The Hokey Pokey

This is the song that never ends. It just goes on and on my friends.

This past Saturday, the Rules & Bylaws Committee (is there any good reason for that word to have three pairs of double letters?) of the Democratic Party met in Washington to decide the fate of the Michigan and Florida primary votes. After much bloviating, rancor and a six hour lunch, they finally decided that they didn’t actually mean what they said six months ago and came to a compromise on the seating of the delegates. The entire Florida delegation will be seated in the proportions in which they were elected, each with half a vote. Michigan’s delegates will be split 69-59 in favor of Senator Clinton, again, each with half a vote. Net gain for Clinton - 4 delegates. Much ado about nothing.

This past Tuesday night, South Dakota and Montana cast their votes, officially wrapping up this interminable primary campaign. However, Senator Clinton’s game of Calvinball continued. The candidates split the final two states by wide margins for each. But by the time the polls closed in South Dakota, a sufficient number of superdelegates had migrated to Obama’s column to put him well over the revised magic number of 2,118. Clinton knew this when she took the podium in New York. Yet instead of acknowledging the reality that Obama had clinched the nomination, she appeared defiant, insisting that she was still the strongest candidate in the race, implying what she has stated previously multiple times - that if only the rules were different, she would have declared victory long ago. Informing the media that “superdelegates are always free to change their minds,” she continued to campaign, though the race was officially over, telling her supporters to visit her website and make their wishes known regarding what they wanted her to do. It is clear that she fully intends to use the delegates she has accumulated to ensure that Barack Obama is constantly reminded from now until November that his toughest opponent is not John McCain, but Hillary Clinton. A less-graceful non-exit strategy I have never seen.

Late Wednesday night, CNN reported that Senator Clinton will indeed “suspend” her campaign this weekend and endorse Senator Obama for president. Until I actually hear those words leave her lips, I have to assume otherwise. Such is the nature of Calvinball. What’s true right now, may not be in ten minutes.

I’m confused by the ardent Clinton supporter. Could I get one of you to help me out, please. I understand that you have/had a lot invested in your candidate and this campaign. But I don’t understand your willingness to abandon your principles, turn your back on everything your candidate stands for and vote against your interests because you’re upset that you lost. Many of you are baby-boomer feminists, whose core issues are universal health care, education and a woman’s right to choose. Are you seriously going to vote for a candidate who doesn’t care to change the current healthcare system and has promised to fill what could turn out to be three Supreme Court vacancies with clones of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, simply because the candidate you supported did not end up on the ticket? Seriously? Think about what that means for the issues you have spent your life fighting for. Will you turn your back on your ideals to express your dissatisfaction? Isn’t there a better way to do that than to throw the election to the candidate you have very little in common with? If you are upset with the way the media (read Chris Matthews) has covered Senator Clinton, take it out on the media, not your party’s presidential nominee. There are ways to express your frustration without providing aid and comfort to your enemy.

I am 31-years-old. (Is that right? Really?) I never thought I would live to see the day when a man with dark skin and a name like Barack Obama would have a real, legitimate chance to be President of the United States of America, leader of the free world. I still believe this country will have a female president before it elects a racial minority. But I will be more than happy to revise my assumptions should Obama continue this roller coaster all the way to the White House.

I am Canadian, so I feel I have to do this. A half-hearted congratulations to the Detroit Red Wings on defeating the Pittsburgh Penguins for the Stanley Cup. Maybe now 46-year-old Chris Chelios can finally retire before he’s too old to lace up his own skates.

Actress, best friend of Lenny Kravitz, and all around smokin’ hot babe Gina Gershon vehemently denies a Vanity Fair article claiming she has been having an affair with former President Bill Clinton. In fact, she’s so angry she’s threatening to sue the magazine and the author responsible for the article. I for one am inclined to believe Gina. She’s not the type of woman Bill Clinton has affairs with. She’s beautiful, successful and washes all her dresses after wearing them. Bill would never go for that.

During the French Open this week, Spanish superstar and “Federer killer” Raphael Nadal worked up quite an appetite during one of his matches. Not wanting to leave the court and forfeit the match, Nadal directed some random guy in the gallery to go to the concession stand and get him a sandwich. Several minutes later, errand boy returns - with a sandwich in a bag - which Nadal directed the ball boy to retrieve for him, then promptly consumed it during the next timeout. Leave it to the French to develop court-side catering.

