CNN Calls Iowa For Obama - Clinton Comes In Third

Second and third place are close, but CNN is calling Iowa for Obama by five points for Obama. Clinton trails Edwards by a percentage point. Huckabee takes the Republican caucus.

Mike Huckabee will be the Republican winner in Iowa, CNN projects.

With 76 percent of precincts reporting, Obama had the support of 36 percent of voters, compared to 31 percent for Edwards and 30 percent for Clinton.

With 41 percent of Republican precincts reporting, Huckabee had the support of 31 percent of voters, compared to 23 percent for Mitt Romney. Fred Thompson had 13 percent and John McCain had 12.

Rudy Giuliani, who has turned the focus of his campaign to the February 5 "Super Tuesday" primaries, trailed behind with 11 percent.

Huckabee's victory can be attributed to his overwhelming support among evangelical voters and women, according to CNN analysis of entrance polls.

Unlike the more complicated Democratic caucuses, the GOP results are tabulated by a single straw poll.

Clinton in third place: worst case scenario for her - and Mark Penn might want to get some resumes out.

Warning: Your Computer Can Give YOU A Virus

Here's some happy news from Healthday. Your computer keyboard or mouse is quite capable of transmitting the stomach flu to you or from you to others. The nasty little norovirus can live on those - and other - surfaces for days. Yes, Virginia, you can catch this particular little sucker from a doorknob.

THURSDAY, Jan. 3 (HealthDay News) — The highly contagious norovirus, often called the stomach flu, can be passed from one person to another through contact with commonly shared items such as computer keyboards and computer mice, U.S. health officials report.

The virus, which is common in winter and is the most frequent cause of outbreaks of vomiting and diarrhea in the United States, is often contracted in schools, at work and on cruise ships.

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on a norovirus outbreak at a Washington, D.C., elementary school last February in which some of the victims picked up the virus from contaminated computer equipment.

"There is evidence that shared objects and surfaces help transmit disease," said Dr. Shua Chai, a CDC epidemiologist and co-author of the report, published in the Jan. 4 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

"This is the first time that we have demonstrated that keyboards and computer mice can be a source of transmission of norovirus," he added.

Of the 314 students and 66 staffers at the D.C. school, 103 came down with the illness — 79 students and 24 staff members. To find the sources of contamination, samples were taken from various surfaces around the school. In one first-grade classroom, a computer mouse and keyboard tested positive for norovirus, according to the report.

Obviously, the best technique to avoid spreading this is the simplest: wash your hands. A lot. And stay home if you're sick. We do not recommend trying extreme methods to decontaminate surfaces, however. Flames will also kill the virus, but wreak havoc on the computer. After the firemen get done here, we'll be back with more posts.  

Messing About In Cars - South African Style

A few days ago, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard reported on the newest rage in New York City: rats living under the hood of your car. Those particular rodents are trying to learn how to hotwire cars so they can go joyriding when the Year of the Rat arrives. Well, in South Africa, they have a different, under-hood brotherhood, so to speak: Dassies in the Chassis.

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - A car-owner in the South African capital Johannesburg was driven to desperation when she found a family of Cape Hyrax, small animals that resemble guinea pigs, living in the engine of her BMW.

Hoping to shake off the short-eared, short-tailed creatures known locally as dassies she drove at high speed to a dealership on the other side of town, but failing to do so dumped the vehicle there without giving an explanation.

Astonished staff at the BMW dealership phoned Johannesburg Zoo and asked them to come and rescue the animals as the car had been abandoned in their washbay and was interfering with their work, a zoo official told AFP.

"The guys (BMW staff) called us and said that there was movement in the engine, that there were animals (there)," said collection manager at the zoo Dominic Moss.

Authorities say the dassies had been inhabiting the chassis for quite some time, judging by the volume of dassie byproduct lying about - pretty much everywhere. But we here at Blue Crab Boulevard fully understand the car owner's distress at finding the dassies under the hood. After all, rodents are not the usual source of power for a BMW.

The dealership must have switched engines with a Yugo.

May The Farce Be With You

A group of eight friends, operating out of a garage in Britain, are filming spoofs of the Star Wars films that rival the originals in quality. They're doing it for a song, too, with production costs of around £3,000 to produce the two they have made so far: The Empire Strikes Backyard and The Emperor's New Clones.

