Global Health Nexus

What were you doing last February 29th?

I may not have been personally involved in the February 29th, 2004 coup de tat that ousted the then hugely popular, democratically elected (overwhelmingly, 70%) President of Haiti - Jean-Bertrand Aristide - but I know that my government certainly was, alongside the governments of The United States and France.

Its that little bit of early new millennial regime change that nobody likes to talk about.

But we here at GHN couldn't let this anniversary pass without at least some cursory collection of a little relevant documentation.

So here then is the definitive NYT account of the events of that day , as well as Aristide's personal, official contention that he was indeed forced out.

Naomi Klein on Aristide in exile.

Z-Net on The Coup, as well as Z-Net Haiti Watch

Haiti: The Fall of The House of Aristide by Peter Daily from the March 13, 2003 NYR.

An archive of the 2004 events from the Cooperative Research History Commons

And what the hell, a Happy Leap Year to Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, Louis Jodel Chamblain and Guy Phillipe.

We hope they're all sleeping well.

The Rich and The Cool

I will admit that though I became surprisingly moved listening to David Brooks retell this story from his NYT column on tonights News Hour with Jim Lehrer about his first ever meeting with William F. Buckley:

"When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described his glamorous lifestyle. Since I was young and a smart-aleck, I wrote a parody of it for the school paper.

“Buckley spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs,” I wrote in my faux-biography. “By the time he had learned to talk, he had finished three volumes: ‘The World Before Buckley,’ which traced the history of the world prior to his conception; ‘The Seeds of Utopia,’ which outlined his effect on world events during the nine months of his gestation; and ‘The Glorious Dawn,’ which described the profound ramifications of his birth on the social order.”

The piece went on in this way. I noted that his ability to turn water into wine added to his popularity at prep school. I described his college memoirs: “God and Me at Yale,” “God and Me at Home” and “God and Me at the Movies.” I recounted that after college he had founded two magazines, one called The National Buckley and the other called The Buckley Review, which merged to form The Buckley Buckley.

I wrote that his hobbies included extended bouts of name-dropping and going into rooms to make everyone else feel inferior.

Buckley came to the University of Chicago, delivered a lecture and said: “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”

That was the big break of my professional life. A few years later, I went to National Review and joined the hundreds of others who have been Buckley protégés.".

I was still grateful to see that The Times in its official obit still saw fit to include a few sweet memories from the early days of National Review:

"In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as a voice for “the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order,” with a $100,000 gift from his father and $290,000 from outside donors. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”

It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying that Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote.".

Buckley was the original pop star of the American New Right. The intellectual godfather of all this media savvy think tank conservatism that has come to dominate so much of American media, politics and political life and thought these days, and as such there is no denying that he is and was a seminal figure. But one couldn't help but be curious about Buckley in his golden years as he watched this child he had so charismatically nurtured since the mid 1950's lose it's way following the collapse of The Soviet Union and balloon into its present form - this severely damaged, lost, defensive and bloated incoherence that has contributed so much towards pushing The United States over the cliff and into the meat-grinder that is contemporary Iraq, a nine trillion dollar debt, historically low approval ratings for the current Republican President as well as as a prison population that has now topped more than one in every hundred Americans for the first time ever.

As The Colbert Report hilariously illustrated last night - the arc of early Firing Line to present day Bill O'Reilly.

Or certainly perfectly captured in this anecdote from Ship of Fools - Johann Hari's classic account of the 2007 official National Review Cruise:

"A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley – two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party – begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking – "I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I'm going to have some ex-friends on the right, too," he rants –and Buckley says to the chair, " Just take the mike, there's no other way." He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who travelled through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims: "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded the National Review in 1955 – when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction – and he has always been sceptical of appeals to "the people," preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a world view that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning." The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward". His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them for interviews. Buckley is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review's 50th birthday, President Bush described today's American conservatives as "Bill's children". I ask him if he feels like a parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly, and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, "The answer is no. Because what animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That's pretty well gone."

FURTHERMORE:

Classic Buckley vs. Chomsky on "American Terror", Post War Greece and Viet Nam from Firing Line 1969:

Part 2

Part 3

Bill Buckley, Rebel with a Cause by Ximena Oritz

It Didn't Work by William F. Buckley Jr.

