He can’t.

Joe Biden has been described by friendly media

sources with the words:

Lunch bucket, blue collar, Catholic, plain spoken, now disciplined, Iraq war supporter, critic of Obama inexperience, lots of legislative (35 years), judiciary and foreigh policy committee (Chairman) and foreign travel experience, meeting with foreign leaders. He is also an Amtrak commuter, born in Pennsylvania.

Gloria Berger of CNN from Denver, CO, says he is a great VP pick, but that has not always made a difference (clever and full of gravitas, Lloyd Bensen “I knew Jack Kennedy and Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy”) but Biden probably was one of the best picks Obama could have made to minimize Hillary hurt.

Biden is somewhat charismatic, plain spoken, (but capable of “going off the reservation” a common liberal expression ironically”)and while older than she is he also does not seem to be a political “threat” to her in any way beyond the age issue. Speaking of age, in eight years, he will be 73, older than John McCain is.

All in all a great pick for Obama. It will be hard if not impossible for McCain to help his ticket as much as Biden helps the Obama campaign, even though he once said he would be proud himself to run with McCain. McCain considers Biden a friend and has called to congratulate him, but of course the political campaigns are already out with adds that showcase Biden’s own words, devaluing an Obama candidacy. It will run it’s course and not suppress the positive attributes of the selection.

Number One: He is likely to win.

Who does not want to be with a winner? Despite the obvious Clinton-Gore tensions, even Gore would not directly and publicly endorse him before the numbers were clear to all and all primaries were over.

Number Two: He will usher in more change than any president has for a long time.

That change will not be as complete as many want nor as much as others fear. On balance, his occupancy has a better than even chance to be positive in many ways.

Number Three: He is willing to flip flop.

Any President who is not willing to consider changes based on new information is dangerous. Knowing when to change is the art of the deal on which opposing parties will never agree on.

Number Four: He would bring a gun to the fight.

And maybe he will be adept in sensitive negotiations with a better outcomes. The take no prisoners approach of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld has not worked. They really wish they had taken no prisoners.

Number Five: He will at least temporarily bring a Barack PR Bounce to the US.

That may or may not have any lasting value, but turning down the heat at least for a while will be welcome by most Americans. But he will have to deal with difficult situations, as did Bush.

Of today’s 19 to 8 vote by the Democratic Party Rules Committee to only give the Michigan Delegates one half votes, he says many of those 19 votes were from Clinton supporters on the committee and that is the signal that it is over.

Additionally, there are only three days to get past the final primaries on June 3 and that the call by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to all the SuperDelegates to place their markers down right after that and indicate who they plan to vote for at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August, does seem to seal Hillary’s long shot continuing campaign because she “is the best candidate”.

He allows for no possibility that there remains a Hail Mary chance for Hillary as president. He did not opine at the same time about the Vice Presidential nomination.

Robert Wexler told Wolf blitzer that an Obama/Clinton ticket would be a very exciting ticket but that would be up to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Toobin also said that Howard Dean is to be congratulated for unifying the party and that the Rules Committee Co Chairmen, Jame Roosevelt and Alexa Herman were to be congratulated for pulling together a very unruly committee which contained a majority of Clinton supporters.

The Democratic Party’s Rules Committee is still out for lunch break at 4:30PM. No wonder we can no longer afford our government.

Could it be they are making back room deals? I sure hope so.

Chris Matthews, before musing that it is a rather late lunch, is publicly wondering, more hoping, if Hillary is going to make a Soft Concession before the final primaries on June 3, as well as the unique one if Puerto Rico on June 1, as graciously as Nixon once did.

Al Gore once said it was not about Howard Dean. Howard Dean today says this is not about “our candidates” it is about our country, about restoring our reputation”. That seems to be about the failed policies of George Bush the Democratic candidates hope to pin on John McCain, but does it also presage that he thinks Obama or Hillary is better capable of doing that? Hint, if so, it is not Hillary he believes in.

Michigan Senator Carl Levin says the fixed privilege Iowa and New Hampshire have enjoyed for too long should be changed and which he and others have tried to get changed in the past unsuccessfully. He repeatedly mentioned “with all the power that gives them.” Not exactly power to the people, rather power to some people.

He recounted the history of the Michigan delegation attempts to deal with the Perpetual Privilege those two states have enjoyed, despite a national committee ruling that would have put someone between Iowa and New Hampshire. He says that New Hampshire ignored the party committee, refusing to participate in spreading the power by scheduled their primary for the first position. He charges that they were rewarded by “getting a waiver” from the national committee’s own rules.

His and other advocates arguments, were often times persuasive on both sides. I felt like a ping pong ball. All of this demonstrated something most of us give lip service to but understand so little.

The wisdom of our founding fathers.

