to do is do something that releases a bunch of energy, and you'll get a randomly selected batch of particles flying out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is catch the particles and see what they were. This simple trick has basically been the driving force behind particle physics for seventy years: the experimentalists keep building more powerful particle accelerators, giving them the ability to see particles with higher energies than they could before; then the theorists try to come up with a theory that explains why that set of particles exists; and the theories they come up with usually wind up predicting other particles, particles that haven't been seen yet, which means the experimentalists have to go back and build another particle accelerator to look for them. This game of experimentalist/theorist leapfrog has become so central to physics that physicists barely know what to do without it-- so much so that after the particle accelerator that was supposed to have been built in the 90s, the Superconducting Supercollider, got cancelled, the theorists all started getting cabin fever and raving about "11-dimensional membranes" and "the anthropic multiverse".

But now we've got the Large Hadron Collider, so that's okay. The LHC has about 7 times more energy than the last particle accelerator to get built (the "Tevatron" in Illinois, finished in the early 80s) and about 100 times the "luminosity". The LHC makes its energy by taking protons-- which, by the way, are "Hadrons", large ones-- accelerating them to incredible speed, and then smashing them into each other; so here "energy" refers to how much energy released is in each collision, and "luminosity" refers to how often the collisions occur. Luminosity is important because the higher your luminosity the more quickly you can gather lots of data. 

And you need lots of data, because the collisions in particle accelerator don't necessarily spit out the particles you want to see: the particles that come out are, again, random. Worse, you don't actually get to look at the particles themselves, because most of the interesting particles are horribly unstable and only exist for incredibly short amounts of time before falling apart or turning into something else (which kind of makes sense, because if the particles were stable and long-lived they'd just be hanging out all over the place and you wouldn't need a particle accelerator to look for them, right?). So the particle detectors that analyze the aftermath of the collisions don't actually get to look at the particles that were generated, just their aftermath-- the unstable interesting particles instantly fall apart into slightly less interesting but still unstable particles,  which then fall apart into boring stable particles. The detectors then pick up the shotgun spray of thirdhand boring particles that are left over.

So let's say that you get this spray of particles, and the spray of particles is consistent with the spray of particles you'd get from the decay of, I don't know, a top quark. You're then left with the question: Is this the aftermath of a top quark? Or is it just a random spray of particles, noise that coincidentally happens to look like the remnants of an exploding top quark? You can't really tell. The only way to figure out what you're looking at is to gather lots and lots of these little particle sprays and do statistical model fitting to shake the coincidences out.

The main thing the LHC is hoping to detect in its statistical model fitting is something called the "Higgs Boson". The Higgs Boson is the one outstanding item in the physicists' eternal game of leapfrog, the very last thing that the theorists are certain exists but the experimentalists have never found. The Higgs is part of what's called the "Standard Model", which is a collection of different known "fields" that show up in nature and are what particles are made out of-- like there's a field for electrons, and a field for each kind of neutrino and quark. There's one field, though, the Higgs field, that doesn't normally make particles-- instead it's just kind of this flat ocean of Higgsness, identical everywhere. Although the Higgs field doesn't ever do anything itself, though, the fact it's there has a huge impact on things-- particles would act completely different, and in fact wouldn't even have mass, if it wasn't for the Higgs field permeating everything and interfering with how all the particle fields operate.

Although the Higgs field doesn't normally form particles, one of the possible outcomes of a particle collider collision is that the collision could cause a ripple in the normally flat ocean that is the Higgs field, and that ripple would look just like a particle. This ripple is the "Higgs Boson" physicists at the LHC want to find, and if they can trap the Higgs Boson and measure what it's like then a lot of stuff about the Standard Model will start to make a lot more sense. There's also some other, speculative stuff that people are hoping the LHC might find-- like "supersymmetric superpartners" (don't ask) or "WiMPs" (which are the particles that a lot of people think are the cause of "dark matter"). But nobody's sure whether the other stuff even exists, so the Higgs is target #1.

