cos

Returns are coming in on election night; the race has been close and polls show either candidate could win. Now, with 83% of precincts reporting, candidate A is leading 53% to 47% over B. It's an insurmountable lead, and the race is called for candidate A.


That's where the Democratic primaries are: Of the 3253 pledged delegates available, about 83% have already been voted on, and Obama is leading Clinton by about 53% to 47%. We can call the race now.

Or, look at it another way: There are 566 pledged delegates left from states that haven't voted yet. To catch up with Obama, Clinton needs to win about 65% of those, which means she needs to average about 65% of the vote in the remaining states. She doesn't win by that margin pretty much anywhere. So far, Clinton has received more than 60% of the vote in exactly one state: Arkansas. Her second-best result was 58% in Rhode Island. Her other home state, New York, gave her 57%.

If every state from now on goes as well for Clinton as her home state of New York did, then she will get about 322 of the remaining pledged delegates, and Obama will get about 244, for a net gain of about 78... leaving Obama still ahead by about 80-90 pledged delegates! Remember, that's what will happen if Clinton gets a New York level win in every state. Not gonna happen. She might do that well in Pennsylvania, but the next-biggest state to come is North Carolina. We also have states like Oregon and Indiana coming.

One way to look at it is this: For every state where Clinton gets less than 65% of the vote from now on, she's losing ground! Imagine you're a runner 100 feet from the finish line, and there's someone ahead of you who's only 50 feet from the line. If, in the next second, you run 30 feet while the leader only runs 25, now you're 70 feet from the finish and the leader is 25 feet from it. Sure, you just ran a little faster, but your chances of overtaking the leader before the finish have gotten even smaller.

In other words, even if Clinton wins Pennsylvania 57-43, that actually puts her further away from catching up to Obama, not closer. She'll do considerably worse than that in most remaining states.

It's over: Obama will go to the convention with more pledged delegates, and will be the Democratic nominee for President.

( What about the Superdelegates? )

( What about Michigan and Florida? )

( Is there any way Clinton can win? )

( Should Clinton drop out? )

( Why you should still vote, if your state primary is coming up. )

In other words, if you want a Democratic president, you should vote for Obama, regardless of which candidate you prefer.

States that still have primaries coming up:
April 22: Pennsylvania - 158 delegates
May 3: Guam - 4 delegates
May 6: Indiana - 72 delegates
May 6: North Carolina - 115 delegates
May 13: West Virginia - 28 delegates
May 20: Kentucky - 51 delegates
May 20: Oregon - 52 delegates
June 1: Puerto Rico - 55 delegates
June 3: Montana - 16 delegates
June 3: South Dakota - 15 delegates

[ table of delegate counts by state ]

Update: I also posted this on Daily Kos and on MyDD. If you have accounts in either place, please recommend?

mzrowan's boy cat, who I have lived with for nearly two years, died unexpectedly on Thursday afternoon.

The afternoon before, when he visited my room, he seemed mosly normal, and he ate some food and drank some water. That might've been the last time he ate anything. The following morning he was really sick and by the time the vet arrived he was just sitting on the closet floor shivering a little, unable to walk.

Almost as soon as the vet saw him, he said "he's in really bad shape". He weighed him (under 8 pounds, down from around 12), smelled his breath, took a blood sample, and diagnosed him with kidney failure. Until he said "this is a dying cat" I thought it would be okay :/

I went to my room to Google directions to Angell Memorial animal hospital, and by the time I got back to the kitchen, he was dead.

He's been known by many names over his lifetime, among them: You, That Other One, Testicules, Oily, Rosencrantz, Prince, black fluffball, and the Princeling ("You" and "That Other One" due to the fact that he looked so much like his sister that Rowan took a while to learn to tell them apart). Not very smart, but fortunately he left the brain cell for his sister (they shared it). His favorite pastimes were bellyrubs, sitting on paper, licking plastic bags, and liberating pasta. Now that I think of it, I haven't seen him licking plastic bags for a long time, maybe that was a warning sign. Cats are so subtle about their ailments.

