Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Just wondering how many of you are watching the series. So far, I have really found it interesting.
I do have to say, though, that during the scenes when he was ill last week, John Adams looked a great deal like Homer Simpson.
Consider this an open thread.
According to the new Gallup:
Barack Obama has extended his lead over Hillary Clinton among Democrats nationally to 52% to 42%, the third consecutive Gallup Poll Daily tracking report in which he has held a statistically significant lead, and Obama’s largest lead of the year so far.
Two caveats- first, as always, remember this is just a poll. Second, we need to give Mark Penn some time to explain why most of the people who prefer Obama don’t count.
Consider this an open thread.
*** Update ***
For today’s most brazen spin, I give you Talk Left, where we learn that if Hillary forces a credential battle at the convention, it is…
I shit you not.
Josh Marshall discusses Donna Brazille’s appearance this morning on This Week here, and in another posts states the following:
So there it is. Since neither side now seems to think revotes are likely and the Obama campaign and the DNC will never agree to seat the delegates from the non-sanctioned primaries, Sen. Clinton seems to be saying pretty clearly that she plans on taking her campaign all the way to Denver.
By saying she’ll continue through the remaining ten contests, regardless of the outcome, and implicitly, I take it, regardless of any superdelegate declarations over the next two months, Sen. Clinton is saying it’s no longer about pledged delegates, or superdelegates or popular votes. It’s about Florida and Michigan. Period.
At the GOS, Rerutled runs the numbers and determines that right now Clinton has 61 votes on the credential committee, Obama has 70, but that 26 are up for grabs. With the way they are apportioned with the remaining contests in ten states, he comes to the following conclusion:
Thus, there is a razor thin margin here, where indeed Clinton has more of a chance in a credentials fight than Donna Brazille’s (incorrect) division of votes. With the 25 DNC members, and 26.33 members still to be elected in future primaries, a majority on the credentials committee can be had by either candidate.
The credentials committee will submit their majoity report to the convention floor, which will state who is credentialed and who is not. Further to the DNC rules (in the same document above, Sec VII, B, 2), a minority of the committee composed of only 20% of its membership may submit a minority report, which will be voted on at the convention floor, too.
That is her endgame. She needs the credential committee to seat the illegitimate delegates from Florida and Michigan. For all her bluster about the will of the people, this is all about back-room deals to subvert the will of the people. As she can not make up the popular vote and she can not make up the delegate count, this is what she has left.
If Hillary “wins” the nomination this way, I will have a very hard time voting for her. I left the GOP to get away from this kind of sleaze.
*** Update ***
One campaign watched Florida in 2000 and smiled in admiration at the GOP handiwork:
Unlike Kath, I was largely unable to take photos because my credentials were challenged. Along with the credentials of a large swath of the elected delegates.
After six or so extremely hot, crowded, confusing hours, many of us were unable to determine why, exactly, our credentials had been challenged. The Clinton camp had announced that they were targeting the 23rd district for credentials challenges and, by god, that’s what they did.
By the end, the Clinton folks were willing — hell, eager — to throw out not just random individuals but the entire delegation of 2 precincts. (So much for voter enfranchisement, eh, Hills?)
The protest process was tailor-made for alienating committed voters, wearing them out to the point where they would drop out. By the end of the night, the convention floor was abuzz with tired, pissed-off voters who now hate Hillary with the fire of a thousand suns.
I’m one of them. Thanks for sucking those 10 or so hours away from me, Hills. Love ya. Mean it.
And she never did figure out why her credentials were challenged:
When we tried to check in for credentials, we were told we had been challenged. My name was on a list that indicated that I needed to leave the stadium grounds and head for the junior high across the street where my credentials “would be verified.”
Enormous confusion, three floors of junior-high-school, five rooms, and two computer data-base checks, I was told I had been “cleared” to participate. I got a fresh print and, thereafter, was able to pull my credentials.
It took me four hours to get my paperwork, and another hour to work my way through the crowd, down the elevator in my wheelchair and back to the convention floor. Then, another hour to get my credentials. And I was one of the quick ones.
The one thing I can tell you is that ALL of the challenges were against Obama delegates.
To continue my Iraq analogy from earlier, this is apparently the hearts and minds portion of the Clinton campaign.
As always Cernig has the most thorough rundown of developments in Iraq. Go read.
Meanwhile, I have a couple of questions for the people who think that Sadr lost something.
* Which goal did Maliki accomplish? Did the JAM disarm, lose territory, surrender any leaders? Unless you count retreating to Baghdad, watching his most disciplined combat division disgraced or releasing Sadrist prisoners en masse as “goals” it is hard to see where Maliki came out ahead.
* Sadr issued a list of demands and Maliki accepted. Presumably if Maliki’s government wasn’t getting violated over a barrel it would have its own list of demands. What were they? Did Sadr accept?
Prompt reply appreciated.
YHS,
TF
That means I have written a whole lot of gibberish in the past few years. Maybe this will make up for it:
That is actually where Tunch spends most of the day, although some days he lies on the desk in between the keyboard and the monitor to make it easier to attack my hands. He sleeps there so much I have to keep the paper tray pulled out, so that he will not roll over on the form feed button and cause a piece of paper to “attack” him. When that happens, all hell breaks loose and he attacks the printer and gets the offending piece of paper jammed.