All this LHC stuff is being done by CERN, who are incidentally the people who invented the World Wide Web (which just in case the giant concrete fortress under a mountain in switzerland didn't tip you off, that should prove-- yes, they are supervillains).

So, when's all this going to happen? Well, everything's actually ready to go already except the particle beams. The detectors have actually been running since the end of last year; since there aren't any collisions going on, they've just been sitting there measuring the cosmic rays from outer space that sometimes pass through the LHC's mountain. (Incidentally, if you hear anyone in the news claiming the LHC might somehow create tiny black holes or strangelets or something and destroy the earth, this is how you know to ignore them-- cosmic ray collisions are actually more energetic than the LHC, and those happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If anything that could happen at the LHC was capable of destroying the earth, it would have happened millions and millions of years ago.)

The particle beam, according to the most recent reports I'm aware of, is set to switch on for the first time in early July; but once they turn it on, the first few months are going to be spent just testing it. So the assumption would be that the first "physics collisions" will be happening in September; again though they have to gather a lot of data before they can actually understand what any of it means, so we probably shouldn't expect published results for at least a year after the data starts coming in, probably even longer. But, nevertheless, after years of waiting, the collisions themselves are not far away.

So as the marathon primary finally winds to a close and the general election begins in earnest, as the election itself approaches and we move deeper and deeper into "silly season", remember this, and perhaps it will provide some comfort: Somewhere on the France-Switzerland border, underneath a mountain, things are blowing up.

FURTHER READING: IF ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY INTERESTED YOU, YOU MAY WANT TO TRY FOLLOWING THESE:

The USLHC blog -- This is a group blog where the U.S. contingent among the scientists at the LHC intermittently post about their experiences there

Not Even Wrong -- This blog normally exists just for this guy who works at Columbia University to complain about String Theory, but sometimes he gets distracted and writes startlingly in-depth analyses of up-to-the-minute science news instead

Dorigo -- This is actually a blog by a scientist working at the Tevatron, the LHC's predecessor in Illinois. Although it's not about the LHC, the author's experience with the particle accelerator he works for often allows him to give useful (although perhaps a bit pessimistic) insight into what to expect of the LHC

while the Wright issue gets prime time...

Our media is a wh*re.

Hopefully, our blogs don't follow suit.

Night, folks, and I hope tomorrow brings a Democratic victory in Louisiana, and some serious, soul-searching truthiness.

Bill Clinton you $109 Million Dollar Man, your wife's elitist.  I know it's been posted already, but in the spirit of Bill Clinton's crazy 'Barack is elitist' spitfest in Indiana, it's appropriate to show who the elitist really is.  Hillary's obviously lost without Ms. Solis Doyle to get her coffee for her.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/friday-happy-hour-clinton-vs-coffee/

An interviewer asks: "Senator Obama, why did you not leave Reverend Wright's church when you heard about these statements. What does it say about your judgment that you affiliated yourself with Reverend Wright even though you knew he had controversial views?"

Reframing the issue: "Well, I would say that it is less an issue of judgment and more an issue of loyalty. If you are doing God's work here on Earth, feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, healing the sick, as I have felt Reverand Wright has been for so many years, then you will have my loyalty and I will do whatever I can to defend your honor regardless of what controversial views you hold in private. But if you go off the reservation and try to publicly promote the ridiculous view that Louis Farrakhan is a great man or the government created AIDs, and then try to turn me into a proxy for your absurd views, then you are no longer serving a higher calling and I will no longer give you my loyalty or defend you. And I hope everyone who works in my campaign takes a lesson from that example."

Why is this a great response? First, it turns an issue(judgment) into a virtue(loyalty). Second, it sets a clear rationale for why Senator Obama acted as he did. Third, it broadens the discussion by making a broader point about how loyalty belongs to those who serve the broader cause(God, or in the latter case, the campaign).

This is how Senator Obama should discuss Reverend Wright every time he comes up.

