why hillary won 2 (not 3) states on tuesday

ok... so guess what happened on tuesday. hillary clinton won 2 out of 4 states: ohio and rhode island. barack obama won 2 out of 4 states: texas and vermont. what the hell are you talking about, you ask? the media has been saying that barack obama lost texas and hillary won there. well, that is partially correct. if you listen carefully, they say that barack obama lost the texas PRIMARY and hillary clinton won the texas PRIMARY. but texas ALSO had a CAUCUS, later the same night, and barack obama won that, according to npr and the texas state democratic party. and according to current projections, barack obama’s win in the texas caucus was big enough to cancel out hillary clinton’s win in the texas primary, thus earning him more delegates to the national convention from texas than hillary clinton. convoluted? yes. fucked up? yes. but that is the “texas two-step” that i and others, including many in the media, have warned you and everyone else about, beforehand. why do hillary clinton’s supporters tend to be less likely to go to caucuses than barack obama’s supporters? well, clinton supporters are generally less educated, and a lot more of them are elderly. obama supporters are generally more educated, and a lot more of them are young. people who are well-educated and/or young are more likely to use the internet a lot. and that means, they are more likely to find out about something like the fucked-up system they use for voting in texas. luckily, barack obama seems to have won more delegates in texas, so he won 2 out of 4 states on tuesday. but the media gets a lot of things wrong, including who won texas on tuesday. now, the current projections for the caucus in texas could still turn out to be false, and hillary clinton could end up winning more delegates from texas. apparently we will not have the final results on the pledged delegates from texas for several weeks, in fact! texas really is fucked up, i mean, seriously. now they are not the only fucked up state when it comes to voting. florida in 2000, ohio in 2004... and this year, on super tuesday, new mexico was really fucked up, and they took like, a week or two before they finally figured out who won. new mexico also had no idea who won in the general election in the year 2000 for a few weeks after the election took place. so, we have several states with voting problems. of course, we cannot exclude my own state of new york, which was the only state that failed to comply with the help america vote act, or h.a.v.a. new york will still be using old machines that do not comply with the new law, in the 2008 election. after that we will transition to newer voting machines. luckily, only one county in new york state has opted for the touch-screen electronic voting machines with no paper trail (or maybe these ones actually do have a paper trail, i am not sure). the rest of new york state will use the same punch-card system florida used in 2000! except we will use optical-scan machines. still... kinda fucked up. anyway, my point is, texas is fucked up in how it votes, but so are a lot of other states. oh, and did i mention the state of washington? it held both a primary and a caucus, with the caucus a week before the primary. oh, and michigan and florida both illegally violated the rules of both the democratic national committee and the republican national committee by holding their 2008 presidential primaries too early. republicans penalized both states by giving them only half the normal amount of delegates. democrats penalized both states by giving them zero delegates. those are the rules. those 2 states violated the law, and now they are being punished for their crimes. lately, the idea has come up to have a re-vote in both michigan and florida for the democrats, where both barack obama and hillary clinton would compete. but the states both refuse to pay for the primaries or caucuses that would take place. and of course, hillary clinton refuses to have caucuses, and only primaries will do for her. and howard dean and the democratic national committee have refused to pay. the reason? the democratic national committee is flat broke. ok, they have like 3 million dollars right now, but re-doing the primary in florida would cost like 50 million dollars. so there is no way in hell the democratic party is going to finance this. so who is left to finance it? the 2 candidates. they could both evenly split the cost, using money from their campaigns. everyone else has refused to pay for this, so the only way left to finance re-votes would be for hillary clinton and barack obama to evenly split the cost of paying for re-votes in florida and michigan. the governors of florida and michigan are being real assholes about this by refusing to pay. it was their state legislatures that passed the bills changing the primary dates to be so early they violated the rules of both parties, and both governors signed those bills into law. the governors and state legislators of florida and michigan, in an ideal world, would have to pay for the costs of these re-votes out of their own personal bank accounts, and they would have to sell off their second homes, or their expensive paintings they collected. this problem is entirely their fault, and they need to fix it. they decided to disenfranchise the voters of their own states, because they knew the rules going into this. and hillary clinton also agreed to those rules, but after winning both states (and being the only major candidate on the ballot in michigan), she changed her mind and decided fuck the rules, i want the delegates from both florida and michigan seated, because those 2 states voted for me and i want more delegates. me, me, me!

