Beyond Opinion

The primary season is still not over. We have five long months until the Democratic National Convention in Denver. There is no way that Clinton can catch up to Obama, and there is no way that Obama can win the nomination on just pledged delegates, ensuring that it is probably going to be decided in Denver unless Hillary quits before then.

This campaign has at times been weird and far-out. It has invoked choirs of angels, cries of "God Damn America!", roosting chickens, nonexistent bullets in Kosovo, and the use of "Hussein" as a term of derision. But one of these is more than just weird; it is just plain inappropriate. That is the questioning of Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary, on Monica Lewinsky. Why bring her up? She hasn't played a part in this campaign. An affair she had did lead to the impeachment of a President, but that is over with now. It does not even concern Hillary. We need to be concerned with crisis of the future, such as peak oil, global warming, the credit crisis, the health care mess, retirement of baby boomers, and Iraq. Chelsea says it right: "It's none of your business."

As of late the news broadcasters have been saying that Clinton and Obama have been damaging themselves by bickering and fighting with each other, bringing in a whole slew of things and people into it, such as monsters, passports, damnation, 9/11, heavenly choirs, Samantha Power, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro and others. Now ABC reports tonight (2008 March 22) that an increasing number of Clinton supporters would rather vote for McCain than for Obama, and an increasing number of Obama supporters would rather vote for McCain than for Clinton. That of course result in a 3-1 landslide for McCain if it really came to pass, assuming an equal race between the Democrats and McCain.

But this runs counter to Allan Lichtman's Keys to the White House theory. There is a key that refers to primary and convention fights, namely Key 2: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. This is the most important key; only four incumbent candidates have lost while taking the key, and only Garfield, by 4,000 votes, has won without taking it. This key has clearly stood this time, since McCain has already won the nomination, and no other candidate came close. But why isn't there a Challenging Party Contest key, say Key 14? Is Mr. Lichtman saying that the fighting doesn't matter?

Apparently yes. He says that ten challengers have won the presidency after losing Key 14 (i.e, having it stand) , and only four have won while winning Key 14 (i.e, having it fall). This means that this key would actually operate in reverse. A fight for the challenger nomination helps the challenger candidate. He says that contesting for the challenger nomination actually provides visibility to the challenger candidates. However, he apparently does not feel that this help justifies including a Key 14' (fourteen-prime), which would say that the challenger had no serious contest to the nomination, or a Key 14 for that matter.

This says that Obama and Clinton are stumbling all over the place, weeding out the mistakes, and that McCain is sitting around doing nothing, and also disappearing from hypermedia radar. The result would be a battle-seasoned Democratic candidate for President, all the more ready to take on Bomb-Bomb. But what about passports, Rev. Wright, Geraldine Ferraro, the name "Hussein" and so forth? They don't mean anything. What matters are the essentials: economy, unity among the incumbents, wars (including Iraq), policy, and mandate. And these right now say the Democrat is going to win. On 2009 January 20, President Obama or Clinton will be sworn in, and there will be nowhere in the media that you will find any mention of Wright, Power, or Ferraro.

On Wednesday of this week (2008 March 19), A Kidspot comic appeared. It was similar to one earlier that I commented on. In this puzzle this array is given:

Also included are pictures of a bat, a panda, a goose, a goat, a frog, a nut, a pig, a pumpkin, and a cake. These words are easily found in the puzzle.

P	U	M	P	K	I	N
A	F	A	I	B	C	U
N	R	S	G	O	A	T
D	O	L	M	U	K	T
A	G	O	O	S	E	A

Other words are found in the puzzle too, for example, "sea" in the right hand corner. If you follow a bent path, you can obtain many other words. Some of these are "loose", "moose", "dog", "muse", "rap" (and "par"), and another instance of "bat". If you are willing to jump two spaces at times, you can find "gold". The most interesting is the phrase "cat takes mouse". Start with the C in position (2,6). Go down, right, down, down, diagonal up and left, and so forth. The sinuous nature of this path reminds me of a real cat chasing a mouse in a maze. This reminds me of one of the games in The Compleat Strategyst. That game featured a cat and mouse in a 3x3 maze, and Williams concluded that the cat should travel in small loops and the mouse should stick to the edge of the maze. Isn't that what is happening here? The path is near the edge of the puzzle, and it goes around in small loops.