Finally, thieves stole an eight foot tall plaster statue of Jesus from a cross outside a church in Detroit. The reasoning behind the theft remains unknown, although there is some speculation that since the statue was a greenish patina color the thieves may have mistaken it for copper and stolen it to sell from scrap. But more importantly, someone seriously stole a statue of Jesus? Do they know anything about Jesus? Are they aware of his position on things like theft, grand larceny and such? Besides, there are far easier, legal ways to welcome Jesus into your life.

Out of Order

I’m a little tired. Muscles feel weak, little aching in the joints. I think I have Clinton fatigue.

I think that to this point I have exercised an incredible amount of restraint in refraining from intensive criticism of Senator Clinton in an attempt to retain some semblance of fairness in my coverage of this primary. No more of that. The senator has made it completely impossible to maintain balance. While it may be true that there are at least two sides to every story, not all stories are created equal. And while some stories may well be worth reading and discussing, others deserve to be scorned, mocked and exposed for the absolute drivel they are. See below.

In a last ditch attempt to salvage a lost campaign, Hillary Clinton sent a letter to members of the Democratic National Committee and remaining uncommitted superdelegates, imploring them to give her the party’s nomination despite the fact that she currently trails Senator Obama in the delegate count, with no chance of overtaking him prior to the end of the primary campaign. She believes that after the final three primaries she will have the majority of popular votes (if Florida and Michigan are counted as is - which they should not/will not be) and pledged delegates from states holding primaries, and on the strength of that she feels she should be rewarded with the nomination. Of course, Senator Obama will still maintain a lead in pledged delegates (the only measure of victory in this campaign), but that’s of no concern to Clinton. She would like superdelegates to disregard the results of states which held caucuses because she believes the caucus process “disenfranchises” too many voters.

Maybe Senator Clinton inhaled too much of whatever President Clinton didn’t. Some states use caucuses to select delegates, some use primaries. Everybody knows this - it’s been this way for quite some time. Clinton never voiced any objection to the caucus process - until she lost them. Then, in the same breath in which she fights to include the results of illegitimate elections in Michigan and Florida (which she initially agreed were illegitimate), she discounts entire states because she didn’t work hard enough to win them. There was no obstacle to Clinton opening up massive grassroots operations in caucus states and turning out enough voters to win those contests. She simply chose not to do it, and then whine about it later. She didn’t lose the contest, no, the contest must have been illegitimate. Where does it end?

While the rest of the Democratic Party has been trying to play by the rules, Senator Clinton and her supporters have been playing a game of Calvin-ball. When this process began in January, every candidate, by their entry into the process, agreed to function by the same set of rules. Rules known and understood by everyone. Senator Clinton was more than happy to play by those rules - until she discovered she was losing. Then, the rules didn’t matter anymore. In fact, the rules were whatever she said they always had been. Prior to (the initial) Super Tuesday, the pledged delegate count was the only measure of victory. Following Super Tuesday, the popular vote count needed to be taken into account. After Obama ripped off eleven victories in a row, and overtook Clinton in the popular vote count, that was no longer as important as the ability of the superdelegates not to follow the will of the voters in their districts. Once her superdelegate lead began to evaporate, the inclusion of votes from Michigan and Florida became imperative. Never mind that Clinton is on record admitting prior to the Michigan primary that she knew it would count for nothing. Never mind the fact that even though Michigan voters physically could not vote for anyone but Clinton, 41 percent of them showed up to vote against her. Once she needed Michigan and Florida to close the gap with her rival, every vote had to count, regardless of how meaningless, how fraudulent, how racist it may be.

Hillary Clinton is desperate. For her, this is no longer about being elected president. This is about winning - whatever the cost. She is well aware that she is doing irreparable damage to Barack Obama’s impending presidential campaign. She simply doesn’t care. She has waited 20 plus years, put up with all of Bill Clinton’s affairs, burned six years in the senate representing a state she has no connection to, all leading up to the moment when she would receive the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. All of a sudden, some skinny no name Hawaiian kid from the South Side of Chicago bursts onto the scene, captures the imagination of the nation and snatches the prize from under her nose. She is convinced the electorate is making a grave mistake - that when it comes down to the wire in November and Americans step into that voting booth, they will not vote for the black guy, and she deserves the to be president. She’s angry and she’s hurt. And she has decided that if she cannot be president, she will ensure that Obama will not be either. Whether it involves invoking the assassination of Robert Kennedy to justify remaining in the race, to raising the specter of rigged Zimbabwean elections to frighten the DNC Rules Committee into giving her Michigan and Florida as is, she will go to any length to guarantee herself an “I told you so” moment this fall. New face, same old Clinton strategy. Get ready for four years of Bush lite.

