Will votes for Edwards in the primaries be counted?  Will they be thrown out?  Will delegates be assigned to Edwards anyway? Will votes for Edwards be reassigned to the winner?

It seems to be different from state to state but I'm having a really hard time finding a definitive answer on State Democratic Parties' websites.

I've started a thread on the John Edwards blog.  

Xan posted a link to this site which seems to say that almost all States' Dem primaries will assign delegates proportionally.

Does anyone else have a link to official info or to someone who has spoken to a named party official?

Crossposted at Corrente

It's about political power, not just keeping dKos running (which I totally appreciate).  From last year's Blogads survey:

Blog readers are "shockingly influential"

 ...70% of blog readers are influentials, those articulate, networked 10% of Americans who set the agenda for the other 90%. (RoperASW, the folks who wrote the book on Influentials...)

snip

To put the blogosphere's influentials density in context, consider that the WashingtonPost.com likes to brag that 34% of its readers are influentials.

Oh, snap!  How do you like them apples, Jim Brady?

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is a major investor in The Carlyle Group, the private equity investment firm where President Bush's father once served as senior adviser and is a who's who of former high-level government officials. Just last year, Dubai International Capital, a government-backed buyout firm, invested in an $8 billion Carlyle fund.

Snow: Who knew?

Then there is the cabinet connection. Treasury Secretary John Snow was chairman of railroad company CSX. After he left the company for the White House, CSX sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World for more than a billion dollars.

In Connecticut today, Snow told reporters he had no knowledge of that CSX sale. "I learned of this transaction probably the same way members of the Senate did, by reading about it in the newspapers."

Color Coding = Media Type
Light Green: Print Media
Orange: TV
Light Brown: Radio
Light Blue: Internet/Blogs

Size of Blob = Reach AKA Relative Size of Audience

["Homecoming"] darkly satirizes zombie movie conventions, as dead soldiers arise to vote against the politicians who shipped them off to war. Meanwhile, a Karl Rove-like presidential adviser and Ann Coulter-like pundit (the names have been changed, but just barely) manipulate a talk circuit where gaseous windbags presume to speak for the military's fallen.

- Variety

"Homecoming", Written by Sam Hamm and directed by Joe Dante, will be playing this Friday, December 2 at 10 p.m. EST/PST as part of Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series.

Kossacks: we need your help to spread the word about this independent film.  From the looks of it, it's going to kick ass.

Links to sample clips and reviews at the Mighty Corrente Building. Brains!

The attention of several Democratic Senators' offices has been turned lately to the observations found in a little radical blog (www.theleftcoaster.com): Why does the Senate Report attribute a letter written by Allele Dihadj Habibou to Nassirou Sabo? Who is disinforming whom?

A couple of weeks ago eRiposte from The Left Coaster emailed me for assistance in contacting La Repubblica to share some of his research.  I referred eRiposte to Nur al-Cubicle.  Looks like eRiposte has connected with the Italian reporters, Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo.  

At the BARBARian drinkfest last week qubit of The Token Reader explained the Physics/Philosophy concept of Emergent Properties to me.  Qubit said he thought it similar to a theory of conspiracy (not the same thing as a conspiracy theory, mind you) I had posted about on the Ol' Shysteeblog.

Wikipedia:

An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. The property itself is often unpredictable and unprecedented, and represents a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or school of fish are good example.

A taste:

-- Now let's jump right in. Mmm, Meaty!

But is it really true that our [Italian] cloak-and-dagger people worked solely with the CIA? Or did they work as part of the clandestine effort undertaken by the parallel intelligence conduit ["Stovepipe"--Nur] created by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz within the Iraq War Group [White House Iraq Group (?) -- Shystee], the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the office of the National Security Advisor--all determined to produce the evidence for "regime change" in Baghdad.

...

La Repubblica has documented the dual channel used by the Italian government and by Italian intelligence. According to intelligence agents, in at least one of the backdoor meetings in which Pollari participated, the the creation of a conduit took place linking government, security agencies and intelligence.

A taste:

Present Day

-- Rocco: I'm a Patsy

Unmasked by the British press (The Financial Times, The Sunday Times) in the summer of 2004, Rocco Martino spills the beans: It's true, I had a hand in the dissemination of those (Niger uranium) documents, but I was duped. Both Americans and Italians were involved behind the scenes. It was a disinformation operation.

An incomplete confession but close to the truth.
Martino conceals the identity of the architects behind the "operation" and appears to be merely a pawn, like his partners in crime. So who is the puppeteer pulling the strings behind their sordid adventure?

As noted earlier, with specifically false information, it's very easy to track who is using it and passing it around.  Poison Pill #1 (Yellowcake Docs) meet Poison Pill #2 (Valerie Plame never worked for WINPAC).   "Take two of these, you NeoCon scumbags, and call us from jail" said the Spooks.  All it took was for someone like FitzKenobi to pick up the breadcrumb trail left by the Perps.

Justin Raimondo via Kos poster Pigpaste.

According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

From WaPo today:

One evening in the 1980s, several years after Harriet Miers dedicated her life to Jesus Christ, she attended a lecture at her Dallas evangelical church with Nathan Hecht, a colleague at her law firm and her on-and-off boyfriend. The speaker was Paul Brand, a surgeon and the author of "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," a best-selling exploration of God and the human body.

When the lecture was over, Miers said words Hecht had never heard from her before. "I'm convinced that life begins at conception," Hecht recalled her saying. According to Hecht, now a Texas Supreme Court justice, Miers has believed ever since that abortion is "taking a life."

Kos' post sounds like more wishful thinking to justify the usual cave by Congressional Dems.

The recent discussions about Senator Obama's post about John Roberts and debate over the Anti-War Protests brought this into focus for me.  RenaRF's post today in response to Obama was brilliant and passionate.  But she's catching some flak from the Liberal Elitists.

The Beltway Democrats

In his post, Barack Obama made obvious he has internalized many of the principles espoused by Beltway Democrats:

Elect Us Now, We'll Stand up for You Later

The Shrillness of the Rabble Frightens the Skittish Nebulous Beings of Centerland whose Non-Positions (which only coincidentally coincide with the least-risky choices we could make)  We Must Represent Above All Others