Firefox just ate an hours worth of work. I used to love Firefox, now I have to change all my habits and save things constantly because of constant crashing and inconsistent restores. Anyway, I had a long post about ready to go about the state of the delegate race. Long story short, Obama is going to finish with over 51% of the pledged delegates in a near worst case scenario, but more likely will finish with over 52% of the pledged delegates. There is not much difference, therefore, whether he wins or loses Indiana, or whether or not he gets crushed in Appalachia. The media narrative will of course differ, but not The Math.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Really, eh? Firefox generally works for me…I only have problems in that after some time, embedded video such as YouTube doesn’t play for some reason or another. I tried Safari for a while, but it hogs more memory and feels too ‘Mac’-ish for my tastes.
As for the delegate race, I think he needs to win in Indiana. Combine that with the requisite blowout in North Carolina, and I think that is when the dripping will become a stampede and force her out.
he doesn’t need to win Indiana. The only contests he needs to win are North Carolina and Oregon. And it will be a nice touch to win Montana and South Dakota as a little cherry on top to end this thing.
If he loses any of those states then Clinton will have at least a case to make. Indiana could end the race early, but he doesn’t need it.
He doesn’t need to, but for the sake of my sanity, along with the Democratic Party’s collective sanity, he should damn well try his best so that it forces the Clintons to face the music.
Oh, yeah, I agree. It would be far better for him to deliver something we could call a knockout blow than to leave the decision to the judges.
Good lord, man!!!
You have seen prizefights that have been won by one fighter at MUCH greater levels than 51%-49% handed over to the hometowner, have you not?
There it is.
He could get jobbed at 60%!!!
And he will get jobbed if he does not capture what is left of the hearts and minds of the Silent Majority, and SOON.
He’s got two weeks.
I’m betting he can’t do it while simultaeously hoping that he can.
Watch.
AG
It would be so much better if he could wallop her.
</end fantasy>
But don’t hold your breath. Indiana will be a close one. It may border Illinois but it’s more like southern Illinois than like northeastern Illinois (which is like Wisconsin and Iowa).
Southern Illinois has a lot in common with Kentucky. And Ohio.
It does have a lot of colleges. But I think it’s likely that many of those students already voted in their home states since no one thought Indiana was going to matter.
to see the Habs play the Flyers on Monday.
I bought 3 “all you can eat tickets” for game 3 in Philly. I think I’ll stick to the beer and the kids can eat as many tickets as they want BUT only after the game.
And I am not sure I will be quite as vocal cheering on Les Boys as I was in Boston. They don’t call it murderdelphia/killerdelphia for nothing…
Any suggestions for things that are “must do” with the 4 little Connecticut Kids while I am down there?
How old are the kids?
1, 4, 9, 15… So, in as far as age appropriate kind of can’t miss there… lol
The Franklin Institute and IMAX theater are cool (the short film overview of Philadelphia before the real movie is the best)
The Philly Zoo is fun this time of year
If they’re older, the Mutter Museum at the Philadelphia College of Physicians is cool
If they’re younger, the Please Touch Museum is across the street from the Franklin Institute
Capogiro has the best gelato (yes, I’m hungry, why do you ask?)
There’s always the Liberty Bell/Independence Hall/Constitution Center
Outside of town, a walk along the Wissahickon creek on Forbidden Drive is always cool (it’s one of my all time favorite places)
I can come up with more if I know how old they are and what they like to do.
1, 4, 9, 15 + 35 and 42 if you count the big kids 🙂
The Please Touch Museum across from Franklin Institute… Don’t they have a Star Wars exhibit there right now? That would mean we could split the kids up and they could all have fun.
That would be a great idea, imo. And there’s a great little cheesecake bakery called Darlings right there too.
and thanks!
Sorry that you lost your piece. I’ve never been a big fan of Firefox. I’ve found that it loads pages much less quickly than IE, much as I detest that great satan of computing, Microshaft.
There’s an extension called FasterFox that’s supposed to help with that.
Plus on my smart phone I turn off pictures. They make the pages load much faster at the expense of not being able to see icons and pooties — which, for the 90 minutes I’m on the bus, I can live without.
For your phone? I tried using it years ago, but it always crashed, so I’m using the stupid IE that came with it. What has made my internet experience on my phone so wonderful lately is Yahoo!Mobile. That’s a seriously awesome interface, it’s ridiculously fast and it renders just about every webpage to a mobile page. This site is so much easier to read now.
I don’t see how you can say how many delegates will be pledged to who before the elections have even been held. Why not wait for people to vote?
well Alice, I wish I had my post to demonstrate the point to you.
I ran two sets of numbers through Slate’s delegate calculator.
In one set, I gave my best estimates on what will happen in the upcoming states based on the polls, but I erred on the side of caution, giving Clinton generous margins.
So, I had her winning in West Virginia and Kentucky with over 60% of the vote, and winning in Puerto Rico with over 55% of the vote. I gave Obama a 10% victory in North Carolina, and a narrower victory in Oregon. I gave Obama a 52-48 win in Indiana, a 20 point margin in Montana and a ten-point margin in South Dakota.