Well, on to lighter things then.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a book claiming that President Bush “manipulated sources of information” with a “sophisticated propaganda campaign” to deceive the American public into supporting an unnecessary war. What? There’s gambling in this establishment? It would have been nice if McClellan had come forward with this information while it was still relevant, but I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too, right? (That has got to be the dumbest saying ever culled from literature. Of course you want to have your cake and eat it too! What the hell else are you going to do with it? What’s the point of having cake if you aren’t going to eat it? Sigh.)

Last week Senator John McCain rejected the endorsements of to evangelical ministers, John Hagee and Rod Parsley (like the herb) who were caught on video saying some fairly offensive things - al la Jeremiah Wright. I feel the same way about this as I felt about Jeremiah Wright. Hagee and Parsley aren’t running for president, so I don’t really care what they think. I do find it interesting that at least in the case of Hagee, McCain solicited the very endorsement he now denounces in an attempt to curry favor with evangelical voters, many of whom are not thrilled with him as Republican Party nominee. Perhaps McCain could have benefitted from a little research into people he solicits endorsements from, save himself some embarrassment in the future.

A Texas appeals court ruled last Thursday that the state’s child welfare authorities should not have removed 460 children from an FLDS compound last month due to suspicions of child abuse. Oops. Curiously, they did not order child services to to return the children to their families either. I admit, I’m as confused as the child welfare department.

Oil prices hit a record in excess of $130 a barrel last week, driving the price of gasoline above $4 a gallon in many cities. In a related story, the hottest vehicle for sale on the internet classified site Craigslist is the Geo Metro. Perhaps you remember this automotive relic by it’s street name, Poor Man’s (Hyundai) Pony. Amazing what $4 fuel will do to a Hummer driver.

Some people just can’t get it right. In an eventually successful attempt to exterminate himself, a Japanese farmer ingested large amounts of chloropicrin. The problem was that during his temporary stay at the hospital he sickened 56 other people by vomiting toxic chlorine gas. People need to learn to leave other people out of their suicide attempts. Suicide plus one (or 56) is no longer suicide. Keep it simple.

Meeting for the first time in a Long Island nightclub, Lindsey Lohan’s father asked professional party girl and steamy home video star Kim Kardashian and her boyfriend (New Orleans Saints running back) Reggie Bush to look after Lindsey out in Los Angeles and keep a watchful eye on her. Isn’t that a little like putting Vice President Cheney in charge of gun safety at a duck hunter’s convention? Her father (rest his soul) must be so proud.

In the first of two extraterrestrial stories this week, what do you do when you really have to go, but you can’t? Ask the astronauts aboard the international space station. Apparently, the only toilet on the station is out of order. The space shuttle is scheduled to deliver replacement parts this weekend, but that leaves the astronauts with three or four days to practice what I like to call, “creative waste management.” My advice, lay off the fiber, wolf down the chocolate bars, and make sure you remember where you put the laxatives.

NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft touched down safely on Mars at 7:53 EST this past Sunday evening. I find this wholly uninteresting. Been there, done that. When we start landing people on Mars, then I'll make the effort to get excited. But I mention this story for the following reason. If you ever get a chance to watch one of these NASA evens live on television, do it. There is nothing funnier than nerd joy. Seriously, get a group of physicists together in a room, turn on an extraterrestrial robotic landing, break out the popcorn and let the good times roll.

Finally tonight, a 50-year-old Florida man hired a nude maid to clean his Tampa home this past Friday. But while she was there she apparently cleaned him out as well. According to the man, the maid arrived, shed her clothes, and went about her business cleaning the house. He then left her alone in the bedroom to clean. But when his wife returned from vacation, she discovered $40,000 in jewelry missing from said bedroom. I have one only one question for this guy. You went to all the trouble - not to mention the expense of forking out $100 an hour for a NUDE woman, to clean your house. Why the hell did you leave the room! Idiot.

What'chu Talkin' 'Bout Willis?

Observant readers may have deduced that I am no ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton. Up to this point I have done my best to refrain from criticizing the senator on several issues. However, after the comments coming from the Clinton campaign following the “Basketball Primaries,” there are several items that just need to be addressed.

If I hear the phrase “until every voice is heard,” or, “until every vote is counted” I’m going to puke. And I had mushroom rice and teriyaki vegetables for lunch, so it isn’t going to be pretty. I don’t recall any other statistically eliminated Democratic candidate in any election prior to this one whining and complaining about how “every voice must be heard.” For fifty years prior to this race the nominating contest has ended months before the final primary and it wasn’t an issue. And does any honest individual truly believe that Senator Clinton and her supporters would be clamoring for every voice to be heard if the situation was reversed and Senator Obama was facing elimination?

