I would recommend yes if you take an interest in political affairs. Hilary's pretty much beat and he no longer has to pander to the far-left section of his party and can now start to refocus on the mid-left and swing voters, so if you're interested it would be great to see what he does.

Personally I'm an undecided democratic voter. That said, I cannot believe the outrageous, obnoxious comments that so many Obama supports / Clinton bashers post to sites like digg. They are so over the top spewing hatred that I am inclined at this point to want Hillary to win just for that reason.

You're right, go. Even if we have to stand outside the main event.

I am past the point of caring. I hate this election so fucking much.

Go, but make sure to point and laugh at the liberals.

Back home already. Part of the 15000 outside. Almost didn't find the end of the line. It was forming faster than we could walk. Finally found it and got about a half block closer before the cop in the squad car announced that the arena was full.
Walked by the XCel center and could see through the glass into the arena. So close. Thousands still in line hoping to get in. Listened to the speech on the way home.
If you need a liberal to point at, just point at me.

om, have you heard the things Clinton supporters say about Obama? Have you heard the things Republicans say about him?

I agree, some of the things said by Obama supporters are shameful, but in the final analysis they pale in comparison to what other candidates' partisans say about him.

Clinton supporters need to stop playing the victim and just face the fact that she LOST. Not because of media bias, not because she's a woman, not because of hatred. She lost because Obama was the better candidate. She was actually favored by the media and at times even referred to as the presumptive nominee before the first primary even began. The coverage of her became more critical because she started LOSING, not the other way around.

She ran a good campaign, but obviously not good enough. She had more money, more institutional support, more media support, more name recognition-- more everything. Obama broke through because, while she was running the traditional metric campaign, he was catching people's attention with his charismatic sincerity and message of change.

Hillary will be back, you can count on that. But her supporters need to get out of denial and simply accept the fact that she lost this race, fair and square. Rather than feel sorry for yourselves, learn from the experience so you'll run a better campaign the next time she runs in 2016.

Factoid: In Hungarian, "barack" means plum. The most typical local drink is "barack palinka", meaning plum brandy. You see "barack" written all over the place in every shop. We have no drink by the name "hillary".

Obama seems like a decent enough man, for a politician. He speaks with an obvious 'preacher' cadence , which I do not trust. Those preachers are just in it for the collections.

Strange isn;t it... George Bush loses the popular vote and is accused of stealing the election. Obama does the same thing and it's barely getting a mention!

Quite why the Democrats are going for a guy who only won in 2 states that Kerry did in 04 beats me... It cannot be a secret that places like Kansas are not going to side in the blue column come November.

McCain it is and Hillary in 2012.

I agree with the sentiments put forth by "dangermouse", but the crass mud-slinging isn't restricted just to Obama supporters. If you're angry because of the mud-slinging done by candidates in media coverage or by their supporters, then you really ought to consider a write-in on the November ballot.

The important issue here is the candidates' platforms and their political record in the past (i.e., is it consistent with the platform that's being presented to us in the campaign?). Large numbers of people in all political camps are guilty of ignoring the real question that they're faced so that they can instead vote along party lines, cast a vote for who they hope will be the first female or non-white President, or by drawing questionable analogies between their candidate and beloved political figures from the past.

My favorite questionable analogy is when people talk about Obama being so parallel to Abraham Lincoln -- an almost unknown senator from Illinois who ran for President and ended up becoming one of the most famous political figures of American history. They usually throw in a few other comparisons, but that's about the depth it comes to. Incidentally, if you focus on similar aspects of his profile (relatively unknown, great oratory skills, and able to rapidly draw a strong following), another equally strong analogy can be made with the early career of Adolf Hitler. Do I mean to suggest that Obama is going to start the next Holocaust? Of course not. I'm just pointing out that sometimes these forced analogies are really just appeals to ignorance.

As for the platforms, Obama's platform doesn't have many points of sharp disagreement with Clinton's. Neither one is entirely consistent between their platform now and their past. Take, for example, how both candidates wish to win the environmentally-conscious vote and have painted themselves green. Yet Clinton supports a gas-tax holiday and Obama was the first author of the Coal To Liquid Fuel Act of 2007 (a bill that, at least as of a couple months ago when I last checked the Senate website, had not yet been brought to vote). Obama also claims "change that we can believe in", but his voting abstinence rate is alarmingly high.