Then I flipped Indiana for Clinton and gave Clinton five additional percentage points in every contest (except Indiana). The difference was a mere 18 delegates.
So, in once case Obama wound up with 1,699 delegates and in the other 1,681. The 50% mark is 1,627.
With or without MI and FL?
without.
With Florida and Michigan the 50% mark is 1783.
Obama ‘earned’ 67 delegates out of Florida, so that would put him at (by my best guestimate) at 1766. If he received 17 of the 55 uncommitted Michigan delegates, he’d be over the top. I think he was plenty of room to spare for the 18 lost delegates in the worst case scenario.
Especially because his real lead is bigger because of add-ons, PLEO’s, and the Pelosi bunch that will go to the winner of the popular vote.
I sent my laptop to its room to think about it when FireFox crashed on me this weekend and it’s still a mess. Have been stuck on PC. If I remember right, I had gotten a FireFox update Friday night and I had problems starting Sat am. The laptop I run McAfee & the PC I run Norton so I’m a little curious whether McAfee missed something that Norton didn’t.
I was thinking something was FUBAR with the latest Firefox update. I keep going over to Big Orange and getting a redirect that just sends me to a default page that says, “It works!” That’s what you get when you first install Apache. That shouldn’t be what you get when you hit a big political blog.
Except now I’m getting that same message with IE on the same machine. Something is very wrong.
We have 4 computers networked here at home. The laptops could access the network, but not the internet. Up until a few moments ago, we had a clashing IP address issue. I’m getting redirected on the new FF update and pages are not loading fully at all.
Then there’s the general weirdness on my blog. My plugin stat counter shows 1 visit for today. Sitemeter is showing 15. My internal stat counter shows over 100 and none of them register my visits. But there seems to be FF issues with my blog. People running FF are emailing me telling me that they can’t comment. That has been going on for two days now. It’s just strange.
I just downloaded Safari. It’s totally weird.
Opera is downright disturbing. Safari is a space sucker. I don’t care what the Mac people say, Safari is not fun. I guess it works better for them because it was made for them. My husband put Opera on all our computers, but it’s so counterintuitive and I’m always accidentally shutting windows that I’m back to FF.
speaking of media narratives, glenn greenwald takes “the pundits” to task in a recent article at the national interest:
recommended reading.
Damn, there’s a YouTube video in there. Starts with fortune tellers in cheesy clothes wearing too much makeup predicting the future. Cut to our news pundits doing the same, contrasted with what actually happened.
the media SHOULD have no credibility. People need to learn to go find facts for themselves. If I could give the world one gift it would be that. The rest is easily fixable.
well, BT’s resident screenwriter, Omir, is in the building
Oooh…I second that! Fantastic idea!
Maybe you were just meant to make a simple declaratory point with no explanation. It turned out well. Brief. Easy to understand.
Except, what’s ‘near’ worst case scenario? Is the worst case scenario that he simply implodes?
I can’t believe you haven’t always been drafting in something else and saving as you go.
Yeah, he could always implode.
As for drafting, I never had a problem with my browser closing until recently.
I hate to be pedantic, but a browser crashing shouldn’t make you lose your post. Gmail periodically saves drafts of messages that are being composed, and blog software should really do the same.
Then, there is always composing a long post in an editor, saving periodically.
I agree with you about the delegate race. There are only two possible explanations for why Hillary is staying in the race: (1) in case Obama’s candidacy implodes for some unexpected reason before she drops out; (2) to damage Obama so severely that McCain will win, setting herself up for 2012.
At home, I can’t run Gmail in FireFox or FF locks up. Gmail lately seems to require IE. Unless I switch to “Older Version”
Since I run gmail in IE I stopped locking up.
Gmail works fine for me in Firefox under Linux. I must admit that Firefox does crash occasionally though, whether or not I’m using Gmail.
As a web designer, I have to run the web developers extension in FF – it’s probably my single most important tool. However the lazy f*cks at Google have known for months that their latest version of Gmail is incompatible with it. So what is their answer? You have to disable the extension to use Gmail. Cause, you know the web developers’ extension has a big budget and can easily adapt, whereas Google is understaffed and running out of money.
Here endeth the rant.
(Yes, I use IE for gmail too – I don’t mind too much, since I have to have IE open anyways for constant browser testing.)
in the gmail header, next to settings you should have a selection for the “older version”…l use that without any of the probs that l have w/ the new v…and l mostly use safari, since it’s native to the mac.
just a suggestion.
I’m on a PC and I much prefer FF to Safari. I need to run FF – it has all the extension I need to do my work. Also, the older version of gmail sucks – my current 2-browser system is fine… I just wish Google would have higher standards.
Thanks, though!
Opera.
Been using it since v 3.14 which fit entirely on one 1.44MB floppy back in the day.
It’s stable and feature packed. It’s worth a look.