Then I got rid of Cable!

I get to save money and stop pre-mature balding at the same time!

A man walks by and sees a small boy digging in manure.  The man says 'boy, what are you doing digging in manure?' The boy says... with all the manure, I figure there must be a PONY. Obama's campaign is a new paradigm, blah, blah, blah.
I then changed the channel as 30 seconds of positive coverage is all she gets on MSNBC in one week.  Obama's campaign is a new paradigm, blah, blah, blah.

Ran over to Fox.  Dick Morris says Clinton can't leave because her superdelegates would go to Obama and that she's lost?  He thinks she will never be a power player, she's like Kennedy a symbol of the 'good cause' and will have difficulty getting reelected in NY if they put an AA up against her.

this may come as a shock to some of the obamaites ( and some of the clintonites) but there was a time when NOONE knew the outcome of the nomination before the convention, watching it on TV was like watching the Miss America Pagent where the outcome was a mystery until the states announced their delegate count.

no one was panicking. no one was all atwitter, it was the way a campaign was held. people were allowed to make a choice when they made it.

I got a kick out of this article in TVByTheNumbers regarding Olbermann's Sunday night NETWORK special.  

Link

I am now returning control of my teevee to me.  Almost time to watch American Idol results with my 14 year old (hey, a mom will do almost anything to be able to curl up with her teenager on the sofa).  

My reservations about him stemmed from:

1.  He uses Edward R. Murrow's sign off without crediting him.
   
2.  When he does an impression of O'Reilly, it is really of the character "Ted Baxter" created by Ted Knight - and sounds nothing like O'Reilly.

3.  He uses "Sir" when addressing his criticisms to Bush.
   
4.  He is very scripted and rarely speaks spontaneously. Edward R. Murrow spoke in a manner that was much more direct.

My evening routine for the past several years was to come home from work and watch Countdown which I taped each day on my DVR.  I'd been a fan of Keith's since his show debuted (although I never liked the fluffy stuff and I especially didn't like the "Keeping Tabs", gossip, waste of time segment).

I couldn't even bring myself to listen to his Hillary bashing special comment.  I stopped taping his show the night of the comment, went through about a week of withdrawals and now I take my pooch for a walk each night instead and I feel great!

I was also a devoted DKos and TPM reader and I've kicked those habits as well.  

Thank goodness for Talk Left, My DD, No Quarter, Taylor Marsh, etc. - I love you guys!

I also tuned into the Stephanie Miller show for 5 minutes yesterday--for the first time in over one month. The first caller she took wanted to share the sudden realization she had about Clinton's distinction between big states and little states: that "ignores half the voters," the caller marveled. This of course has been an Obama talking point since February, so apparently this caller hibernates during the winter months.

This is not about race or gender, in my opinion:  I think that Barack Obama is winning because he is the better candidate for the times!

Hillary is very smart; Barack is very smart. Hillary has great positions (some better than others); Barack has great positions (some better than others). Hillary is better on health care; Barack is better on getting out of Iraq. Hillary is running a decent campaign; Barack is running a better campaign (50 state focus, ground-up organizing, very good email campaign, terriffic fundraising).

But the clincher is that Barack Obama is inspiring. He can inspire us to think about the world in a different way, and to take the difficult steps to make changes in the next administration.

Will it be hard for him to win? Sure. Same with Hillary.

So, like I said, after a little channel flipping, I turned off the teevee to observe the nightly KO boycott.  By the time I turned KO on in response to this open thread, Howard Fineman was just winding up something about how Clinton can't get more superdelegates.  Then they segued into a dump on McCain.  How refreshing!  Dumping on the Rethugs!  Aw'right!  

Domestic infiltration of U.S. activist groups finally discontinued.

Lincoln Chafee's new book quotes Vice President Cheney saying in 2000 that the new administration was not bound by stuff they had to say to get elected.

Study shows that most dangerous nation in the Middle East is...Saudi Arabia.

