The "Electoral College" argument, though, is interesting. On its face, it's silly. The Democratic Party has a set of rules in place for how it selects its nominee. Those rules don't at all resemble winner-take-all model mirrored on the Electoral College.

All the negatives naturally belong to Bad Monster Lady, who is "divisive" according to Obama's own BS selling point. (In case no one noticed, that's not an affirmative selling point for BO.)

Ergo (goes the reasoning) whatever BO's rival gains is deemed to have been stolen, and gets talked about as such by BO's supporters. It's infectious, especially to impressionable and addled media. (CNN: the most trusting name in news.)

And silly and wrong to the heretics to the Obama movement.

Why is this deja vu all over again? Because Repugs have been running this personality cult boondoggle for decades and some slick Dems have figured out a way to rig "our" own version of the same stupid, albeit forward moving, machine.

Everything else is way too murky.  There are like 12 different arguable ways to count the popular vote, and there's no logic in trying to cast my mythical superdelegate vote based on whoever ends up with 12 more popular votes than the other.  That metric is a poor tiebreaker.

I'm going with Door No. 2: it actually does make sense.

Of course there are unknowns, but the trends are there:

1.  she has been winning steadily since March 4th.

2.  she has won states she wasn't suppposed to win.

3.  she has won despite being outspent and out-advertised.

4.  she has won despite big name endorsements for her opponent.

5.  she has eroded her opponent's support in key demographics.

6.  she has won states the Dems must have in order to win in November.

7.  she is a known quantity who is not likely to be swamped in a tsunami of damaging information between now and November.

8.  there is growing anecdotal evidence that if her opponent is nominated, her supporters may vote for McCain, stay home, or not vote the presidential ticket.

I keep hearing that no matter who the nominee is, we will all fall into line like good little Democrats, and vote for him or her, but I think that's an argument that might be close to being on its last legs.  

intellectual exercises don't have real consequences. there's nothing inherently wrong with them, but real life isn't the time to be doing them. the military has massive war games during peacetime, not usually when they're actually in the middle of actual hostile action. they have micro exercises then, to train with the lessons learned during the current fray, and apply them in real-time.

sen. obama's campaign just doesn't seem to have that capacity for quick adaptation to a swiftly changing environment.

mr. joyner managed to contradict himself in two paragraphs. does he really get paid to write that? a straight popular vote determination is proportionality, by definition. the electoral college and delegates aren't.

And if Obama is that strong a candidate he should emerge only stronger from the nomination process because unlike McCain he would be campaiging in many states still which should help him later.

Also regarding tearing the party apart accusation, I believe by not allowing the process to play out fairly would be extremely damaging to the party and that is what will lead to tearing of the party rather than everyone not accepting Obama.

She also called Obama naive for suggesting he would talk with all world leaders.  If you don't talk with world leaders the only alternative is to bomb the ones you disagree with.

-Aretha Franklin, "Another Night"