Y’all probably remember my lengthy Comcast saga last month (posts here, here, here, here, here, here and here). The whole thing was extremely frustrating and took way too long to resolve — and might never have been resolved at all, if not for corporate intervention which was due solely to the fact that I’m a blogger. Yet despite all the angst, Comcast managed to keep my business — even after the revelation that they were stealing my cable — by fixing the problem and giving me a refund.

And then they proceeded to lose my business over a lousy $5.

I explain after the jump.

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Jonathan Chait on Hillary’s newly escalated Florida-and-Michigan rhetoric:

This gambit by Clinton is simply an attempt to steal the nomination. It’s obviously not going to work, because Democratic superdelegates don’t want to commit suicide. But this episode is very revealing about Clinton’s character. I try not to make moralistic characterological judgments about politicians, because all politicians compromise their ideals in the pursuit of power. There are no angels in this business. Clinton’s gambit, however, truly is breathtaking.

If she’s consciously lying, it’s a shockingly cynical move. I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It’s not just that she’s convinced herself it’s okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency.

Indeed.

With regard to why her "attempt to steal the nomination" is "obviously not going to work," it isn’t just because the supers "don’t want to commit suicide"; it’s also because the math just isn’t there for Hillary. Even if Florida and Michigan are seated according to her best-case scenario, Obama only needs 19 percent of the undeclared supers to secure the nomination. Given that many of those supers are already in the tank for one candidate or the other — i.e., they’re not undecided, just undeclared — it’s inconceivable that Obama won’t get at least 19% of them. So he’s got the nomination wrapped up, no matter what happens with Florida and Michigan.

What, then, is Hillary playing at? I have a theory. She appears to be racheting up her rhetoric to the point where, if the Rules & Bylaws Committee does anything other than seat the Florida and Michigan delegations with full voting rights and in complete accordance with the rogue primary results, she can declare that decision an anti-democratic outrage that must be remedied, irrespective of its significance to the nomination battle, and thus use it as an excuse to keep fighting all the way to the convention, even after Obama secures the nomination by any and all mathematical standards (whether the magic number is 2,025, 2,210, or something in between). In this scenario, Hillary would most likely "suspend" her campaign, but refrain from endorsing Obama or "releasing" her delegates, and then lie in wait for the next three months, hoping some political calamity befalls him in the mean time, at which point she can sweep in like a "white knight" and take the nomination away from him.

So, you might ask, why doesn’t Obama just surrender on Florida & Michigan — since he’s going to have a majority either way — in order to deny Hillary that phony rationale for continuing her campaign? The answer is that, even if he does surrender, the Rules & Bylaws Committee won’t. As I mentioned yesterday, more than just the current nomination fight is at stake here. The party’s very credibility, its ability to meaningfully enforce its calendar and its rules, is on trial. Again: "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."

Hillary knows this. But instead of laying the groundwork for a reasonable compromise, she’s dropping the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear bombs in the party’s path, insinuating that no middle ground is possible because anything less than a complete recognition of the rogue primaries would be an affront to democracy on par with the 2000 election, the denial of women’s suffrage, segregation, slavery, etc. (!!)  These are the words of a person who doesn’t want a problem to be solved.

This is her path forward, people: to keep her campaign going all the way to Denver, ostensibly not because she wants the nomination, but because she wants to make sure that Michigan’s and Florida’s "voices are heard." It’s an incredibly cynical, dishonest, destructive tactic. It will deny Democrats the ability to unify behind their nominee all summer long. It will perpetuate, particularly among low-information voters who aren’t familiar with the math, the notion that Obama is trying to win the nomination illegitimately. It will degrade people’s faith in the electoral process for no good reason. It will create a (false) image of the Democratic Party leadership as disenfranchisers and vote-stealers. But it’s her best shot at constructing a rationale for staying in the race — so that she can take advantage of any "July surprise" that might befall Obama — once he has the nomination mathematically secured beyond all doubt, which will happen shortly after June 3. And since Hillary cares only about herself, it seems reasonable to presume that this is precisely what she’ll do.

P.S. A Huffington Post article suggests it’s quite possible Hillary will lose at the Rules and Bylaws Committee by a vote of 15-13. Hmm. You don’t suppose, do you, that she might compare such an outcome to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, and use the closeness of the vote as an excuse to soldier on to the Credentials Committee, with rhetoric along the lines of "2.3 million voices were silenced by the votes of two unelected party officials"? Nah, she can’t be that shameless… [/sarcasm]

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:

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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. :)

Sen. Barack Obama will win Oregon’s Democratic primary, CNN projects.

Sen. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic primary in Kentucky by a wide margin, CNN projects.

The polls close at 6:00 PM EST in most of Kentucky, 7:00 PM in western counties. Oregon is mail-in only; last ballots are due at 11:00 PM. Oh, and the American Idol finale is from 8:00 to 9:00.

Barack Obama’s big Iowa rally is at 8:30 PM, which creates an odd dilemma for him: how is he going to declare that he’s won a majority of pledged delegates before the polls have even closed in Oregon? Admittedly, it’s a foregone conclusion that he will secure the majority tonight — with or without Florida and Michigan — and indeed, he will probably secure the non-Florida/Michigan pledged-del majority based on Kentucky alone. But isn’t it a bit unseemly to either: a) declare quasi-victory based on a 20-point loss; or b) declare quasi-victory based on presumed results from a state whose polls aren’t even closed yet? And yet if he waits until 1:00 AM or whenever, everyone will already be asleep.