Yesterday at zalice's parents, I was called on to make a quick bread, and remembered the time magickalpony made biscuits with mushed yams and how tasty they were. She wasn't online, so I improvised, and these came out even better!

I started with this recipe off the net, modified a bit for ingredients at hand and the addition of yams:

1 cup bleached white flour
1 cup whole flour
1 1/4 T baking powder
1 T sugar
some salt (about a teaspoon?)

4 T butter
3/4 cup buttermilk
2/5 of a large yam (could be 2/3 of a small yam)

1. Peel yam, cut into medium blocks about an inch thick. Put in a pot of water and boil, let it simmer...

2. Mix flours, sugar, salt, baking powder in a bowl.

3. Cut 4T butter from stick into smaller portions (about 10) and scatter over the flour mixture. Mix around a little bit, cut up the butter pieces some more.

4. ... get the yam pieces out of the water, let them steam dry for a moment, drop into the bowl. Mix and mash - the hot yam will soften the butter. Mix in the buttermilk.

5. Spread the gooey mixture on a very floured surface, pat out to about 1/2 inch thick, and cut/separate off roundish pieces about 1 index finger in diameter onto buttered/greased cookie sheet.

6. Bake 11 minutes, take out and let cool on cookie sheet for 1-2 minutes.

That's what I did, though when I try this again I may modify it. The amount of yam I put in made the final mixture very gooey and sticky, so I increased the amount of flower and baking powder from the original recipe, but next time I might try with a bit less buttermilk or yam or a bit more flour. Still, despite not looking or feeling like dough, it baked into wonderful biscuits, and the one I took home with me and at just now was still soft and moist.

Edit: As in the original recipe, the oven should be 450 F. Also, I tried a less gooey version with satyrgrl, with whole milk instead of buttermilk, a smaller piece of yam, and slightly more flour. It was pretty good, but the original version was better; I'm not sure if milk vs. buttermilk, or doughy vs. gooey, made the bigger difference.

The ACLU writes,

"Under pressure from the White House, the US Senate recently passed a terrible bill that rubber-stamped the President's warrantless spying on innocent Americans. Worse yet, it lets telecoms who went along with the illegal program off the hook. Now the Bush fear factory has turned its attention to the House, which is under increasing pressure to cave in to these scare tactics and pass the Senate bill."
...
We need you to call your Representative today via the Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121.
If you have time, please also call Speaker Pelosi (202-225-0100) and Majority Leader Hoyer (202-225-4131).
Tell them to:
• Stand strong against fear-mongering and the terrible Senate bill
• Reject immunity for phone companies
• Reject warrantless spying

Telecom companies are defending themselves in court against charges that they broke the law when they collaborated with the government's illegal domestic spying. If Congress excuses the phone companies, the court cases will abruptly end and we'll probably never know the details of Bush's illegal spying.

Here's what has happened since I posted about this a month ago:

• All of Russ Feingold's amendments were defeated in the Senate.


• Chris Dodd realized the Senate was hopeless, and that the House was the best hope, so he dropped his filibuster and the "Protect America Act" extension passed the Senate with amnesty for telecom companies in the bill.


• House Democratic leaders tried to pass a PAA extension without amnesty for telecoms, but couldn't get enough support, so they let the PAA expire without passing any extension. Bush said he'd veto the bill if it didn't have amnesy for telecom companies.


• The Protect America Act expired, and Republicans started running scary TV ads full of lies (we don't really need the PAA, and good riddance to it).


• Now, the House is considering caving in and passing a PAA extension with amnesty for telecom companies, just like the Senate already did.

If you don't want this to happen, please call your Representative ASAP?

P.S. Please repost this.
P.P.S. If this post appears twice, it's because post-by-email is having trouble. I'll delete the duplicates; this is the real post.

Texas is one of four states that still has a law banning the sale of sex toys.* Or was. This week the 5th Circuit US Court of Appeals struck it down.

