Many people mistakenly believe that the Eastern Martial Arts like Karate, and Jiujitsu They are really not. Rather they are about the application, direction, and management of force. Whether it is physical, mental, or in some cases political.
One of the best and easiest to learn lessons of martial arts is that if you are being attacked, it is often for the best to not meet force with force. In fact what is best is if you can just move out of the way of the enemies attack, and let their excessive force cause them to over balance, leaving them vulnerable to your attack. What is even better is if they have put so much energy into attacking that they end up damaging themselves without you having to lift a finger.
Hi all. Welcome back to The One About....'s special weekend feature, The One About Book Club. For those of you who are new readers to The One About...., let me recap for you. On the weekends I write in depth about a book that I feel is of significance to Progressives, looking at one or more chapters per post. For the complete introduction to the project you can go here. My pick to inaugurate this project is The 48 Laws Of Power. So far I've offered an introduction and overview of the book, and written about Chapters(or in keeping with the tone of the book Laws) 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. So I bet you can guess what comes next.
Has anyone noticed that Chris Matthews has moved a bit off the center in the last year or so? He used to be reliably centrist in his yelling but at some point during the second term of the Torture Administration he developed a bit of a conscience. At least sometimes. Today he went off on Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) for using the phrase "Democrat Party." The Issa comments is at 4:43 and the Matthews upbraiding at about 5:05 in the video below:
If you can't play the video Matthews ignores Issa's point and instead points out his use of "Democrat" and asks "Why do we have to do this every night?" He also calls it "Mickey Mouse" and says "let's just call people what they call themselves."
The news that Obama and McCain are in a virtual dead heat is the cause of much consternation among my friends in the political blogosphere today, for good reason. Obama is the better candidate, he's running the better campaign, he's got more money by far--so why is he still struggling when he should be putting the boots to McCranky and be done with it?
Nate Silver from the LA Times has a decent explanation for why this is, but the core question remains: Why is McCain still exploiting his reputation as a moderate, when he's clearly anything but?
I found what I think is the answer in Malaysia, of all places, and that country's struggle between its political establishment and an oppositional force organized and propagated on the Internet.
Certainly popular vote holds merit. It is intended for the superdelegates. Remember in January when the Obama people said the supers should follow the will of the voters. Well it is time to stick to the word. We have to remember that Obama cannot win the nomination without the supers. So it's all fair game. Forcing the supers to pick Obama is undemocratic and will make this election cycle illegitimate.
As for counting the popular votes, we should just follow what the state decides. If we want to consider things like caucus, open primaries, closed primaries for the popular vote, then why not do the same for the pledge delegates where we take the primaries rather than the caucus results (for those states that held both). If we want to be fair, we have to be truly fair and not be fair to one candidate and unfair to another. This will not bring about unity as dedicated supporters of the that candidate will feel disfranchised and cheated. Remember that millions of people dedicated so much of their time and money investing on their candidates. The investment and time by the people is unprecedented and therefore very unique. Assuming that the party will come together once we get a nominee without resolving the problems is a fairy tale. Never once in our nation's history have we had a primary like this.
In this case, Hillary decided to give up on the caucus states and that's for her to lose. She made a strategic blunder and it's no one's fault but hers. This goes with Obama as well. Obama decided to team up with Edwards and Bill Richardson to pull their names out of Michigan. Out of 8 candidates, 4 pulled their names out. These 3 candidates did distribute fliers and such asking the voters to vote uncommitted. Dennis Kucinich even campaigned in Michigan. So it is their strategic blunder and therefore should not have gotten any popular vote. As painful as this might sound, we have to be fair. The RBC made an unprecedented precedence by allocating delegates to Obama even though he was not on the ballot and they awarded him more than he should have received. The RBC's job is to adjudicate instead of playing politics. They failed in their job and with this hundreds of thousands of Hillary supporters had felt the nomination stolen for her. Rules are rules. If the DNC decided to cherry pick rules, then we had become the entity which he pledge to get rid off and is no difference than the Republican party.
If Pollster.com deserves the 2006 award for the Best Polling Website of the year, the 2008 award has to go to Poblano's FiveThirtyEight.com. This is by far the most interesting website for us statistics and polling wonks.
Poblano, a frequent Daily Kos contributor, is predicting the state-by-state primary results for Clinton and Obama based only on demographics and regressions...Look ma! No opinion polls. Given the long primary season, this is giving us wonks an unparalleled in-depth look at who makes up the Democratic voting populace, and how they are voting in the primaries.
Today's 538 prediction: Obama wins North Carolina by 17 points, resulting in a district-by-district delegate count of 66-49 Obama over Clinton. This compares with Chris Bowers' 7 point Obama margin and 62-53 Delegate count based on polling averages. Five districts are close to delegate thresholds. Why does poblano think the pollsters are wrong? It's mostly about their inability to predict the African American primary turnout:
By the way -- I think I know what the pollsters are doing wrong too. They're calibrating black turnout to a proportion of the population, but not to a proportion of the Kerry vote. This is a significant mistake, because in some states, the vast majority of the available white voters will vote as Republicans -- meaning that black voters make up a larger share of what remains in the Democratic electorate. I noticed for instance that SurveyUSA underestimated black turnout in Republican-leaning South Carolina (55% against their estimate of 41%) but overestimated it in Democrat-leaning New York (16% against their estimate of 21%), which would be consistent with this sort of error.
538 also keeps a running tally of the General Election matchup predictions on the front page. This requires an explanation, because the state-to-state results are displayed as probabilities. So, Massachussetts at Obama 88% and Clinton 99% shows the likelihood of winning the state, not the voting percentage.
What else makes 538 so cool? Let me count the ways:
