Voting

COME WATCH ME change my clothes. On MTV's dime. The newest vlog titled News From Nezua [1] is freshly-shorn and waiting to entertain you with nifty editing and news of Oregon. True, a volatile mix, but Creosote is my middle name, chula. Either that or Pine Cone...it's hard to make out the writing sometimes.

This piece was originally covering about six stories, but I ditched the rest of the footage in the editing process as I suddenly realized it would be a fifteen minute spot, if not.

Program provided here. See you at the proscenium arch, baby.

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus' General, and OpEdNews.

1. John McCain is officially the presidential nominee of the Republican party.

2. Texas is deadlocked in the primary vote : Obama 50%, Clinton 48%

3. People have been waiting for hours to get their caucus vote counted

4. Many precincts in Texas didn't have enough ballots

10:23pm EST
5. Barack Obama got in Texas 44% of the white vote, 89% of the black vote and about 30% of the Latino vote.

10:27pm EST
6. Obama now leads only 1% with 17% of the precincts counted in Texas.

7. Erica O Grady is also reporting angry caucus goers who can't get in to vote.

10:30pm EST
8.David All just tweeted from ABCNews where he will be talking about the voting results.

9. Ohio is a dead heat as well. Clinton has won in a lot of rural areas but results are pouring in for Obama from the heavily populated urban areas.

10:47pm EST
10. Clinton now is leading in Texas by less than 1,00 votes. No word from the caucus.

ABC News and Washington Post published a poll today saying that most Democrats want Hillary Clinton to stay in the race if she wins any of today's state primaries, even by a small margin.

More mind-boggling is their alleged support for a Hillary Clinton Vice-Presidency. After the campaign she has run, I am absolutely speechless about that prospect.

In this sampling of US Americans, 50% of Democrats want Barack Obama to win the nomination over Clinton's 43%.

And who are these Americans? They're only white or Black ---and "teh blakz" are adjusted to represent the minority they're supposed to be, but of course.

"Other" squeaks in at just 1%.

The PDF of the poll is here.

Barack Obama has hit his 11th straight win thanks to primary for Democrats Abroad, a primary for over 20,000 Democrats living around the globe.

More than 20,000 U.S. citizens living abroad voted in the primary, which ran from Feb. 5 to Feb. 12. Obama won about 65 percent of the vote, according to the results released Thursday.

Voters living in 164 countries cast votes online, while expatriates voted in person in more than 30 countries, at hotels in Australia and Costa Rica, at a pub in Ireland and at a Starbucks in Thailand. The results took about a week to tabulate as local committees around the globe gathered ballots.

"This really gives Americans an opportunity to participate," said Christine Schon Marques, the international chair of Democrats Abroad.

There is no comparable primary among Republicans, though the GOP has several contests this weekend in U.S. territories, including party caucuses in Puerto Rico Sunday.

Of course, like everything else with the democratic Party, the system for calculating the final tally of delegates is screwed up, so we won't know how many pledged delegates will end up behind each candidate :

It takes someone to win by 10 to have a landslide. The New York Times is projecting his win by .. ahem ...

This is not a landslide. As we would say in Puerto Rico :
Barack limpió el piso con Clinton.

Screenshot of NY Times Wisconsin tallies

There's some interesting poll info from CBS via Marc Ambinder :

Info from our trusty pals at CBS News: this electorate is very white; only four in ten have a "college degree." They're "less affluent" than Dems in other states. The percentage of late deciders is declining: only 27% made up their minds within the last seven days.

-- Issue number one is, of course, the economy, followed by health care... adding the economy and health care brings you to nearly 70% of the electorate.
-- Change trumps experience, 52 to 24.
-- Very few first time voters -- only 17%.
-- 27% of the electorate were independent
-- Clinton was seen as the most unfair attacker;
-- Obama (55%) was seen as the candidate most like to improve relations with the res tof the world.

Elections - Ethics and Voting

Type of Event: Training
Hosted By: J. Dalton Institute
Event Dates: 6/23/2008 - 6/24/2008
Event Location: Las Vegas, NV
Contact: J. Dalton Institute
Email: jdalton98@aol.com
Contact Phone:1-888-886-0664
Contact Fax:920-338-8683
Website: http://www.jdaltoninstitute.com

Course Description:DAY ONE: Seminar Overview, Professional Networking Exercise, Ethics and Professional Responsibility - Core Values Role Play, Roles and Responsibilities of Board Members and Staff, Role of the Tribal Council, Fundamental Fairness in Tribal Elections, How to Prepare SOP's for Election Staff and Boards. DAY TWO: Electronic Voting vs Manual Voting, Ballots, Evaluations, Presentation of Certificates, Closing.