"This case assesses the constitutionality of a Texas statute making it a crime to promote or sell sexual devices. The district court upheld the statute's constitutionality [...] We reverse the judgment and hold that the statute has provisions that violate the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."

* Actually, the law is much worse than that. It bans promotion or possession with intent to promote sex toys, and then defines: "Promote" means to manufacture, issue, sell, give, provide, lend, mail, deliver, transfer, transmit, publish, distribute, circulate, disseminate, present, exhibit, or advertise, or to offer or agree to do the same.

They rely heavily on two of the most important sex rights cases the Supreme Court has decided:

• Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which legalized consensual private sex, including sodomy and BDSM and gay sex and group sex - anything consenting adults choose to do without intending for it to be public (IOW, a peeping tom doesn't make it "not private").


• Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which legalized the pill, and the sale & use of contraceptives in general.

They used Lawrence to evaluate the consitutional right in question, and the state's supposed interest in suppressing it, and concluded that "the asserted governmental interests for the law do not meet the applicable constitutional standard announced in Lawrence v. Texas."

"Because of Lawrence, the issue before us is whether the Texas statute impermissibly burdens the individual's substantive due process right to engage in private intimate conduct of his or her choosing."

Several times in the ruling, they use the phrase "an insufficient justification for the statute after Lawrence" when referring to each of Texas' justifications for the law, implying that before Lawrence, courts might have given weight to those supposed justifications, but that's all settled now and those justifications (like "morality") no longer fly in suppressing a basic right.

They used Griswold to establish that a ban on public commercial transactions can violate individuals' private rights, and that those who wish to engage in those commercial transactions do have standing to go to court on behalf of their potential customers.

In the landmark 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, which invalidated a ban on the use of contraceptives, the Court recognized that the plaintiff pharmacists "have standing to raise the constitutional rights of the married people with whom they had a professional relationship."

... Griswold, where the Court held that restricting commercial transactions unconstitutionally burdened the exercise of individual rights.

So, Because of Griswold, "the statute must be scrutinized for impermissible burdens on the constitutional rights of those who wish to use sexual devices" - rather than merely the constitutional rights of those who wish to sell them.

Both Griswold and Lawrence were decided based on the Constitutional right to "privacy", a right which is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution but which the Supreme Court has held is implied. It's based on the 9th amendment, which states that just because a right isn't specifically mentioned should never be held to mean that the right does not exist or is not protected, and the 14th Amendment's "due process" clause, which extends most of the Bill of Rights to state governments. We hear a lot about the right to privacy as being associated with the right to end a pregnancy, but it's not just abortion, it's also about the right to have sex. Without a Constitutional right to privacy, we wouldn't have the legal right to:

• Buy, sell, or use condoms or the pill


• Buy, sell, or use vibrators or dildos


• Have oral sex

... and state laws could criminalize any of those things if they chose to.

Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia were the only remaining states with laws against selling sex toys. Several other states had such laws but they were struck down by their own state courts. Since Mississippi is also in the 5th Circuit, this decision striking down Texas' probably also invalidates the Mississippi law, leaving just Alabama and Virginia.

Thanks to ratatosk for pointing out this decision.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is election day in 24 states, including: Massachusetts, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Kansas, Arkansas, and other states where few of my readers live :)

I'm not gonna have a chance today to write a real post about why I endorse Obama, so here are some links to explain or illustrate why I support Obama.

• xkcd's endorsement of Obama
  
• Obama's speech on religion and politics to a religious audience. Long but excellent, watch the whole thing!
  
• Because it works! - Obama's conflict-resolution approach
  
• Former president of Chicago's NOW chapter on why she switched to Obama (short video)
  
• Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters (Andrew Sullivan)
  
• Endorsements from the Boston Globe and from Blue Mass Group
  
• The Choice - why progressives should choose Obama over Clinton
  
• Edit: Lawrence Lessig (EFF board member, founder of Creative Commons, Stanford Law professor) endorses Obama in this 20min video
  

Geek, Tech, Open Government

• Obama plans to have a Tech czar to "ensure government officials hold open meetings, broadcast live webcasts of those meetings, and use blogging software, wikis and open comments to communicate policies with Americans".
  