The films have been made by Backyard Productions, who have spoofed two of the six Star Wars movies, calling them The Empire Strikes Backyard and the newest offering: Star Wars - The Emperor’s New Clones.

Darren Scales, who co-founded Backyard Productions, said they transformed everyday objects into unlikely, realistic space-age props.

He said: “We have got bubble wrap on the ceiling, we’ve got bottle tops and yoghurt pots on the walls along with tubes from the centre of rolls of carpets.

"The blasters are water pistols, we just stuck a few bits of lids on, add a bit of spray paint and then you have a blaster.

"You take a hard hat, put an Imperial sticker on it and suddenly it’s an Imperial work helmet for someone building the Death Star - it’s not rocket science.

"It’s the same with the light sabres. Up close they look awful but you put a stick in it, you hold it and on screen you can’t tell the difference.”

The amateur company, which has an eight-strong team, shot their first short sketches in 1993 but have gone on to spoof some major Hollywood films, including Jurassic Park (entitled “Geriatric Park”) and the Indiana Jones Films (called “Doom Raiders”).

Obviously home videos to begin with, the birth of modern technology has seen the latest films take on a far more professional look, so much so they are hard at first glance to tell apart from the real thing.

You can judge for yourself by watching the trailer for The Empire Strikes Backyard. They actually have some nicely done special effects.

It cost George Lucas millions to do what these guys can now do in a garage. Isn't technology wonderful?

More Science That Than You Need To Know

Yesterday, we brought the news that the primary cause of missing golf balls had been discovered: Fairway Pythons. Well, guys, it just got worse. Science has discovered a real menace: The Fashion Snake. And they're eating the models!

And we thought it was bad when they were going for the shoes.

Ski Florida!

Florida citrus growers may have dodged at least the worst of the crop damage that a major cold snap brought to the shivering Sunshine State. But it has snowed overnight in some areas in Florida. The bitter cold has enveloped many areas of the nation, with Louisiana going into emergency operations to save people from the cold weather blanketing that state.

When temperatures get down to 28 degrees for four hours, a tree can be ruined. While forecasts said it could get that cold overnight, temperatures hovered in the 30s in central and South Florida where most orange and grapefruit growers are based.

"Overall, this is preliminary, but it looks like we have dodged a bullet," said Rusty Wiygul, director of grower affairs for Florida Citrus Mutual. He said there will be pockets of minor damage.

Growers were doing two things — harvesting as many mature fruits and vegetables as possible, and trying to protect plants by spraying them with water that freezes, insulating the temperature at 32.

Temperatures in many areas of northern Florida dropped into the 20s early Thursday, following the 30-degree temperatures some northern parts of the state saw Wednesday. Cross City was 20. Farther south, Orlando was 31 and it was 39 in Miami. Snow flurries were reported near the Daytona Beach coastline, the first in Florida since 2006.

People in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast and the Ohio Valley woke up to sub-freezing temperatures…..

…..The unusually low temperatures led New Orleans emergency officials to enact a "freeze plan" on New Year's Eve, allowing homeless shelters to temporarily exceed their fire safety capacity. Six shelters took on 700 extra cots between them, boosting the city's capacity of about 400 shelter beds. The plan is expected to last through Thursday.

Southern California has major rainfall forecast and authorities there are warning residents to be alert for mudslides. (Remind me again why people choose to live there? If it isn't fire, it's mudslides. Yeesh.) By the way, Accuweather predicts temperatures in the low twenties with windchills making it feel like about 8 degrees for Des Moines, Iowa tonight. If you don't think the brutal temperatures there will have an adverse impact on caucus turnout, you're dreaming. In is still bitterly cold in the Midwest.

Handy-Dandy Pre-Post-Caucus Spin Guide

Chuck Todd at MSNBC has your handy-dandy guide to post-Iowa-caucus spin all made up in advance. He lays out how he thinks the various camps will spin any possible outcome to the caucuses. Well, not every scenario, but close to it. Its a lesson for armchair punditry.

