Apparently, Harry Reid has decided that it is his duty to force the selection of the Democratic Party nominee. So Reid, Pelosi and Screamin' Howie Dean will, according to Reid, force the decision.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday that he may have to push undecided superdelegates to make their decisions in the Democratic presidential race, if the contest stretches into June.
Reid said he would consider writing a joint letter with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) demanding that superdelegates make their endorsements public.
“The three of us, we may write a joint letter [to superdelegates],” said Reid. “We might do individual letters. We are in contact with each other.”
Reid's comments suggest that the party’s top three officials are contemplating a high-level intervention if the primary season concludes in June without a nominee and many superdelegates still undecided.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.)'s 9-point victory over Sen. Barack Obama (D-ill.) in Tuesday's Pennsylvania Democratic primary means that the contentious nomination fight will likely continue into the summer. As the race continues to tighten, the decisions of the undecided superdelegates could determine the final outcome.
Both Dean and Reid have made no secret of their desire to see the nomination fight end by the end of June.
This is funny on so many levels. The smoke-filled room is really, really small this year, apparently. Best of all, if their chosen one fails to win the election, my prediction comes true: Reid and Pelosi (and Dean, too) will be utterly vilified by the rank and file of the party.
Carry on, Harry. By all means, carry on.
warns Arctic ice melting faster than predicted
MONTREAL (AFP) - Arctic sea ice is melting "significantly faster" than predicted and is approaching a point of no return, conservation group the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned in a new study.
The volumes of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ice in the Arctic Ocean were estimated at 2.9 million and 4.4 million cubic metres respectively in September 2007 — the lowest ever levels recorded, the organization said Wednesday.
The sea ice shrank to 39 percent below its 1979-2000 mean volume, it said.
Cryosphere Today on this date.
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal pronounces Hillary Clinton's campaign over. Primarily the defeat can be blamed on two things: what Henninger calls the "iron law of Democratic primary politics" and filthy lucre. What is the "iron law", you ask? Simple:
No centrist can secure the party's nomination in a primary system dominated by left-liberal activists. The iron law produces candidacies such as McGovern (1972), Mondale ('84), Dukakis ('88), Gore ('00) or Kerry ('04), who pay so many left-liberal obeisances to win in the primaries that they cannot attract sufficient moderates at the margins to win the general election.
But what is the other big reason, then? Why it is money. Cold hard cash and lots of it.
Money. Barack Obama's mystical pull on people is nice, but nice in modern politics comes after money. Once Barack proved conclusively that he could raise big-time cash, the Clintons' strongest tie to their machine began to unravel. Today he's got $42 million banked. She's got a few million north of nothing.
That is why Hillary will never sit in the big chair in the Oval Office. More so than even the iron law. But said law may well be enough to end the chances of Barack Obama ever sitting in that chair, either. Despite the money, he has run well left of where the majority of the country is comfortable. The protracted fight with Clinton has made him stay far to the left even as he should have been trying more for the center as people begin paying attention to the elections.
Steve Chapman points out the absurdity of recent statements by the Chicago Police Superintendent, Jody Weis. In response to a spate of gun violence in Chicago, Weis is - for completely unknown reasons - calling for a ban on "assault weapons." How many of the shootings involved that type of weapon? Exactly one.
If there are too many guns in Chicago, it's not because of any statutory oversight. The city has long outlawed the sale and possession of handguns. It also forbids assault weapons. If prohibition were the answer, no one would be asking the question.
The recent spate of killings gives a misleading impression. Since the peak years of the early 1990s, the number of murders in Chicago has fallen by more than half. In the first three months of this year, homicides were down by 1.1 percent. No one would describe the current murder rate as acceptable, but the city has made huge progress.
It has done so despite the alleged problem cited by Weis, which is the availability of guns, and particularly one type of gun. "There are just too many weapons here," he declared at a Sunday news conference. "Why in the world do we allow citizens to own assault rifles?"