Before I tell you what part of their wisdom I believe is relevant to this circus, let me first say, the founding fathers were fallible human beings doing their work in a completely different time and under completely different circumstances. While some may think that “fallible human beings” is the definition of any given group of white men, as a conflicted person, I can not yet accept that!

Regardless, I won’t attempt to discuss in detail or even mention everything that can be fairly debated about what they created. However, my grand conclusion is that the world should be grateful for what they created as a way for human beings to govern themselves regardless of it’s flaws. It’s wisdom trumps it’s flaws. One of my recurring rhetorical questions is will our current actions be the same, will our wisdom trump our flaws?

For now, I will only mention that some of the Founding Fathers were slave holders and they denied the vote to both slaves and women partially by silence on the issue. It seems that when they voted for the words “all men are created equal” they specifically meant or at least tolerated and in some cases lived the meaning that the “men” were not mankind, rather it meant white men. In that day, as a colony of England, it was a big step to allow white men who did not own land or have a noteworthy lineage, to vote. Pretty big step at that time.

Advocating the elimination the state level delegate system (yeah, that get’s my vote!) and allowing the direct vote in the presidential primaries by the Democratic Party, Rick Jacobs in the Huffington Post wrote the following:

The framers of the constitution did not trust the public to select the chief executive. They also needed a series of compromises to convince the small states to sign the Constitution. The Electoral College addressed both concerns handily. In today’s world, the prospect of introducing a mechanism by which to buffer the people’s will would be laughable. 2008 should be the last year that any democratic institution insulates itself from the people. While it takes a constitutional amendment to end the Electoral College, it takes only a vote of the Democratic Party delegates to end indirect, manipulated elections. If leaders can’t trust their own members and voters, how can the people trust our leaders? See the entire article here.

Some of us know that the founding fathers did create a pure democracy, but a republic and what that means. Fewer of us know that it is believed by historians that the founding fathers did not think the creation of political parties to be a good thing. For sure, they did think that an indirect system rather than direct voter would be best for President and for the laws we pass.

Neither major party, now that we unfortunately have them, should continue its impossibly flawed electoral system for it’s candidates. It simply rearranges the acknowledged back room practices that enabled a very few to determined the candidate selection in past years and which the current system is designed to fix.

They failed in their purpose even though so much of the process is public, because it is still fraught with unintended consequences. Additionally, given the persuasive skill of our lawyers, the emotion of the issues, and the richness and complexity of our language, all of us would be better off if the members of the private clubs called political parties let their members directly select their candidates.
However, the wisdom of indirect elections at the national level should continue as it exists today. In this environment, no changes should be made to how we elect the President from among the various parties nominees. No changes should be made in this environment to how our House of Representatives or our Senators are elected, who then pass bills by rules they create, another example of how a republic, representative, non pure democratic form of government conducts business.

If there weren’t more important issues facing our country, I might say we should appoint a commission to review the strengths and weaknesses of our current system, for the sole purpose of educating the public. Then maybe someday, decades in the future, that debate can begin.

Not today. We should forget about rearranging any of the chairs in this environment of partisan conflicts so obvious in a failed Democratic Party nomination process to say nothing of the inability of the major parties to be collegial in tehir opposition and find a way to eliminate the acrimony and permanent posturing for an election.

My strong view, is that the most important decision facing us is NOT whether Clinton, Obama or McCain is our president. We can do well as a nation regardless of which becomes President, despite differences that seem to be so pivotal.

What this country needs is a little dose of unity between the parties, regardless of who is president, even a little positive nationalism where in we take a sober non political look at our national interests. We need all of our politicians to stop being so arrogant and to understand our changing place in the world. It is important to understand that we do not site at the near unreachable top of the pyramid in terms of power to protect ourselves anymore.

The world has changed and it is very noteworthy that during this rise of power in other nations, these nations are clearly going to look out for their national interests, and most importantly that their national interest will be determined as interpreted by only a few entrenched leaders already at the top. Putin will never leave. The nominal only communist leaders in China will be unopposed for some time, absent violent revolution. The incredibly rich leaders in the Middle East Countries will bow down to the state religion only because they control the public emotion and if required, the vote in most countries.

All the while we piddle with ineffective Private Party Primary Politics which can legally sell the nomination to the highest bidder under our laws as interpreted by the courts fi they want. Given the money in politics that is almost, not quite, what we already do.

The continuing jolting news coverage in the US media of the human toll and the seemingly uniqueness destruction of the earthquake in China which has created lakes, as well as exposed shoddy construction, and showcased the government response (informed by Katrina?) and the perspective of our newest blogger from China, The Tao, has caused me to think. Well it’s about time some many say.

