Tonight, on 104.5 Urbana Free Radio Brad Bugos, and Benjamin Phillips of Fat Robot Radio will be quests on “The Show”. Tune your ass in. 10:00pm. If you miss it, then you are lame, unless you can’t catch it where you are, in which case you are not lame, merely living in the wrong town. So move to Champaign/Urbana by tonight at 10:00pm. Better start packing.

That’s it everybody. It’s over. Congratulations are in order for Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. Don’t believe me? This is the next cover of Time Magazine:

Like that? I sure do.

Oh, and by the way, the small print says, “We’re pretty sure this time”. Damn right we are.

A new episode of Fat Robot Radio is up now over at fatrobotaradio.com. Exciting? You bet. Honestly, I think this last little run of shows has been our best yet. So don’t miss out. (Be warned though. There will be filthy talk, and if you are easily offended, maybe something else would be a better idea for you. I’m just saying.)

——This Urgent Biscuit Tip Is Brought To You By Brain Pan Online, In Association With The National Office of Edible Emergencies——

Never buy Biscuits in the tube again. Nobody needs to eat 12 biscuits in one sitting. Plus, they are super hard most of the time, and basically suck. From today on, settle for no less than frozen biscuits. You can make a few at a time, and they are about one hundred times tastier than those crappy tube biscuits. Just try it once, and see if I’m wrong.

——This Concludes This Urgent Biscuit Tip……The NOEE And Brain Pan Online Thank You For Your Attention—–

Ladies and Gentleman, Episode 2 of Steve Jiff’s Morning Shenanigans:

 

 Episode 2 - Steve Jiff Fights a Grave Injustice [6:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve been working nonstop on episode 2 of Steve Jiff’s Morning Shenanigans, so I will keep this brief. FRIDAY, the episode will premiere both here, and at stevejiff.com. And on May 9th, Brad and Ben will appear as guests on “The Show” on 104.5 Urbana Free Radio. That program will be rebroadcast on Urbana Public Television, the following Monday, at 10:00 PM. Busy times.

And if you would like a FREE Steve Jiff or Fat Robot Radio sticker, email me from my contact page for more information. They really are Free. So act NOW NOW NOW.

This Friday, the wait will finally be over. Episode 2 of Steve Jiff’s Morning Shenanigans: The Animated Series, will premiere on this website, stevejiff.com, and elsewhere on the web. Excited? I bet you are. So look here on Friday for brand new entertainment, brought to you by the people who so nobly gave the world Fat Robot Radio.

Steve Jiff’s Morning Shenanigans: Real. Rock. Radio.

Ok. One last thing.

We must realize, that if Hillary can actually steal this thing, and really does become president, we could be looking at eight more years of “Bill Clinton cheats on his wife” jokes. Oh sure. It sounds like fun now. But lets go out to 2012. I don’t think I can take a combined 20 years of stupid cock sucking jokes. I just don’t. I’ll crack.

STOP THE INNUENDO! VOTE OBAMA!

In the days since Hillary won the Pennsylvania Primary, she has been crawling all over Indiana talking about the Popular vote, and how important it is. Now that she has been mathematically eliminated from winning the race based on pledged delegates, the election of whom the entire race is designed to determine, it’s not surprising that she would want to cling to the only real-world-type numbers she could actually wrangle into her favor. If fact, she’s running around claiming to have already won the popular vote, if you include Florida and Michigan, and don’t give Obama any of the votes from Michigan. Aside from how absurd and comically footnoted that math is, there is another problem. The popular doesn’t mean anything. I’ll let Newsweek explain. There’s a lot here, but it explains it really well.

For starters, the Democratic rules clearly state that delegates, not votes, are decisive. But even if you grant that Team Clinton is only asking tiebreaking superdelegates to consider the popular vote when choosing a candidate–and not claiming that votes should replace delegates altogether–there’s still a pesky little problem to deal with: the popular vote is completely and utterly uncountable.

First, there’s Florida. Despite warnings from the Democratic National Committee, the Sunshine State scheduled its primary before Feb. 5–and true to its word, the party stripped the state of its delegates. That said, we’re not talking about delegates; we’re talking about votes. In Florida, where both Obama and Clinton were on the ballot, Clinton won by 294,772 (870,986 to 576,214). It’s an open question, of course, whether a primary in which both candidates refrained from campaigning should even count. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it should–which reduces Obama’s popular-vote advantage to 206,366. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help us much.

Next up is Florida’s fellow gun-jumper, Michigan, where Clinton racked up 328,309 votes. Obama’s total? Zero. That’s because his name wasn’t even listed on the ballot. On Jan. 19, Michiganders had two choices: Clinton or “uncommitted.” And while “uncommitted” earned about 45 percent of the vote, it’s impossible to determine what portion of that bloc backed Obama and what portion backed John Edwards, whose name was also absent. Ignoring the fact that Clinton herself said Michigan wouldn’t “count for anything,” this murkiness alone makes an overall popular-vote tally impractical: either you award all of the “uncommitted” votes to Obama, which would be grossly inaccurate; count Clinton’s votes and leave Obama at zero, which would undoubtedly disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Obama supporters; or don’t include Michigan at all, which would disenfranchise even more, both pro-Clinton and pro-Obama.