How to Register: http://www.jdaltoninstitute.com/registration.html

I AM SURPRISED, in all honesty, that this is not linked in more places. In my opinion, people who believe in the Democratic process (and I'm not even sure how much I do, anymore, especially given events like this which seem to happen over and over) would be incensed that the Registrar in charge of Los Angeles County would acknowledge that 94,000 votes, thats NINETY-FOUR THOUSAND VOTES will not be counted. Votes that were cast. By humans! Who thought their will would factor into the Democratic process! Who the hell is this person to assert that their votes are meaningless?

Perhaps you remember the recent post I did on this voting trouble in Califas. Here's the follow-up.

A BLOG POST exclusive to MTV (as it must be, contractually) can be read by clicking the image above. No video this week. But a specially-crafted Non-Super Wednesday message instead.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus' General, and OpEdNews.

This post was not supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to give a quick and dirty, "you go girl" to Alisa Valdés Rodriguez for her smackdown of Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer. Why? They've written one of the most poorly researched, poorly fact checked, backed by barely just one expert in Caribbean and Latin American history, anthropology or public policy race-baiting piece of drivel about how Latinos will not vote for Obama because they can't relate to his blackness.

In Obama and the Latino Vote, Alisa goes to bat :

The sloppy, inaccurate story goes on for 32 agonizing paragraphs, using the terms “black” and “Latino” as though they were mutually exclusive – which they are not. Historians estimate that 95 percent of the African slave trade to the Americas took place in Latin America.

To this day, the vast majority of people in the African diaspora live south of the U.S. border, in Latin American countries from Brazil to Colombia to Cuba and, yes, even Mexico. The song "La Bamba," in fact, was brought to the Veracruz region of Mexico by Africans enslaved to the Spanish. The song likely has roots in the Bembe (Bantu) culture from what is now the Congo. This is only a stone's throw, geographically, from the Kenya of Obama's father's birth.

How quickly we forget in this country. How brutally we refuse to learn.

The New York Times not only ignores completely the African history of Latin America by positioning "blacks" against "Latinos" as if none of us were both. To do so is enormously irresponsible because it dissolves from public consciousness the fact that African slavery was a crime committed all across this hemisphere, by colonial Europeans who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The story also erroneously portrays Latinos as a race unto themselves - an error egregious enough to be stated in our own census bureau's definition of Hispanic as a person "of any race". Including "black".

I was supposed to expand on Alisa by going deeper into the work I have already covered here, most recently with On Why I Hate Hispanic Heritage Month and Blanquito vs. Latino or the Unbearable Lightness of Being Alberto Gonzales. I was supposed to smackdown Nagourney for his complete lack of any understanding of Latin American history, culture and politics.

And then something happened.

A book arrived in the mail, sent by Public Affairs, one of the publishers that Culture Kitchen and Daily Gotham has dealt with before. Based on what I had done with them in the past, they wanted me to reveiw the book. At the time I was excessively busy and had little intention of getting around to it. But, just to be fair, and since I didn't have another book going at that moment, I picked it up for my subway ride to work. Well, I have to admit that it was inevitable that it would grab me. So here I am reviewing it.

The book is The Political Brain, by Drew Westen. It is no surprise that it grabbed me since it combines two of my obsessions: politics (particularly liberal politics) with science (psychology and neurosciences). More to the point, it takes the concept of "framing" and explains why framing is so necessary, and takes it one step further. The Political Mind is a must read for each and every Democratic campaign out there and it explains in no uncertain terms why Democrats, despite having a voter registration advantage, being better at governing, having better ideas, and, in general, better sharing the values of the average American, lose elections to Republicans whose ideas are atrocious and whose values consist of blind greed, corruption and cronyism.

Sometimes the best person for the job is not the best candidate. In fact very often the best person for the job is NOT the winning candidate. This is a flaw in any democratic system that is probably unavoidable. People win because they are considered appealing by voters, not because they are qualified. If all it took to win was the best resume and skills, Gore would have won by a landslide and Bill Richardson would be a shoe in.