Blogito

“I’ll leave it up to the Democratic National Committee to make a decision about how to resolve it,” Mr. Obama told ABC News on Thursday night. “But I certainly want to make sure that we’ve got Michigan and Florida delegates at the convention in some fashion.”

What Obama means is that he'd like them to be there, but in non-voting fashion. For the party, in order words, but not for the Democrat Party...conventions can be a hell of a lot of fun!

Actually, Obama is playing the smart card here, because what he does NOT want, above anything else, is to have the votes already taken accepted. Anything but that is better for him, obviously...and perhaps he figures that even if he loses both states it won't be by enough to seriously diminish his delegate lead.

I listened to him during a tv interview with Charles Gibson last night and Obama is one cool, impressive customer, very comfortable, as they used to say without thinking about it, in his skin. Relaxed, confident, even charming. His likeability factor is very high.

And now I'm really tickled, as reading further in this article (I write my comments as I read, in real time, as a rule) I come to what I just finished saying...makes me feel less alone:

David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, floated the idea of allocating the delegates from the two states 50-50, which would erase Mrs. Clinton’s hypothetical advantage and essentially make the two states meaningless in the competitive delegate count. It would, however, allow Michigan and Florida delegates to participate in the national convention.

Exactly. The perfect solution, from Obama's point of view. It's fun to read all of the proposals, watching them all try to sound like the soul of rectitude while actually seeking advantage for their own side. And it's fun to read some of the silly statements:

Sure, Mr Dean, but wasn't it Party rules which created the problem? After all, if it was really up to the states, well, then, they already did what they wanted to do. It was the Party which objected.

Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat, and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, a Republican, have jointly called on the national party to resolve the situation. Aides to both said on Thursday that they were seeking a solution that did not require either state to pay for new elections.

I'm tickled watching Crist, who doesn't even have a dog in this hunt, behave like he's only being reasonable and helpful. And doing it so well that the Democrats are unwilling to tell him to butt out of their party politics!

In Florida, Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat who supports Mrs. Clinton, and the state party chairwoman, Karen Thurman, who is neutral, said the national party or some other source should pay for any do-over. Both insisted that Florida’s delegates must be seated, even if that meant allocating the delegates according to the Jan. 29 results.

“If we don’t do anything, we’re looking at a train wreck,” Mr. Nelson said. “I’m hoping reasonable heads with prevail and will see the Democratic Party doesn’t want to be at the convention in Denver two months out from the general election and having a major intraparty fight with two of the biggest and most important states in electing the next president.”

Oh, no, says Governor Crist, with a suitably concerned mien, we mustn't have that. Right, John?

He might be a better vice-presidential candidate than I originally thought; that's Obama-smooth there.

Wondering how the scientists can have conflicts over global warming data? Try this:

By dating mineral deposits inside caves up and down the canyon walls, the geologists said they determined the water levels over time as erosion carved out the mile-deep canyon as it is known today. They concluded that the canyon started from the west, then another formed from the east, and the two broke through and met as a single majestic rent in the earth some six million years ago.

Previous theories had posited six million years as the earliest age for the beginning of the entire Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.

Now here we are talking about a relatively wide-open book in the geologic record, since the pages are flat-lying and relatively undisturbed, even though now uplifted tens of thousands of feet from when the sediments were deposited. Trust me, that's remarkable.

And yet it's still possible to be wrong by 11 million years when you first decided upon 6 million...nearly 200%.

The point should be obvious: just because some 'scientist'--or even a "consensus of scientists", a new collective noun--pronounces thus and such to be so, that doesn't necessarily make it so, or mean that they are correct, either jointly or severally.

Gathering scientific data is only the first step. After that it has to be interpreted, and here is where the human factor comes in. When I was a geophysicist working for Standard Oil, my job was the interpretation of seismic, gravity and magnetic survey data. Sometimes we acquired the data ourselves, and sometimes we bought older records from our competitors who had previously interpreted the data and concluded there was nothing of value in it. Sometimes they were right; sometimes they were wrong.

The conclusion to be drawn from this example is that there really aren't that many hard and fast permanent conclusions which can be safely drawn from scientific data and held up to be incontrovertible fact, incapable of challenge. Sure, it's more comfortable when you have others who agree with you, a consensus is always nice to have...but you have to remember that a consensus had been reached by the other geophysicists in the competing oil company which sold or traded away the survey results, too, because they wouldn't have done so if they had thought they had missed anything in their own interpretation.

The famous--or perhaps I should say infamous--"hockey stick" graph is an excellent example of how scientific data can be misinterpreted, even when the results seem to be obvious on their face. Overlooking the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age caused serious errors to be present in conclusions made as a result of that failure.

When something as simple as the geologic age of the Grand Canyon can go from 6 million years to 17 million years, that should alert you to the dangers inherent in drawing hard-and-fast conclusions about any body of scientific evidence, because up until this time the 6 million years had been confidently accepted as fact by virtually every geologist in the world.

