Nelson, Blanchard and Levin made Wexler and Bonior look tendentious and amateurish in the morning. And Brazile's "cheating" remark is likely to make the YouTube rounds very rapidly, unfortunately for Donna.

Tom P - Just replied to you and the person who said my 'ad' (sig) was obnoxious in the last thread.

However, I just stopped by over at dkos, and ran away about as fast as I could.  I realize that some of Clinton's supporters take it way too far as well, but jeez.  Can they at least act like that not everything that comes from the Clinton's campaign's mouth is automatically the dumbest argument ever conceived?

Right now their argument seems to be that reinstating Michigan and Florida is like California demanding that they suddenly get 5000 delegates and that they should all count.  How that makes sense, I'm not sure, but I bet the people there are eating it up.

Wexler now spinning to Tweety that since Obama had 3 large rallies, he would win the state. Riiiiiiight.

When I got back, Chuck Todd was on talking about how Hillary could get out of the race with class. Like Al Gore.

That comparison was scary, bcz, yes, Gore left with class, but we were left with the Supreme 5's pick and war, deficits, higher debt, two wars, and threats of economic meltdown.

I've been wandering around mostly lurking for a while on blogs with various slants, but I hardly even stop in at the big orange place at this point. I can handle bias, and I certainly don't have to agree with everything I read, but I can't handle intellectual dishonesty.

AND, here's the best part...normal people don't get such a long lunch hour.

I hope Michigan and Florida take it to the convention.  Levin is right, they're getting screwed.  The RBC members have shown themselves to be corrupt, morons.  Not a surprise, they are politicians.  But given the complete lack of intellectual honesty, MI and FL shouldn't stand for this.  I don't care if Clinton and Obama hold hands and declare this thing resolved, they aren't the voters of MI & FL.  

Is there a smackdown going on somewhere in the building? Did somebody have too many lunch cocktails and throw up on Howard Dean?

But I think seems too much to hope that they will back down from the rules violation finding they made in August.  They are not going to admit that mistake. The removal of the 100% penalty is probably what will happen.

It was however a huge mistake, and cost the Dems a lot of approval here in FL.  I'm not sure it can be repaired with the half way solution.

It's a lot of work to set these live-blogs up and so I want it to last as long as possible.

What I would do if I ran the universe is seat FL as is, and seat MI at a 50% penalty in delegates but with the results of the election that they had, whatever its flaws. If that isn't feasible, I'd honestly not seat MI at all, personally. You can't just use guesses about how votes that don't exist might have gone if things had be different -- that's a really dangerous precedent IMO. And the "rights of the non-voters" argument makes absolutely zero sense to me, never has in this context. Nothing barred them from voting, not even in the abstract, and there's no way to know how many people might have voted or for whom if the DNC hadn't made its earlier decision.

As for what they will do, I have no idea. I think some of the committee very clearly does get the core issues at play here, but I also think that the desire for the party to just get this over with and unify is strong -- somewhere in the middle of the candidates' positions would be more unifying, but IMO incorrect in terms of honoring the fundamental importance of votes that are cast.

So why did they bother having this meeting at all?  What happened to the public debate and vote?

If they come out and just announce a resolution, I will be really upset with the DNC.  This isn't transparency.  This is cowardice.  Come out and debate in public.  Show your positions.  Vote in the sunlight so everyone can see how this process played out and who stood for what.

I hope it is all being video taped, and accurate and complete transcripts will be available.

Heard this on C-SPAN.

If you try to alter or not reflect the votes of more than 2 million ballot-casters, you can expect that those who represent them are not likely to want to give up on their constituents.

ITA what BTD said about here. She is so divisive.
The cheating comment was unbelievable.

She thinks she can get away w. everything. And she probably will.

By any rational reckoning, one can't seriously claim that Obama is further to the left in terms of overall policy than Clinton. The policy distinctions are pretty small in general, and the one case where I think the difference is real and important, namely health care access, it's Hillary who's further to the left.

And yet we see Obama supporters taking up cudgels against Hillary over the health care policy difference -- effectively arguing the position to the right.

So the division between the two sides is based on something different.

My own view is that it really is a class based argument, not a policy based one. That is why the disagreement has become so heated. In fact, for many people, politics is a form of class identification -- I'm not like those racist hicks in WV! I'm not like those decadent snots in Chicago and Berkeley and Cambridge! Policies too are, for most people, just markers for the underlying class distinctions in our society. (How many people are themselves directly affected by a reversal of Roe v Wade, for example? In terms of their own lives, it very rarely has an effect.)

And in our meritocracy, class is defined most fundamentally not in terms of money per se, but in terms of the type of education one has (HS or college; state college or elite college) and the prestige of one's job. Even the youth vs mature/elderly adult distinction follows the glamorous vs. unglamorous lines in our society, and the differing amounts of prestige that attaches to them.

These are the real lines along which the Hillary/Obama clash has been driven. And it has everything to do with the heat of the battle, because it follows the real fault lines in our society, and not what we imagine to be the important ones, namely policy differences.