But notice what is going on in the upper right corner. The C-word appears! This is the word that Jane Fonda used recently on the Today show. If you look in that corner, you will see a C, a U, an N, and a T, in a t-pattern, the same type of pattern as with the F-word that appeared in Kidspot a number of weeks ago. All I can say is look at your puzzle before you publish it. It's OK to include a nut in your puzzle, as long as it is nowhere near any C.

I haven't commented on the political campaign for a while. It has gotten boring ever since the last primary, in Mississippi, happened. Pennsylvania is not until April 22. There are now three candidates, which are going to be petrified in a state of limbo for five months, until the end of August. What are they going to do in that time? What are their supporters going to do? What is the media going to do?

Plenty. The media unearths all sorts of things and slings them on our face, saying this candidate did this and that at such and such a time, and then the candidate has to come to terms with that. I've already commented on Samatha Power saying that Hillary is a monster, saying that means with Hillary as President we will have more jobs. Well at least she does not want to build polluting coal plants, as Virginia Power wants to do.

The next was Geraldine Ferraro, the vice presidential pick of Walter Mondale, who won one of the biggest landslides in history, over Ronald Reagan, getting 91% of the vote. (OK, I mean with black voters). She said that Obama is where he is because he is black, throwing race into the race. The least thing we need now, with a big crisis coming up, is a race race. She later apologized and quit the Clinton campaign, and I don't think Hillary was affected much by it.

Then there was Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the fire and brimstone minister of Obama's former church. Mediots uncovered some tapes of some of his sermons near the beginning of this millennium. In one of them he said "God Damn America!", and he said that because of the way America has treated black people in the past. Well, if I were black, that is what I would think of this country. He said nothing that much out of the ordinary. He also said of the 9/11 attacks, that we have sponsored terrorist attacks on other countries, and that "the chickens have come home to roost", reminding me of the title of Ward Churchill's article. The pundits all ganged up on Obama because this was his minister.

Obama gave an excellent response to this uproar. In a talk on 2008 March 18, he condemned Rev. Wright's remarks but said he could no more separate himself from the Reverend as he could from the black community. He pointed out the tremendous gains that blacks have gained in the past half century on rights, and recited his own life and the wide range of ancestry and experiences that he has. To me, Obama is a ray of hope in a cloud of deception, mendacity, and belligerence. If he were President, many of the conflicts that nations have with the United States, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia, would be defused.

Now today it's John McCain's turn. Earlier, he remarked to a request to send an airmail to Tehran by singing the doctored up old Beach Boys song, "Bomb Iran". He said, "Bomb bomb bomb…". Today he said that Iran was supporting Al Qaeda, and an advisor quickly pointed out to him that that was incorrect. Al Qaeda (which should be called The Base), is Sunni and has no relation to Iran, which is Shiite.

And now it is my own minister that is the subject of a controversy. Rev. AC Miles, author of the Auspicious Jots blog, says she was quoted once as saying that she heard dying people in a hospice giving advice to others: have more sex. She says, "Wait until CNN gets a hold of this". This comes about two weeks after she whisked a spider off her pulpit, saying "Beat it". That was the subject of one of my blogs on Blogtrek, "The Spider Theory".

So what does all this matter about the Presidential Campaign? Absolutely nothing. There is no way that Samantha Power, Geraldine Ferraro, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Iran, or CNN is going to select or eliminate a candidate. Who is elected is based on more fundamental principles; according to Allan Lichtman, a Presidential election is basically a referendum on the previous administration. Such things as the disruption in our economy, the 2006 Congressional elections, the war in Iraq, the charisma of the candidates, and the lack of any real policy changes by President Bush have far more of an effect on who will get elected. And so far, these things say that our next President will be either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, with greater odds on the latter. And maybe someone from my congregation will be elected President in 2012.

It seems that freedom of speech is under attack under several fronts. Recently Danish newspapers repeated the cartoons showing, among other things, Mohammad as a bearded man wearing a bomb for a turban. Mullahs and others in Muslim nations, especially in radical corners, condemned the cartoons, burned Danish flags, and even threatened death on the people who publish them. We condemn what these Moslems do, because we feel the Danish freedom of speech has been attacked. There is talk all the time about radical Muslims. But how about radical Christians?

