Hillary warns Barack: "Just because you're way ahead, don't get cocky"

whatrya gonna do, hill...? snip off his huevos...? abridge his chimichangas...? snap his cojones with a rubber band...?

Hillary Clinton had a warning on Monday for rival Barack Obama, who is on the verge of claiming the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination: Not so fast.

"This is nowhere near over," Clinton said at a rally in Maysville, Kentucky, pressing ahead with her long shot bid for the White House even as Obama focuses on November's general election match-up with Republican John McCain.

Despite Obama's almost unassailable lead in delegates who will select the nominee at the August Democratic convention, Clinton repeatedly has shrugged off calls to quit the race before the last of the voting concludes on June 3.

She warned the Illinois senator against premature victory celebrations one day before Kentucky and Oregon cast ballots in the lengthy Democratic White House fight.

"None of us is going to have the number of delegates we're going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that," Clinton, a New York senator, said in Maysville.

Obama expects to claim a majority of pledged delegates won in state-by-state races after Tuesday's returns, but he will still be about 75 short of the 2,026 needed to clinch the nomination without further help from superdelegates -- party officials who are free to back any candidate.

Obama contends the remaining undecided superdelegates, who have been trending his way heavily in recent weeks, should back him since he won the most delegates in state voting.

have i mentioned lately just how deathly sick and tired i am of that woman...?

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12 WaPo questionable "News Alerts"

from this morning's email...

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Clinton Triumphs in California

washingtonpost.com News Alert: McCain Wins Missouri

washingtonpost.com News Alert: McCain Is Victorious in California

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Obama Has Strong Showing in Mountain States

washingtonpost.com News Alert: McCain Wins Home State of Arizona

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Obama Wins Connecticut; Huckabee Wins Alabama

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Romney Wins Utah

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Clinton Wins Massachusetts

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Clinton Wins N.Y.; Obama Takes Delaware

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Clinton Wins New York, Massachusetts

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Obama Wins Ill., Mass. Goes to Romney, McCain Victorious in N.J.

washingtonpost.com News Alert: Obama Beats Clinton in Georgia

imho, the time and effort spent in preparing these special alerts (i usually receive 4-6 total from the wapo PER WEEK) would have been better spent informing the wapo readership about how our united states constitution is being destroyed and how none of the candidates are really talking about it... < sigh >

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Conventional Wisdom Man

tom tomorrow...

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Fair elections: Kucinich fires a shot across the bow [UPDATE]

[bumped]

this is very cool... let's keep the pressure on... whether or not there was vote-tampering in nh isn't even the point... all eyes need to be on our election process... we simply can't tolerate any more bullshit...

Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who won less than 2 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, said Thursday he wants a recount to ensure that all ballots in his party's contest were counted. The Ohio congressman cited "serious and credible reports, allegations and rumors" about the integrity of Tuesday results.

Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said Kucinich is entitled to a statewide recount. But, under New Hampshire law, Kucinich will have to pay for it. Scanlan said he had "every confidence" the results are accurate.

In a letter dated Thursday, Kucinich said he does not expect significant changes in his vote total, but wants assurance that "100 percent of the voters had 100 percent of their votes counted."

note the key wording here, "he does not expect significant changes in HIS vote total..."

[UPDATE]

courtesy of the brad blog and black box voting, here's a youtube video clip demonstrating how diebold optical scan machines can be easily hacked...



this is from the black box voting site, speculating that kucinich may be falling into a trap by calling for a recount...

NEW HAMPSHIRE ELECTION INTEGRITY ADVOCATE NANCY TOBI IS CORRECT:

"We have no control over the ballot chain of custody and we have learned the pain from the 2004 Nader recount, in which only 11 districts were counted, chosen by a highly questionable person, and then nothing showed up. Now all we hear is how the Nader recount validated the machines."

As Tobi says, "A candidate asking for a recount may well be a tool used to 'prove' everything was okay and then that candidate will be further discredited."

I'll go further than that. The only way a recount makes any sense at all in New Hampshire is AFTER an assessment is made of the chain of custody issues. If the chain of custody isn't intact the recount won't be worth a cup of warm spit.

there are more twists in this story than the highway up pikes peak...

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For my money, THE definitive word on both Iowa and NH

without question, there is nothing else to be said...

ONE DAY AFTER IOWA:

(D) version: Obama is invincible. His campaign is legendary. He sweeps all those before him aside with his aura of manly inevitability. Hillary is doomed.

(R) version: The Godbillies of Iowa have shamefully nominated some know-nothing. This is a great victory for McCain, whose teenish-percent finish is evidence of his tremendous strength among the rest of the country, which is not nearly as populated with dumb-as-rocks Bible chewers as Iowa is known to be.

ONE DAY AFTER NEW HAMPSHIRE:

(D) version: Hillary is invincible. Her campaign is legendary. She sweeps all those before her aside with her aura of competent inevitability. Obama is doomed.