That said, the worst is yet to come. The final four states–Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington–all held caucuses. But unlike Florida and Michigan, none of them even kept track of how many people voted for each candidate. (This is standard operating procedure in some caucuses, where delegates are awarded proportionally in thousands of precincts.) Wonks can devise equations to estimate the popular vote all they want, but mixing precise vote totals from other states with caucus approximations–which are, by definition, inaccurate–is mixing apples and oranges. Besides, thousands of voters in Iowa entered the caucuses intending to support Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich, but were forced to jump to Obama, Edwards or Clinton once their preferred candidate didn’t reach the 15-percent viability threshold; in Nevada, the same thing happened to Edwards supporters. How can you possibly pretend to count people required to resort to their second choices?

The fact is, the Democratic Party has only one mechanism in place for deciding the nomination: delegates. The system is simply not equipped to produce an accurate tally of popular votes.

So, to sum up, Florida is shady, but countable, Michigan is wildly unfair, and the popular vote doesn’t even include three entire states won by Obama. Iowa, Washington, and Maine. And anyway, the popular vote has nothing to do with anything. If it did, those three states would have counted them.

What I find interesting is that in the same breath that Hilary uses to wax indignant about disenfranchising the poor Florida and Michigan voters, she actively campaigns to make irrelevant the votes in Iowa, Washington, and Maine. And what about the other caucus states where the popular vote is merely estimated? Should estimations be some kind of legitimate measure? I don’t think so. And on top of all of that, if she doesn’t make her preposterous popular vote argument effectively, she will simply say that the election was a wash, and that she should simply be coronated winner by the Super Delegates, basically disenfranchising ALL the votes, everywhere.

And I want to make one other observation. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. A powerful cabal in trouble, constantly redefining the definition of victory to suit the political reality of the day, repeatedly lowering the bar, over and over again, as the simple fact of failure becomes more and more apparent. Blindly stating the opposite of reality as if the truth were no more important than the content of an attack add. Changing or ignoring information that doesn’t suit them, while distorting and misinterpreting the information that does. This is Bush stuff. Plain and simple. I am tired of that, and I’m tired of this, and I don’t think I’m the only one, as the success of Barack Obama will clearly show.

So the bottom line argument for Hillary is this: Flordia and Michagan should count, caucus states don’t matter, and nothing is important unless Hillary says so. Nice. Just the president I want.

I guess Pennsylvania didn’t go that well for Obama. It was wierd to watch though. For six weeks all the media talked about in regards to expectations was that Hilliary was sure to win in the state, and that barring Obama’s death or the second coming of Christ, her campaign was doomed. Then, the INSTANT they called it for Clinton the coverage turned into how this was a disaster for Obama, and that Clinton was pulling together some amazing wave of support. It makes me wonder why all the must win game changing states are ones in which Hiliary has a known advantage, and are next to impossible for him to win. The same rule does not apparently apply to Obama, as will surely be the case regarding North Carolina, a state that favors Obama in a similar way that Pennsylvania favored Clinton. Somehow Obama’s victories are considered layups, while every state won by Clinton is an amazing last minute three point shot. I just don’t get it.

My only theory is that somehow, as a culture, we just can’t let Hillary go. An Obama victory in the Primary effectively ends Clinton dominance over the party. We, as a nation, have spent 15 years invested in the Clinton story, and the foreshadowing of a Hilliary Clinton presidency began back then. We know them. To many of us, they ARE the democratic party. It’s very hard for everyone to let the story end, without the long assumed Hilliary-Clinton-as-President climax. The story is too good. That is why everyone needs Obama to throw some late game knockout punch. It means nothing, really. Obama has this won by the numbers, but as far as the long time Clinton narrative is concerned, America needs closure.

The worst part for Obama is that this has gone on so long, that the voters have solidified to some degree behind which ever flavor of democrat they prefer. The old story, or the new. And it will be pretty hard for him to change the minds of people at this late stage in the game. He is ahead. More people support him, as both the polls and the reality of his delegate and popular vote standing clearly show. But with that ceiling, it will be hard for him to pull off the sort of crowd pleasing smackdown the democrats need to finally let the Clintons go. To show them, beyond the numbers, that this thing is over.

And Indiana is it. He can actually win Indiana. It’s the only one of these “game ending” states that doesn’t start off with Obama at some comically large disadvantage. So hopefully this will be it. The big cathartic moment when we can put this primary, and the Clintons, behind us.