Well, well. We got a race.

Clinton 39, Obama 37, Edwards 17 (81% in).

On the Republican side, not so much surprise: McCain 37, Romney 32, Huckabee 11, 9iu11ani 9, Paul 8 (78%). Thompson 1%. LMAO

OK, back to the presidential race (emphasis mine):

After Iowa, Clinton and her aides seemed resigned to a second straight setback. But polling place interviews showed that female voters — who deserted her last week — were solidly in her New Hampshire column.

She also was winning handily among registered Democrats. Obama led her by an even larger margin among independents, but he suffered from a falloff in turnout among young voters compared with Iowa.

Word of Clinton's triumph set off a raucous celebration among supporters at a hotel in Nashua — gathered there to celebrate a first-in-the-nation primary every bit as surprising as the one 16 years ago that allowed a young Bill Clinton to proclaim himself "the comeback kid."

Ah, the Comeback Gal will be the story for the next few weeks. More on that girl thing:

So there's a huge gender gap. Massive. Apparently, women didn't take kindly to people beating up on Hillary for -- gasp! -- tearing up. Can you believe it? In a way, this is a nice middle finger to that bullshit double standard.

Had a nice lively conversation today about whether that statement by Edwards was sexist or not. I thought it wasn't, but maybe obviously I was wrong.

Update (1/9): Two different yet similar opinions on why Clinton snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Not how. Why.

FOX News: now even conservatives know it sucks

After Ron Paul was denied the opportunity to participate in a debate of Republican presidential candidates carried by FOX, he held his own forum in New Hampshire. The local Paulistas took the Chron's bait and posted diatribes against the Fairly Unbalanced news network, calling them "traitors" and "scumbags" -- epithets usually reserved for capital criminals, victims of Joe Horn, and Democrats. Some of the 'nicer' comments:

Torque wrote:

Fox, Fox News, their supporters, and sponsors just earned a LIFELONG boycott from me! I suggest all Ron Paul supporters do the same. They should have let him debate, them neo-facist Nazi War MONGERS pretending to be fair media! Lies.

Kind-of sucks for me too because COPS was one of my favorite shows.

Clearspeak wrote:

According to the numbers, Mr. Paul had a right to be included. Fox is trying to put in a "fix", blatantly manipulating the contest, and should have their license pulled by the FCC.

Josey2006 wrote:

If you're upset with Fox News, do like I've done: Buy a share of their stock and crash their stockholder meeting in October.

Hankskool wrote:

Why would Fox want to invite a true fiscal conservative to rain on their reckless parade? Somehow they've already bamboozled millions into believing they provide a conservative "balance" to the rest of the "liberal" news coverage despite the fact that their idea of fiscal conservativism , both for the individual and the nation, is to borrow as much money as you can and blow it all. How many ads a day did they run on behalf of the subprime frauds anyway? So much for conservative having anything to do with "conserve". Most of their pundits have already endorsed Rudy G.. A smaller government conservative ? No, actually if he had his way the U.S. would be a full blown police state with one cop for every citizen, hardly smaller government from the free individual's standpoint.
FAUX NEWS-- We've taken the conserve out of conservative!

So then the Paulites decided to protest outside the Faux News building in New York, where they ambushed Sean Hannity as he was leaving (you have to watch the video).



This on top of Bill O'Reilly's meltdown at an Obama campaign event, where he screamed at, grabbed and shoved an Obama staffer. Secret Service agents actually surrounded the guy. Yes, there's a YouTube of it also, though it isn't as embarrassing to O'Reilly as it could have been:



Boycotts, protests, embarrassing actions by their anchors videotaped -- how long before FOX's core audience really does put down the Kool-Aid, sober up and start deserting them?

As with the rest of the crumbling Republican monolith, are we watching the beginning of the end of Faux News' media "dominance"?

Pop the corn.

Update: Robert Greenwald's video is a more thorough report on the flap between FOX and Obama that O'Reilly apparently is exacerbating.

2008's first Weekly Wrangle

And they're off!

TXsharon burned despair's chair. See Bluedaze for an inspirational New Year's message of hope.

Off the Kuff asked a variety of interesting people to write a post named Looking Forward to 2008. Topics ranged from music and television to local, state, and national politics. The entire series, which wrapped up last week, can be found here.

Barfly at McBlogger says thank you to our neighbor to the north for giving us some of our most cherished celebrities. Like Celine Dion.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston lists who is running for officeand who is not in Clear Lake.