Proof came this week that they are in abundance in the United States. In the past two years, the cartoonists of the University of Virginia's Cavalier Daily have posted cartoons that have drawn irrational attacks from Christian groups. First, it was Christ on an xy coordinate plane. Big deal. Mathematics is on the minds of University of Virginia students a lot, because they are taking courses in the subject that are graded. So you can expect their cartoonists to put math into various situations. Then there was the one about immaculate conception sexually-transmitted disease. Last year, it was about a food fight among Ethiopians. That may very well be the case out in Africa.

This time it was cartoons on the comic strip PCB depicting God and the "virgin" Mary talking after they had sex, and another one was about Christ doing stand-up comedy on the cross. These two have received numerous objections from Christian groups and the National Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Now there are some that have said that these cartoons are in poor taste. Well, then, one does not have to look at them. These Christian groups do have a right to express their viewpoint. But to me, that right stops when they try to stop others from exercising their freedom of speech. These groups have clearly violated the cartoonists' rights, as they forced them to withdraw their cartoons.

Further, in my opinion, these cartoons highlight in their peculiar way problems with Christianity and the Catholic Church. God having sex with the virgin Mary? The doctrine of Virgin Birth is really absurd. The only way to produce a human child is to have an impregnation occur in the womb of a woman. Stand-up comedy on the Cross? The idea that somehow Christ rose from the dead, like some balloon floating in the air, and wound up with a father "God" somewhere way out there is incredulous as well. Maybe these cartoons are insensitive, but the Christian religion has clearly provoked them.

It seems to me that before Christians go and holler down the cartoon attempts of a few students at a university, they need to clean up their own act. Just this past week, Pope Benedict XVI was announcing three more "sins" that cause the sinner to roast in Hell. Wishing something like that on a person is itself a sin. In any case, the actions of student Christians and of the Catholic Church on these cartoonists are perhaps not as violent, but are in the same category as that of the Muslims who condemn the Danish cartoonists to death. There is no difference between them. Both groups want to abrogate people's right to freedom of speech. Those who want to take action against Muslim extremists may want to look at what their Christian analogues are doing.

Last week was really something for the Democratic race. Clinton won three primaries out of four but only 12 delegates more than Obama. Then Samantha Power says she is a monster. Hillary demanded that Obama remove her, and she resigned. I remarked already that she was being a tyrant by doing that.

Now this race is getting really absurd. Hillary Clinton is stupid. Or at least "she has run one of the stupidest Presidential races in recent history.", according to Charlotte Allen, a columnist for the Washington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. She says this in an article in which she decries the way women behave in our society, for example, in the way they react to Barack Obama, namely, the Obama girl phenomenon: "can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, 'we women,' of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all." She then makes her remark about how Hillary runs her campaign, namely, that she whines, she complains about being called first in debates all the time, and she leans on her husband Bill (reminds me of the song "Lean on Me").

Whether women, or some women, are still behaving like subordinates to men, is one issue. What I am going to talk about here is Hillary's non-reaction to it. After all, if Samantha Power can't call her a monster, then certainly Charlotte can't call her campaign stupid. Maybe is because Samantha worked for Obama while Charlotte does not. That's the principle of impartiality. If you are not working in someone's camp, you can freely assess their potential. You can call them stupid, if you want.

It's just words, Hillary. That's what I was told when I was a fifth-grader. "Sticks and stones will break your back, but words will never hurt you." One day I wrote on a blackboard at the back of the room that my teacher was stupid. When she saw that, she sent me to the office for the rest of the day. That proved to be a turning point in my life. After that, I continued to misbehave a little in class, but I worked on what was really important at that time - learning, getting a good education, and getting good grades. And after all these years, I know that calling people stupid, idiot and the like doesn't harm much at all. In fact, these words sound comical, and belong more on Jay Leno's show than in a Presidential campaign.

This stupid-calling by Charlotte Allen is adding to the weirdness of this campaign, which now has featured stupidity, monsters, choirs of angels, shame, Karl Rove, Obama girls, hott for Hill girls, Big Sister Hillary being blown up by a hammer tossed by a female runner, and polls that run out of ballots, not just once, but over and over again. As I write about this, I note that most of this weirdness seems to be emanating from the Clinton camp somehow. Let's hope the candidates get down to sense come August or November.