Hillary Clinton

• A win: Strike up the inevitability pose. If Clinton squeaks out even a one-point win, it will have the effect of a landslide victory, particularly if she succeeds in a high-turnout scenario. She'll need to follow up a win in Iowa with a win in New Hampshire, of course, but success here could motivate both rank-and-file establishment Democrats (who had been on the fence) to climb aboard. And that will send a message, in particular to women voters, that there is a movement happening, one that the media has ignored until now.
• A three-way tie: The Clinton camp will have two challenges in this scenario. One is to make sure the media doesn't somehow turn the tie into a "60-plus percent of Democrats rejected her" spin. While the Clinton campaign believes that they've gotten bad media coverage, they do have to worry about a certain segment of the press interpreting Clinton as the incumbent being rejected by majority margins. The second challenge is to make sure they declare victory in this case. With the polls indicating that Edwards and Obama had the juice to win, and Clinton seeming destined for no better than second, a tie may equal a win if her camp plays their cards right.
• A loss: Obviously, the Clinton team would rather lose to Edwards than to Obama. Third place would be a near-disaster scenario; second is recoverable. There will be a lot of Friday morning quarterbacking about whether Clinton should have even played in Iowa. It was never a natural fit and because many in the national media know this, there's every chance she'll get a few more primaries to prove herself.

No chance anyone believes she's one or two and done. There's too much history with the Clintons and their ability to come back. Despite what they think of the media, they'll be looking for comeback hints at some point; maybe it's Nevada, maybe it's Feb. 5.

He looks at all the candidates except Dennis Kucinich, leaving out the one major twist that might happen: the caucuses pick the mother of all "none-of-the-above" outcomes and nominates an alien! That's the one we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are hoping for. Just for the humor factor.

Novak Autopsies Clinton Iowa Campaign

Robert Novak, who appears to be very confident that his prediction of a third place finish for Hillary Clinton is accurate, is also fairly certain he knows why Clinton got into trouble: Clintonian triangulation, too early on.

(Mark) Penn, a professional pollster who was political adviser to President Bill Clinton, is chief strategist for the Hillary Clinton campaign. He has embraced the triangulation — coming over as a third force somewhere between liberal and conservative poles — that characterized Bill Clinton's politics after 1994, based on advice from Dick Morris. To many Democratic operatives, Penn's triangulation prematurely introduced a general election strategy, when in fact the party nomination was still in doubt.

Health care is particularly sensitive for Sen. Clinton. Her failed 1993-94 plan is blamed inside Democratic ranks for the Republican takeover in the '94 elections and for freezing the entire health issue for a decade. While her current call for mandatory health care coverage might seem radical, it is criticized on the left as embracing "shared responsibility" with private health insurance firms (similar to plans by Republican Govs. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California). That looks like triangulation.

It was even more obviously triangulation in September, when Clinton voted for a resolution declaring that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization. The other three Democratic senators seeking the presidential nomination — Obama, Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd — all opposed the resolution on grounds it would give President Bush a pretext for invading Iran (though Obama was not present for the vote). Clinton, while attacking Bush's Iraq policy, did not want to seem soft on Iran's Holocaust-denying president vowing the destruction of Israel.

Penn's strategy from the start was predicated on the inevitability of Clinton's nomination so that the real concern was to position her to run against the Republicans by making clear she was no more a hard leftist than her husband had been. Iowa, with its passionately liberal caucus-goers not suited for triangulation, always was a problem for Clinton. Early polls there gave the lead to John Edwards, running on a class-warfare, populist platform.

Interesting take - and likely very close to being spot on. Clinton did appear to be trying to run nationally before she had the nomination in hand. When the campaign belated realized it might actually have to work to get that nomination, the campaign appeared to falter. It was as if they had no idea how to actually do that. One wonders if Penn is going to be out if Iowa and New Hampshire are both disasters for Clinton. Novak thinks Penn might be the scapegoat.

I would not bet against that.

Things Getting Ugly In Kenya

The Financial Times notes just how potentially ugly things are getting in Kenya - a country that was almost a model in Africa up until these past few years. They see great danger there -but interestingly, they are not making the usual calls on the usual suspect to do something. They are blatantly NOT calling for the United Nations to step in.

There are no easy answers to stopping the violence and reconciling the embittered rival factions. Mwai Kibaki, sworn in with unnatural haste for a second term as Kenyan president, was not freely and fairly elected. All the advance polls suggested he would lose. The simultaneous parliamentary elections saw his ruling party decimated, with 20 members of his cabinet, including the vice-president, de­feated. He won only 35 out of 210 seats, against at least 100 for Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement. In the presidential vote, however, amid evidence of ballot stuffing and falsification of the figures, Mr Kibaki suddenly emerged the victor. It was both blatant and incompetent.