Gary at Easter Lemming Liberal News saw the Iowa results as a progressive sweep and picked out the winners and losers.

winding road in urban area declared that of all the undignified events surrounding the Harris County District Attorney's office, the announcement regarding assistant district attorney Kelly Seigler's run for her boss' job has taken the proverbial cake. It is just charming that Ms. Seigler said on camera, that aspects of being district attorney "sucks." Nothing says "get to know me" the first time a voter may see a candidate like saying the job I want, "sucks!"

nytexan at BlueBloggin points out the newest GOP stunt to block the Senate and screw up another presidential election. With the primary season underway for the presidential race the Federal Election Commission has shut its doors.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes James 'Rick' Perry ignored ceremony for fallen Texas military hero. That's how Republicans support and honor our troops!

It was a bad start to 2008 (if you happened to be a Republican), no matter if your name was Vicki Truitt, or Chuck Rosenthal, or Jared Woodfill, or Mitt Romney. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has more on the conservative misery.

To kick off the new year for Texas Kaos, Lightseeker takes a look at some of The Big Texas Issues we'll be talking about in the coming year.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson opines about the death of Ric Williamson and who will be the next leader of TxDOT.

Muse is only now able to get her bulls---t detector to quiet down after Harris County DA, Chuck "Romancethal" Rosenthal, told the Houston Chronicle that he was only sending romantic emails to his secretary because she had personal problems. Right (wink, wink, former FBI agent wife). What else happened? Pity sex?

Phillip at Burnt Orange Report takes a preliminary look at some numbers on filings for the Texas House, including the large number of Republicans that are facing both a primary and general election opponent.

Texas Toad at North Texas Liberal introduces the new slate of Denton County Democratic candidates, as revealed at a press conference promoting the strength of the local party with high hopes for 2008.

The Texas Cloverleaf cautions you to smoke 'em if ya got 'em, but you still might go to jail. DFW area law enforcement is ignoring the new option to give citations to pot smokers.

On The Texas Blue this week, contributor David Gurney explains that he doesn't really buy this business of a "war on Christmas."

Devastating account of e-voting's flaws

Is anybody in Texas who can do anything about this paying attention?

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

Gotta love that first sentence: "the fringe" are "disgruntled citizens".

Anyway, there's plenty to be appreciative of in this report...

If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is nowhere near dilligent enough, and the federal regulators are too sympathetic and cozy with the vendors. The 2002 federal guidelines, the latest under which machines currently in use were qualified, were vague about how much security testing the labs ought to do. The labs were also not required to test any machine’s underlying operating system, like Windows, for weaknesses.

Vendors paid for the tests themselves, and the results were considered proprietary, so the public couldn’t find out how they were conducted. The nation’s largest tester of voting machines, Ciber Inc., was temporarily suspended after federal officials found that the company could not properly document the tests it claimed to have performed.

“The types of malfunctions we’re seeing would be caught in a first-year computer science course,” says Lillie Coney, an associate director with the Electronic Privacy Information Commission, which is releasing a study later this month critical of the federal tests.

In any case, the federal testing is not, strictly speaking, mandatory. The vast majority of states “certify” their machines as roadworthy. But since testing is extremely expensive, many states, particularly smaller ones, simply accept whatever passes through a federal lab. And while it’s true that state and local elections officials can generally keep a copy of the source code, critics say they rarely employ computer programmers sophisticated enough to understand it. Quite the contrary: When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in Florida, told me, “the head of the largest I.T. department in their entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer systems, without any training at all.” Many elections directors I spoke with have been in the job for years or even decades, working mostly with paper elections or lever machines. Few seemed very computer-literate.

The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.

This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely on the vendors — accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed and, crucially, that no votes were altered.

In essence, elections now face a similar outsourcing issue to that seen in the Iraq war, where the government has ceded so many core military responsibilities to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater that Washington can no longer fire the contractor. Vendors do not merely sell machines to elections departments. In many cases, they are also paid to train poll workers, design ballots and repair broken machines, for years on end.

“This is a crazy world,” complained Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor of Leon County in Florida. “The process is so under control by the vendor. The primary source of information comes only from the vendor, and the vendor has a conflict of interest in telling you the truth. The vendor isn’t going to tell me that his buggy software is why I can’t get the right time on my audit logs.”