The first video is his closing remarks at the N.C. Jefferson-Jackson dinner. It's a new addition to his speech. I love it.

The second is a funny clip of Michelle Obama.

I like to write about my hobbies. I have two big ones (and really need a life besides them). I love politics and I love anime. The two have relatively little to do with each other. Since anime is written in Japan, it is almost never written with the ins and outs of American government in mind. However, there are some lessons that can be universally applied.

One anime that I recently finished (and love to all the characters' deaths) is called Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, or When the Cicadas Cry. Now, before I go on to connect horror anime with politics, I must ask any people who think they might see this anime to please leave the room because it is impossible to say anything about it without spoiling something. I'll give you time.

..................................

Are we good? Great.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is divided into small, four-or-so-episode-long stories that detail six characters living in the small town of Hinamizawa. The focus of this anime is on trust and paranoia, and although each story involves the same characters, it is common that most of the characters are killed at the end of each story.

For instance, in the first arc, the main character, Keiichi notices that two of his friends are trying to kill him through a few different means. What start out as thinly-veiled threats ("I'd hate for you to be absent tomorrow.") turn into a needle buried in some food they give him, culminating in them both assaulting him and trying to drug him using a syringe. At this point, Keiichi manages to break away, killing both of them with a baseball bat, and runs away. He later calls the police from a phone booth only to be interrupted in the middle by his own suicide attempt to scratch through his own throat. He dies a day later.

Sounds gruesome, doesn't it? So ultimately, what is the point? Not even Keiichi knows. He asks their corpses before running away, "Why?? What was all of this for??" He dies without getting an answer, but later, we (the audience) do.

Ultimately, the purpose was.... self-fulfilling prophecy, of a sort. His friends were never trying to kill him. Keiichi became afraid because of a murder streak in that village that occured every year on the same day (indeed, the most recent murder had occurred the day before his friends started threatening him), and that fear had spiraled into paranoia, to the point that he hallucinated both the needle (tabasco  sauce mixed into the food) and the syringe (really a magic marker) and killed both his friends needlessly, then promptly killing himself, which is a symptom of the paranoia (Hinamizawa syndrome, a fictional disease) he suffered.

So what's the lesson? We create our own bogeymen, and ultimately, the only ones who can claw out our throats are ourselves.

Right now, I'm worried that the entire Democratic party is suffering from a case of Hinamizawa syndrome (The only thing scarier than one person with it is a lot of people with it at once). We are running around chasing each other with metal bats, creating our own conspiracy theories as to who is out to betray us, but here's the thing: We're all nakama!  We're all looking to the same thing! We're all in the same boat! If one of those bats hits the boat hard enough, though, it springs a leak, and then we all sink.

No one who isn't in the boat can make it sink. The Republicans can't do that, terrorists can't do that, heck, the Green party can't do that! This is the thing that all Democrats need to remember. You don't need to get rid of your bat. Keep it with you, if you want, for crying out loud, the bigger, the better. Just use it to row instead of beating your comrades.

In the anime, there ultimately was a conspiracy to thwart, but no one was looking in the right direction because they were too busy killing each other. Ultimately, the anime does have a happy ending, once the characters manage to overcome the paranoia, but I'm worried that we'll wind up stuck in one of the bad endings where everyone kills each other.

Democrats have a choice now. We can acknowledge our fears on both sides and overcome them (Neither Obama supporters nor Clinton supporters are conspiring to throw the election to the Republicans). Or we can wander through the dead-end timelines until we ultimately claw out our own throats.

So, what's it gonna be?

Splatterred

Like a fly on the windshield
Crooked legs point in all directions
Make a Nazi symbol
With a heart and body in the middle

The once lively juice-filled life
Turns green

But what of in between?

All of us have our good moments
Those times when God if there’s a God says
“You were worth it”

Did the fly feel worth it?
Did the fly protest wars against flies?
Did the fly raise funding for a fly party?
Did the flies try to at least teach themselves not to bang into a windshield going 60 mph?

