Almost ALL those Florida reps are HILLARY SUPPORTERS...

WTF is wrong with these Florida Dems? Florida DNC members voted for the rules and never applied to be an early state. They voted for the rules and need to comply with the rules. Enough of this nonsense.

Back in June, Nelson was making noises about a compromise. I guess he's been sitting on his thumbs the whole time because I haven't seen any compromise out of him.

BTW, only three of the Florida Democrats -- Hastings, Meeks, and Wasserman Schultz -- have endorsed Clinton; Nelson and Castor have yet to make an endorsement.

Something that never occurred to me until I just read an AP wire about it is: if all this jockeying of primary dates forces the Iowa caucus into December, then the FEC rules become immediately muddied. The contribution limits technically refer to caps for the year of the primary, and not to an actual election cycle spanning two years.

The article says that a strict reading of that rule could allow a new cycle of fundraising from the same contributors as the 'year' turns to 2008; and that that strict reading would fast be pitted against a 'spirit of the law as intended' reading.

What a mess, even without this FEC conflict arising. This AP article does leaves me scratching my head and wondering if some of the insane jockeying of dates is, in part, a mostly 'under the radar' strategy for advantages not yet defined.

Ooh. I like it!

Pass that on.

If you donate online, they'll flood you with e-mails, not with s-mail (same as Emily's List and DNC do). In the meantime, they have your credit card number and all sorts of other data. Would you put it past them not to charge your card $30 instead of $.030,claiming you must have made a mistake? I wouldn't trust them.

Someplace I read that the rules of the Democratic Party state that only primaries or caucuses happening during the calendar year of the election are recognized. If that's the case, pushing Iowa into December of 2007 would invalidate those delegates.

Peace,
Paul

Good points, Cal D. I wasn't paying close attention to the DNC leadership camps back then to know, for reference, how the individual state organizations lined up back then pro/con Dean, or pro/con the establishment's alternative.

I was puzzled when, shortly after the '06 election successes, James Carville did his public attack on Dean, thinking, hmm, 'what in the world is that about? Why wouldn't the DLCers just be darn grateful for Dean's grassroots party-extending efforts?"

So those candidates with primarily maxed out donors would benefit the most.

Hmmm, wonder who thaaaaaaaat would be?

You can tell "Rightroots" is a true Republican operation, because they've renamed the ABC PAC site they had a year ago (abcpac.com redirects to rightroots.com) and put out press releases claiming it's "new" so they can pretend it wasn't a colossal failure in '06.

Here's the other defining right-wing characteristic:

One notable feature of Rightroots is its creation of “slates” of Republican candidates who share some defining political characteristic.

But:

Torchinsky said Rightroots eventually will include a tool allowing users who join the site to create their own candidate slates.

That's right, "slates" are a "notable feature," but they're all slates defined from the top down! After all, you can't keep everyone marching in lockstep if you let the followers make their own decisions.

Evil does as evil is . . .

Frankly every primary needs to be fixed by Federal law for no earlier than the second Tuesday in June of the election year . . . New Hampshire can hold it one week earlier outta respect for historical perspective.

Enough of this made for television movie politics . . . If I wanted to seeped in shit for a year, I'd start a company pumping Andy Gumps.

Why wouldn't the DLCers just be darn grateful for Dean's grassroots party-extending efforts?"

They are now -- or some are anyway. Others, like Carville, I think remain convinced that if we'd spent all that money on advertising and consultants' fees we could have won more seats in 2006 than we did. But as vindicated as the 50-state strategy may be now for all but a few spoilsports, even if grudgingly so, it was pretty roundly pooh-poohed as a hair-brained scheme among the DC Democratic establishment before the 2006 elections. Dean and Rahm Emanuel all but came to blows over it a couple of times. Big money donors have also been skeptical and have been kind of starving the DNC for cash while contributing more to the congressional campaign committees, both of whom are pretty flush these days. Dean stuck to his guns though and his stubbornness paid off and we all owe him a debt of gratitude for that (money contributions to the DNC are also cheerfully accepted).

But give Terry Mcauliffe his due. He did build up the material infrastructure of the DNC -- for example the IT resources necessary to match the RNC's micro-targeting capability -- and left the national party in a much better financial position than he found it. It remained for someone to devote some TLC to the grassroots, and that Dr. Dean has done pretty admirably in the face of some pretty powerful opposition.