Alas and alack, I know no one I wish to proposed to, on this rare day when I could do so with impunity, but I will enjoy Sadie Hawkins Day anyway. I guess I'd better prepare for 2012.

Labels: about me

Who knew he wrote so well? Bob Geldof has a piece in Time Magazine that I cannot recommend highly enough. On the Bush trip to Africa, which Geldof took with him, and on the aid to Africa and Bush policies in general. It's got the balance and calm tone that I've wished for in so many political discussions about almost everything.

Labels: america, gwb, writing

If you use Firefox, please accept my apologies for the weird display. Several weeks ago, I'd worked it out so the display was fine in both browsers but now, only in Firefox, not I.E.7, the first title and date appear but everything else drops down to begin below the sidebar and spread out across the whole screen. All the div and /div codes seem right so maybe it's something else. Any suggestions will be very much appreciated. In the meantime, I need to check and doublecheck, and don't have time right now unfortunately. I don't use Firefox as my default because it's wildly less secure for me (every time I've used it even for a few moments, I've gotten third-party invasions). But I know lots of people use it so I want to accommodate them too. So bear with me....

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Recent lapses in posting are due to preparations for and attendance at a 4-year-old's birthday festivities several states away. I'm going to post some photos of the drive back today in totally intense rain and snow (yes, I occasionally snap photos while driving). I also got to read to the birthday girl's class and that was a blast. Take a look at "Duck and Goose" if you want an amusing read. Different age audience from Tom Wolfe or Candy Bushnell, but lots of fun.

Labels: about me, family, fun, writing

Some Dem totals have changed. American Samoa and "Americans living abroad" have been added, and the AP seems to have moved superdelegates around some more.

I still can't explain the differences but there it is for today.

Labels: 2008 election, statistics

I love making charts. It's some kind of organizational and graphic illness, I think. Anyway, I thought it would be a blast to see whether I could construct an Excel chart that would reveal the bias of various news organizations and, perhaps, the truthfulness of others. But I hadn't realized how utterly bizarrely the primaries and caucuses are run. (By the way, what's happening with Huckabee's entirely justifiable protest about Washington's caucuses being shut down because the organizers said it was late?) I also hadn't realized that party bosses still ruled with strong-arm tactics all these many years after Tammany Hall became a heap of ashes. As a result, plain and simple arithmetical calculations differ so much from what states report as their delegate counts that it is nothing short of astonishing.

The one agreed-upon fact is vote count. What voters did is clear. But that's where it ends. Each states makes its own (often utterly arbitrary) decisions as far as ascribing delegates. You might think it would be obvious. You might think % of votes would determine and equal % of delegates but all I can say, as politely as possible, is "not on your life" and "no way." Plus, for their part, the Republicans have a whole bunch of winner-take-all states so it's impossible to see the real actual so-called will of the people reflected in their delegate counts. The Democrats may be saved in the end by the relatively open situation this year since everyone can see what the votes actually are. They may have to accept that the votes matter enough that reversing the results simply won't work. And perhaps that's what Romney was hoping for and why he "withdrew" rather than stopped.

At about two-thirds through the process, here are the numbers for any rare readers to check out. Perhaps, like me, you will fall to the floor clutching your calculator and gasping for air. What was that about one man, one vote? Not even the delegate totals being divvied up by the "authorities" are the same. Sheesh.

And if you think that's crazy, check out the Democratic side which at least has the benefit of more proportional assignment of delegates, although it must have more strong-arm party bosses given that many states' results won't be certified until the bosses say they are:

After that, all I have left to say is uncle.

Labels: 2008 election, silliness

Last week I called a local toy store that's reputed to be wonderful, to see if they would be open today. The owner said yes, definitely. I expressed my pleasure because I've never been there before and have been looking forward to going, but their hours are 10-5 all week when I'm 70 miles away gathering rosebuds, bread and bacon. So just to clarify, I asked whether for sure they'd be open since it would be President's Day and she said, oh yes, because it's a big shopping holiday. I said see you then, then, and she said something along the lines of indeed.

I picked up my friend at 2:30 and drove the ten or fifteen miles and . . . you guessed it: it was closed. No sign on the door, no note saying how sorry they were but they were closed on account of no one could work because everyone wanted to stay home and recite the Emanciation Proclamation followed by James Polk's inaugural address followed by Roosevelt's declaration of war followed by homilies about George Washington. No, they simply were not open.

