I am watching a C-Span broadcast about the broken, undemocratic, and corrupt nomination process. Elaine Kamarck of the DNC Rule and Bylaws Committee is going through the history and droning on about this and that. And it hit me. The solution to the problem is simple - we should change the Presidential nomination process to a pure popular vote system. This would end all the silly calendar nonsense. You want to go first? Be my guest. That is not going to change the fact that California has the most people.

This would also let states decide if they wanted to pay for a real election (a primary) or wanted instead to hold a phony election (a caucus). It gets rid of superdelegates. Heck, it gets rid of DELEGATES period. It gets rid of every unDemocratic feature in the process (no overweighting rural districts or urban districts or any district.)

Finally, it eliminates the importance of incompetents like Donna Brazile. So there you have it. My proposed reform for the nomination process.

One stop voter registration and voting is already underway in North Carolina which holds its primary May 6.

Here are the latest voter registration stats for the state. They are broken down by county, but here are the totals as of April 26:

• Total Voters 5,791,221
• Democrats 2,616,995
• Republicans 1,933,929
• Unaffiliated 1,240,297
• White 4,368,780
• African Amer. 1,192,950
• Hispanic 49,835
• American Indian 44,170
• Women 3,163,294
• Men 2,603,775

Since people can register and vote on the same day during one stop voting which doesn't end until May 3, these won't be the final numbers.

Here's what the numbers were at the start of 2008. The number of registered Dems has increased by about 105,000 since January. The number of African American voters for both parties and unaffiliated has increased about 65,000, from 1,128,082 to 1,192,950 (the 4/26 numbers aren't broken down by party.) [More...]

Barack Obama's new politics may not be exactly the same as his old politics. The LA Times reports he wrote a letter for a donor and client requesting and obtaining a $50,000 grant for a ping pong ball venture.

After an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2000, Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama faced serious financial pressure: numerous debts, limited cash and a law practice he had neglected for a year. Help arrived in early 2001 from a significant new legal client -- a longtime political supporter.

Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell Jr. paid Obama an $8,000-a-month retainer to give legal advice to his growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange. It allowed Obama to supplement his $58,000 part-time state Senate salary for over a year with regular payments from Blackwell's firm that eventually totaled $112,000.

After receiving his last paycheck from EKI:

Obama sent a request on state Senate letterhead urging Illinois officials to provide a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin.

More...

David White Jr., in a Boston Globe op-ed, asks "what is it about our priorities that has us spending more on incarceration than higher education?"

Incarceration rates increased dramatically when the "War on Drugs" was launched in the 1980s. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, strict mandatory minimum sentences were enacted for drug dealing. One of those sentences, for selling any type or quantity of drug within 1,000 feet of a school, annually sends more than 300 people to jail for a mandatory minimum of two years.

What a waste. So is the "zero tolerance" attitude that makes a big deal out of petty crimes.

At the front end of the trial process, the courts are cluttered with the smallest of crimes, such as disturbing the peace or passing a bad check. Because these crimes carry the threat of incarceration, if the defendant is indigent the court must appoint a lawyer at taxpayer expense. If treated instead as civil infractions, with only the risk of fines, the dockets could be cleared, and the legal help could be reserved for more serious matters.

White proposes additional sensible solutions to the mess our criminal justice system has become: (more...)

I frequently write about the need to be smarter, rather than just tough on crime. That means funding prison programs that rehabilitate prisoners and reduce the chance of recidivism.

Here's a success story. On May 26, among those wearing a cap and gown to receive degrees at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs will be Alex Matheson.

Matheson, a twice-convicted felon, has earned degrees in English and Philosophy. Now 26, Matheson's first crime stint landed him in Colorado's youth correctional facility. He escaped, and ended up at the Crowley Correctional Facility.

More...

Vast Left at Corrente: Obama's smart and charismatic and he voted against the war. Right?

Let's talk about the reasons to like him -- and more importantly, reasons he should be the Democratic nominee for President. Or not.

