Kenji JOHJIMA on the case!!

my favorite player, Kenji Johjima, STOLE HOME PLATE today! woo hoo! i couldn't be happier (Tulane advances in the NCAA tournament today and that doesn't HURT!). the saturday is better than it started by a LONG shot!

Still gross

This year, at the MS Braves, instead of racing fans in inflatable balls, they have a running (blood shot) eyeball race. It is about 3x as gross as it sounds.

Sadly, Terribly Convenient for Tracking

A report just surfaced listing the FBI's involvement in detainee interrogations. One of the most enlightening parts of the report was the FBI's catalog of our government's role in torturing people. the link above takes you to an incredible chart from talking points. An amazing catalog of the betrayal of American principles and values. This 8 year long insult to the integrity of my home cannot end with enough speed.

OK, I'm Officially Sick of It.

Hillary Clinton needs to get the hell out of the way. I've been kind of quite about it lately, but i'm done. Hillary has been saying for over a month now that she's keeping in the race because she can't give up when she's this close. she can't give up when everyone hasn't had their say in the vote.

I'm sorry, but this has bound into the land of fantasy. She cannot win with the math of a month ago. it isn't better today. More to the point, she cannot win without tearing the party apart. seriously. anyone supporting hillary now (or for the last month or two) needs to explain to me how she can win without asking delegates to overturn votes that went to obama. How we can have a party together without taking earned votes away from the candidate. we can't. if we do, then we tear the party into pieces. I'm sorry, but this is how it is. The worst part, she is living up to the worst lights that people have cast her in over the last 18 years. People have defended her actions as take-charge aggressive, not manipulative and self serving to the point of harming others. It hurts to see her live out the caricature that others have drawn of her.

The part that annoys me most is hearing hillary say 'everyone deserves their time to vote'. as if it were about going through all 50 states. As if we EVER had a primary that was decided by direct vote, after ALL the states voted. No matter how nice it sounds, we have never waited to the end of the modern primary process to pick our nominee. It is not the nature of our process. it never has been. None-the-less, we have this vanity contest with a senator who cannot win and cannot seem to let herself quit. we have a multi-million dollar drain on our monies, needed for house and senate races, like the one we WON in MS- Dist. 1. instead, we're continuing donations to this farcical primary attempt. the race is over. it is costing money and may be costing votes. i'm done with it and i'm sick of waste. Right now Ronnie Musgrove is up 8 points in an attempt to take back a Miss. Senate seat for the democrats for the first time in a generation...yet we waste time and MONEY on this vanity project for Hillary Clinton. Because she came "so close". I'm sorry. I've worked races where we lost by 36 votes. i know what close is. It stinks. It's time to suck it up and go back to being a senator. every day and every dollar works against a Majority in the senate. a supreme court that is secure. a government i can live for instead of living through.

I'm done waiting. Hillary should quit now.

Well, we Lost.

But I had as good a time as I could have hoped for!

MSUSA!

More from the lounge!

Left Field Truckin!

The left field lounge is built on crazy old vehicles and home made stands. Every section has some crazy Mississippi State constructed stuff.

Left field lounge

MSU baseball basically has a 'left field lounge' that is basically like a party in the outfield for every game. Lots of fun, even if you are losing!

Last Game of the Season!

Our coach at MSU is retiring today. Ron Polk is the winning-est coach in SEC history for any sport!

IF You Watch Anything This Week...

You've got to see this. Olberman puts it out there as clear as a bell. all i can say is "wow". watch this and tell me what it leaves you thinking. seriously.

75% Democratic

OK, how big of a year is it for the Democrats? HOW bad has the GOP screwed it up? Mississippi has 4 congressmen and it just elected its THIRD (of 4) Democrat to congress! In this district (which is the whitest in MS, voting 62% for bush in 2004), they tried to 'tar' the democratic candidate by tying him to Obama and calling him a "liberal". If the go-to playbook doesn't work with Obama in Mississippi, then i cannot WAIT to see what happens in districts that aren't considered 'close'. I have to say, this may be the most important electoral indicator you will see all year.