Labels: about me, ridiculousness, shopping

I read this book to one of T2CGITW last night. It's so good I can't begin to praise it adequately. Zen Shorts by Jon Muth. The story is terrific and so are the watercolor illustrations. The little girl I was reading to was entrance by some of the illustrations herself, not something that often happens with *little* children, but they are beautiful, frameable.

I discovered Jan Muth linking from some other book, basically browsing online at Barnes & Noble - something I haven't done particularly successfully very often because I'm more familiar browsing in a physical store. Anyway, I'm a convert now because this is an amazing experience. On the surface, it's a story about a big panda named Stillwater and the three children who meet him because he's sitting in their backyard under a red umbrella. They visit him at his house, and play with him, and he tells them three stories. The essence of the book is to inculcate in one's mind a quietness that welcomes thoughts and ideas. The almost-4-year-old I was reading with last night liked the book so much that after we read it and played with cut-outs for a while, she asked me to read it again. And then she asked her father to read it to her at bedtime. Three times in a couple of hours. What greater compliment is there?

Labels: books, children, reading, reflections, t2cgitw, writing

It would be really bad if the 2008 election were to be decided by tricks and a shell game instead of voters.

I wrote here about how daunting it is to get straightforward and clear facts about delegate counts.
The NY Times acknowledges here that delegate counting is inaccurate, confusing and run by party operatives.
CNN states that their numbers are estimates; okay but apparently they have agendas as well since their overall results don't derive from their own details.
USA Today springboards from AP numbers but excludes two states and patently uses estimates for some figures.
MSNBC writes here about the complex process they use which is the closest to plain facts.

There are many important questions of which these are just some:

Who gave party bosses the power and freedom license to devise and play this shell game?

When will someone who's audible and visible (not just little old me) pull away the wizard's cloak and reveal what's really going on, instead of letting us muck along thinking we're actually voting for the candidates?

How is that a candidate might be chosen other than simply by the votes?!?

Superdelegate voters may make the difference in the Democratic Party since the race is so close. Superdelegates aren't chosen by voters, they're chosen as rewards for party work and loyalty. And their votes are decided by party machine operatives, not by voting results. How can that be allowed to happen?? (As a friend of mine said, can you say back room wheeling and dealing, without the smoke?) Gifts of tickets to the convention are fine but how can it be that they don't have to ratify the votes of their primaries or caucuses?

Another swirling rumor is that Billary will sue to get Michigan and Florida delegates permitted since she won those primaries. Edwards and Obama withdrew their names there because the party had told them to but Billary ignored the party's edict and left her name on the ballots. If she got those delegates, the voters in Florida and Michigan would have been totally stiffed since they literally could not vote for all the candidates. It would be different if they'd been allowed to vote as they wished although the delegates were unassigned. How can this be allowed to happen??

Wouldn't it be bad for democracy if the primary - let alone another election - were decided by lawyers instead of voters?

Labels: 2008 election, politics

In case you don't think the Dems are starting to sweat, read Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times. He notes some of the same issues that I've written about (he calls the Florida and Michigan delegates "ghosts delegates" which I wish I'd thought of) and how utterly nasty it may get given how the Clintons have already been - several examples of which he cites. Curiouser and curiouser.

Labels: 2008 election, politics, ridiculousness

Huckabee won 60 delegates in the Kansas Republican primary today. He's pressing on.

Only a few months ago, as recently as November, McCain was thought to be out of money and out of realistic contention. What the heck happened? He's not even remotely conservative, has a famously raucous tongue and temper and yet there he is. What happened to Romney and Guiliani who were supposed to be the real contenders with Huckabee the darling of the religious right but unlikely to win enough delegates to put him in contention. And Thompson supposed to be the candidate for the rational thoughtful Republicans.

Thompson delayed entering the race for aaaaggggeeeesss and then was desultory about the whole thing, so much so that one wondered if he cared. And Guiliani decided to sit out all the states until Florida and pin all his luck on that donkey. Not surprisingly, neither strategy - if that's what they were - worked at all.

As a result of which, the angry little old man with a pretty second wife and an admirable war record (about which I am mighty tired of hearing, forgive me) is back on the radar screen. How come?