February blah blah blogging

The last two weeks have seen no posts at this particular site as I have been fighting the winter, searching for a new apartment but most importantly have been deeply immersed in another writing project. I apologize for this lack of attention and though blogging may be sporadic over the next two weeks to come I will try to do better.

Yours sincerely,

The Editors.

The Imperial Endurance of John McCain

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we alongside the mujahedeen bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All praise is due to Allah.

"So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah is willing and nothing is too great for Allah."

Osama Bin Laden, on the eve of the 2004 election

But why listen to that guy? He's only supposedly Public Enemy Number One.

I plan to write more about McCain and the Military and particularly "the Surge" in the future, but for now you may want to take together these two bits of digital goodness and see how it digests:

First there is this column - The Rise of the Imperial Class - by uncompromising, anti-imperial conservative Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com:

Just last week, on Feb. 8, 18 "defense"-related contracts were announced totaling $326,664,244. That makes 58 publicly-reported defense contracts for the week, totaling $1,584,635,220. Last month, there were 223 publicly-reported defense contracts, totaling $19,625,989,716. While the civilian economy is shrinking, the military sector is expanding – and, if either of the eventual major party candidates have their way, the military expenditures will balloon. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are pledged to an even bigger U.S. military. It's good for business, if your business is war or war-related, and it's good for votes – especially the votes, active support, and political contributions of the growing group of Americans whose livelihoods, and claim to some sort of social status, depend on the continuation of our foreign policy of perpetual war.

And then there is this video which I found today via Matthew Yglesius:

The joke of which will only truly make sense if you have seen this wildly popular will.i.am video supporting Barack Obama.

That didn't take long.

Oh Amy

Now I don't recall ever giving a shit about The Grammys and this year was certainly destined to be no different until I noticed a story about the great Amy Winehouse on the old TV last night while watching some CNN at my buddy's house after the Raptors game.

As you probably know by now the divine Ms. Winehouse - who is up for six nominations this year including Best New Artist and Album of the Year - was scheduled to perform on the Grammys broadcast tomorrow night in Los Angeles but unfortunately her application for an entry visa had been denied by The American Embassy in London. Well it turns out that this decision had been reversed by somebody and it had once again become possible for Amy Winehouse to perform in Los Angeles. But Amy - perhaps more than a little justifiably pissed that her application had been denied in the first place - decided to stick with her original decision and perform via sattelite from London.

Good on her, we say.

If they are going to treat you like that than they can have you on your terms Amy. Baby. Stay in your hometown and let them watch you on the big screen. This is shaping up to be an absolutely delicious rock and roll drama perfectly suited to and for an artist of Amy Winehouse's stature. Diva - for sure. In the best definition of the word. The girl just can't help it. She is just one of those decadent, dark and dangerous, immensely talented figures of which the world of rock and roll has been so sorely lacking of late; with a voice far beyond her years and a singing style that can bring to your knees.

Whether or not she will perform her break out hit Rehab - I have no idea. And whether not such a choice would be just too obvious, or perfectly, brilliantly triumphant, so befitting the deep irony of the occasion - I really have no idea.

I'm sure she'll do the right thing. Or better yet, maybe not.

Its been a tough year for Amy after her beloved husband Blake Fielder-Civil was sent to jail for alleged witness tampering in his upcoming assault case; and after she did in fact have to go to rehab after a video surfaced online of her purportedly inhaling smoke from what looked to be a crack pipe. And thus you might think she would be a strange choice for a blog called Global Health Nexus, but we the editorial staff beg to disagree. Because we, like the Times of London itself, just want to see Amy get well and prosper. We only want to see her live on and create more of her signature beautiful, luscious and dark songs.

We think she's good for us and wish her only good health.

And so we wish her all the best tomorrow and into the future. We love the fact that by staying in England she basically told the Grammys and the American government to go fuck themselves.

And we proudly welcome her this week as GHN's Weekly Musical Guest:

UPDATE:

Okay. Perhaps I was a little off the mark with the "go fuck themselves" thing, but you know, it felt good. My cultural commentary may be on par with my political punditry, but I persevere.

FURTHER UPDATE:

It appears that Amy cleaned up winning five awards, as if that was ever in doubt. I'm sure our endorsement pushed her over the top. I had the show on in the background last night and her performance was easily the most exciting, only interesting thing on that dreary broadcast.

Some day the 60's will end.