(R) version: I'm sorry, every pundit within a thousand miles of Washington has just reached orgasm. Please check back for wisdom later.

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So, why WERE the polls so WRONG about Clinton and Obama in NH (and why is dKos so stubbornly blind)?

hmmmm...? inquiring minds - and brad friedman - want to know...

[T]he way the ballots are counted in New Hampshire, largely on Diebold optical-scan voting systems, wholly controlled and programmed by a very very bad company named LHS Associates.

Those Diebold op-scan machines are the exact same ones that were hacked in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy.

i confess, i was very surprised to watch the results coming in last evening, and the same thought immediately crossed my mind...

[W]hat's going on here?

While I have no evidence at this time --- let me repeat, no evidence at this time --- of chicanery, what we do know is that chicanery, with this particular voting system, is not particularly difficult. Particularly when one private company --- and a less-than-respectable one at that, as I detailed in the previous post --- runs the entire process.

I should also note that some 40% of New Hampshire's precincts are hand-counted, which equals about 25% of the votes. All the rest are counted on hackable Diebold op-scan systems, with completely hackable memory cards, all programmed and managed by LHS Associates.

brad then goes on to point out, in no-holds-barred fashion, the same points about daily kos that i and a number of my fellow bloggers have been making for some time...

Over at Daily Kos, diarist "AHiddenSaint" has written a post quoting, and linking over to this one, by way of sharing his/her concerns about the NH results.

The result: an embarrassing thread of comments, smashing up AHiddenSaint for posting something that the dKos commenters feel is little more than "conspiracy theory". Foolishly (for them), they have taken a sentence from the original post, in which I noted that I "have no evidence at this time --- of chicanery," to wonder why I would therefore write such a post at all. Their claim: that I am some how charging that Clinton stole the election.

I have made no such claim. In fact, if there was skullduggery here, there are plenty of reasons to believe it could have been committed by any number of interested parties, who have nothing to do with the Clinton campaign.

Daily Kos, of course, is a Clinton-centric website, which, more disturbingly, purged diaries and diarists after the 2004 Ohio election, if they were judged to be questioning what went on there. I spoke to Markos (the site's founder) about that, when we were at a conference together in Vegas last Summer. He stills stands by his decision to purge those folks. That, despite so much that has come out since '04 to show that what happened was a travesty of democracy. As I told him then, he owes his readers an apology. He did add, however, that he has someone ("Georgia10") who now cover issues of Election Integrity on their front page.

The result of his purge, is the mindset of the commenters now seen over there. It seems to me they are are begging for a world of hurt, someday, when their candidate doesn't win, under questionable circumstances. They will, of course, have cornered themselves such that they won't be able to ask questions themselvses. In the bargain, they are now fostering a culture of fear. Fear of asking questions. Fear of insisting that our democracy be transparent, of the people, by the people and for the people. If it were only themselves they were hurting by fostering that culture, I wouldn't give a damn. But rest assured, their comments, actions and attitudes will be leveraged, as we move forward, to hurt all of us.

For the record, I am neither a Clinton supporter nor an Obama supporter (nor a supporter of anyone else in the race at this time, in any party.) I am a supporter of the VOTERS. Period. It's they --- us --- who could really use some support right about now. I intend to do exactly that. All damned year. No matter how many "tin foil hats" the shortsighted, self-destructive Kossack types, who are behaving like the worst of the Republicans, try to throw at me.

i think it's absolutely shameful that the proprietor of one of the first, biggest, and certainly most visible of the so-called "liberal," "progressive" blogs has chosen to stick his head firmly in the sand, setting both the role model and the expectation for his talented cast of front-pagers, his many thousands of members and diarists, and his millions of monthly visitors to do the same... i've never claimed to have a privileged access to the truth, but i know damn good and well that, to GET the truth, you have to be willing to follow it wherever it may lead... too bad markos does not accept that responsibility on behalf of those who make his site possible...

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Dear Maureen Dowd... Please go directly to hell, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200...

this is what greeted me in my nyt headline email this morning...

Can Hillary Cry Her Way
Back to the White House?
By MAUREEN DOWD

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary Clinton crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one.

i will not dignify such crap by even opening the full piece to see what modo has to say... the headline itself is quintessential dowd bitch-speak, and in its abject repugnance, is totally unworthy of the op-ed page of any newspaper, especially the gray lady... tears are part of being human, and while it's impossible for me to know what really provoked hillary to cry, be it stress, exhaustion, overwhelming emotion, or political calculation, that such an event becomes the overarching topic of tongue-wagging pundits across the nation is nothing less than despicable...

and btw, maureen, on your trip to the inferno, take your new son-of-a-bitch nyt colleague with you...

10:42 PM: Bill Kristol: “It’s the tears. She pretended to cry. The women felt sorry for her. And she won.”

i don't hesitate to reveal that i'm no fan of hrc, but, that notwithstanding, NO ONE deserves this kind of bullshit...

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