In fact, Romney isn't as far behind McCain in *actual* delegates as Billary is behind Obama, yet the Democrats are talking about how close their race is while the Republicans have handed the mantle to McCain, although Huckabee refuses to cave in. I can't stand the man's views but I am relieved that someone refuses to look at the emperor and praise his new clothes.

I can only think that deals have been made. How else explain all this? Remember smoked filled back rooms? Cigar-smoking wheelers and dealers? Why isn't it possible that GOP Powers That Be are convinced that Billary or Obama can only be beaten by McCain (not Romney or Thompson or Guiliani or Huckabee) and that, therefore, "for the good of the country" (as Romney almost chanted the other day when he withdrew) all the rest of them should take a hit? What else explains Rudy's plummet from eager to utterly lifeless AND Thompson's shuffling off the mortal coil of the campaign AND Romney's withdrawing when he's not actually very far behind and there are 27 states yet to have primaries and caucuses? How is it possible that Huckabee is the only one with enough personal gumption to say "take that deal and shove it"? What other conclusion can one draw?

Labels: 2008 election, reflections, silliness

Listening to the news this morning, I was surprised to hear some so-called pundits saying they thought Obama would win the next few Democratic primaries but that Billary would win a few "important" ones (Texas) and eventually eek out a narrow win. I was so struck by this because they've been so wrong about the two of them. They said American voters wouldn't vote for a black man . . . but Iowa went for him enthusiastically. They said Hillary would be trounced in New Hampshire . . . but she got emotional and won.

This year it seems the pundits have as much ability to predict the outcome of the Democrats' primary season as weathermen have to predict whether it will be sunny or snowy tomorrow.

Perhaps Peggy Noonan knows something, however. In her always calm and engrossing style, today she has an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Can Mrs Clinton Lose? which includes this startling and literate paragraph:

Political professionals are leery of saying, publicly, that she is losing, because they said it before New Hampshire and turned out to be wrong. Some of them signaled their personal weariness with Clintonism at that time, and fear now, as they report, to look as if they are carrying an agenda. One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she's a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched. Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river. When he floated to the surface they found he'd tried to claw his way from under the ice. That is how reporters see Hillary.

I was, first, pleased that it wasn't just inexperienced old me who notes that pundits don't want to acknowledge that Billary is losing. (Besides, who'd want to risk her wrath if they say she'll lose and then she wins - and anyway she'll still be a senator.) As a speechwriter and inner-circle-member of both Reagan and Nixon administrations, Noonan knows whereof she speaks.

Labels: 2008 election, politics, reflections, writing

I have an excel spreadsheet with all the votes and all the delegate counts if percentages of votes were used as the basis for delegates. It includes lines for CNN's and AP's and the NYTimes' delegate counts and it turns out that the actual delegate count has little logic at all. My favorite Dem example is New Hampshire where Edwards came in 2nd but received one more delegate than Clinton. My favorite GOP example is California where McCain's percentage should earn him 71 delegates to Romney's 58, Huckabee's 20 and Others' 20, but where the assignment is McCain 149, Romney 3 and everyone else zero. Fifty percent of the states do not assign delegates simply based on percentage of votes. Weird, scary if we're really a democractic society, but true.

At least the electoral college is based on actual votes, however, so if the majority of Kansans voted for Billy Bob Thornton then Kansas's electoral college delegates would have to vote for BBT on the first ballot. But not primaries. Not in the GOP.

Labels: 2008 election, politics, ridiculousness

I'm going out on a limb and predicting that Romney will take the lead in the Republican delegate count today. I think enough people find McCain just too much of a loose canon - temperamental, weird, and so on. One of Seablogger's readers dubbed him John McQueeg and I do admit I've wondered if he fiddles with little steel balls when no one is noticing. Romney's a Stepford Candidate and Huckabee's a religious zealot who's son killed a dog with his bare hands so to my mind, so the GOP has no one I feel comfortable with but , Romney's conservative enough for the right wing of the party and family enough for people who don't over-analyze (like me) and economically-minded enough for business people, so I think he's going to pull out the lead today.

Labels: 2008 election, reflections

Today ("super Tuesday") is Adlai Stevenson's 108th birthday. Perfect.