Ugh. More bad news for democracy. Is there a solution? Sancho in Florida may have one:

Optical scanning is used in what many elections experts regard as the “perfect elections” of Leon County in Florida, where Ion Sancho is the supervisor of elections. In the late ’80s, when the county was replacing its lever machines, Sancho investigated touch-screens. But he didn’t think they were user-friendly, didn’t believe they would provide a reliable recount and didn’t want to be beholden to a private-sector vendor. So he bought the optical-scanning devices from Unisys and trained his staff to be able to repair problems when the machines broke or malfunctioned. His error rate — how often his system miscounts a ballot — is three-quarters of a percent at its highest, and has dipped as low as three-thousandths of a percent.

More important, his paper trail prevents endless fighting over the results of tight elections. In one recent contest, a candidate claimed that his name had not appeared on the ballot in one precinct. So Sancho went into the Leon County storage, broke the security seals on the records, and pulled out the ballots. The name was there; the candidate was wrong. “He apologized to me,” Sancho recalls. “And that’s what you can’t do with touch-screen technology. You never could have proven to that person’s satisfaction that the screen didn’t show his name. I like that certainty. The paper ends the discussion.” Sancho has never had a legal fight over a disputed election result. “The losers have admitted they lost, which is what you want,” he adds. “You have to be able to convince the loser they lost.”

That, in a nutshell, is what people crave in the highly partisan arena of modern American politics: an election that can be extremely close and yet regarded by all as fair. Not only must the losing candidate believe in the loss; the public has to believe in it, too.

The article makes the most cogent point possible, that the greatest concern isn't about the integrity of voting officials or hackers, but the vast potential for unintentional errors -- by the programmers, by the administrators, and by the voters themselves.

Can we take preventative action before next November to avoid the possibility of a catastrophic failure similar to 2000 in Florida, and 2004 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio? The only tool at our disposal is the continued agitation of those responsible for the decision-making. At every level of influence.

More Sunday Funnies

Obama and the Mil-Gen vote

Noted but worth emphasizing:

Not only did Clinton lose to Barack Obama by an almost six to one margin among Millennial Generation (those under 25) caucus attendees, but also her weakness in this age group was the key to her overall loss among women. While Hillary carried the over 45 female vote 36%-24%, Obama won women under 45 by a 50%-21% margin and the surprisingly strong turnout among young caucus goers turned that margin into an overall defeat among the female constituency Hillary was counting on the most. Had she and her team only read their history, they wouldn't have been surprised by this outcome.

Plenty more in a variety of tangents at the link, but the youth vote phenomenon belonging to Barack is what I'll pause on with some anecdotal evidence.

I have a nephew who is a freshman at Texas A&M. (I probably don't need to mention that A&M is the most politically conservative public university in the state, if not the nation, do I?) He comes from an Aggie legacy on his mother's side; his father, my younger brother, is a staunch Republican who works for a defense contractor and lives in a suburb of Fort Worth. My nephew spent the past summer interning with my older brother the lawyer (and Republican) here in Houston. When I asked him over the holidays who he planned to cast his first presidential vote for, he said "Obama". The only 'why' we got into was that he had attended an Obama function while he was here and was impressed. Suffice it to say I was surprised (not as much as the rest of the people at the table, though).

And I spent some time over lunch this past week with a prominent Af-Am Democratic activist, also an attorney with a long history of civil rights advocacy. In short he doesn't think the country is ready for a black president, and doesn't think Obama is the right man for the job in any event (not progressive enough -- he, like me, supports Edwards).

Maybe we just both discount Obama's obvious personal appeal; the feature that also obviously resonates with younger voters. The US electorate tends to favor charismatic presidential candidates over those with experience -- exhibits A, B, and C: JFK over Nixon, Reagan over GHW Bush, and even Huckabee over the rest of the GOP field.

But the real open question is: will this youth surge sustain itself, carrying Obama to the nomination and the White House? History is strongly against it, but perhaps a variance to the historical trend is happening even as we blog.

Sunday Funnies

Post-Iowa postpourri

--Lots of commentary to be found, but I'll just link two of my local peers Greg and Gary. Gary's is best for both accuracy and agreeableness; Greg is as usual barely comprehensible through his ponderous writing and conservative -- and Hillary -- bias. He keeps up a theme of antagonistically denigrating Edwards and progressives with excessive harshness, which compels me to dismiss most of his take (most of the time), but at least we all agree that Edwards must find a win somewhere to remain viable after February 5. I don't think it will be in South Carolina, and thus I don't see where it will be.

The agent of change (make that progress) this go-round is Barack Obama. And about progress, I'll quote some of an e-mail Open Source Dem, the irregular poster here, sent me late last night:

Please note that in Iowa the people sent out an overwhelmingly insurgent and populist message.