Today (2008 March 7), an Obama aide named Samantha Power called Hillary Clinton a monster. The Hillary camp immediately demanded that the Obama campaign fire her. Shortly after that, Samantha resigned. You'd think that Samantha held up the local bank, the way Hillary reacted.

What's so wrong with being a monster anyway? If Hillary Clinton really is a monster, then her theme song is the "Monster Mash". That is a nice danceable tune. It seems to me that Hillary would be proud of that. After all, she wants the public to dance her way come August and come November 3, doesn't she? If she were elected, given that she is a monster, what would we expect? Jobs! There would be plenty of jobs available. After all, to get a job these days, one does go to a monster. The unemployment rate would drop to 1%, and those 1% are those who don't give a darn about jobs anyway.

By demanding Samantha's resignation, Hillary Clinton has done several things. She has established herself to be a dictator, even over those elements that she does not have purview over. She has taken a stand for increased unemployment. She shows that she has the dancing ability of Al Gore, even though she can bring choirs of singing angels down from the heavens above. She has shown that she can take drastic action over a triviality. People call people monsters, idiots, numbskulls, scoundrels, and villains all the time. Try Googling "Hillary Clinton is an idiot.", for example. I just did and came up with 44,200 hits. Now if any of those hits came from the Obama camp, I suppose that right away she would demand the resignation of the idiotcaller. That's 44,200 sites, with 44,200 people behind them. Of course if she starts demanding that all these idiotcallers that are in the Obama or McCain campaigns resign, she is going to sound like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: "Off with his head! Off with her head!".

If she can take such drastic action over a triviality, think of what would happen if a real emergency occurred, such as a major regional war. I don't think I would want her hands on the red phone. Give me Obama any day. She needs to ignore trifles like this.

Well now McCain has clinched the Republican nomination, and Obama and Clinton has cleared all the others out of the field - Ron Paul and Mike Gravel need to quit. With only three possibilities for our next President, a review of how the keys stand might be in order.

1. After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.

FALSE. Not only did the Democrats gain the 4 seats enough to topple this key, they outright took all of Congress from the Republicans, with help from a spoken "macaca".

2. There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.

TRUE. Lichtman kept insisting that a dragout fight for this nomination would occur because of the wide range of candidates available, and that would topple this key. I predicted that no matter the range, one candidate will pull out ahead of the others, and indeed that has happened. Not only has McCain clinched the nomination, the non-McCain delegate total of 527 is much less than 1/3 of the total. So this key stands.

3. The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.

FALSE. Because of the 22nd Amendment.

4. There is no significant third party or independent campaign.

TRUE. The third party time has come and the third party time has gone. I don't see Ron Paul running as an independent. Ralph Nader does not count - he won't get 5%, and he would affect the Democratic vote. Mike Bloomberg decided he would not win and decided not to run. So this key stands.

5. The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

FALSE. Public perception is what matters. There is talk all over the place that a recession is occurring. Increases in the price of oil will make it worse. So although the numbers say we squeak by, I think this key goes down.

6. Real per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.

FALSE?. It is difficult to get good data on this key. I found a table from the Economic Research Service that has GDP and growth for a number of countries. It suggests that the growth rate was 1.4% for 1996-2004 and 2.0% for 2004-2007. It takes only a decline of 0.3% this year to make the average for 2004-2008 less than 1.4%. So this key is in danger, and if key 5 falls, then there is a loss, probably more than 0.3%, so this key falls.

7. The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

FALSE. I see no changes that Bush has effected. The Department of Homeland Security does not count. A year after the 9/11 attacks, it was business as usual, buy and buy from the local Wal-Mart.

8. There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

TRUE. Anti-war protests don't topple this key. They would have to be extensive and possibly cause injuries and damage, and be occurring repeatedly or all over the place.

9. The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

TRUE. Scooter Libby does not count. If this is indeed a major scandal, the public does not see it that way, or it does not know. It is what the public thinks that counts. Although the public thinks Bush is an idiot, being idiotic does not constitute a scandal.

10. The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

FALSE. Years of fighting in Iraq have not seen much improvement. The situation is so bad that it caused Congress to switch parties.

11. The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

FALSE. I have not seen any. Now if Iraq becomes a stable nation and Bush starts pulling troops out, this becomes true, but Key 10 still remains false.

