Not that she cares about history, or rules, or fairness, or consistency, or democracy, or anything else other than her own power.

Hillary Clinton, speaking today in Florida:

Here in Florida, more than 1.7 million people cast their vote, the
highest primary turnout in the history of Florida. And nearly 600,000
voters in Michigan did the same. And not a day goes by that I don’t
meet someone who grabs my hand or holds up a sign, no matter where I
am, in Kentucky or anywhere else, and says, “Please, make my vote
count.”

Hey, guess what, Hillary? In Iowa, 236,000 people cast their votes. In Nevada, 117,559. In Maine, 44,670. In Washington, 200,000 or so. And yet your tally doesn’t count any of their votes, even though it’s perfectly possible to estimate the tallies, and even though those states’ caucuses (unlike the Florida and Michigan primaries) were indisputably legitimate. I bet those people want their votes to count, too!

I receive dozens and dozens of letters and emails and phone calls,
every couple of hours it seems like, all making the same urgent
request: please count my vote. We used to be worried about voter
apathy, didn’t we? We worried why Americans didn’t participate. Now,
people are worried that their participation won’t matter.

You know what I’m worried about? I’m worried about you destroying your own party, undermining your opponent’s legitimacy, and needlessly shaking voters’ faith in democracy, all because you are shamelessly demagoguing this issue for your blatant own personal gain — and ridiculously cloaking your self-serving arguments in idealistic terms, acting like some sort of G*d-damned martyr — when, in reality, you and your campaign agreed to the rules that you now demand be disregarded, and didn’t start objecting to them until it was too late!

I believe the Democratic Party must count these votes. They should
count them exactly as they were cast. Democracy demands no less.

Ah yes, democracy! Count every vote! But wait, does "democracy demand" that you be granted a 328,309 to zero victory in Michigan, in direct contradiction of the clearly expressed will of that state’s voters, who granted you only a 55% "victory" even though you were the only major candidate on the ballot? Does "democracy demand" that you be declared the "winner" because you won an uncontested election that sounds more like something out of Soviet Russia or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq than the United States of America? What the hell does pretending that nobody in Michigan supports Barack Obama have to do with "democracy"?

I am here today because I believe that the decision our party faces is
not just about the fate of these votes and the outcome of these
primaries. It is about whether we will uphold our most fundamental
values as Democrats and Americans. It is about whether we will move forward, united, to win this state and take back the White House this November.

"It is about whether I will get what I am owed: the presidency. It is about whether my ambitions can be stopped by such mere technicalities as ‘rules.’ It is about whether I can construct a ridiculous, indefensible metric whereby I can fool you dumb plebes into thinking I won. Wait, did I say all that out loud?"

I would go on, but it’s just too depressing. I can’t even bring myself to read the rest of her ridiculous speech. I really think she is seriously one of the most disgustingly shameless people on the planet.

P.S. I’m pretty sure this speech constitutes Hillary setting off a nuclear bomb in Obama’s, and the Democratic Party’s, path. She is now explicitly and full-throatedly questioning Obama’s legitimacy as the nominee (invoking the specter of the 2000 election, and the civil rights movement, in the process!) unless the party agrees to her demands. Demands which are — objectively — absolutely beyond the pale. The Democrats cannot simply seat Michigan and Florida, with full voting rights, in exact accordance with the results of the states’ primaries, in direct contradiction of the previously imposed sanctions. If the party does this, it would completely undermine, forevermore, its ability to control the primary & caucus calendar in any way. Such an action would be abject surrender to chaos. The 2012 New Hampshire primary would be sometime in fall of 2009. They can’t do it. They won’t. And yet Hillary is quite clearly saying that, if they don’t, they are subverting democracy, and Obama is an illegitimate nominee.

Superdelegates, this is the moment to end it. Every undeclared superdelegate who cares about the future of the Democratic Party should come out for Obama, now. Hillary cannot be allowed to drag this out any further. It’s gone on far too long already, but this is the last straw. May 31 must be made irrelevant to the outcome of the race. As must Hillary Clinton.

End it.

P.P.S. Andrew Sullivan:

How do you respond to a sociopath like this? She agreed that
Michigan and Florida should be punished for moving up their primaries.
Obama took his name off the ballot in deference to their agreement and
the rules of the party. That he should now be punished for playing by
the rules and she should be rewarded for skirting them is
unconscionable.

I think she has now made it very important that Obama not ask her to be
the veep. The way she is losing is so ugly, so feckless, so riddled
with narcissism and pathology that this kind of person should never be
a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Yes.