In profiting from rigging, Mr Kibaki has inflamed resentment in the country against his Kikuyu tribe, to which some 22 per cent of the population belongs. They refused to share the spoils of economic growth. Having fought the 2002 election promising to unify the country and root out corruption, Mr Kibaki has failed on both counts.

Without outside pressure, neither Mr Kibaki nor Mr Odinga is likely to seek a settlement. Each is persuaded of his own righteousness. But they must be induced to meet if only to defuse the violence.

The African Union should certainly attempt to bring them together, but most African leaders are guilty of rigging elections as blatantly as in Kenya, so they may have little moral authority. They need to act in conjunction with the US, the UK and its European Union partners. They should exert pressure on both sides to annul the results of the elections and create some sort of government of national unity pending a new poll.

The situation in Kenya certainly looks bleak at the moment. Riot police have begun busting heads there and opposition rallies are being banned.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Riot police fired tear gas and water cannons Thursday to beat back crowds heading for a banned rally to protest Kenya's disputed presidential election, and the attorney general called for an independent body to verify the vote tally.

Kenya's electoral commission said President Mwai Kibaki had won the Dec. 27 vote, but rival candidate Raila Odinga alleged the vote was rigged. The dispute has triggered ethnic violence across the country that killed 300 people and displaced 100,000 others.

Smoke from burning tires and debris rose from barricaded streets, not just around the city's huge slums where hundreds of thousands of Odinga's supporters live, but on main roads leading into suburbs that are home to upper class Kenyans and expatriates.

In the Mathare slum, rival groups of angry men hurled rocks at each other. Black smoke billowed from a burning gas station, and several charred cars sat along roadside. The corpse of at least one man lay face down on a muddy path, and a wailing wife pulled her battered husband from the dark waters of the Nairobi River, where he had been dumped and left for dead.

The US, UK and EU better step up here before Kenya really unravels. Calling for the UN is a waste of time, as even the FT tacitly acknowledges. Kenya can't afford to be turned into another Rwanda by the UN.

The American Paradox

Daniel Henninger points out a rather ridiculous paradox in the polls of American voters. While some 80% believe their personal lives are on track and are satisfied with those lives, a full 70% also believe that the nation is headed in the wrong direction. This is the great paradox heading into the elections - one that has actually existed for all the years the United States has existed.

On New Year's Eve, Gallup's poll delivered unto us the good news that 84% of Americans say they are satisfied with how things are going for them personally. What Woody Allen might say about that phenomenal datum of good cheer one can only guess. One then has to account for the darker data Gallup released two weeks earlier: Some 70% of those responding believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

Explanations for this paradox would fill screen after screen of comments on Internet blogs, written no doubt by the 16% who can never be satisfied with "how things are going." Sample: It's the 46 million uninsured, stupid!

Starting tomorrow morning, with the results of the Iowa caucuses, the state of the nation likely will strike many as worse. Aaargh, those fools in Iowa have handed victory to the most dangerous man or woman in America. This we've gotta stop!

For the next 10 months they will be agitated, glum and apoplectic about many things. The candidates themselves, professional marketers of anxiety, will contribute. Then come a Wednesday morning after the presidential vote in November, nearly half the country, the losers, will see darkness falling across the land.

Before any of this happens, let's get a grip. To quote a children's classic I read out loud perhaps a hundred times: "Could be worse!"

It could, indeed. Henninger points out some amazing statistics:

In 1980, deaths per 100,000 U.S. children aged 5 to 14 was 30.6; by 2004, that number fell to 16.8. Some 25 years ago, daily cigarette smoking among 12th graders was about 21%; in 2006 it was about 12% for both males and females. Childhood immunizations are rising steadily.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control noted that the death rate in 2004 fell by 3.8% in a year, "a record low historical figure." Life expectancy for men and women at birth in 1940 was 63 years; it is now nearly 78 years. We, or someone, must be doing something right.

As always, Henninger's entire column is worth reading. People are prone to sitting in front of their large screen televisions complaining about the economy. Call it the "I'm Ok, You, However, Are a Mess," theory of social organization. In many ways, this is the result of the way the media covers news. For every good bit of news, there has to be an analysis warning of unspecified - often completely fictional - dangers that lie ahead. Every silver lining has a big, black cloud behind it, so to speak. The problems have been exacerbated by the 24-hour television news cycle. But it really has existed all along in this country.

So, keep in mind that the politicians and media have an unofficial motto, "Good news is no news." It helps keep things in perspective.