If my heart were to be ripped from my body right now
And flung against a wall
It would feel no different

I want to make a difference before I’m beetle juice
I want to raise my voice and scream in protest
“Something is WRONG here!”
“Some things are WRONG!”

And then die
Knowing that other flies are still protesting
Still maniacally throwing themselves into windshields
Trying to make a difference

Trying to get the attention of those who drive cars
At 60 miles per hour
When it’s been proven that cars conserve more energy when being driven at 55

The voice of clarity has long been sung out
The buzzing of flies has taken over

So I fly around, around, around,
Circling,
Diving,
Rising,
Only to circle and dive and rise again

Waiting for my moment
Watching for the next windshield

Waiting for a Prius to land on

 

I say, now that McCain has outed the open secret that we're in Iraq to secure their oil fields for the US, that we outsource the cost of the military and the attendant contractors to the oil companies and save the US taxpayers any more grief. After all, you can't get blood from a turnip and we and especially our kids can afford this no longer. The oil companies might as well start picking up their own tab or they won't have a market for their product. 

Votemaster Andrew Tanenbaum has several new general election polls available at <a href="http://www.electoral-vote.com">electoral-vote.com</a>, so I reran Monte Carlo simulations of the general election using both the Obama/McCain and Clinton/McCain polling data.

As before, I've run 10,000 trials for each, assuming a 4% margin of error in each state poll, and that the sampling error in each state is an independent random variable.

This week's polls bode well for both Democratic candidates. Tanenbaum's site allocates the electoral votes by who is ahead in a given state, and now gives Obama a <a href="http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Obama/Maps/May02.html">264-263</a> electoral vote lead over McCain. Hillary has a more solid lead, <a href="http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Clinton/Maps/May02.html">291-236</a>.

My simulation results:
Obama wins 79.4%, average 292.9 EV
McCain wins 17.5%, average 245.1 EV
Electoral tie 3.1%

Clinton wins 97.1%, average 289.1 EV
McCain wins 2.43%, average 248.9 EV
Electoral tie 0.47%

Now both Democrats would quite likely win against McCain, and Clinton would win almost all the time. Interestingly, Obama has a slight edge in average electoral votes, becuase McCain's slim 1 point leads in Ohio, Florida, and Texas mean that Obama wins at least one of these big states most of the time.

Clinton has slight leads in several states, but in the current map basically all the close states would have to break against her for McCain to beat her, which is why she wins over 97% of the simulated elections.

Compared to my <a href="http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/the-probabilities-of-electabil.php">two</a> <a href="http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/probabilities-of-electability.php">previous</a> simulations, Obama has his biggest lead over McCain, as he's put Florida and Ohio very much in play, and he's swung Pennsylvania much more solidly into his column. Both Democrats have their best showings against McCain now, by far.

Clinton has a 10 point lead in Ohio, 9 in Pennsylvania, and 8 in Florida, taking all the key swing states from the 2004 election. If she can hold these leads for the fall, that would virtually guarantee she would win.

Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said, "A week is a long time in politics", and my simulations indeed reflect that. In just a week, both Democratic candidates have shifted from being virtually tied with McCain to being quite likely to beat him. This is circumstantial evidence that the continued nomination struggle isn't as damaging as many pundits think.

My opinion is still that Obama would likely run stronger in the fall, or at least that he's much more likely to win in a landslide. But based on the current polling numbers, while both Democratic candidates are currently strong against McCain, Clinton appears the stronger of the two.

Sounds like Senator Evan Bayh, Hillary and Bill Clinton will have some explaining to do on Sunday during her townhall meeting with George Stepenopolis on ABC.

A memo from Evan Bayh has surfaced in which Bayh blames the Clinton's for the closing of the Magnequench plant in Vapraiso, Indiana, and this memo is due to hit the presses tomorrow.  Hillary's been campaigning for 2 weeks on this plant closing, blaming it on Bush, and that this had been effective tactic for her.

Opps...
Looks like Hillary's little credibility problem is about to surface again, and not a moment too soon I might add.