P.P.P.S. I managed to skim the rest of the speech, and I just wanted to call attention to this line:

Senator Obama and I are running to be president of all Americans and
all 50 states. And I want to be sure that all 50 states are counted and
your delegates are seated at our convention.

That "all 50 states are counted" … except for Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington!

There are truly no words adequate to condemn the utter vileness of Hillary Clinton.

I begin with the caveat that the popular vote is an illegitimate metric for determining the "winner" of the primary and caucus process, and that pledged delegates are in fact the proper measure of such. (Note that "such" refers to "the ‘winner’ of the primary and
caucus process," not "the winner of the nomination.")

I also note that Obama has already secured the pledged-delegate "win," with or
without Florida and Michigan — if we give Obama the Edwards delegates
who have personally declared for him, and if we give him all (or nearly all) of
Michigan’s "Uncommitted" delegates, both of which are accurate counting methods if we’re trying to project what’s actually going to happen at the convention in August.

Nevertheless, with all that said, here’s an update on the "popular vote" math:

(more…)

With producer Peter Jackson and director Guillermo Del Toro set to host a live chat Saturday about their impending film adaptation of The Hobbit, movie site The Deadbolt has posted an excellent article about the "Seven Things We Want From The Hobbit." They’re spot-on. There’s a lot of detail to each one, but the site’s seven basic demands are:

1. It has to be funny.
2. It needs to work as a stand-alone film.
3. The whole movie can’t be about the Battle of the Five Armies.
4. Smaug needs to be a classic movie villain first, dragon second.
5. Don’t cut out all of the songs.
6. Explain the ring.
7. Don’t be afraid to make Gandalf a bit of a bastard.

In the item about Smaug, I particularly like this bit:

Renaissance festivals and lackluster CGI have defanged the dragon for modern
film audiences, so how can Del Toro hope to make Smaug as cool as he needs to
be? Our advice - concentrate on the drama and dialogue of the Smaug scenes first
and worry about his design later. Smaug, first and foremost, needs to be a
classic villain - we’re talking Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, Hans Gruber, etc.
- and we need to be much more afraid of his words and demeanor than his spiky
claws or teeth. In fact, Del Toro should use the scene in No Country for Old
Men between Anton Chigurh and the gas station owner as the model for the
tone and level of raised stakes in the Bilbo/Smaug scenes. Chigurh was so scary
it didn’t even matter that he had the haircut that he did, so if Smaug’s
character is handled correctly, it shouldn’t matter that movie audiences aren’t
afraid of dragons anymore.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Welcome, InstaPundit readers! If you’re interested in this topic, you should definitely read the Deadbolt article. It has way more detail than I’ve included here.

At last, the perfect running mate for Obama:

Heh. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

I sure wouldn’t. She’s spending herself into massive amounts of debt — $31 million as of April 30, presumably even more by now — all in the pursuit of an utterly lost cause. What’s the point, Hillary?

Of course, $11 million of that debt is money she owes herself, and another $5 million is money she owes Mark Penn. Some of the rest is owed to other high-dollar consultants. I’m not exactly weeping for those folks. They knew what they were getting into.

But some of this debt is owed to miscellaneous small-time vendors in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other states she’s campaigned in. How can she justify that? She’s throwing money down the toilet in pursuit of a nomination she can’t win, accruing more and more debt along the way, while a bunch of people who’ve helped her — caterers, cleaners, landlords, event planners — are paying the price, in the form of unpaid bills. She claims to be a "fighter" for the little people, and yet the little people are among those who she’s stiffing. Are these folks ever going to get their money back? If they don’t, Hillary Clinton will have some serious explaining to do.

P.S. Slate offers a useful primer on the topic, under the headline, "Can a Campaign Go Bankrupt?" (Short answer: yes.)

Meanwhile, about the possibility of Obama helping Hillary retire her debts: I was going to say that it would be an outrage for Obama to use the hard-earned, small-dollar donations of his individual contributors to pay off the debts of a rival campaign that was financially mismanaged to the point of near-criminal incompetence — and that didn’t know when to quit. However, according to Josh Marshall, that’s not even a legal possibility, and all the MSM talk about it is legally ignorant babbling.

"Obama is not allowed to take millions of dollars from his own campaign
and give them to Clinton’s campaign," Marshall writes. "The most his campaign could
legally give would be $2,000. Any deal to help Clinton with her debt
would have to be in the form of Obama helping to raise additional money
on Clinton’s behalf." More here.

Here is Obama’s speech in Iowa last night:

Mark Halperin calls it “one of the best-written (and delivered) speeches of the campaign.” I guess there’s something in the water in Iowa: the guy always gives a great speech there. :)