Irish Trojan in Tennessee

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Former Sen. John Edwards will endorse Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, Obama's campaign says.

Obama-Clinton: "terminal insanity"

By Brendan Loy

Dick Morris disses the "dream" ticket:

It would be an act of terminal insanity for Barack Obama to name Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential candidate. It would not help him get elected, it would drag all the Clinton controversies into the general election, and having her down the hall in the West Wing would be a recipe for disaster, dissension and civil war. Other than that, it's a hell of an idea!

Heh. Indeed.

Read the whole thing. (And read my previous anti-dream-ticket posts here and here.)

Relatedly, from Politico:

Greg Sargent spends some time making the very good point that Obama doesn't do notably worse against McCain with working-class white people in much polling than Hillary does -- a lesson in the danger of reading primary results into the general election.

Don't confuse us with facts!

Hillary to IA, NV, WA, ME: Drop dead

By Brendan Loy

My earlier question about whether Hillary Clinton would proclaim her fraudulent popular vote "lead" today -- a "lead" which, for the first time, unequivocally depends upon completely ignoring the will of the voters of Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine -- is, alas, answered in the affirmative:

Clinton's high command is hosting a conference call right now. Terry McAullife, the chairman of the campaign, has a new talking point. It's "Hillary Clinton has now moved ahead in the popular vote." (He requires Florida and Michigan to make this claim)

Yes, he does -- but Florida and Michigan aren't the half of it, as I've pointed out repeatedly.

Including the vote tallies from two meaningless beauty-contest primaries that didn't count -- including a Saddam Hussein-style 328,309 to zero "victory" in a state where Obama wasn't on the ballot -- is bad enough. But largely escaping the media's notice, still, is Hillary's reliance on the disenfranchisement of four whole states that held indisputably valid, binding contests!!

I know I'm a broken record on this point, but I find it absolutely infuriating, and it seems like nobody is paying attention.

It bears repeating that two of the excluded states, Iowa and Nevada, were included among the four "early states" that Clinton herself pledged to honor -- by not campaigning in Florida and Michigan!! I quote from the September 2, 2007 New York Times article about hat pledge:

“We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process,” Patti Solis Doyle, the Clinton campaign manager, said in a statement.

"Unique and special," indeed! Their votes are uniquely irrelevant, according to Hillary's current argument for being awarded the nomination!

People, this math isn't just fuzzy, it's is completely indefensible, and it's an absolute joke that nobody is calling her on it. Everyone talks about Florida and Michigan, but nobody talks about Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine. Yet their exclusion from the popular-vote tally isn't even arguably plausible, and it goes completely against everything Clinton is pretending to stand for in the Michigan and Florida debate. "Count every vote!" Honor the "will of the people!" Unless those people happen to live in Iowa, Nevada, Washington or Maine!

Enough! This is ridiculous. I'll be writing letters to some Clinton superdelegates from those states. I'll post 'em when I'm done.

Big CA gay marriage ruling tomorrow

By Brendan Loy

The California gay marriage decision will be released tomorrow at 1:00 PM EST.

Needless to say, if the California Supreme Court were to legalize gay marriage (or otherwise reach a decision that sets up an immediate statewide political battle over the issue, as envisioned in the final paragraph here), it would throw the national political scene for a massive loop. It'll be very interesting to see what happens.

 Andrew Sullivan has more.

All of God's creatures

By Brendan Loy

The Vatican says it's OK to believe in aliens.

But not gay aliens, presumably. ;)

Hillary romps, everybody yawns

By Brendan Loy

So... is it still over? Survey says... yes.

Still, Hillary won West Virginia by 41% -- about what I expected -- but, thanks to high turnout, she got an unexpectedly large raw popular vote margin: 147,410 votes, according to the current count. This increases her chances of ultimately winning an arguably plausible "popular vote" count, as it's about 40,000 more than my estimate gave her from the Mountaineer State. If she can similarly beat my estimate in Kentucky, she'll net an extra 68,000 votes or so there.

That said, her overall hopes remain slim, as they depend on surprise results in Oregon, South Dakota and Montana, and a huge victory (and turnout) in unpredictable Puerto Rico -- where, incidentally, Michelle Obama is going. And of course, the whole notion of using the "popular vote" to determine the nominee is illegitimate, and there's no way the superdelegates are going to give her the nomination over the clear pledged-delegate winner on the basis of such fuzzy math. But we're talking about the margins of plausibility here. "So you're saying there's a chance."

Anyway, Hillary already "leads" the fraudulent "count" that includes Florida and Michigan, but excludes all Obama supporters in Michigan, and excludes entirely the states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington. She's ahead by 29,471 votes in that "tally." That is, of course, not an "arguably plausible" count, as I've explained before. And it's the only count she currently leads. If you add in the estimated IA/NV/ME/WA totals, she trails by 80,751. (If you use Washington's beauty-contest primary instead of its binding caucus, she trails by 30,751.) And of course, if you give Obama the "Uncommitted" votes from Michigan, rather than giving Hillary credit for a Saddam Hussein-style 328,309 to zero "victory" in Michigan, he's way ahead. He's even further ahead if you only count the contests that, y'know, actually counted (i.e., not Florida and Michigan). But let's not get crazy, and start enforcing "rules" and whatnot. ;)

It'll be interesting to see if Hillary proclaims her popular vote "lead" today. If she does, I may write letters to her prominent superdelegate endorsers in Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, arguing that they should insist on her not disenfranchising the voters of their states.

P.S. Speaking of superdelegates, the immediate result of Clinton's big win in West Virginia is... two more superdelegate endorsements for Obama. Heh.

P.P.S. TNR's Josh Patashnik makes an interesting point:

In retrospect, Barack Obama may be lucky he didn't win Indiana last week. Why? Suppose he had--there would have been immense pressure on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race, which she might have done. Given that around seven percent of West Virginia Democratic primary voters pulled the lever for John Edwards, who dropped out of the race more than three months ago, there's a pretty decent chance Obama would have lost West Virginia, or at the very least would have come up short of 50 percent. And as bad as tonight's results look for him (even though it's yet one more instance of the essentially unchanging demography-is-destiny story in the Democratic race), surely it would have been far worse to lose to Hillary if she had already conceded the race. As it stands now, he'll be able to take his licks in West Virginia and Kentucky without being totally humiliated, then make a victory declaration of sorts after a win in Oregon. That's about as reasonable an outcome as he could have hoped for, given that the quirks of the primary calendar put two of his worst states in the union at this juncture in the race. (Random question: Oregon uses mail-in ballots, so there are no exit polls. Will the networks be able to project him the winner early enough in the night for him to make a speech at a reasonable hour?)

If, in fact, it was the antics of Rush Limbaugh that put Hillary over the top in Indiana, it may well be that El Rushbo was the only thing standing between Obama and a deeply embarrassing loss to a non-candidate. The joys of unintended consequences.

Heh.