Actually, in Chicago "we" don't allow citizens to own assault rifles. Elsewhere they are allowed for the same reason other firearms are permitted. The gun Weis villainized is a type of semiautomatic that has a fearsome military appearance but is functionally identical to many legal sporting arms.
And its bark is worse than its bite. As of March 31, there had been 87 homicides in the city. When I asked the Chicago Police Department how many of the murders are known to have involved assault rifles, the answer came back: one.
Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Citizens of that state cannot get a carry permit - period. The so-called assault weapons are nothing of the sort, either. Most Americans cannot own a weapon capable of full automatic fire. Yet Weis is misdirecting on the cause of Chicago's problem. Many people have pointed out that the "assault weapon" ban passed by the Clinton administration was really nothing but an ugly gun ban. Instead of blaming ugly guns, maybe Weis could try enforcing the laws already on the books and cracking down on the criminals. Just a thought.
UPDATE: The Agenda is out on full display as Bob Owens has already noted.
This is a strange story. Remember the sneak attack by Israel on a site in Syria last year? Well, it seems that the Israelis showed Washington a video of North Koreans inside the facility - which just happens to be almost identical to the North Korean reactor facility at Yongbyon, right down to the number of holes for fuel rods.
The officials said the video of the remote site, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, shows North Koreans inside. It played a pivotal role in Israel's decision to bomb the facility late at night last Sept. 6, a move that was publicly denounced by Damascus but not by Washington.
Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core's design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows "remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon," a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video "very, very damning."…..
…..David Albright, president of Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said the absence of such evidence warrants skepticism that the reactor was part of an active weapons program.
"The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities," he said. "The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program."
Now that is one weird statement. The absence of fuel in the presence of what certainly appears to be a reactor should not lead one to conclude that there is no weapons program. Rather, it should lead one to believe that the Syrians hadn't fueled the reactor yet. Albright's statement is akin to claiming that a man carrying a machine gun isn't armed if he doesn't have bullets in it. (One doubts such a defense would work in a court.) Wikipedia had a picture of the top of the reactor at Yongbyon. Perhaps Mr. Albright could explain what in the world the Syrians could have been planning to use such a facility for if not for plutonium production.
Side note: This paints Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria in an even worse light. And kind of points to the silliness of Barack Obama's grasp of how to deal with thugs.
Charlie Cook calls the situation Hillary Clinton is in political purgatory. She can't win, she can't break even and she pretty much can't quit the game.
The good news for Hillary Rodham Clinton is that she’s winning a lot of battles. The bad news is that the war is pretty much lost. Sure, she won Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary by a strong 9 points in the face of being outspent on television ads by Barack Obama 2-to-1. She also won Ohio, Rhode Island, and at least the primary part of the bizarre “Texas two-step” primary-and-caucus combination on March 4. But today, she is 133 delegates behind Obama, 1,728 to 1,595, according to NBC News. At this point last week, she trailed by 136 delegates. Since then Clinton has scored a net gain of 10 delegates in Pennsylvania, according to NBC, but has lost a few more superdelegates, so she has made little headway.
If this contest were still at the point where momentum, symbolism, and reading tea leaves mattered, Clinton would be in pretty good shape. Everything she has needed to happen is happening now. Obama is getting tougher press coverage and critical examination. He’s also getting rattled a bit, and he didn’t perform well in the recent debate in Philadelphia. Clinton is winning in big, important places, but it’s happening about three months too late.
Cook writes that Clinton simply cannot quit while she is winning in the big states. But it is just about over for her - the win in Pennsylvania only netted her about 10 delegates after you subtract the superdelegates who jumped over to Obama. But if you think she's in a bad way right now, just wait until the fallout she will suffer if Obama gets the nomination then fails to win in the general election. She'll be blamed for that, even though the real fault is the bizarre nominating process the Democrats have in place.
Politics | Gaius Thursday, 24 April , 2008 | 
Comments (5) 
