The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it - Henry David Thoreau
I am Karan from Olympia, WA.
Almost every other name used here is a pseodonym pseudonim pseudonymn alias.
The rest of it is true - mostly - and all of it is my own.
Don't even think about taking any of it, unless of course, you want to pay me.
The counter says that 1949151
have been flummelized, but I
personally think it's all a big lie.
Speaking of lies....
I’d rather live in China than Myanmar. Hands down.
Never tell anyone that I don’t wait until the last minute to do something:
Click the button and enter scads of contests...but do it before 9pm Pacific Time today or you definitely won’t win.
John Lennon - Julia
I’ve been mucking around in the ee code that build this place and so far have managed to mess it up a bit. For example...the RSS feeds are completely broken. Must fix. And...there’s other internal bits that don’t work any more but I don’t care so much about that.
I also changed Rej’s name back to Rej/Rejjie. I like it better than Orion and Rejjie doesn’t seem to care about that right now.
One cool thing I finally changed was that I reset the permissions to allow me to use small snippets of code here which allows me to post cool stuff like this from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories:
More mucking about to do…
Because most of the world seems to already understand what the heck a super delegate is, I thought it was high time I indulged in a bit of self-edjumacashu.
Apparently the DNC had had enough of dark horse candidates like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter swooping in and getting themselves set up as the democratic candidates for the 1972 and 1976 elections. What with the whole popular vote determining who they wanted it totally stole the control from the party. Who were these delegates to think that they could just tell the party who to place on the ballot? The noive. In response, in 1984, the DNC set up the “at-large” delegates also called super delegates comprised of democratic party elites who, unlike the other flavor of delegates, are free to vote for whichever candidate they choose and free to change their minds right up until they actually cast their final vote at the convention in August.
The whole idea is to avoid surprises like McGovern and Carter and to maintain control of the convention outcome. Since the super delegate system was installed in 1984, there really hasn’t been an issue of their role in the conventions. This bit of history reminded me that except for rare examples, us common folk really have no say in what happens in politics.
Walter Mondale (1984), Michael Dukakis (1988), Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996), Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004) all were clearly voted as the democratic candidate by the both flavors of delegates and the super delegate role was minimized by these agreeable circumstances.
Now we have Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama dueling it out with delegate counts that are achingly close. Never before has it been made more clear to me that the delegate numbers count more than the total number of states each candidate has under her/his belt. This primary season will finally demonstrate the impact these super delegates will bring to the 2008 convention where the winning candidate will need 2,025 delegates to secure the candidacy. That’s at least 2,025 of the 4,049 total delegates including 796 super delegates or “at-large delegates”.
I worry that there will be great numbers of grumbles when they finally do cast those ambiguous votes which will REALLY count. In fact, I am greatly worried that approximately half the democratic voters will be unhappy with the candidate who emerges in late August...and the truth is that because of the large numbers of young, first-time-involved-in-politics Obama voters, I worry more about this effect if Hillary Clinton is selected. Hillary’s support base is more seasoned and will more than likely be able to live with the outcome and step up in support of him.
If the super delegates pick Hillary, then the DNC had better have a plan in place to salvage all those alienated feelings or certainly all will be lost.
How dramatic is that?
I hope they rethink this whole thing. I don’t much like it...not only because of the stuff I wrote above but also because there seems to be a lot of pandering to this very select group. Not that I wouldn’t do it in exactly the same circumstance, but I do wonder, what sort of conversations are going on behind the scenes, what sort of deals are getting brokered. Hmmmmm.
And finally, I am tired of this impending election with the impendingness lasting already one year too long and the longer it continues, the more I fear that no matter who makes it to the ballot, the democrats will suffer a sad and agonozing defeat in November. The saddest thing of all is that they’re doing it to themselves. While Hillary and Obama box each other’s ears, exposing tiny bits of foibles and mis-steps, McJohn sits back and looks all reasonable and electable. He is hand picking his appearances, guiding his media exposure and designing his candidacy to work for him in the best of ways. The democrats are doing the dirty work for him.
By the time we have our candidate in August, s/he’ll only have about 2 1/2 months to repair that damage while at the same time beefing up all the anti-McJohn crap they can. Not a good position to be in at all...not attall.
I hope I’m wrong, but maybe now is a good time for someone to consider stepping down. Hillary Clinton seems to be struggling so maybe Howard Dean can find a carrot that will suit her and entice her to do just that.
Thanks Alan for the link.