but her wins on tuesday were not all about her, her, her. sure, her “kitchen sink” strategy did some damage, but most of the damage was done to the democratic party, not to barack obama. you see, according to a new poll, 90% of barack obama supporters would vote for hillary clinton if she were the candidate in the general election (myself included in that 90%). but only 75% of hillary clinton supporters would vote for barack obama if he were the candidate in the general election. i think the main reason for the disloyalty of hillary clinton’s supporters to the party is, she has viciously attacked barack obama, and her supporters like her and find her credible, so when she says he is not qualified to be commander-in-chief and john mccain is, her supporters agree with her, following her blindly like sheep. not all of her supporters, mind you. only 25% of her supporters are lemmings jumping off a cliff for john mccain. but hillary clinton is the one who put that disloyalty into their heads, by attacking barack obama instead of focusing her attacks on the real enemy, john mccain. that is why hillary clinton is now john mccain’s best political ally, for the time being. just as john mccain teamed up with loser mike huckabee to get rid of mitt romney in the republican primaries and caucuses, john mccain is teaming up with loser hillary clinton to get rid of barack obama in the general election. hillary clinton cannot win pledged delegates at this point, since it would require her to win almost all remaining states by huge margins, and the superdelegates will flock to whomever wins the pledged delegates, as i have heard many superdelegates say on news shows on tv. so really, hillary clinton is only in this race for one reason: to sabotage barack obama’s chances for 2008 and help john mccain win so that she can run for president in 2012 and be the great savior of the party by defeating the very same john mccain that she is trying to help get elected in 2008. why do you think party leaders such as howard dean and nancy pelosi, or former candidates such as john edwards, joe biden, bill richardson, and dennis kucinich have not endorsed either clinton or obama? it is because they are superdelegates, and they will follow the will of the people as expressed through the pledged delegates! which means this: obama will win and clinton will lose. but it will be, as don rumsfeld would call it, a “long hard slog”.

now why did hillary clinton win in ohio? she was probably going to win that state anyway, since she had been ahead in the polls there all along, but the gap had been narrowing somewhat. it was never a state obama expected to win, but he was trying to close the gap so they would split the delegates evenly. he did not succeed in this, and hillary won ohio decisively. it is because of nafta. now, at first, when the news of the canadian memo about barack obama saying one thing to the people of ohio and another thing to the canadian government surfaced, and hillary clinton and john mccain were both all over this story, i thought the clinton campaign was behind it. it turns out that i was wrong about that. she did not really stoop that low. the canadian government was behind it, not hillary clinton. the government of conservative prime minister stephen harper of canada was behind this attack on barack obama. and the attack on him was entirely 100% false. he did not lie about nafta, and the canadian government has now publicly admitted to making false accusations against him and apologized for it. now, as for their past positions on nafta, hillary clinton did point to nafta as a success in one of her books, so her position on that has changed quite dramatically, although it is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. anyway, the hillary clinton campaign jumped all over the canadian reports that barack obama sent an aide to meet with a canadian envoy in chicago to give assurances that he was just telling lies about what he would do about nafta. these canadian news reports turned out to be complete lies and fabrications, made up by officials within the administration of canadian prime minister stephen harper. and, i am sure that the canadian prime minister will have whoever is responsible for this fired, in order to keep diplomatic relations nice with the united states. anyway, without further ado, here is the newer, accurate canadian news report that corrects the erroneous previous canadian news reports:



those damned canadians! i think we ought to invade canada, like in that “south park” movie! i hate canada! no... just kidding. i love canada. i would never want to invade such a great country as our next-door buddy canada. now guess who really lied to us about nafta? i’ll give you a hint: hillary clinton. check out this video from keith olbermann:



okay, so let’s just ignore the fact that the clintons lied to us yet again, and move on, for the good of the democratic party... anyway, can you guess why hillary clinton won rhode island and why barack obama won vermont? in both cases, it was because neither of them was doing much campaigning in either of those small states, and barack obama was way ahead in the polls in vermont because they are antiwar just like him and do not like hillary clinton’s centrist triangulation, and hillary clinton was way ahead in the polls in rhode island because they respect her record as a former first lady and a senator from nearby new york and they thought barack obama was an unqualified upstart who should wait his turn. in other words, both rhode island and vermont voted in a democratic process and were not overly influenced by lies or shenanigans.