</rant> Please do excuse me; I have some Major Beef with the Democratic Party because it's so frequently inconsistent and almost always too conservative. And I haven't even started with the scepter of Instant Runoff Voting (supported by the Democrats as an alternative to the current voting system, but it's one with major consistency problems; see http://condorcet.org/rp/IRV.shtml for a good illustration of this) or carbon capture and sequestration technologies.

Blackheath: which popular vote do you mean?
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/popular-vote-scenario-tester.html

What is the Coal to Liquid Fuel Act? Sorry, i don't have lots of time to google and research.

As an impartial Non-American, i am actually pleased to see a thread about Obama.

I reckon' he will be the best man for the job, in changing the way the way America is viewed at home and by other Nations.
The "Monarchy" of Bush, Clinton, Bush and another potential Clinton, was all too scary for me.

The time of America's Dark past and its arrogance will now come to an end, one would hope, if we believe Obama's press.

Clinton should have conceded 2 months ago. She really looks like an evil Alien!

Besides the fact she is as false as Obama is truthful.

She deserves to Lose- and already has!

conceding Friday(AEST-Australian Eastern Standard Time)

Well menace I mean in the iold fashioned sense that when you put a vote in a ballot box that counts as one. A second vote actually cast counts as two and so on. While it may be very clever clever to come up with 900+ "ways of counting the popular vote", if you start to question the validity of smiply counting votes then the whole validity of elections unravels in a post modern nightmare. Any additional methods which do not simply count ballots are specious and irrelevant chaff. What is it with the US system of democracy which means votes can't be counted anyway!!

Interestingly enough however the link you have placed shows Clinton ahead by more than a quarter of a million people :)

Blackheath-

I apologize for having to dismantle your premise so completely, but I feel I must. Hillary Clinton did NOT-- repeat, NOT-- win the popular vote.

While she cried out in favor of counting all votes, all states, her own metrics for claiming the popular vote betray that very sentiment. Because, by her own admission, her vote count estimates completely leave out ALL caucus states-- including mine!!

I understand that vote counts are difficult to estimate in the caucus system, but does that then mean that the most accurate and most fair way of counting them is to not count them at all? That every single person who took the time to come out and vote (including me) does not count, because caucus states don't really matter?

This is why I get so upset whenever I see her or her supporters claim that she won the popular vote, because it is entirely dependent on the premise that MY vote is not worthy of being counted.

If you factor in the caucus states, with marginal turnout estimates based on released figures combined with exit polls, Hillary Clinton actually LOST the popular vote by a rather wide margin! Even if you round those estimates in her favor, count Michigan the way she wanted (i.e. assign Obama zero votes on the assumption that zero people in that state turned-out to support him), she *still* loses the popular vote by a very healthy margin.

So, she lost the delegate count. She lost the popular vote. She won far fewer states. That only leaves her with the desperate claim of, "I'm winning the general election by electoral votes!" By that standard, next time the Mariners have a 4-game winning streak near the end of a lousy season, I'll tell everybody that they just won the World Series.


--Kris

P.S. Oh, and just a note about 2000, since you brought it up: The main point of contention wasn't just that Bush lost the popular vote, but mainly that he also lost the FLORIDA vote! All the subsequent independent recounts that used obvious voter intent (i.e. the method used before machines came around) in all counties, Al Gore won the state by several hundred votes. And that's not including all the ballots that were allegedly suppressed by the Bush campaign. But because the Secretary of State in charge of adjudicating the election was also Bush's state campaign manager, because the state government was dominated by his fellow Republicans (including his brother), and because the U.S. Supreme Court justices were each either right-wing friends of the Bush family or temporarily insane (see Sandra Day O'Connor), he managed to take office despite losing the election.

The only way you can say Bush won Florida is with the following premise: He won the election in Florida, 5 votes to 4.

I completely agree with Kristopher here. I've been receiving a lot of email from the Hillary Clinton campaign and have read some portion of it (but not all, as I have things in my life that matter a bit more than rhetoric regarding primary elections in other states). Clinton's writers have employed every possible means to argue that their candidate is the rightful winner of the Democratic primaries, and in general the reasons they give for it are appalling.

For instance, they make some arguments that rest on the idea that primary votes cast in states that traditionally vote Democratic in the general election should for some reason count more than the votes cast in primaries for traditionally Republican states. They also have tried to justify winning the primary system by invoking a winner-take-all system of assigning delegates from states, which imitates the Republican primaries and the general election.