Finally, time for the grown-ups to be back in charge.
--
Notes (and MUCH thanks from Cotton Mouth):

2008 SPECIAL ELECTION RUNOFF
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE 1ST DISTRICT
----------------------------------------------------
CHILDERS (D) 50,401 - 52%
DAVIS (R) 46,160 - 48%
(414of 462 precints reporting)

(notes)
1. Lee County at +800 childers, we got +1,600 last time, 8 precints of 42 left in Lee
2. 38/38 of Desoto is in now, Lee still 42/42, Prentiss 0/15
3. Childers in comparison to 4/22 picked up 500 in Chickasaw, 400 in Yalobusha
4. Union and Webster a wash
5. Lafayette +450, Panola +700 with one precint left
6. Childers wins Lee by 1,800 , a little more than last time
7. Counties left to report: Prentiss, Calhoun, Clay, Tate, Itawamba, Pontotoc
9. Picked up 200 in Alcorn
10. Desoto hits, now 38/38, we are gonna win this thing, yehaaaaw!!
11. Prentiss only 3/15 in
12. Per MSNBC AP calls race for Childers

----------
FYI, THAT is a badass breakdown of the race region by region. you will be NEVER see anything like that at 10pm if you aren't friends with a campaign. That's incredible. those guys are top notch.

UPDATE!
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more from Cotton Mouth:

entiss only 3/15 in 12. Per MSNBC AP calls race for Childers

MS-01: Resources for tonight Posted: 13 May 2008 06:16 PM CDT We will be posting results as they come in tonight, as are several other blogs. I am going to post links to a lot of cool stuff for MS-01 so that you can be prepared when the results start coming in. Phonebank for Childers MS-01 Resources: Mississippi Secratary of State's website has the official SOS returns for the April 22 election 2008 Race Tracker has district information Swing State Project has two very cool charts with the county by county results from the last go around. Live Blogging the Results: ( I will add more as I learn of them) Swing State Project Democratic Convention Watch Cotton Mouth Official Results: (will update with specific links as they come available) Daily Journal election results page District Map (Color Coded from April 22 results) Blue - Travis Childers Red - Greg Davis - Links to today's news articles on MS-01 TPM: All Eyes On Mississippi House Race Tonight - Commercial Dispatch: Voters don mud boots, head to polls - Daily Journal: Reaffirms endorsement - WSJ: A House Race Holds Clues for GOP

Greg Davis is trying to save us from scary liberals with liberal ideas Posted: 13 May 2008 01:16 AM CDT The Commercial Appeal's special election preview article came out early this morning. It was fairly standard but this one Greg Davis quote caught my eye. Davis told several hundred at the Civic Center rally, "Thanks for being here on the eve of the historic election. Voters have a choice. They can vote for my opponent's party that has the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and John Kerry, all liberals with liberal ideas..." You know, it is not like the last eight years of Republican rule have been a bed of roses there Greg. The man you brought in to campaign for you today is a principal architect of the failed policies of the current administration. I don't think people are too scared about Pelosi or Obama, they just don't want him or any his cronies anywhere near Washington. Today the GOP will learn a painful lesson. The days of the politics of fear and division are drawing to a thankful close in Mississippi.

WaPo's The Fix - Chris Cillizza's Political Blog on recent polling in MS-01 Posted: 12 May 2008 10:54 PM CDT The Fix, a political blog by Chris Cillizza from the Washington Post, featured this little nugget of information on recent polling. There is even a short video of Chris on the MS-01 race. Despite the onslaught of spending, knowledgeable sources on both sides of the aisle insist little has changed in the last 21 days. Childers is believed to have a mid single digit lead over Davis with Republican strategists turning pessimistic about their chances in the last 48 hours or so. If you are in north Mississippi, please go vote tomorrow and take someone with you, unless they are voting for Davis of course. The Republican strategy appears to be to bring in all their guns to get their vote out, and make the race so ugly that it repels a large turnout. Don't be complacent or fooled, go vote! UPDATE: The NRCC has fired $4000 a day for a daily tracking poll for the last two weeks, including today. Our friend Mitch at the Thorn Papers has been talking to little Republican birdies about said polls. A little bird just informed me that the Republicans' own internal polls are showing Childers up five.