Michigan and Florida deserve to be stripped of their delegates and be left out in the Rocky Mountain sun to wilt at the Democratic convention in August. Everyone knew the rules before the game began, those two states decided to flip the bird at the rules, and should now face the consequences. Especially Florida, which after eight years STILL hasn't figured out how to vote correctly. But of course, they won’t be held responsible. Still haunted by the events of the convention in Chicago in 1968, the Democratic National Committee has no stomach for enforcing the rules. You see, the DNC is like the parents who tell all the children, If you throw your pizza on the floor you won’t get any more pizza.” The two bratty kids in the family (Michigan and Florida) throw their pizza on the floor and the parents take away the pizza. Well, the kids start to cry, telling all their friends and neighbors that their parents are trying to starve them to death by not giving them the fresh slices of pizza they deserve after willfully dumping theirs on the floor after being told not to. The parents don’t want people to think they are starving their useless bratty kids, so they capitulate and give them fresh pizza. Now all fifty kids can throw pizza all over the place because they know all they have to do to get more pizza is scream bloody murder claiming that mommy and daddy are starving them to death.

What qualifies someone to be president? According to the Constitution, one must be a U.S. citizen by birth, over the age of 35, and a resident within the country for 14 years. Everything else is gravy. But you wouldn’t know that listening to the “experience” banter in this primary. The definition of presidential experience seems to be eight years living in the White House as First Spouse. The truth is, experience is over-rated. Name one administration with more combined experience at the highest levels than the current one. How well has that worked out? How much experience did George Washington have? Abraham Lincoln? John Kennedy? Sometimes, a lifetime in spent in Washington in precisely the type of experience a president needs to avoid.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright has been a thorn in the side of Barack Obama since video of his sermons appeared on YouTube six weeks prior to the Pennsylvania primary. Obama immediately and has consistently made it clear that he certainly does not share the extreme views of his former pastor regarding race relations and the actions of the United States. Yet many individuals refuse to believe the senator, or give him the benefit of the doubt. Their reasoning? One cannot be in the presence of a charismatic figure like Wright two hours a week for twenty years and not become a clone of that figure. There are several flaws in that reasoning, but I’ll limit myself to one example. I like to be informed. I like to know what everyone’s thinking. So, three hours a days I listen to/watch conservative talk radio/television. Three hours a day, five days a week, for at about eight years, comes to 6,240 hours, perhaps minus a few hundred hours for vacations and cleaning the cobwebs out of my ears. If he actually attended church every Sunday for the past twenty years (which he hasn’t) and Reverend Wright preached fire and brimstone sermons excoriating America every single week (which he didn’t), Senator Obama has spent about 2,080 hours in Wright’s presence. According to the math, I have spend three times as much time listening to conservative talk radio than Obama has spent listening to Reverend Wright, and I am LESS conservative now than I was eight years ago. If merely being exposed to an idea for a length of time is all it takes to influence someone, “The Mark Factor” would be the number one primetime news analysis program on cable. When Obama says he doesn’t share Wright’s extremist views, it’s pretty easy to believe him.

Some people are upset that 90% of black voters cast their votes for Senator Obama. Funny. None of those individuals were complaining when 100% of ALL voters cast their votes for whichever white male happened to be on the ballot.

Finally, a troubling statistic emerged in the exit polls as this race dragged on. At the beginning of the primary season, Democratic voters claimed they had two candidates (three for a while) whom they liked very much and would be happy to vote for either of them. However, now, near the end of this train wreck, over a quarter of Obama supporters polled say they cannot/will not support Clinton is she is the nominee, while closer to half of Clinton supporters polled claim they cannot/will not support Obama if he becomes the nominee. Senator Clinton has seized upon these numbers to suggest that even though this primary race is likely to end with her trailing Obama in delegates and in popular vote, she should be given the nomination because her constituents are far more bitter and irrational than those of her opponent. I’ve covered this before, so I will try not to belabor the point, but I have to say this. I would hope that a political party claiming to be progressive and inclusive would be beyond the type of thinking that would lead to those exit poll results. But if there truly is a significant segment of the Democratic electorate who would rather vote for the white man with a viewpoint completely opposite to theirs on nearly every issue, (supreme court justices, pro-choice, health care, trade agreements, etc...) than vote for the black guy who AGREES with them on nearly every issue, then perhaps the Democratic Party deserves to lose this election.