I thought about the phrase “the only superpower”, which has always made me cringe for a lot of reasons. It refers, of course to the US as the world’s lone remaining superpower, after the fall of the Sovier Union, before the now obvious economic (and military, and techonoligical and space?) rise of China begun 30 years ago with a capitulation to capitalism., indeed the rise of all of extended Asia including Russia and the Middle East.

How fleeting that fact (only superpower) might be viewed to have been in the eyes of history, however flawed as always, which importantly is not that of any of us alive today. Yes, we probably had/have more nuclear weapons than any other power, more oil/energy consumption, more of this and more of that. But we, in my opinion, unlike world oil, have peaked. I like to think that does not mean we have to fall in any important real terms, whatever that is, but that the rest of the world is rising.

Because if that is true, I think the US can take some credit for the rise of the rest of the world. Despite our many flaws including the current seemingly ham handed results of some of Bush’s policies, 1) we have resisted the massive true and continuing colonization of the world that other powers and governments have (and would have tried to exploit, differently than we tried), 2) we have encouraged the move to capitalism, which encourages other countries directly and indirectly, to compete with private companies in the US and throughout the world, and 3) we have encouraged democratization in some manner, not just in our image.

The challenges of China are significant, as it moves from 5000 years of poor government in my opinion, to one where human rights and human opportunity are taking center stage. I note from the writing of The Tao, that there is support for China’s continuing suppression and control of the media.

The thinking is that if there were US style freedom of the press inside of China as well (it still exists in the US despite charges to the contrary), more than one revolution would break out in that vast and historically diverse country. So much would come to light, accurate and inaccurate, that even millennium old conflicts will be exposed and given the harsh light of day that the US government and it’s candidates for office are exposed to everyday. That would make it impossible for the government to govern. The government is nominally Communist, but in reality is is simply an entrenched authoritarian regime trying to hold on to power while it gives power to the people through capitalism without democracy, so that human rights and human opportunity, can increase the quality of life that all previous government failed to achieve.

I applaud the cold eyed pragmatism this leadership in China embarked upon decades ago, for the benefit of billions of people alive now and in the future, as well as for themselves in their leadership positions. That pragmatism continues today in it’s national interest. Some think national interest is inextricably tied to the charge of fascism, but I do not, although extreme nationalism if it emerges, could deserve even worse and more precise labels.

China is not politically correct in US terms. It would shock most American sensibilities of human rights (think one child policy). For the world’s benefit, their most important challenge is to release power gradually enough so as not to move into the next revolution, in the style embodied in Marxism and Mao, which called for continuous revolution, even violent, approving of the killing of innocents (similar to but importantly different to “collateral damage”) in the wrongful belief that each revolution would result in a better government. Absolutely wrong because it just transfers power into the hands of a different corrupt group, think Castro and yes, the beloved Che, Hugo Chavez and many others. No it does not include the hapless Bush.

The challenge to the US is to continue to support China’s rise (and the rest of the world) while finding way to be appropriately nationalistic, looking our for our legitimate national interests without entering into disastrous conflicts, economic, political or militarily. It is important for the extreme political divide in the US to get healed, because given all the givens, the US is in danger of serving up our national interest to a now more powerful “rest of the world”.

Who thinks we cannot go from superpower protected status to extreme vulnerability to modern day versions of colonialism, extreme nationalism, real fascism, through terrorism or outright warfare from aggressive state powers, and continuing non state terrorism, in your kids lifetime. 9/11 could look tame compared to a worse case scenario. We need to relearn how to act in the world, in this really new world order (not the kind trumpeted by conspiratorialists).

Where will the leadership come from to create a good outcome for the world, including the US?

To indicate that Hillary Clinton made an inappropriate political statement to South Dakota journalists when trying to point out that the Democratic nomination has frequently not been wrapped up until June, is to play, well, common politically intended, hurtful politically correct silliness. At best.

Today, his was intended.

Today, hers was innocent.

Some may remember “The Stepford Wives” an organized male brainwashing of females in the second half of the last century, some may have seen it in reruns or rented on a DVD. More likely, many today may have seen it on YouTube.object> I liken the unacceptable premise of “The Stepford Wives” to be exponentially true in the FLDS situation today.

To allow such brainwashing of children by the FLDS (in the Stepford Wives, the abused were all mature and very successful women) who are the most vulnerable in any society, for the sexual and power gratification of any man or group of men, so as to enslave children from birth, is beyond the pale. Those in the FLDS abuse religion for their earthly desires as Muslim extremist do to justify killing themselves and everyone else when the powerful men in charge say to. Only the powerful or rich in that religion practice organized or institutional polygamy of indoctrinated women. Simple polygamy is not illegal in many countries, but it is illegal in the US and rape is a separate illegal activity.