Governor William Winter on Davis campaign: "I am appalled..." Posted: 12 May 2008 10:08 PM CDT Just released by the New York Times is another article surveying the effect of recent Davis campaign attempts to bring down Travis Childers by linking him to presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama. Many Mississippians see this as what it is, race baiting at is finest. Former Governor and hero of Mississippi politics, who gave us the monumental Education Reform Act of 1982, had this to say, “I am appalled that this blatant appeal to racial prejudice is still being employed,” said Mr. Winter, who lost the 1967 governor’s race after his segregationist opponent circulated handbills showing blacks listening to one of his speeches. Mr. Winter went on to win the governor’s office 12 years later. “I had thought we had gotten past that,” Mr. Winter said. “That was a tactic that was used against me in the 1960s.” Professors at Ole Miss noticed the blatant use of race by the Davis campaign as well. The chairman of the University of Mississippi’s department of public policy leadership, Robert J. Haws, said he had also noted the use of race in the contest. “Does this reflect a certain level of desperation?” he asked. Dr. Haws also said he had detected a “real reaction from people I know, Republicans” against the ads. What does Travis Childers think of these controversial tactics? Mr. Childers, 50, a court official in the district’s rural section, said voters believed that the effort to link him to Mr. Obama was about race. “When I’ve been out in the district, people tell me, ‘They’re trying to play the race card,’ ” he said. The Childers campaign is counting on that reaction, as well as an increased black turnout, focusing pre-election efforts on rallying African-American voters scattered through the small towns of the district’s 24 mostly rural counties. Mr. Davis, on the other hand, is counting on Mr. Cheney to help rally his base in DeSoto County, which has about 20 percent of the district’s population, abuts Memphis and is the fastest-growing in Mississippi.

Walk it Out

This is a pretty amazing sync of the a song from today with theses dancers from the Ed Sullivan Show doing a routine to a song called "Mexican Breakfast". WATCH!!

Glutton for PunishEnt!

My 2 favorite baseball teams are among the 3 worst teams in all of baseball. Oddly, it's not as bad as it sounds. I'm not much of a fair weather fan.

It's About that Good Judgement...

John McCain, fresh off rigging a sweetheart land deal in AZ for one of his supporters, has picked
former lobbyist for Burmese dictatorship to run GOP convention. One assumes how well he made the that military junta look (you know, the ones blocking aid from citizens after the cyclone killed 10s of thousands) and thought he'd be PERFECT for making the GOP look great this summer!

If you speak to a McCain supporter, ask them if they like the judgment he's had on actual decisions the man's made, versus just gushing how dreamy he must have looked in a uniform.

A Letter to the Super Delegates

I found this and figured i'd share. It's the letter from the Obama Campaign (in light of yesterday's primaries) to the Super-Delegates. Here is how it stands.

TO: Superdelegates
FROM: David Plouffe, Campaign Manager
RE: An Update on the Race for Delegates
DA: May 7, 2008

There are only six contests remaining in the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. Only 7 percent of the pledged delegates remain on the table. There are 260 remaining undeclared superdelegates, for a total of 477 delegates left to be awarded.

With North Carolina and Indiana complete, Barack Obama only needs 172 total delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. This is only 36% of the total remaining delegates.

Conversely, Senator Clinton needs 326 delegates to reach the Democratic nomination, which represents a startling 68% of the remaining delegates.

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

We believe it is exceedingly unlikely Senator Clinton will overtake our lead in the popular vote and in fact lost ground on that measure last night. However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.

Just as the Presidential election in November will be decided by the electoral college, not popular vote, the Democratic nomination is decided by delegates.

If we believed the popular vote was somehow the key measurement, we would have campaigned much more intensively in our home state of Illinois and in all the other populous states, in the pursuit of larger raw vote totals. But it is not the key measurement. We played by the rules, set by you, the DNC members, and campaigned as hard as we could, in as many places as we could, to acquire delegates. Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.

The Clinton campaign was very clear about their own strategy until the numbers become too ominous for them. They were like a broken record , repeating ad nauseum that this nomination race is about delegates. Now, the word delegate has disappeared from their vocabulary, in an attempt to change the rules and create an alternative reality.

We want to be clear – we believe that the winner of a majority of pledged delegates will and should be the nominee of our party. And we estimate that after the Oregon and Kentucky primaries on May 20, we will have won a majority of the overall pledged delegates According to a recent news report, by even their most optimistic estimates the Clinton Campaign expects to trail by more than 100 pledged delegates and will then ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.

But of course superdelegates are free to and have been utilizing their own criteria for deciding who our nominee should be. Many are deciding on the basis of electability, a favorite Clinton refrain. And if you look at the numbers, during a period where the Clinton campaign has been making an increasingly strident pitch on electability, it is clear their argument is failing miserably with superdelegates.

Since February 5, the Obama campaign has netted 107 superdelegates, and the Clinton campaign only 21. Since the Pennsylvania primary, much of it during the challenging Rev. Wright period, we have netted 24 and the Clinton campaign 17.

At some point – we would argue that time is now – this ceases to be a theoretical exercise about how superdelegates view electability. The reality of the preferences in the last several weeks offer a clear guide of how strongly superdelegates feel Senator Obama will perform in November, both in building a winning campaign for the presidency as well as providing the best electoral climate across the country for all Democratic candidates.