• Obama supports Net Neutrality - and understands why.
  
• xkcd's endorsement of Obama
  

War

• Obama's early opposition to the Iraq war
  
• Obama's 2002 speech on Iraq
  
• Get Your War On artist David Rees endorses Obama for his opposition to cluster bombs in civilian areas.
  

Rule of Law

• Obama's views on presidential power & the Constitution
  
• Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees endorse Obama en masse
  
• Judge him by his laws - "Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused. Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped."
  

One year ago today, at about this time, Boston was in a panic:

For those of you not familiar with Aqua Teen Hunger Force , the Mooninites are a race of video-game aliens who attempt, albeit inefectually, to wreak mayhem on the world. (They are completely awesome, though, because Schooly D does their theme song.) The joke is that the Mooninites always fail to do any real harm.

Except, that is, in Boston.

In the wake of the attack of the Mooninites, I wrote What Does Random Panic Protect Us From?

We're not facing a serious threat.
We have a process, which I call "Random Panic", that doesn't protect us from it anyway.
The protection is actually a bigger problem than the supposed threat.

... please read the whole post. Please pass it on.

A New Hampshire friend asked me what I thought of all of the candidates, tonight. With the NH primary tomorrow, I wrote this almost stream-of-consciousness ramble about all of the ones she listed, plus a few she didn't list that I know were running. Just in case you want to see it, or pass it along to others, I'm also posting it here. It's not my best writing, or as well-argued or fleshed out as I could do, but it's late and the NH primary is tomorrow. This is more or less my opinion of each candidate.
( Read more... )

All over my LJ friends page in the past couple of days, and on reddit and other places on the net, was this AFP article:

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

Since then, this story has been picked up in about this form by:

• Some foreign press
• Questionable domestic media like UPI, Capitol Hill Blue, and Fox News
• Not by the likes of CNN or the New York Times

In this case, the "respectable" media got it right: it's an interesting but minor story, and AFP's presentation is glaringly wrong. "The Lakota Sioux" have done no such thing.

These stories cite Russell Means as the source of the declaration, but follow AFP's lead in calling him a tribal "leader" and implying he represents the Lakota Sioux, without giving the actual context. To be sure, Russell Means is an activist "leader" with a great claim to fame & notoriety: he led the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.

However, the Sioux tribes have elected leaders too, not just notoriously famous activists. Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is part of the Oglala Sioux tribe, and Russell Means has in fact repeatedly run for president of the Oglala - but has never actually been elected. Although I'm not sure what mechanism there is for the entire Lakota Sioux to make a decision like this, or who gets to represent them and speak on their behalf, I'm quite sure that a press release by someone who keeps losing elections for the presidency of his own tribe (one of several that make up the Lakota Sioux) isn't it.

Stories in the local & native press reported this story with ( more context and a better perspective on what it means... )

---

P.S. In early 2006, Oglala President Cecelia Fire Thunder got some blog publicity and national news when South Dakota passed a law banning all abortions and she suggested the Oglala would open an abortion clinic on tribal land. Since then, Fire Thunder has been impeached over money issues, and South Dakota repealed its abortion ban in a vote later that year.

Back in March 2006, when this story first came up, I did some research and posted about it on Daily Kos. I exchanged emails with Tim Giago, who broke the story on Indianz.com after Fire Thunder made the remark privately to him and then told him he could publish it. Giago founded the first American Indian newspaper in the country, The Lakota Times, in 1981, and earlier this year became the first American Indian added to the SD Newspaper Hall of Fame. In 2004, he briefly ran for US Senate against Tom Daschle, then withdrew.