Of course, as a commenter on Pablano’s site points out, maybe it doesn’t matter, since everyone will be watching Idol anyway. (I don’t even know who the finalists are. Okay, check that, I just looked it up: the finalists are David Archuleta and David Cook. But I honestly haven’t been paying any attention. And I’m apparently not alone.)

Anyway, leave your predictions, comments, observations, etc. (about any of the three contests) here. I’m not sure how much live-blogging I’ll be doing. The last several nights, after putting Loyette to bed, Becky and I have been (finally) watching the first season of Lost on DVD — I know, we’re so hip and with it! Viva 2004! — and I have a feeling she won’t want to watch Wolf when she could be watching Jack.

Oh, and no Lost spoilers, please. And by "spoilers," I mean "anything that has happened in the last four years." Thanks. :)

Doctors say Sen. Edward Kennedy has brain tumor; condition discovered after he had seizure.

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but I couldn’t let this one go. I’ve just sent out this letter to various members of the MSM, hoping to get somebody to pay attention to what Hillary is doing.

Dear members of the press,

Today’s New York Times highlights Hillary Clinton’s claim of a lead in the "popular vote."  The article discusses the controversy surrounding Florida and Michigan, but it barely mentions the two most intellectually dishonest aspects of Senator Clinton’s tally:

* Her count totally and deliberately excludes the states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, even though it is perfectly possible to include reasonable estimates of those states’ popular-vote totals.  Senator Clinton has chosen to ignore these states, and yet she has the audacity to claim that she is the one who wants to count every vote, in all 50 states.  That claim is flatly untrue. Hers is not a 50-state count, but a 46-state
count.  In direct contradiction to her rhetoric — "we cannot claim that we have
a nominee based on 48 states," she said yesterday — Senator Clinton is ignoring
four whole states that held indisputably valid elections, simply because their
inclusion would give Senator Obama a combined 110,000-vote boost and thus
eliminate Senator Clinton’s 26,000-vote "lead."

* Her count not only includes the unsanctioned primaries in Florida and Michigan, it makes no allowance for the fact that Senator Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan.  Instead of counting Michigan as a 328,309 to 238,168 victory for Senator Clinton — her margin over "Uncommitted" — she is awarding herself a 328,309 to zero victory.  This margin is reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s electoral "victories," and it obviously bears no relation whatsoever to the actual expressed will of the people of Michigan.  Yet her national "lead" is completely dependent on this absurd perversion of the popular will.  If "Uncommitted" is counted for Obama in Michigan, and if Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington are included in the tally, Senator Obama leads the national tally by more than 319,000 votes.

Through both of these indefensible vote-counting choices, Senator Clinton demonstrates that she is not interested in counting every vote, but only those votes which benefit her argument.

The Obama campaign is not aggressively countering these lies, presumably because it does not want to legitimize any aspect of Senator Clinton’s "popular vote" argument.  However, the press has a duty to report the truth, and even granting Senator Clinton all reasonable benefit of the doubt, her fraudulent tally bears no relation whatsoever to "truth."  To claim that Senator Clinton has "received the most votes" is not merely a controversial statement, it is an outright lie, and the press must report it as such.  To do otherwise is to actively participate in the disenfranchisement of all voters in Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, and all non-Clinton-supporters in Michigan.

I am an independent blogger, unaffiliated with any campaign and personally
undecided between Senators Obama and McCain.  However, I am exasperated by
Senator Clinton’s use of a facially fraudulent vote tally, and by the press’s
willingness to play along with her risible spin.  In particular, the exclusion
of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington gets barely a mention in the mainstream
media, when in fact this is the most obviously indefensible aspect of Senator
Clinton’s vote-counting tactics.  How can she claim to "count every vote," and
lambaste Senator Obama for declaring victory "based on 48 states," when she
herself is only counting, at most, 46 states?!  This lie must be countered by
the truth!

I have written letters to all of Senator Clinton’s superdelegate endorsers in the four uncounted caucus states, urging them to insist that she stop ignoring their states’ voters.  As my letter notes, it is particularly ironic that Senator Clinton is refusing to count Iowa and Nevada, given that she signed a pledge to respect those states’ early caucuses by refraining from any campaign activity in the unsanctioned Michigan and Florida primaries.  "We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process," Clinton’s campaign manager said at the time. Yet she is now arguing that Iowa and Nevada should not count, while Michigan and Florida should. This is hypocritical and intellectually dishonest to a degree that beggars belief.

If Senator Clinton wants to argue that Florida should count, and that Michigan should count with the "Uncommitted" votes going to Senator Obama, those are reasonable arguments, and can be fairly considered.  But the inclusion of her Saddam Hussein-style, unanimous "victory" in Michigan, and the exclusion of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, completely undermines the intellectual underpinnings of her argument, and it is your duty as members of the press to point this out.

I urge all members of the media to provide honest, objective, and thorough analysis of this issue, rather than granting the Clinton camp’s unrebutted spin a veneer of legitimacy that it plainly does not deserve.

Sincerely,

Brendan Loy
"Irish Trojan in Tennessee"
http://blog.brendanloy.com/