He comes to set them free

Like a lot people, probably most people, when I initially heard about the impending Shaquille O'Neal for Shawn Marion trade on Wednesday I was deeply skeptical. I have always loved Shawn Marion's game and have a lot of respect for his athletic ability, originality and defensive prowess. Its a rare player indeed who can guard all five positions. And yeah his shot is really weird but it usually goes in. But as the day wore on and I became involved in some intense discussions with some of my colleagues over this matter, and I began to read about Marion's unhappiness at being the 12th highest player in the league while still being on one of the most consistently competitive, incredibly exciting teams in the league while still getting to play with Steve Nash; and especially as I began to read about all the doubt (71% of Americans surveyed thought it was a "bad idea" apparently) and often outright animosity that existed out there for this deal then well, my opinions began to change. So that by the time the thing was actually made - I was all for it. So we here at GHN are now giving this deal our whole hearted endorsement. So stop the presses!

Yes, a lot waits to be seen, and everything of course depends on the big Aristotle's health. But for now all we can say is:

Go Shaq!. You rule!

Now we could go in depth as to all the reasons why this deal could potentially be that thing which the Suns have be waiting for to finally get them over the playoff hump and into the realm of NBA champions, but none would be as well-reasoned as the arguments laid out in this Scoop Jackson espn.com column - Guess What? The Suns just made a fantastic trade.

A sample:

Shaq doesn't fit into their style of play. Even if he's in the best shape of his life, he can't get up and down the floor with the Suns. He'll be worthless on offense, and he's going to destroy their flow. He's lazy. He's not going to work hard. He's injury-prone. He's not worth the money. They still won't win a championship with him there.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Sorta wrong. Maybe. Yes. Wrong. Wrong.

In Miami (and in L.A. and Orlando before) Shaq was Option 1 or 2, and over the past two seasons that became a problem. In Phoenix, he'll be Option 4, maybe 5. Mike D'Antoni should have no plans to depend on Shaq for any offense -- heavy emphasis on "depend." Not in the conventional way that everyone is thinking. The pressure on him to score 20 and grab 10 is finally over. Now he'll be the Big Decoy. And because he won't be double-teamed (remember he's still one of the best-passing post players in the game, and the Suns are one of the best outside-shooting teams in the League, hitting 38.7 percent on 3-pointers along with four players capable of dropping 20 to 30 every night), Big stands a chance of being more valuable by doing less in Phoenix.

The beauty is -- again, if the Suns play this right -- Shaq doesn't need to be a part of their transition game, he just needs to ignite it.

Rebound, turn, outlet! Rebound, turn, outlet! Precision. Execution. Buckets. Only six seconds off the shot clock. Back on D. Repeat. So unfair.

I suggest you read the whole thing.

And if that isn't enough to convince you that the Phoenix Suns - as exciting as they were and could be - were doomed to another non-Championship playoff exit because they lacked a classic big man like Shaq down in the block than perhaps you should consider this dazzling bit of number crunching by some guy calling himself Gold Star for Robot Boy over at this
Matthew Yglesius post thread :

"Everyone acts like the Suns were this close to winning a title, but I'm not seeing it. Lemme throw some out some numbers: PHX vs. East: 20-2, and yet to play both BOS and DET. PHX vs. Western non-playoff contenders: 8-4. PHX vs. the other nine Western teams in postseason contention: 6-9 In short, the Suns fattened up on the bad teams yet struggled against the good ones. That's a title contender?"

Only to return later:

"While everyone raves about Marion's defense (and rightly so), why do critics of the trade fail to mention Stoudemire's struggles against good big men? The Lakers' Andrew Bynum: 14 points and 13 rebounds in the disaster that was Phoenix's home opener, followed by 28 and 12 on Christmas. Orlando's Dwight Howard: 33 and 18, and he could've scored more if not for nine missed free throws. Minnesota's Al Jefferson: 32-14 and 39-15, as the NBA's second-worst team upset Phoenix twice. Toronto's Chris Bosh: A career-high 42 points. New Orleans' Tyson Chandler: 14-18 and 19-11, both losses for the Suns against their closest pursuer for the conference lead. Marion's stellar D doesn't mean anything if a playing-out-of-position Amare gives the points right back."

Still not convinced?

Well then consider the fact that Shaquille O'Neal is Amare Stoudemire's idol and Shaq has known and mentored him since he was 13. With Shaq in the the line up Stoudemire will not only get to play beside his idol but will now be able to return to his natural position of power forward and thus get a much better chance to stay out of the foul trouble that is the real plague of his game now that he won't have to guard the opposing team's big men all the time. This trade, among other things, is a gift aimed directly at the constant under-achieving but immensely talented Amare Stoudemire.