It is important to note that Senator Obama leads Senator Clinton in superdelegate endorsements among Governors, United States Senators and members of the House of Representatives. These elected officials all have a keen sense for who our strongest nominee will be in November.

It is only among DNC members where Senator Clinton holds a lead, which has been rapidly dwindling.

As we head into the final days of the campaign, we just wanted to be clear with you as a party leader, who will be instrumental in making the final decision of who our nominee will be, how we view the race at this point.

Senator Obama, our campaign and our supporters believe pledged delegates is the most legitimate metric for determining how this race has unfolded. It is simply the ratification of the DNC rules – your rules – which we built this campaign and our strategy around.

The Morning After

UPDATE: Clinton just lent her campaign $6.4 Million, leading me to believe it may not be over yet. Sadly, this is good for no one, including her.
--

To follow up from last night, I think Obama is gonna get the nomination this week, if not today. As of this morning, I’m still sticking to the fact that she's canceled all coming news appearances, including the morning shows. No one in a close race that plans to make a go of it cancels on free media. you don't do that unless you quit.

Which is good. she HAS to quit, or tear the party apart. Because she cannot win
Mathematically. without political insiders trumping the popular vote, it is impossible for her to win by people counted in the popular vote. She would have to override the will of the people with the consent of a minority of supporters (no matter how big a minority) which will send the party into chaos.

Which brings me to something else. I keep hearing that Hillary, whom i like, and her supporters keep saying "who tells someone that's 2% behind 'you should quit'". The problem is that sometimes you just lose by 8 votes (like in Guam this week). Additionally, Chaos is a proper word here. Have you heard of “Operation Chaos”? Rush Limbaugh and others have been advocating daily for ALL GOP'ers to vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary for weeks now. The theory was that Hillary is the weaker candidate to run against, so the GOP should help HER be the nominee. This means some of the support that pushed her was fueled by GOP people crossing over to vote for her because she's a better opponent for them than Obama. In some of the exit polling I saw showed a substantial percentage of Hillary supporters 10-18% were saying they don't feel she matches their views, etc. the only way that makes sense is crossover vote and when you win by a few points, that's a few Rush Limbaugh points!

I liked her until the end, when it came down to the teardown politics. This is not because I'm naive about how that works, but she had the slimmest of chances to actually win. She was edging into Mike Huckabee land. She was trying to lay waste to her opponent, leaving him too bloody to go on. This was done so the super delegates could feel comfortable tossing out the popular vote. They could feel he was too battered to go on in the general election. Even THAT would be ok if she had any chance to pull off a real win without a real party breakdown. I didn't like it because to win that sort of nomination, outside of trumping the popular vote and sending Dems into orbit, is impossible. In my mind, she’d have inevitably lost, ripped the party and left Obama with a knife in his back.

No thanks.

Obama Takes It!?!?!

Well, Obama walked away with the NC primary Tuesday. As of midnight, Indiana was too close to call. It seemed to be that The Entire race was coming down to Lake County and the City of Gary. Earlier on, they were about 20,000 votes apart. While there are still a few votes to count, NBC called the race for Hillary.

Nothing about this is good for Hillary. Her case for the nomination is week. More to the point, I've felt for s while now it was a fiction created by one part Media daydream and one part Right Wing lust. She could have made a (weak) claim to continue if she won both states today. A(n even) weaker claim if she won 2. The close win in Indiana may have been too close to keep her boat afloat. I think she is about to concede and save the party from certain disaster.

My rationale? You don't cancel all your upcoming tv news appearances (and the morning shows) I'd you're about to make that big final push. As I hear it, that is just what she did.

We may now have a democratic nominee.

How Bad is It!?!

Its so bad that the guy that struck out has a .000 batting average. Ahem...literally, my grandmother could do that...and she's dead!

Fw: Good Night Tonight!

I caught a baseball and a T-Shirt tonight at the Braves game. Pretty good, plus we're winning! There was a remarkably gay couple behind me tonight at the game. I don't know if I've seen a more enthusiastic couple with their boys at a baseball game. Pretty cool.

Oh.
Obama won Guam by SIX VOTES! Geaux big O!

I'm a Bit Speechless this is So Sad

This may be the saddest thing I've heard in a while. Eight Belles, the horse that won 2nd place in the Kentucky Derby today, broke both its front ankles as it crossed the finish line. the poor animal came crashing to a halt and had to be euthanized immediately, there on the track. what a tragedy.