While there may be some strategic value to running primaries in a way imitative of the general election, the fact of the matter is that by the time you've resorted to flaming your own party's handling of the primary system because it doesn't match the (less democratic) handling of the general election, you're going to lose a lot of credibility.

Do you include the primaries that everyone, including Hillary, agreed would not count before hand? Do you include the caucuses and the advisory primaries? Do you include the primaries in places like Puerto Rico where they don't get a say in the presidential election? If you count Michigan, how do you count the huge numbers of uncommitted votes for 'uncommitted,' given that Obama's name wasn't even on the ballot?

If you count according to the rules that everyone agreed to before hand, then Obama won. If you try to change the rules after the fact to influence the outcome, that may be a victory for Hillary, but it sure isn't the rule of law.

fastspawn: The Coal-to-Liquid-Fuel Act of 2007 is a bill that has gone through a number of draft versions and (at least as of a couple months ago when I last checked) has not been brought to vote in the Senate yet. It's a bill that would provide Federal subsidies toward the construction of new plants to convert mined domestic coal reserves into gasoline. The push behind this is to wean the United States off foreign petroleum reserves and to instead use the fossil fuels that are more abundant at home.

The problems with Coal to Liquid Fuel technology is mainly that the process of taking coal from the ground all the way to the time it's combusted as gasoline ends up being about twice as polluting as it is when you use gasoline made from a petroleum precursor. That's essentially saying that we must release twice the CO2 for the same energy yield if we start with coal. There are other big problems such as groundwater contamination that are very strongly associated with coal mining but not always attached to petroleum or natural gas extractions. Considering that the regions of the United States that depend heavily on groundwater for agricultural or drinking resources are the same ones that have the domestic coal reserves, this is especially problematic... and it's only exacerbated by the current groundwater extraction processes that are removing groundwater more quickly than it is being replaced. If we increase our coal-mining practices in these regions, we're setting ourselves up to have groundwater so contaminated it becomes toxic for the purposes we use it for today.

I don't have the link handy right now, but if you go to Google and input "Coal to Liquid Fuel Act of 2007", you will find the exact text for all versions of the bill posted on the US Senate website.

it may be twice as polluting, but the united states sits on enormous coal reserves. so its practically inevitable as a project, combined with other domestic options like biofuels. while these do miss the point of global warming, that will hopefully be a combination of global warming not being so awful and overall shifting patterns. biofuels and coal gasification are a great way to continue to run the current fleet because they put people to work, and often the jobs go to places that are sort of economically struggling, and also because they restore some domestic control over the cost of fuel.

not to mention the investment in this kind of thing also can yield research results - that could be another possible way to reduce overall carbon & other emissions.

Any system whereby a candidate can win the vote and not get the most delegates, ie as happened in Texas is a betrayal of the fundamental premise of democracy.

Any election where people can vote but those votes aren't actually counted or recorded, such as a caucus simply isn't credible however. The weighting iof Caucus centres that goes on in Iowa which boosts the value of smaller meetings isn't democratic either. There are many flaws in the US system of running votes.

Trying to deny the inconvenient truth of the vote counts doesn't mean that Hilary did not poll the most number of actual ballots cast. That said, the reverse is also true... Hilary entered an election knowing the rules (although apparently her Chief of Staff didn't realise the Democrat primaries were proportional!!!). Obama is the winner under these rules and good luck to him.

There are many aspects of our system that are undemocratic. Technically, electing representatives at all is undemocratic, since in a "pure" democracy all decisions are made by popular vote. Though we tend to call ourselves a "representative democracy," it's really just a fancy euphemism for "republic."

Furthermore, most primaries are also undemocratic as well, in that they are not determined by popular vote. Rather, they simply use a different kind of delegate-proportioning system based on the number of votes in each jurisdiction, hence why a candidate can end up with more delegates with less of the popular vote in a primary state. Caucuses have the same problem; it's just manifested in a different manner. But if you don't want to count the caucus states on those grounds, then you must also not count any of the primary states as well. In that instance, you would have zero votes for Obama, zero votes for Hillary, and three votes for Kusinich (space aliens vote absentee).

All that being said, it still doesn't change the fact that Hillary lost the popular vote. By the way, I'm in Washington (state), not Iowa, and we had hundreds, in many cases thousands of people turn out to the caucuses, and we voted overwhelmingly for Obama. There is no excuse for trying to argue that these votes should not be counted, simply because the caucus system-- like the primary system-- distorts the exact proportions in calculating delegates.