Such blatant and illegal abuse must not be tolerated in the US. The antics of Hitler had to be defeated. In the case of the Allies and in the current complex case Texas authorities are faced with, those charged with defeating these scourges, have to use imperfect but necessary power available to them as best they know how. Such power can never be used in a way without unwanted consequences. We can all pray for pacifism, but we must have realistic expectations in the face of such unacceptable situations and not blame the fixer for the sins of the guilty when perfection is not a choice.

It is likely that among those children who do not somehow go back to a slave plantation, some will become prostitutes, some will commit suicide, some will recreate their early learning in all sorts of ways you probably do not want for your daughter or niece or next door neighbor or anyone. Those awful outcomes also face many of those who live in all segments of our society, to some degree, the most minimal of which is still terrible.

Despite likely undesirable consequences, this kind of organized and especially this so well known abuse must be stopped and the authorities have to use the tools available to them as best they can. They can not be expected to undo decades of abuse, as legions of well intended psychological counseling, addiction interventionist know as they face their limits with frustrations on a daily basis. That fact does not mean they, or us as society should put their/our heads in the sand because of our obvious frequent failures when we endeavor to teach people how to lead nondestructive lives.

In an interview today with Tim Russert, alleged new foe of the Democrats, Howard “Dean conceded that there is no set criteria laid out for the superdelegates on how they should vote. “They have to vote with their conscience,” he said. “My personal view is that they should vote for the person who can best beat John McCain.””

Earlier in the interview he said he wants the Super delegates to commit by the end of June because if they go into the convention in Denver divided, they will come out divided. Further he said he has never seen the Super delegates go against the will of the voting majority. He was not clear how Michigan and Florida votes figure into that calculation, but said one way or another they will somehow be seated. That’s clear.

I wonder who he believes can most handily beat John McCain? He did not clarify that and of course it would be an egregious move if he did but it seemed he was making it clear that the Super delegates can meet their original mandate, that of preventing the majority from making “mistakes” as the Democratic leadership believed has happened in several past primaries that yielded Muskie, Carter and Dukakis.

I agree with Jeffry Tubin, legal analyst for MSNBC who said last week that if the Democrats can not take the White House in 2008 they should change their party name to the Whigs.

On Charlier Rose, when asked, Howard Fineman talked about the conventional wisdom that a 6%, margin in Pennsylvania, which he is a part of creating in his Cable TV roles behind the big desks, is the tipping point for a win or a lose for Hillary against the Politician Formerly known as Barry.

He said Gov Rendell and Vernon Jordan may be among those who personally will tell Hillary it is time to call it a done deal, but that more importantly it will be the funders and their bundlers who will make it clear that the race is over. He further said Hillary is already broke and will not want to spend the next few years at fundraisers to pay off accumulating debts and even if she wins by more than 10% in Penn, that convincing win will be undone by future primaries, the numbers and the proportional system works against her and for so many reasons time is too short and she is unlikely to win the nomination.

While referring to current Clinton loyalist Harold Ickes, who carried Ted Kennedy’s water at a previous long past Democratic Convention in a last ditch effort to dislodge Jimmy Carter as the incumbent nominee, in the race he lost to Ronald Reagan, Fineman indicated that if that occurred in Denver in Aug 08 at the Democratic National Convention, a lot of damage will be done and by inference would increase John McCain’s less than likely chance to beat either Democrat in November.

So when will the money guys send the message?

And if they do, will Hillary et al be willing and try to find a way to nontheless joust with the politician formerly known as Barry in Denver this August?

Fidel Castro, accustomed to hypocritizing his own single candidate elections, chose not to continue in his dictatorial role, but did appoint his broker without anyone able to oppose his actions, is an ostensible democratic voting system, but actually a one party system that prevent anyone from really changing leadership. Forces of nature but not of democracy were at work in this change, for democracy has always masqueraded in Cuba but only with heavy make up. Democracy was in no way behind this change of leadership. Hopefully forces of democracy will find a way to grow and bloom in the new regime.

Musharaff in Pakistan seems to have been moved aside

Super delegates constitute super hypocrisy.

But the Supreme Court has upheld any political parties right to choose their candidate however they want.

IT DOES NOT NEED TO EVEN RESEMBLE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPALS.

So the Republicans have one set of rules for the selection process and the Democrats have another. And the “Party” bosses are indeed the bosses. The processes are fraught with historical baggage including a lot of ways to try to keep the “voter” from making a mistake.

This link bares this in a way I am sure very few really understand, especially those who think their vote counts as much as any other. Bill Clinton has two votes, one counts for next to nothing like any individual vote in a pure democracy with a large population of voters. But the other, additional vote counts as 1 of 800 appointed voters of the just over 2000 required votes to get the Democratic Nomination. Together these 800 or so appointed voters are about 40% of the total required voters. The individual voters like you and I, altogether only count for about 60% of the votes.