The sky hasn't quite fallen yet, but it has been drenching Barack Obama's parade in faintly yellow precipitation for the past six weeks. In Biblical terms, this would qualify as raining for 40 days and 40 nights.

So since the creek is rising, will someone please go wake Sen. Obama?

Blame Rev. Wright. Blame Hillary, the GOP and the MSM (wait, I said GOP, didn't I). Yes, they're all liable for distorting Obama's message. But has anyone told the candidate or David Plouffe that the campaign's been snoozing lately? With Hillary gaining ground across the board, you'd think someone might sit up and take notice.

She's framing the debate with emphasis on the hugely deceptive McCain/Clinton proposal for a gas tax holiday. So naturally, Obama plays along with his response ads. Naturally? Come on!

Here's a guy who can run rings around her on the issue while contrasting his theme of change with her game of Washington bait and switch. Or he can change the game by focusing on his message in more down-to-earth terms that connect the dots between his policies and their effects on real people.

Obama needs to snap out of his lethargy. Shake things up a bit. Maybe announce a major economic initiative that people can understand easily and take to the bank quickly. One that is economically sound and doesn't pander.

At the least, he could show some real passion on the trail, for godssake. Take the emotional level up about three notches. Rail about the plight of families and single Moms, about homeowners and displaced workers and kids — not "crumbling schools" but the KIDS themselves and what their future is going to look like if things don't turn around. Take off the suit coat AND the tie when he addresses a rally.

He doesn't have to slam shots of Crown Royal to show he cares. But he does have to show it.

Senator Obama, try channeling Teddy Roosevelt or Jack Kennedy. Quit stuttering your points. Make them firmly and with the conviction that's in your heart. Let it come out. Banish the persona of the Constitutional law professor for a week and you might finally connect with those blue-collar whites who think you don't care.

Congres and the public need the compelte information related to POW abuse and Geneva violations.

However, the White House will only release the POW information, in secret, to the Intelligence Committee. This doesn't address whether the information is highly redacted.

It's troubling the White House is providing only select Members of Congress some infomration, as they did with the FISA briefings.

These are serious war crimes issues:

"[I]t is not yet clear whether the White House will turn over the complete and unredacted opinions of the government lawyers that claimed the <b>president could ignore the law and the Geneva Conventions</b>.

Nuremberg reminds us nobody ignore Geneva and credibly believe they'll be immune from prosecution:

"Even if the documents are not censored, the Bush administration has agreed to <b>give them only to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees</b>. It is <b>withholding them from the Senate Judiciary</b> Committee. . . "

The White House agreed to stonewall, much like the Vice President's staff counsel in re Yoo and Addington testimony. I suppose the Members of Congress will later claim they didn't realize what they were agreeing to, or that they weren't told, but agreed not to consult Congressional counsel.

So much for that 2006 Mandate for Change in Congress. If Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain really change while they are Senators, we might believe they'll change as President.

I could not have said it better!

"The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules," he said. "In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it."

Thank you, Mr. Clinton.

Yep, a 4:52 second song and video about John McCain's free ride and scary side, courtesy of HuffPo's version of The Onion, 23/6.

Click and Enjoy!

Watch on TV, or on C-Span's website.

I keep reading accusations that Rev. Wright is a hateful racist. Will someone please quote anything Rev. Wright has said or otherwise done to demonstrate he's a racist. And please, stick to facts.

Thanks!

Hope this wasn't posted earlier.  

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/05/clinton-to-obama-ill-see-your.html

The Clintons are wily and crafty politicians, no question. But  as Hillary showed with all the drinking and the convenience store coffee buying, they’re regular folk too.

Such contrasts: Rowdy yet refined. Fun-loving yet responsible. Good old boys, sure, but not really meaning any harm by it. I mean let’s be honest here: they’re just making their way the only way they know how. It’s not their fault if that’s a little bit more than the law allows.

Hmmmm….

Yup, just as I suspected all along. They're the Clintons of Hazzard.