Labels: 2008 election, anniversaries, juxtapositions

I need to vent. Recently I read a blogger's diabtribe about best sellers and it reminded me of how frustrated I get when people act all high and mighty about what they read, or (more often) about what others read. Some people actually make apologetic excuses if you ask them what they're reading and it turns out to be a best seller. My father wouldn't let me read what he called "trash" (i.e., Nancy Drew and other popular novels) so I grabbed a flashlight and became a secret Nancy Drew reader. When he found me out, he took all the novels out of my room and made a deal with me that I could read one of my choices every time I finished two of his. The result of which was that I stopped reading for pleasure. My mother had me read aloud to her to surmount the onus of the requirement. Thus I read Ivanhoe, The Black Arrow, Christians Courageous, and Master Skylark and came to adore all of them.

My father was a noted professor and an avid reader. He read so quickly that he could polish off a small novel in a couple of hours without any trouble. So he read mysteries and spy stories the way some of us watch Shark or CSI. And yet, despite his passion for, and ability to wax thoroughly rhapsodic on the wonders of good mysteries and spy stores, he was an inveterate snob about best sellers, like the blogger I encountered the other day.

I fail to understand a snotty attitude toward best sellers. Despite that dreadful patch with my father which led to a period where I didn't read anything for pleasure, I now read voraciously and anything that strikes my fancy, both "good" and popular. I asked people why being popular *must* equate to being lesser but never get a satisfactory answer. Popular really isn't necessarily bad. In fact something being popular may mean it has some merit. Pasta is popular. Apples are well-liked. Blue jeans are hugely popular. Are any of these bad for people? Of course not. And as far as reading goes, not everyone can work up interest in the smells of a small pastry or a mother's shawl. Proust's prose is certainly graceful and stirs more qualitative and evocative images, more so than Danielle Steele. And Sartre demands responses from a reader, whether in agreement or not. And Shakespeare requires engagement. And Jane Austen wraps you in her arms. All of which is wonderful and unquestionably more refined and smart, more likely to enhance the reader's cleverness and perceptions of life and people than, say, Jackie Collins or John Grisham.

But any reading stimulates the imagination. Babies read Pat the Bunny - a humungous best seller, by the way - and move on to Eric Carle and 1001 Tales and Madeleine and libraries-ful of wonderful fantastic books. If they're lucky, they proceed to Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames and Judy Blume and eventually Norton Juster and Tolstoi. What matters is that their imaginations are stirred. If one adult likes so-called trashy romances and another prefers history and biography, is either a better person? Possibly more aware of facts and events, which is useful and good to know, but beyond that?

I'd love to know what any rare readers of this page read and what they think about best sellers.

Labels: books, history, reading, reflections

Tomorrow's various primaries and caucuses will have Democrats pin the tail on 2,084 convention delegates from 22 states plus American Samoa and "democrats abroad" and Republicans do the same for 1,081 delegates from 21 states.

My brilliant insight is that neither party will have it completely decided tomorrow because there's too much dissention in the ranks (i.e., among voters). Besides, most of the states distribute the delegates according to the percentages of the voting results, not winner-takes-all like the electoral college or anything (an interesting subject for another day). My out-on-a-limb prediction is that it will be an insane day and that several states' results will be very unexpected. How's that for a sure thing?! Anyone care to make a real prediction?

BTW, if McCain ever yells and screams about the electoral college or winner-take-all delegate assignments, someone should tell him to stop. At the moment, he's ahead in delegates by 10 but behind in votes by almost 15% - all because of winner-take-all Florida. If delegates were entirely assigned by percent of votes, which sure seems the right and fair way to do it, Romney would have 86 to McCain's 51, Huckabee's 37 and "other's" 44. If I were Romney, I'd be pretty ticked off right about now.

Labels: 2008 election, people

Oh for goodness sake (here). Does she really think voters will fall for this AGAIN?? Please tell me no one is so easily manipulated in 2008? Pulleeezz tell me it isn't so. And, by the way, if on-the-eve-of-election displays of just a touch of emotion are a good thing for Billary Rodton because it shows she has feelings, then why were Edmund Muskie's tears so catastrophic?? And does she really think a female whimper or whine will appeal to voters? I thought that was exactly why people did not want to elect a woman. What have I missed?

Labels: 2008 election, silliness