Update: (different topic) Check out Elizabeth Edwards op-ed in today's New York Times: Bowling 1, Health Care 0. It's about the media's shallow coverage of the presidential race.

AdamB is living in the past. In 2006, Barack Obama may have been the fresh face for Claire McCaskill in Missouri. But things change:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds John McCain leading Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points, 50% to 41%. He leads Barack Obama by an even larger margin, 53% to 38%.

Survey USA:

* John McCain 50%
* Barack Obama 42%

* John McCain 46%
* Hillary Clinton 47%

Time for Obama supporters to give a realistic argument for Obama's electability and downticket strength, not reprise bromides from 2006. That was then. This is now.

Watching MTP and ABC's This Week, the pundits roundtable demonstrates that Barack Obama's most important constituency, the Beltway Media, remains firmly in his corner.

It should not matter, but it matters a lot. It is why I believe Barack Obama is more electable than Clinton.

This is an Open Thread. Below is my live blog of Obama on Fox. Jerome Armstrong has a nice post on it. Open Thread bonus - Indiana demographics and North Carolina demographics.

On "Face The Nation," when asked about Jim Clyburn's outrageous comments about the Clinton camp, David Axelrod went out of his way to categorically reject Clyburn's conspiracy theory. It seems clear to me that Clyburn was off the reservation there and the Obama camp wants no part of Clyburn's delusions. More . . .

I stopped by Larry Johnson's No Quarter and found his latest post on Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. We've both written about Ayers before, but we have different views of Ayers and his wife.

As I've said many times, I admire the work the Ayers' have done for children and education and in trying to keep them on the right track rather than go down the wrong one. Larry tends to view Ayers as a terrorist. I don't. I also like what I know about Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorn for how they took in Chesa Boudin and raised him while his parents were in jail for many, many years over their activities.

So Larry and I disagree a bit on which aspect of Ayers' connection to Obama is or is not a problem.

This is an open thread.

Michael Barone at Real Clear Politics examines the popular vote totals, including caucus states, and says Hillary Clinton is ahead.

Her 214,000-vote margin in the Keystone State means that she has won the votes, in primaries and caucuses, of 15,112,000 Americans, compared to 14,993,000 for Obama.

If you add in the votes, as estimated by the folks at realclearpolitics.com, in the Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine caucuses, where state Democratic parties did not count the number of caucus-attenders, Clinton still has a lead of 12,000 votes.

Barone says even with a loss in North Carolina, Hillary may keep the lead if she does well, as expected in W.Va and Kentucky and Puerto Rico. [More....]

The Associated Press reports on the state of the electoral map and says right now it favors Democrats. It includes 14 states as battleground states that could go either way.

William Arnone, long-time Democratic party activist and the author of the key state series I've quoted many times, has just finished his preliminary electoral vote preview and again graciously agreed to let me publish it.

Arnone says there are 17 battle ground states among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, which also has electoral votes.

As to Hillary or Obama, who's more likely to get the Dems over the 270 mark? Arnone says it's Hillary.

Here's his breakdown of the 538 electoral votes:

• 15 states are likely will go Democratic (196 EV)
• 19 states are likely to go Republican (152 EV)
• 17 are toss-ups or battleground states (190 EV)

The 17 battleground states are broken down as follows: [More...]

Paul Rosenberg, who like me has been a critic of Barack Obama's political style, speculates that Obama will go after Fox tomorrow in his appearance on Fox News Sunday:

Obama could--potentially--go on Fox News, and counterattack the very essence of the Versaille narratives deployed against him, and yet gain a fair amount of Versailles support, because his supporters could act as if he's only attacking Fox News, and not their own identical behavior.

NOTE: It turns out the interview already took place and it was a lovefest. Stoller does not believe Fox. I do. I think it would have been quite shrewd of Obama to do so and I agree with Rosenberg that Obama could have pick up Media Elite support for doing so. But I think Obama is clearly too cautious a politician to even try it. More . . .