It just so happens that President Fire Thunder's opponent in the 2004 election was Russell Means; and that Tim Giago, a friend of Fire Thunder, is a strong opponent of Means (and AIM) in tribal politics. So, several of the comments I got on that dailykos post about Sioux tribal politics talked about Russell Means. If you're interested, I recommend reading through them.

P.P.S. I emailed Tim Giago to ask his take on this new incident, and will update this post if he writes back.

My stepmother's 10th book became available earlier this month, and this is the one I've been waiting for most eagerly ever since she mentioned the idea. She wishes should could've titled it "Photoshop: CSI" but that would've been too complicated legally, so instead it ended up being Adobe Photoshop Forensics: Sleuths, Truths, and Fauxtography by Cynthia Baron.

It's a fun, readable survey of image manipulation and fakery. How it's done, how to spot it, what Photoshop tools are used... full of examples and famous cases from history, the law, the news. Retouching models to make them prettier, cars to make insurance companies think they're damaged, or Hoodia export certificiates to fool web customers. Examples show you not only what software people use to manipulate these images and how, but what sorts of things you can look for to figure out that it happened.

P.S. Let me know if you buy a copy? And write a review on Amazon when you finish reading it!

I hung out with dreams_of_wings and aatish2's new kitten, de la sprog, last weekend when they were in Chicago. He was quite the people-starved kitty! As soon as you enter the house, he starts mewing from behind his door over and over until you enter the room. Then he's perfectly happy to climb the human and play with the human and *purr*purr*purr* for hours... as soon as you leave he room and close the door with him behind it, the mewing starts.

At home in my room is a kitten. When he's not sleeping, he's skittering across the room, doing battle with shoes, errant pieces of paper, or heck, even the floor. He notices me with startlement, and even purrs if I pet him, but pretty soon there's a blanket that desperately needs to be pounced on. I'm only interesting for extended periods if, say, I have a shoe that needs untying (something he's glad to do for me if I let him).

---

You may recall that we found three kittens and moved them into my room. uberjay and jojotbird adopted his siblings, so now I have just one. Shortly before they took them, I took some more photos and videos of them living in my room. Watch as they discover paper on the floor, or the cat carrier door.

• Vern Ehlers (R-MI), first elected in 1993
  Ph.D. in nuclear physics from UC Berkeley; former chair of the Physics Department at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI.


• Rush Holt (D-NJ), first elected in 1998
  Ph.D in physics from NYU; assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab 1989-1998.


• Nancy Boyda (D-KS), first elected in 2006
  Chemistry/Education double major in college, then worked as analytical chemist and field inspector for the EPA.

For much of the past decade, I believe Holt and Ehlers were the only scientists in Congress; they jokingly referred to themselves as "the bipartisan physics caucus". Boyda's election made it three. And soon, there may be a fourth: Bill Foster is running for Dennis Hastert's seat in Illinois. His science background includes a Ph.D. from Harvard, and 20 years at Fermi National Laboratory (aka "Fermilab"), and he just got endorsed by 19 Nobel laureates.

If he gets elected, the number of scientists in Congress will have doubled in just a couple of years :)
Interestingly, the 4 of them would be 75% Democrats, and 75% physicists; also, the one woman is the only non-physicist. And we still wouldn't have a biologist. (Anyone wanna draft fyfer for Congress?)

Edit: Thanks to my posting this on Blue Mass Group I discovered that there's one more scientist in Congress who I totally missed, despite a) having paid attention to who the scientists in Congress were for years, and b) having met this Congressman and chatted with him in person. And even a thread on dailykos about scientists in Congress didn't catch it. Here's one more:

• John Olver (MA-01), first elected in 1991
  Ph.D. in chemistry from MIT; professor of chemistry at several universities, including MIT and UMass-Amherst.

... still no biologists :)

The kittens and their young mom are temporarily living in my room. It's not a good long term home for them because it's just one room, and we can't let them into the rest of the house or they'd freak out mzrowan's cats, who have tenure here.

Right now they're skittering about the room, rolling over each other, having a lot of fun but miraculously causing very limited chaos.

Want them? One, two, or all four?