Please also notice that the people running the GOP have wrecked it. They are more interested in maintaining control of their party than actually winning. Does that sound familiar?

Here is Andrew Sullivan, an actual Tory:

Tonight was in many ways devastating news for the GOP. Twice as many people turned out for the Democrats than the Republicans. Clearly independents prefer the Dems.

Now look at how the caucus-goers defined themselves in the entrance polls. Among the Dems: Very Liberal: 18 percent; Somewhat Liberal: 36 percent; Moderate: 40 percent; Conservative: 6 percent. Now check out the Republicans: Very Conservative: 45 percent; Somewhat Conservative: 43 percent; Moderate: 11 percent; Liberal: 1 percent.

One is a national party; the other is on its way to being an ideological church. The damage Bush and Rove have done - revealed in 2006 - is now inescapable.

Let me say the damage our state and local party establishment have done by pandering to non-existent “moderate” Republicans is also very bad. The competition today is between progressive and reactionary populists. The only in-between strategy is exit strategy.

Does that sound familiar?

The young voters Howard Dean needed four years ago finally showed up last night -- tripling their numbers and making the difference for Obama. The overall turnout Democrats to Republicans was 238,000 to 118, 000, or the two-to-one margin Sullivan refers to. (That compares to 122,000 Democrats caucusing in Iowa in 2004.) In an open primary the percentages would look like this:

Percentage of total vote
24.5% Obama
20.5% Edwards
19.8% Clinton
11.4% Huckabee (R)

That's all the omen you need.

-- Christ, Chuck Rosenthal is both drama queen and publicity whore. Just go TF away already, you jerk.

-- New Hampshire votes this Saturday Tuesday. On Saturday the 5th there will be back-to-back GOP and Democratic debates moderated by Charlie Gibson of ABC. And Facebook users can participate in debate groups, discussing the candidates and commenting on the play-by-play. But we'll be down in Galveston meeting the Texas 2008 Democratic slate with Jim Hightower.

Watching the caucuses live

on C-Span. I first caught this four years ago and was fascinated.

FWIW, I'm hoping it's Edwards, Obama, Clinton and then Dodd, but I'm thinking it will be Obama, Edwards, Clinton and then Richardson.

Will update here later with results and some post mortem.

7:45 p.m. A good site for the latest:

www.iowacaucusresults.com

And it currently shows:

Senator John Edwards : 33.18%
Senator Hillary Clinton : 32.47%
Senator Barack Obama : 31.52%
Governor Bill Richardson : 1.90%
Senator Joe Biden : 0.81%
Senator Chris Dodd : 0.07%
Uncommitted : 0.05%
Precincts Reporting: 346 of 1781

8:05 p.m.:

Senator Barack Obama : 33.48%
Senator John Edwards : 31.97%
Senator Hillary Clinton : 31.76%
Governor Bill Richardson : 1.73%
Senator Joe Biden : 0.96%
Senator Chris Dodd : 0.06%
Uncommitted : 0.04%
Precincts Reporting: 750 of 1781

8:30 p.m.:

Senator Barack Obama : 35.78%
Senator John Edwards : 30.69%
Senator Hillary Clinton : 30.52%
Governor Bill Richardson : 1.89%
Senator Joe Biden : 0.98%
Uncommitted : 0.10%
Senator Chris Dodd : 0.03%
Precincts Reporting: 1347 of 1781

9:00 p.m.:

Senator Barack Obama : 37.14%
Senator John Edwards : 30.00%
Senator Hillary Clinton : 29.60%
Governor Bill Richardson : 2.16%
Senator Joe Biden : 0.95%
Uncommitted : 0.13%
Senator Chris Dodd : 0.03%
Precincts Reporting: 1642 of 1781
(Percentages are State Delegate Equivalents.)

Sometimes I hate being right.

A seven-point win is pretty significant. Don't tell Greg, though; he thinks Hillary has already won.

Rosenthal bails

This 180 makes even Jim Rockford jealous:

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal has withdrawn his name from the Republican ballot for re-election today amid pressure from his own party following last week's release of intimate emails he wrote to his personal assistant.

Rosenthal publicly had rejected the local GOP's call for him to drop his re-election plans or face the prospect of the party endorsing another Republican for the March primary.

His decision to drop out of the election was confirmed about 5:35 p.m. by Michael Wolse, the Harris County Republican Party's primary director.

The story goes on to identify Jim Leitner as filing to run as a Republican. He was mentioned in the story filed this morning:

Two of the potential candidates, according to sources, are defense lawyer and former prosecutor Jim Leitner and former felony court judge Patricia Lykos, who now works for Harris County Judge Ed Emmett. They both ran against Rosenthal in the 2000 Republican primary.

