Ruby and Daddy

Just checked out the most recent photos, which you can link to in the sidebar. Ruby has great eyes.

A Belated Mother's Day post for Zuzu

Carrots

Beautiful. And the carrots are nice too. The old fisherman's trick is to hold the fish out towards the camera (not away from it) to make it look bigger.

There is a new May 2008 photo album and a couple of new youtube vids available on the sidebar.

McCain's response to Obama on Military Issues

Digby is smart. Here is a passage, but read the rest. Read her often.

It's well known that McCain has a temper. He is commonly despised by people he works with. But I don't agree with Kevin here that this is just an intemperate blast that shows he's too hot-headed to be president (although he certainly is.) It is to establish his dominance on military issues and the war. As much as he's a mean man for real, he is also a ruthless politician who is positioning himself as the older Alpha Dog against the "disrespectful" upstart. This is some primitive stuff unfolding here.

McCain is also playing rather crudely into the developing theme that Obama isn't patriotic or quite a "real American." You would think that it would be ridiculous to claim such a thing when Obama is voting for a GI Bill and McCain isn't, but when you really look at what McCain does in his statement (you can read it in full, here) he goes out of his way to juxtapose his family's long history in the US military with claims about Obama only supporting veterans out of political convenience. It's really quite insidious.

May 23 Delegate Math

PocketNines provides more math than I can handle. Go have a look. His method looks pretty sound and, if it is, confirms what I had suspected. Here are some of his conclusions:

Seat the Michigan and Florida delegations in full, as-is, and Obama needs 138 delegates of any kind as we sit here today. 43 of those are guaranteed by the final three primaries or public declaration, leaving 95 needed. Obama will get a huge percentage of 69 other identifiable delegates in the calendar through June 21, leaving him roughly 26-41 delegates short. The group out of which he needs that 26-41 is 208 delegates, or 12.5%-19.7%.

and

31 [delegates for Obama] in Michigan right now. That's worst case. That's why Ickes made that little-noticed, jaw-dropping argument yesterday. You have to be really familiar with the math to appreciate why this staggeringly hypocritical ass did it. Not only did Ickes vote to strip Michigan of its delegates originally back in August and now is screaming at the top of his voice that it's outrageous that Michigan has been stripped, now he wants Michigan to let Clinton keep her 73 delegates but strip Obama of the 31 he got at the district level.

. . .

Maddow is dead-on that the Clinton goal for the May 31 meeting is merely to come out with some result that is being kicked down the road in appeals. But Ickes knows that Obama can surely see the mathematical inevitability in what I just explained, that Obama can call the big bluff by agreeing to Michigan and Florida in full, and then what will the Clintons claim in outrage? The fog they're thriving off of disappears. So Ickes is trying to pre-empt Obama's pre-emption by laying groundwork for further fog - that Obama agreeing to seat the delegations in full is too favorable to Obama because he got 31 and deserves 0. Ickes knows that nobody besides a few bloggers really knows that Obama already has 31, so he's hoping to get in front of the dawning awareness. (It hasn't been in Obama's interest to claim that number until as late in the process as possible, either.)

But the 31 exist, and the math is inexorable. While Obama would need 138 delegates after agreeing to seat Michigan and Florida in full, as-is, 43 are in a group of 100% guaranteed, 69 are in a group of 85-99% guaranteed, and 208 are the rest. Obama has been winning "the rest" by a huge ratio for a loooong time now, and many of us personally know people in that latter group who are just waiting for the primaries to officially end to declare. The closer Obama comes to 26-41 supers in the next week, the more likely I believe he is to agree to full seating.

And here is TPM discussing the May 31 Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting.



Rumors are that Clinton (or her husband) is willing to end the campaign if she is offered the VP slot, and that Obama said no. Other rumors are that she is considering dropping out regardless, but this decision would defy all recent comments and actions. As discussed above, it's all over anyway. The question is about how she goes out, and how that effects Obama's general election campaign as well as Clinton's ongoing political life.

Big Puma

From Jerry Crasnick

At Rice University, where Berkman won the National Player of the Year award in 1997, they still love to tell the "Blue Dart" story. As legend has it, longtime Owls coach Wayne Graham thought it would be a good idea if all his players ran a three-mile loop around Houston's Memorial Park in less than 21 minutes. He told them they'd have to keep trying until they succeeded.

While his roommates spent the summer in training, Berkman ate pizza and played the role of resident sedentary guy. But he also hatched a survival plan: After making a token effort in the first three-mile run -- while his roommates passed the test -- Berkman would run far enough on his second attempt to disappear from view. Once he was shielded from the sight of the coaching staff, his buddies would swing by in a car, pick him up and drive him most of the way around the course.

When race day arrived, Berkman bounded out of his vehicle moments before the scheduled 7 a.m. start. He wore royal blue Rice shorts with matching T-shirt and headband, tennis shoes and no socks, and trash-talked about the whipping he was about to apply. He called himself the "Blue Dart."

Berkman busted out as if spring-loaded, with the expectation that he would croak in a hurry. Then he checked his watch and was astonished to see he'd covered the first mile in a blistering 5:40. He decided to keep pushing, and he continued to lead the pack.

"At about the two-mile marker, a gorilla jumped on my back and the party was over, but I was so close to finishing, I decided to go ahead and try to make this thing," Berkman said. He managed to hang on and wheeze home among the leaders in slightly less than 19 minutes.

Graham initially accused him of cheating. But after Berkman dropped to his hands and knees and vomited in the grass, the coach relented.

"The next day at practice, he was like, 'Did you see the heart that Lance showed?'" Berkman recalled. "He had no idea that I had planned on cheating."

Straight Talk

New Photo Galleries

Check the sidebar for photos from our Utah trip and Thatcher's Birthday party.