Remember how good a passer Shaq can be out of the low post and remember how good an outside shooting team Phoenix is. Remember that Phoenix despite being the highest scoring team in the league is also one of the worst rebounding teams, known for allowing other teams multiple offensive rebounds.

And if you're still not convinced - remember that Shaw Marion for whatever reason was apparently actually unhappy playing for the Phoenix Suns.
Though he was due to be paid over seventeen million dollars nest year and he was playing on a team with one of the best point guards of all time in a system that was tailor made for his style of play apparently he had actually asked for a trade over the summer. And if you think that that wasn't creating problems with the Suns' team chemistry than I defy you to watch the below videos of Steve Nash's press conference following the trade, as well as interviews with the other Sun players and then ask yourself: Don't these seem like guys who are happy and excited to have Shaq for Marion?

I mean really.

To me, the relief and anticipation is pretty obvious.

I really hope Shaq gets and stays healthy enough to be the factor he can be. Because he comes to set them free. And that could be a lot of fun for everybody.

The coming Trial of KSM

I had speculated in a previous post written just over a month ago - What did Abu Zubaydah know and when did he know it? - that Kahlid Sheik Mohammed was never going to be brought to trial, not because he isn't responsible for 9/11 attacks, but because he had been tortured; probably waterboarded.

Well according to an article in today's NYT I was wrong about one thing and right about others.

I was wrong that Khalid Sheik Mohammed would never be brought to trial, because as it turns out it looks like there is a very good possibility that he will be. Tried, that is. Though not in a regular trial like his nephew Ramzi Youseff but through the specially and specifically designed Millitary Commission system set up by the U.S. Government down in Guantanamo Bay.

(Just to recap - much of what I have already written in that previous post. The Military Commissions had been declared illegal under American law by the United States Supreme Court in a June 29, 2006 decision known as Hamdan v. Rumsfeld; illegal as they violated the Geneva Conventions, which is American Law. And so as this ruling "presented the Bush Administration with the risk of criminal liability for war crimes" under the American War Crimes Act - a 1996 law which "criminalized breaches of the Geneva Conventions" - the U.S. congress passed and adopted the Military Commissions Act. I'll save going into the specifics of this piece of legislation for a future post - mental note - and for now just state that this legislation has the duel purpose of allowing the trial of KSM to go forward under circumstances that the American government deems appropriate to his status as an enemy combatant, well at the same time retroactively protecting Bush, members of his Administration and anyone involved in the "interrogation of KSM from charges of war crimes.)

From that article - 6 at Guantanamo Said to Face Trial in 9/11 Case:

Military prosecutors are in the final phases of preparing the first sweeping case against suspected conspirators in the plot that led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and drew the United States into war, people who have been briefed on the case said.

The charges, to be filed in the military commission system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would involve as many as six detainees held at the detention camp, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former senior aide to Osama bin Laden, who has said he was the principal planner of the plot.

The case could begin to fulfill a longtime goal of the Bush administration: establishing culpability for the terrorist attacks of 2001. It could also help the administration make its case that some detainees at Guantánamo, where 275 men remain, would pose a threat if they are not held at Guantánamo or elsewhere. Officials have long said that a half-dozen men held at Guantánamo played essential roles in the plot directed by Mr. Mohammed, from would-be hijackers to financiers.

But the case would also bring new scrutiny to the military commission system, which has a troubled history and has been criticized as a system designed to win convictions but that does not provide the legal protections of American civilian courts.

War-crimes charges against the men would almost certainly place the prosecutors in a battle over the treatment of inmates because at least two detainees tied to the 2001 terror attacks were subject to aggressive interrogation techniques that critics say amounted to torture.

One official who has been briefed on the case said the military prosecutors were considering seeking the death penalty for Mr. Mohammed, although no final decision appears to have been made. The official added that the military prosecutors had decided to focus on the Sept. 11 attacks in part as an effort to try to establish credibility for the military commission system before a new administration takes the White House next January.

“The thinking was 9/11 is the heart and soul of the whole thing. The thinking was: go for that,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case. Even if the charges are released soon, it would be many months before a trial could be held, lawyers said.