now what about texas? hillary clinton won texas’s primary because of shenanigans. what shenanigans, you ask? again, it was not her doing at all. and this was not the canadian government. no, friends, the reason hillary clinton won the primary in texas was none other than radio talk show host rush limbaugh. yes, things like the “3 am” fearmongering ad also helped. but barack obama had a lot more ads on tv than hillary clinton. that may be why, in all likelihood, he was probably still able to win the caucus and thus win more delegates. but anyway, here is the reason hillary clinton won texas:



rush limbaugh has a lot of listeners in texas, that state is full of dittoheads, and republicans were allowed to crossover and vote in the democratic primary. and many did. and unlike previous states that allowed this crossover voting, barack obama did not win among republicans by an overwhelming margin. the reason is: despite the hatred republicans and people on the right-wing have towards hillary clinton, they love the idea of a long, drawn-out fight between barack obama and hillary clinton. so now that barack obama is ahead, they are doing what rush limbaugh suggests and voting for hillary clinton in the primaries. these are the shenanigans i was talking about. in earlier states where barack obama held a commanding lead among republicans, i think this was partially due to republicans hating hillary clinton very much, and partially because hillary clinton was originally the front-runner and they wanted to knock her down a peg or two. but also, there are many disaffected republicans who are actually willing to vote for a democrat, and a significant percentage of republicans who voted in democratic primaries were undoubtedly voters who were actually serious about supporting whomever they voted for, or who at least saw that person as the “lesser of two evils” between hillary clinton and barack obama. oh, and another thing: many people in the united states who are registered in one party are not actually loyal to that party, and there are actually a number of people who are registered in one party since they registered that way a long time ago and never changed it, but who have completely changed their political beliefs since then and now support the opposite party. and there are people who are just registered in the opposite party so that they can vote for the candidate they dislike the least, in case the party they support loses. and a very large portion of voters are actually not strongly ideologically aligned with either party, and so even referring to these voters as “democrats” or “republicans” because of their party affiliation is a big mistake, because they vote for whomever they think is most qualified, or whoever they like the best, regardless of which party the person comes from. but in any event, the rush limbaugh dittoheads in texas all voted for hillary clinton in the primary, although most of them were probably not smart enough to show up for the caucus. and since hillary clinton won texas by such a small margin, perhaps rush limbaugh is the one who gave her just enough votes to beat barack obama a tiny little bit in the texas primary.

anyway, i think hillary clinton made a big blunder the other day when she said that both she and john mccain were qualified to be commander-in-chief but barack obama was not. but then she repeated it! she seems to have a pattern here... just look at her supporting john mccain while denouncing barack obama:



i hope that she corrects this misstatement, and i really believe she probably would support barack obama if he were the general election candidate, and probably demand to be his running mate. and if barack obama chose someone else as his running mate, hillary and bill clinton would probably still support barack obama and campaign for him. it is the least they could do, after all the bad karma they have been accumulating so far this year with their campaign, and all the divisiveness on both sides in the democratic party (mainly stoked by the clinton campaign). whoever loses the democratic nomination needs to endorse and campaign for the winner, and tell all their supporters to vote for the democratic nominee. and i will heed that call, because i am a loyal democrat and fiercely partisan. in the end, we must unite to do everything possible to keep john mccain out of the white house! and on that note, i give you the latest map of which states hillary clinton won and which states barack obama won, with hillary’s states blue, obama’s states red, and the states hillary won that don’t count are both light blue (or cyan, if you prefer):



and as for me marking texas as an obama win instead of a clinton win, DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS! i already explained why he is the overall winner in texas, if you look at both the primary and the caucus, and the total number of delegates for each candidate. call me biased. i am biased. but i calls it as i sees it. i ain’t no objective journalist. i’m an anonymous blogger. at least i can freely admit to all of my biases, unlike reporters who have to pretend not to be biased even though they are full of just as much bias as anyone else. so, since i actually admit to my biases, i am much more honest than some news reporter who pretends to be completely objective but then does a story that makes one candidate look good and another one look bad. now even the news media admit to being biased. victory is mine!