At any rate, there goes post 10,000. About as important as the previous 9,999 posts.
More election news, this time from a Clinton interview in the WaPo:
In her most definitive comments to date on the subject, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton sought Saturday to put to rest any notion that she will drop out of the presidential race, pledging in an interview to not only compete in all the remaining primaries but also continue until there is a resolution of the disqualified results in Florida and Michigan.
A day after Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean urged the candidates to end the race by July 1, Clinton defied that call by declaring that she will take her campaign all the way to the Aug. 25-28 convention if necessary, potentially setting up the prolonged and divisive contest that party leaders are increasingly anxious to avoid.
“I know there are some people who want to shut this down and I think they are wrong,” Clinton said in an interview during a campaign stop here Saturday. “I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan. And if we don’t resolve it, we’ll resolve it at the convention — that’s what credentials committees are for.
How she will continue to fund her run is in question, though. As the Politico reports:
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cash-strapped presidential campaign has been putting off paying hundreds of bills for months — freeing up cash for critical media buys but also earning the campaign a reputation as something of a deadbeat in some small-business circles.
A pair of Ohio companies owed more than $25,000 by Clinton for staging events for her campaign are warning others in the tight-knit event production community — and anyone else who will listen — to get their cash upfront when doing business with her. Her campaign, say representatives of the two companies, has stopped returning phone calls and e-mails seeking payment of outstanding invoices. One even got no response from a certified letter.
Their cautionary tales, combined with published reports about similar difficulties faced by a New Hampshire landlord, an Iowa office cleaner and a New York caterer, highlight a less-obvious impact of Clinton’s inability to keep up with the staggering fundraising pace set by her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
If the Wolfson/Ickes/Penn axis of evil remains true to form, expect a mailer to be released on Monday listing ten times Obama has been late paying things, leading off with the time in 1987 when he was two weeks late returning a movie to Blockbuster. As we all kow, the thing adults do when confronted with their own failings is to attempt to minimize them by pointing out the failings in others.
Finally, Clinton is getting some rave reviews:
Does all this mean I’m ready to come out and recommend that our Democrat readers choose Sen. Clinton in Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary?
No — not yet, anyway. In fairness, we at the Trib want to hear Sen. Barack Obama’s answers to some of the same questions and to others before we make that decision.
But it does mean that I have a very different impression of Hillary Clinton today than before last Tuesday’s meeting — and it’s a very favorable one indeed.
Call it a “counterintuitive” impression.
Richard M. Scaife is the owner of the Tribune-Review.
Nice company to have, I guess, and the Clinton campaign seems comfortable with their new relationship with Scaife.
And that is where we are right now, it seems. An increasingly unpopular leader, convinced of her own infallibility and swayed by a messianic complex guiding her to believe that she alone can win, vows to fight on with no end in sight. Advised by a coterie of morally crippled degenerates and buoyed by the support of a rabid but diminishing core of die-hard loyalists, the campaign will continue on, attempting to re-write the rules and re-write history all the while branding those who refuse to remain loyal as treasonous or traitors to the cause. Certain states don’t count we are told, certain voters are irrelevant, and we must pay no attention to the losses and only look at the scant few successes and latch on to the future firewalls. When those firewalls come and go, new ones are immediately erected. The spin is uncritically swallowed, regurgitated, and those who reject it are told they are wrong or just aren’t seeing things right or just want to lose and have Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
It is so painfully clear what is happening here, and the analogy writes itself. But Hillary has vowed to fight on to the convention, no matter what, giving us all six more months of blood and treasure lost. One more Friedman Unit and everything will magically turn Hillary’s way. Just you wait. You will see.
This was unexpected.
NAJAF, Iraq, March 30 (Reuters) – Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called on his armed followers on Sunday to leave the streets and stop battling government forces in Basra and other southern towns.
[…] In his statement Sadr denied that his followers possessed heavy weapons. He said the government should stop large-scale arrests of his followers and implement an amnesty to free prisoners held in detention.
I should probably dispel any misunderstanding about what this is and what it’s not. Sadr is saying that his militia will stop fighting as long as Maliki and the US don’t attack him, plus some demands for prisoner amnesty. The Mehdi army will hand its weapons over, Sadr, says, but only to a government ready to kick the Americans out of Iraq. If Sadr meant to surrender he would have asked people to hand over their weapons and pleaded for terms. This is Sadr asking Maliki to accept that his mission to cripple the Mehdi army has failed. It says that Sadr and not Maliki has the power to control this fight, and early reports seem to be bearing that out.
The decision for Maliki must be painful. Honoring Sadr’s terms would make him look weak, but as things stood the Iraqi government was on a short path to losing Basra and most of the Shiite south. The choice between losing now or losing later isn’t much of a choice.
Sadr, meanwhile, looks a lot like a guy who would rather win democratically in November than knock the government over and take power as a warlord. For Iraqis it must make an interesting contrast.