For a couple of years, from 2005 up till this election season, I watched a lot of CNN, particularly AC360, but no more.  I've watched all of the debates and much of the primary coverage, but I avoid the pundits like the plague.    

dk asked:
I'm curious.  You say that voting in the Republican primary was a "reasonable strategy at the time."  What strategy are you talking about?  I mean, I can see how refusing to vote in the Democratic primary would have been a reasonable option for an Obama or Edwards supporter, but in what way did voting in the Republican primary help either one of them?

My response:
I'm a liberal Democrat. I live in Ann Arbor, with lots of other liberal Democrats. Every other house in the neighborhood (exaggerating only somewhat) has an Impeach Bush/Cheney sign. My point being that this was an area with lots of likely Democratic voters come November who are politically engaged and committed to ending the Republican dominance of our national politics.

I found there was a lot of discussion at work, with other parents, etc. about what to do in the election in January. Among those Democrats I talked to, I heard seven common strategies before the primary election:

1. I'm voting for Clinton because I prefer her as a candidate.
   
2. I'm voting for Clinton because she's the only Democratic candidate named on the ballot, I always vote, and I could never vote for a Republican. (I also heard folks saying that they didn't want to vote undecided because they disliked Obama / or Edwards and didn't want the undecideds choosing if the election came down to Obama vs. Edwards.)
   
3. I'm voting undecided because I favor Obama or Edwards.
   
4. I'm voting for Undecided, even though I favor Clinton, because this election is a crock and I want to send a message to the state Democratic party.
   
5. I'm not voting because this election is a crock and I want to send a message to the state Democratic party.
   
6. I'm voting for Romney because my vote in the Democratic primary doesn't count. I'm picking Romney to get the weakest Republican candidate in November / to maximize the chance of the Democratic candidate winning the presidency. (I'd call this the tactical Democrat strategy.)
   
7. I'm voting for McCain because my vote in the Democratic primary doesn't count. I'm picking McCain because he's the least bad of the viable Republican candidates and, if the Democratic candidate loses in November, I'd like the most palatable Republican president for the next 4 years. (I'd call this the loyal American strategy.)

Likewise, I heard absolutely ZERO discussion of the possibility that "you should not vote Republican because there might be a revote in the Democratic party and then you couldn't participate in the revote."

Sure, you could argue that a truly smart voter would have thought through these contingencies, made a decision, and must now suffer the consequences. However, I certainly saw a lot of Democrats coming to different decisions, and I'd hesitate strongly before disenfranchising any of them. Note, most of the voting strategies might seem to favor proponents of one of the three Democrats, but there were folks drawn from all 3 camps for every strategy but #1 and #3.

So, returning to the original question, why vote in the Republican primary?

If you felt like the Democratic vote was a waste and if you had no idea there could be a revote, then there were two good reasons to vote Republican in the primary, even if you had every intention of voting for the Democratic candidate in November. The two strategies were at odds with each other, but both had merits. A reasonable percentage of the "loyal Democrats" (10%? I'm not sure if I actually read that somewhere or am confusing it with another factoid) chose to vote in the Democratic primary. I would think it likely that most were Obama or Edwards supporters, but we don't know that for sure.

The problem is that there is no way to figure out where these people would have voted given a full slate of choices. You can't distinguish them from true Republicans without giving those true Republicans the ability to make mischief in a Democratic primary.

Basically, there's no way to fix it now that isn't unfair to some fraction of the likely Democratic voters in November. So, saying that "Michigan voters will be upset if their preference isn't represented at the convention" is true. However, this does not lead to the conclusion we should either ratify the existing election as if it represented the real view of the voters or revote with participants in the Republican party included / excluded. In fact, any of the proposed solutions that purport to represent the will of the electorate will disenfranchise some fraction of the Democratic electorate. They are all unfair to someone. Not allowing the Michigan Democratic delegation to vote has the advantage of being fair (or equally unfair) to all candidates. All of the other solutions are unfair to some subset of the candidates, IMO.

I watched Gone Baby Gone this week, that was actually pretty good.

So: no KO, no MSNBC, no CNN, no ABC, CBS, or NBC.

I've also had to stop reading my so-called liberal mags. Newsweek has turned into a combo of Christian Monthly & ObamaWeek. So, I get the basic news from NPR and the WSJ's front page (not yet touched too much by Murdoch).