Always be wary of people who assure you that something is settled science because a consensus has been reached. Be even warier when those same people tell you that doubters must sit down and shut up and stop questioning them.

At Americablog, John Aravosis jumps on Obama's latest criticism:

"So is that why Hillary isn't releasing her returns? Because she knows that sometimes tax returns hide things that might appear (or be) scandalous? But even that argument doesn't make sense since Hillary has promised to release her returns AFTER she becomes the nominee. That means that she has no privacy interest in her tax returns, she's going to let the public see them soon anyway, but she simply doesn't want Democratic voters to get the chance to have her tax returns inform their vote during the primaries.

"See, here's how it works. Hillary's tax returns could have something foul-smelling in them, like her 10,000% profit on the cattle-futures. If she releases her returns now, it gives you and me and every other Democratic voter the chance to judge her on what's in her returns, and vote accordingly. But if she waits until after she becomes the nominee, she knows she has us by the, uh, cattle-futures. As a Democrat, I might not vote for Hillary in the primary if I see something fishy in her tax returns. But in the general election, of course I'm going to vote for Hillary, regardless of what's in her returns."

We aren't, you understand, adopting a stand based upon any kind of absolute morality, only relative morality within the party. She could be an axe-murderer, but that wouldn't matter as long as she was the Democrat running in the general election. Revealing.

The Obama campaign has sent journalists eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. I am not the only one to note, however, that these are small-bore items of almost no controversy -- more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, fighting avian flu and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage.

On the difficult compromises that required the political courage to challenge one's own political constituency, Obama flinched: the "Gang of 14" compromise on judicial appointments, the immigration compromise to which Obama tried to append union-backed killer amendments and, just last month, the compromise on warrantless eavesdropping that garnered 68 votes in the Senate. But not Obama's.

Who, in fact, supported all of these bipartisan deals, was a central player in two of them and brokered the even more notorious McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform? John McCain, of course.

Yes, John McCain -- intemperate and rough-edged, of sharp elbows and even sharper tongue. Turns out that uniting is not a matter of rhetoric or manner, but of character and courage.

In his speech yesterday commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security, Bush made this point twice.

"When this department was established following the September the 11th terrorist attacks, it was hard to imagine that we would reach this milestone without another attack on our homeland," he said. Hearing no applause, he said it again: "For those of you who were here five years ago, you think back to that time -- I don't think we would have predicted that five years later there had not been another attack on us."

Such a statement requires an asterisk -- after all, in a still-unsolved attack shortly after 9/11, a half-dozen letters containing anthrax bacteria were mailed to media and government offices, taking five lives.

Nevertheless, Bush has a point. Especially given the widespread fear after 9/11 -- fear that Bush continued to stoke for political gain -- it's reasonable for Americans to feel fortunate that we haven't been hit again.

The relevant question, however, is why? Was it something Bush did? And if so, what? Should Bush's most controversial policies -- including the harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects, the warrantless spying on domestic communication, and the decision to merge 22 different government agencies into an often dysfunctional behemoth -- get any credit?

Well, Dan, tell me something. If another attack does occur, will you assign Bush any of the blame? Why is it I think that the answer will be yes, while assigning credit is difficult? Can you have it both ways, denying credit but assigning blame? What am I saying...if you are a Liberal, of course you can.

The party has three problems. Its excruciatingly proportional system of delegate selection is so fair to the losers of primaries that no primary winner can ever get a big bounce in convention delegates, thus the problem both Obama and Clinton face in assembling a majority.

Uh huh. Let's take the numbers from RealClearPolitics, just to be consistent. By their figures, Obama leads in pledged delegates 1371-1218, a difference of 153. But Obama got 24 of those extras in Minnesota, 35 in Georgia, and 55 in Illinois, the majority of his lead in just three states. Who says there are no big bounces?

Michael Gerson, writing about Democrats promising to restore American prestige in the world:

It is worth noting that American relations with European governments have rebounded strongly in the past few years with the election of Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France. And the next president, Republican or Democrat, is likely to close Guantanamo and sign legislation to restrict American carbon emissions, mollifying two justified European criticisms.

I have to laugh, because the spot commonly selected to move these prisoners is Leavenworth, Kansas. Prior to Castro, Cuba used to be considered a garden spot for American vacationers, especially for people from Leavenworth, Kansas! They paid good money to be able to leave Leavenworth to go to Cuba even for a short time before they had to return home.

I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio's Hugh Hewitt, because, "there's something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power . . . people who don't want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end."

It was like Claude Rains summing up the meaning of everything in the film "Lawrence of Arabia": "One of them's mad and the other is wholly unscrupulous." It's the moment when you realize you just heard the truth, the meaning underlying all the drama. "They win in the end." Gave me a shudder.

I like Christopher Hitchens, despite the fact that we disagree on many things, but this isn't one of them.