Let's skip to the part that concerns him:

Leitner, who placed third in the 2000 primary, said his experience on both sides of the courtroom would help the perspective of the district attorney's office.

In 2001, Leitner said he thought Harris County prosecutors were overzealous in their pursuit of death sentences against capital murder defendants.

"As long as that is the prevailing view, there are going to be a lot of capital murder prosecutions. People in other counties don't see it that way."

He added, "I think we kill a lot of people who don't fit the statute."

A Republican arguing against the death penalty. No wonder he came in third. Perhaps the climate has softened a little for his candidacy in the GOP this go-round.

That alone would qualify as progress.

Update (1/3, 5:30 a.m.): This morning's story quotes Leitner as saying he'll stand down for a more qualified challenger and names some assistant DAs as potentials ...

Top Rosenthal assistants Marc Brown, Stephen St. Martin and Denise Bradley, formerly Denise Nassar, also went through the interview process with party leaders, along with former state District Judge Patricia Lykos. Brown and Bradley said they will talk with their colleagues about becoming candidates, perhaps with only one emerging from Rosenthal's staff as a consensus choice.

2008 starts badly (IYAR)

*If You're A Republican.

-- Former state representative Nancy Moffat, a three-term incumbent Republican in Tarrant County who was defeated in a primary by the odious Vicki Truitt, will run again for HD-98 ... as a Democrat:

"It wasn't so much that I left the Republican Party as much as it was that the party left me," Moffat said. "They're all about the wealthy, and I want to be for the little guy and the middle guy."

Recall that Dan Barrett in neighboring HD-97 was just elected in a similarly believed-to-be-red district. Recall also why Vicki Truitt is odious:

Truitt is, of course, no favorite of any bloggers thanks to her sad attempts to pass a blogger libel bill last session.

Hat tip to jobsanger here also.

-- It takes a woman's POV to remind us men that Chuck Rosenthal was either stalking his secretary/former girlfriend, or graciously offering her pity sex. He is one hell of a cocksman, if nothing else. Don't miss the takes from the starboard tack.

-- The Chron plays catchup; Democrats are poised to retake Harris County -- particularly the bench -- back...

With contests for president, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and district attorney attracting most of the voters' attention to the top of the 2008 ballot, the races for 25 or more criminal and civil court judgeships likely will be decided based on the candidates' party label rather than public awareness of their performance or qualifications, experts said.

Republicans essentially have reached their voter turnout zenith in Harris County in recent years, University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray said, thanks partly to the drawing power of the Texan president and the party's mobilization of Christian conservatives. Now some Anglo voters, the core of GOP strength, are trickling away to neighboring counties, he added.

Meanwhile, the number of Spanish-surname participating voters, as calculated by the Harris County clerk's office, is booming — on pace to approach 150,000 in 2008. Hispanics already favored the Democratic Party and surveys show that Republican inroads have been blocked by the GOP's image on the immigration issue as punitive.

In the overall Republican vista, "there are no more Anglos to work with," said Murray, who has been informally advising candidates from both parties as they seek data on the 2008 election. "In some ways you run out of bodies. There's no one else out there."

The trends may explain a narrowing of the gap by which Republican judicial candidates won their races in Harris County. On average, these GOP winners hit a high of 56.47 percent in 2002, with the top of the ballot featuring Republican Rick Perry's gubernatorial election stomping of Democratic challenger Tony Sanchez. In 2006, as Perry won with about 38 percent of the statewide vote against three other major candidates, the average posting for local judges seeking re-election in two-way races was 52.17 percent, a 14-year low.

Similar population shifts helped Dallas County Democrats sweep judgeships and other countywide offices in 2006 after the county had been in Republican hands for many years. That surprise reversal serves as an inspiration for Democrats here, and as a warning for Republicans.

-- Mike Huckabee is still having difficulty not stepping in his own shit in Iowa. Yet it appears from the polling this morning that he and Barack Obama may emerge victorious from the cornfields tomorrow evening. Kooch told his caucus-goers to report to Obama, an interesting development in light of a similar move by him four years ago to send them to John Edwards. Whether that is bad news or not for John remains to develop, but it's all bad for Hillary no matter what.

On shortly to New Hampshire for everyone, where John McCain has risen from the dead and Ron Paul has been excluded from a GOP debate there. The cacophony from the Paulistas is of similar pitch to this incessant whine.

Ric Williamson comes to a fork in the toll road