Honestly, I tend to believe that the primary system, as well as the electoral college, should be done away with completely, and replaced with a single national primary and a single national election. All parties would be on the same ballot and nobody would be kept off the ballot due to party affiliation (or lack thereof), and the top x number of candidates (let's say, 5) would make it to the general election ballot, even if there are multiple candidates from the same party. This would end the bipolar two-party dominated system. Then the general election would be a popular vote. No more pandering to Iowa corn growers, no more corrupt state officials doctoring election results.

Of course, this will probably never happen in our lifetimes. So in the meantime, until we can change the system, we have to respect it as-is, and at least be thankful that it could be a lot worse. And once again, all that aside, even if it were a straight-up popular vote, Hillary still lost. She can't blame the system, she can't blame sexism. The only person she can blame is herself.... Well, and Obama, of course. =)

fwancophile:

It's true that the US sits on huge coal reserves and it's also true that the world's known extractable natural gas + petroleum reserves are insufficient to meet projected demand for fossil fuels over the next fifty years. That said, since the coal-to-liquid-fuel options available to us now are so destructive to groundwater and have a low energy:CO2 emissions economy, the only reasonable and wise approach is to exhaust the less-polluting reserves first while researching ways to make cleaner technologies for when we MUST turn to reliance on coal.

Global average temperature rise and redistribution of precipitation are also not the only things we have to worry about in a higher CO2 world. As it stands, our CO2 emissions are dissolving coral reefs and making parts of the world ocean uninhabitable for certain phytoplanktonic organisms (think coccolithophorids here). As we continue to pump out carbon dioxide at unprecedented rates, we face the decline and eventual collapse of some major oceanic food sources as well as a sharply decreasing oceanic carbon sink as the surface waters become saturated with CO2. There are other feedback loops besides just the CO2 output that further change our climate scenario as long as we emit CO2, and most of these are positive (amplifying) feedbacks. For instance, one major worry comes from heating water masses in contact with continental shelves and with thawing permafrost soils. These places hold enormous quantities of methane hydrates (methane frozen in a slush with water), most of it very near the temperature/pressure boundary for which methane hydrates are stable. Use carbon dioxide to ncrease the temperatures only marginally in these arease and there is the strong possibility of a catastrophic release of methane from natural sinks -- and methane is many times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

This sort of catastrophic release of methane has happened only a few times in the geologic past, most notably at the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, the result of which is rapid global warming of as much as 6ºC over 1000 years... and this is just the naturally occurring methane release of then. Today's expected global temperature increase due to CO2 exceeds that warming rate at the PETM and thus has the potential to start an even more catastrophic methane release.

In light of the possible positive-feedback loops that we will only bring closer to making into runaway effects (also precedented in geologic history!), we seriously have to let our economy and the price of fuel take a far back seat to greenhouse gas emissions. After all, this may be the monetary cost of a surviving human civilization.

Also, with respect to biofuels in the US: Our domestic biofuels are not thermodynamically efficient, except for those that are created from cooking oils that would otherwise have gone to waste. Corn-based ethanol actually increases our dependence on fossil fuel resources and on fertilizers and pesticides. It drives up the price of food and fuel, and it brings a net increase in our greenhouse gas emissions per Joule of energy yield.

I think we should all be for alternative energy sources and biofuels, but only conditionally. When the alternative energy we endorse ends up being less than what we'd hoped for, we need to be critical of it and fix the situation rather than blindly applaud it just because it has the tag "alternative" in its name.

"There is no excuse for trying to argue that these votes should not be counted, simply because the caucus system-- like the primary system-- distorts the exact proportions"

Who are you?!.... The Head of the Zimbabwe Election Commission?

Blackheath-

Huh?!.... Whatever it is you're smoking, can I have some?

In Zimbabwe, they jailed the opposition candidate and responded to their protests with threats, intimidation, beatings, and murder. Are you trying to argue that my state's primary system is somehow comparable to that?! How on Earth is that quote you cited, in which I argue that you should not discount all votes simply because the system is flawed, tantamount to the brutal, disgusting human rights violations going on in Zimbabwe?? Are you Clinton supporters really so diluted that you think your petty loss somehow measures up to what those people are suffering with?? This is yet another example of Clinton and her supporters "playing the victim," rather than accepting responsibility for their losses.

I suppose next you'll tell us that Clinton voters were kept away from the polls by Bosnian sniper fire.... :P