But I was right about the treatment of KSM while in American custody being a possible potential bombshell in his defense:

Lawyers have said that two of those are men whose treatment in American hands would inevitably be a focus of defense lawyers in their cases.

One of them, Mr. Mohammed, known as KSM, was subject to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding while in secret C.I.A. custody, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed this week.

Indeed, Hayden did publicly confirm this week in testimony before the Senate that Khalid Sheik Mohmmed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rashim al-Nashiri have all been waterboarded.

And I was right when I said that given the opportunity KSM would "probably confess". Unknown to me at the time I wrote that post, according to this article apparently he already has:

The American-educated Mr. Mohammed was described by the Sept. 11 commission as the “self-cast star, the superterrorist,” with plans for destruction on a vast scale. At a Pentagon hearing last year, he claimed responsibility for more than 30 terrorist attacks and plots.

He was explicit about his role in the 2001 attacks. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said.

I should have known about this and I didn't. I missed the boat. But according to this CBS news article:

"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a written statement that was read to a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon on Wednesday.

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed statement was read at the military hearing by a member of the U.S. military who is serving as the tribunal's Personal Representative for Mohammed, who the transcript says was present and was asked by the presiding officer about the authenticity of the statement.

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the statement that was just read by the Personal Representative, were those your words?" asked the presiding officer, according to the transcript, which says Mohammed replied: "Yes."

Later in the hearing, the transcript says, Mohammed spoke directly to the court, in a final statement in which he describes himself as an enemy combatant, compared the fighters in the jihad against America to George Washington, and makes a plea on behalf of "many" Guantanamo Bay detainees he says were "unjustly arrested."

The secret proceeding last Saturday was closed to news media. The detainee spoke in English to a four-officer panel during a proceeding that lasted one hour and fifteen minutes.

"I'm not making myself hero when I said I was responsible for this or that," said. The brazen list of attacks, read by his Personal Representative, ranged from the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing led by his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who is serving a life sentence in the U.S., to the 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, which killed more than 200 people.

Mohammed's confession also refers to many plots not previously made public: potential attacks on the Panama Canal, Big Ben in London, NATO headquarters in Brussels, an assassination of former President Jimmy Carter, and the destruction of an Indonesian oil company purportedly owned by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The confession also talks of plots against U.S. and U.K. targets in Turkey, nightclubs frequented by Americans and Brits in Thailand, U.S. embassies in Indonesia, Australia, and Japan, Israeli embassies in India and the Philippines, and the Israeli resort of Eilat.

Mohammed furthermore claims credit for training the nineteen Sept. 11 homicidal hijackers and would-be "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid, who was tackled by passengers on a 2001 Paris to Miami airline flight. He took responsibility for a 2002 attack that killed a pair of U.S. soldiers on a Kuwaiti island and a shoulder-fired missile that missed an Israeli passenger plane taking off from Mombassa, Kenya.

Mohammed's role as the lead actor in the Sep. 11 plot, which he proposed to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996 and bin Laden set in motion in 1999, has long been established. It was described in detail in the 9/11 Commission report published in 2004 and in a written substitution for his testimony in last year's trial of al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who Mohammed says was tapped only for a "second wave" of post-9/11 attacks.

Among his new revelations, Mohammed said potential targets for a second wave of attacks using planes as missiles were the Empire State Building in New York and the Plaza Bank Building in Seattle.

Should this case, or any of these cases, ever actually proceed, they will go right to the heart of the American justice system and everything that has taken place in the United States in the last seven years. Hell they should put it on TV. It could even eventually take place during the thickest part of the Presidential election season. And no doubt, as the above NYT article suggests, the Bush Administration would love to wrap this up before they leave office, thus legitimizing the Military Commissions.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has be in a constant fight for "due process" though out all of this, and I would certainly expect that will continue.

UPDATE:

Prosecuters will seek the Death Penalty.

Primary Response - 10

Okay. Its the next day now, and obviously that became pretty ridiculous last night and if any of you are asking yourselves - hey, you know, what exactly was the point? - well you would certainly have a second in me.

And I'm not sure which was the most stupid: The relentless youtube rhino videos. That whole thing about Soldedad O'Brien. Or the picture.

Probably the picture.

But nonetheless, having started it all I do feel obliged to now try and wrap up our special Super Tuesday coverage some how. So I might as well go ahead and do that by linking to other people a lot more insightful about this kind of thing than me.