12. The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

FALSE. The question is whether John McCain is a national hero. He is certainly not charismatic. To be a national hero, his actions would have to have altered substantially our history. Grant and Eisenhower clearly did that. Kennedy, McGovern, and George HW Bush all have been heroic in World War II, but none changed our history that much. None of these satisfy this key, but Kennedy secured the key because of his charisma. I think McCain's 5-year imprisonment in North Vietnam falls in this category. So this one falls.

13. The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

UNCERTAIN. If Barack Obama is the nominee, the key falls as he is charismatic. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, this key stands, as she is not charismatic. I think this is leaning towards falling, as it looks like Obama will be the nominee.

The totals: FALSE, 8. TRUE, 4. UNCERTAIN, 1.

This says that the Democrat will win the election in November. McCain apparently does not have a chance. Our next President will be either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, and then it remains to be seen whether Barack or Hillary will deal successfully with the major crises confronting the nation, and become a Crisis President instead of another Nero.

This night is getting weirder and weirder. John McCain won both Texas and Rhode Island. But this is no ordinary pair of wins. They put his delegate total over the 1,191 votes needed for the nomination. Therefore, the game is over in the Republican party. John McCain has won the nomination. Further, his present opposition has accumulated less than 1/3 of the delegates, and won't get any more. This means that Lichtman Key 2 stands for the Republicans. It is as I predicted. One candidate flys away with the nomination.

Ok, now for the ridiculousness. The networks are so caught up on John McCain winning the Republican nomination that they have said absolutely nothing about the Democrats in Texas and Rhode Island. Absolutely nothing. Not even to say they are competitive. My spreadsheet analysis of exit polls show that Obama has taken Texas big, and Clinton just gets by in Rhode Island:

Texas (incorrect - see end of this blog)
Clinton 44%
Obama 56%

Rhode Island
Clinton 52%
Obama 47%

To me, this means that Hillary Clinton is in trouble. She lost two of the primaries tonight, including by a huge margin in Texas, and she has just barely scraped by in the other two (that is, if the extended balloting in Ohio doesn't flip that result). She needed a big gain on delegates in this primary horse race, which is nearing the finish, but instead Obama gained. However, Obama's streak of 12 (or 13, as the networks have not called Ohio yet) victories has ended.

The previous ridiculousness in Texas has now been explained. They were showing the votes of those that have already voted. In Texas, you can mail in your vote before Election Day. The networks displayed this, together with the percentage of votes that were in tonight. That is a misrepresentation. Further, the networks should not have released any vote totals before the polls in El Paso closed.

UPDATE 2008 March 4 22:28

My deducing a huge margin for Obama in Texas was the result of a spreadsheet copying error. I did it over again for several categories and found that Clinton will win, 49.1% to 47.8%. Just as with Ohio, both candidates take a huge step towards the finish line, and Clinton gains precious little. Clinton still will need some big victories to win the pledged vote total, and I am sensing now that superdelegates will not overturn a delegate victory for either side. So although Clinton won three primaries tonight, she has moved closer to losing the nomination.

Using the spreadsheet exit poll analysis technique that I explained in a previous blog, I have come up with the result that Hillary has taken Ohio by 50% to 47%. However, this will give Clinton precious little gain on Obama. Hillary will not take all 162 of the delegates but only probably about 82 of them. She gains maybe 2 or 3 delegates on Obama, while both step ahead by about 80 delegates to the goal, with Obama in the lead. To me it is another step towards Obama getting the nomination; that is, unless the superdelegates decide otherwise.

UPDATE 2008 March 4 2020. It looks like Clinton has won, but something has happened. The weather is frightful in Ohio, with snow, sleet, and freezing rain. And just like in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and in fact, in my very own precinct, they have run out of ballots in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, an Obama stronghold. A judge has ruled that polls have to stay open there until 9 pm. This could result in a late surge for Obama, making this primary about as tied as it can get.

RIDICULOUSNESS: Something has happened to the Texas vote, and I am wondering now if I can trust anything in Texas. The networks, including CNN, are presenting results for Texas! Obama is "leading" by 300,000 to 210,000, approximately, with 0 or <1% of the vote. Huhh?? That implies that the population of Texas is greater than (300,000+210,000)/0.005, or 102 million. No way. I think Texas has only about 25 million people. Not only that, but they are displaying these results before the polls close in the El Paso area, which is on Mountain Time! Something is screwy in Texas.