But first things first:

What are the post Super Tuesday delegate counts? Well, they vary apparently. And the difference lies with those who are counting "projected delegates" and those who are not.

Over at Politico they have -

For the Republicans:

McCain - 613

Romney - 269

Huckabee - 190

Paul - 14

With 1,191 needed to win.

Democrats:

Clinton - 845

Obama - 765

With 2,025 needed to win.

But hold on. This Slate article - Delegate Count Chaos! - goes into the issue deeper while dropping the wildy varying delegate count numbers from various news organizations.

On the Democratic race:

What seems interesting is, that despite what I said last night, Obama seemed to win a lot of heartland red States while not doing as well as he had hoped in either the Northeast (other than Connecticut) or the the two big prizes of New York and California.

This is certainly what initially impressed Karl Rove.

So what is at the heart of this Clinton - Obama divide?

For an idea you might want to read this e-mailer to TalkingPointsMemo.

David Frum of all people wonders if there is a class divide amongst the Democrats.

And yet considering where he was months, even weeks ago the fact that Obama was able to basically pull even in delegate counts, with some counts actually having him leading - is that evidence of a Obama surge?

Marc Ambinder points out that he is basically really well organized in some States, as he was in Iowa.

Andrew Sullivan is all for him.

While James Wolcott is not buying it. He's a Hillary man. And its a legitimate question: Obama talks so much about bi-partisanship, but what happens when the Republicans come after him guns blazing, or have no interest co-operating with him on anything.

Here's an interestingly analogy getting much play:

Obama's a Mac. Clinton's a PC.

George Packer demonstrates definitively why the Obama - JFK comparison is just lame, inaccurate, actually quite limiting and just a bad all around idea for Obama. And he's right. JFK is one of the most overrated Presidents ever.

Meanwhile over at the Republican tent, I'll keep this short:

One of the big questions for the moment is now that Mitt Romney has now spent 1.16 million dollars per delegate earned - which at that rate will cost him 1.33 Billion dollars (!) to win the nomination - will he now give up the ghost and finally drop out of the race?

And would Huckabee ever accept being McCain's VP? And would that be enough to placate all the GOP's right wing dittoheads?

But after all of this - the other obvious big question of the day is:

Shaq for Marion?

Good Lord.

That's it for me. For today. Elect whoever you want.

I give.

Primary Response - 9

The California numbers are coming in and they look very bad for Obama.

We begin discussing the journalistic talents of perky CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien.

We have decided to look for the most compromising Soledad O'Brien photos we can find, and I'm afraid there are just not that many. This is the best we can find right now. So just use your imagination.

Matthew would like a word. Matthew?

Um, no. Actually, we're sorry, it seems he has declined.

They have just given Georgia to Huckabee. It was incredibly close. They are all around 30. Politico is giving him the state with 33.97%, McCain at 32.25 and Romney at 29.64.

McCain is now about to speak and I am about to run out of power again. We had turned up the TV but the people at the other table became uncomfortable and so once more we have turned it down and now I can't hear it again.

Cindy McCain is wearing a stunning red jacket. It is incredibly striking. Matthew thinks it has more to do with the monitor we are watching. He feels the saturation is far too high. John McCain's 95 year old mother is also wearing red.

It is beginning to dawn on Jim that Obama might actually lose, and I'm worried that he is not properly prepared for this. And in Jim's potential anger and disillusionment which may come with an Obama loss I feel lays a larger universal symbol for potentially disenchanted youth everywhere.

McCain was speaking and then Obama came up to speak on the other side of the split screen.

Then CNN decides to go with Obama - so what does that tell you?

Obama is speaking and we are the only ones here at the Rhino who seem to care. Once more I am almost out of power so I am going to have to post this post now and go plug in again.

Primary Response - 8

We have now moved to the back room and I managed to plug in for a little while and grab about 13% more power, so like - I'm back.

My cousin Matt has shown up. He says hey.

The polls in California have just closed so its about to get really exciting.

Hillary just gave a speech to her supporters in New York City and we were trying to figure out why which was tricky because we could barely hear what she was saying. We decided to take a photo of all of us just to add a little texture to the evening. I almost always take a bad photo. I never know how to smile and so I often over-compensate. So that's why I look like that.

We just got the waitress to turn up the TV so now for the first time tonight we actually have sound and can hear the actual wise words of the CNN punidts.

Wolfe has just shown the first numbers out of California and it appears Obama is losing quite badly.