With much celebration, Kentucky and Oregon brings “the milestone” to Senator Barak Obama - that of the majority of pledged delegates. Yet, Hillary Clinton agues that Florida and Michigan - discounted as a punishment to those states because they presumed to change their primary election dates without permission from the DNC - would deliver her the popular majority of votes.

Hence, the “dreaded milestone”. Democrats cannot escape the difficulty they have created for themselves - having to themselves reject who they think should the first woman president or the first black president.

Couple this with the complete mismanagement by the DNC of the primaries with a system designed to divide people who would typicaly be of like mind - now add the Florida and Michigan debacles. The democrats cannot even effectively manage their own primary process. Hillary’s campaign is $12-odd million in debt and someone - presumably the DNC or Obama - is going to have to buy that debt from her campaign before she will go away.

And with all this, people think the Democrats can actually lead the country. Interesting.

This is a dream campaign - man oh man!

I was in despair - truly. My thinking was we Republicans didn’t really have the best candidate running for president. Yet, John McCain has managed to settle my stomach a bit. As we get closer to the convention, my distrust has turned to reservations, which are now turning into “this will be ok”. I will trust, but verify.

Now, my tepid to luke warm to warming up feeling about our candidate must be something others like me feel as well. And as I keep an eye on the Democratic candidates, something hits me. Right on the noggin, where it does me some good.

Regardless of the family feud we have in the Republican party - we will coalesce. At the worst, we will do so out of far of the alternative - but I think it will be more than that. I think people are warming to John McCain. He has been talking the right talk and looking presidential. The Democrats, on the other hand, are it this knuckle and skull. They are not playing party politics - Hillary and Obama are playing for keeps.

This is good.

I have seen this same protracted battle for dominance out at the dog play area at the city park. Total seriousness on the part of the competitors.  I will tell you why this is. These folks are running for more than to be the president. That’s big enough, but each of these candidates thinks they will make history. They will be in the history books for 500 years. They are running for a spot in history and there is no way either of them is just going to say, “yeah, I should probably bow out”. There is too much at stake.

Keep fighting, Hillary! Keep fighting, Barak! You are both going to be the most successful “almost got elected” people in US history and I love you for it. You rock!

Hillary and money seem to be like oil and water - they don’t mix unless you shake really, really hard.

Her campaign is 10.3 million dollars in debt. I wonder what she would do with the US treasury.

Just saying.

It appears that Bubba is not liking the looks of the campaign these days - he really wants to sleep in the White House again.

“It was one of the worst political meetings I have ever attended,” one superdelegate said.

According to those at the meeting, Clinton - who flew in from Chicago with bags under his eyes - was classic old Bill at first, charming and making small talk with the 15 or so delegates who gathered in a room behind the convention stage.

But as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how “sorry” she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a “Judas” for backing Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

“Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that,” a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media’s unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out.

“It was very, very intense,” said one attendee. “Not at all like the Bill of earlier campaigns.”

It is interesting though to see so many Clinton people push away from another Clinton administration.

“Hillary and Hypocrisy, live together in perfect harmony. Side by side on the campaign keyboard, oh Lord wait and seeeeeee…”

I thought one of the worst, yet memerable songs in music history was a perfect match for one of the worst, yet memerable campaigns in elections history.

Planted questions, Corkscrew landing, Tears, 3 AM, indicted fundraisers, and now this:

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign manager, Maggie Williams, earned about $200,000 on the board of a Long Island subprime lender that charged prepayment penalties - a practice that Clinton, a critic of the subprime industry, now seeks to eliminate.

Williams, who took over the reins of Clinton’s campaign in early February, served as a director on the board of the Woodbury-based Delta Financial Corp. from April 2000 until the firm declared bankruptcy in December, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records.

She was recruited by former New York City Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch, a Delta consultant. Her assignments were to create a new code of “best practices,” and to improve the company’s crisis management operation in the wake of state and federal predatory lending probes that resulted in a $12 million payout to borrowers.

Just, wow.

Old Goat wonders why we are so bent on re-electing Bill Clinton.

I keep hearing Hilliary say she has experience and Barrack Obama does not. I think she slept in the White House, she was married to the President, she meddled in the Travel Office staffing, she removed all the GWB keys from the computer keyboard before her husband left office, but I don’t recall her having ANY official status when it came to running the country. Especially at 3:00 am.

The (probably horribly insensitive) question that keeps coming to my mind is, if Hillary knew so much about what was going on in the White House while Bill was president, how come she didn’t know he was getting honked by an aide in the oval office? Or was that at 4AM?

The timing of this is insidious. There are a couple of things to note:

1) The release of Hillary Clinton’s schedules is being coordinated with “representatives of Hillary Clinton”

2) The Clinton rep thought the National Archives was being to stringent on which papers to release - meaning they wanted more schedules released.

3) The Clinton rep has asked a judge NOT to release phone records for another year or two.  the National Archives certainly would not do this as they have no reason to withhold the phone records.

The aim of getting these papers released is to float schedules that show how much “experience” Hillary has without having the associated phone records, which could show a great deal more about Hillary than she wants anyone to see before an election.

None of this matter. From the Democratic Party standpoint, Hillary is the “establishment” candidate running against a “change” candidate. Her support is going to continue to wane, as her contributions already have.

We reported only recently that Hillary had lent her campaign $5 million of her own cash. It didn’t help much. She just is not raising the kind of money it will take to stay in this race, especially considering that public records show her campaign to be almost $7 million in debt.

She is raising about$10 million per month less than Obama, and still trying to spend what Obama is spending.

Ain’t gonna do it! Texas won’t help, Ohio won’t matter.

This is the end.

I am doing some business travel this week - spending time in the cold hitting the Midwest. I had forgotten the ear-biting cold that sub-zero temperatures bring, but it is something I will remember for a month or two now. I think it is going to be something Hillary feels as well - I will tell you why.

There are not dramatic differences between the politics of Hillary and the Politics of Barak. Small nuances to most democrats, who are generally ambivalent toward the thing that solidifies most Republicans - the war. So, the choice seems to be who believes what I believe and who is going to be a good representative to the international community. These are not my words - it’s what I hear. A lot of it is the exact same reason Hillary feels she needs to have little emotional moments. He is genuinely personable and she is genuinely not.

In the airports, shuttles, rental agencies, hotel lobbies, diners, everywhere you go - What I see is Barak Obama has sold a lot of books lately. Buying a book and reading it in public is a commitment to my way of thinking. It is more of a surety than investigating someone you might like to know more about. You don’t do that in public.

I am not a fan of this guy’s politics and this is not an endorsement. I am just calling this the way I see it. People are intrigued with Barak, they want to know who he is.
Hillary should be very concerned by what I see.

If John McCain gets the party nomination, we are going to have a Democrat in the White House on January 20th, 2009. It’s that simple.

McCain has held conservatives and conservative principles in disdain as his evolution to left-of-center politics reaches its peak. He wants your vote now.

The Republican frontrunner for president, Sen. John McCain, promoted his conservative bona fides on Face The Nation, while also admitting that, should he win the GOP nomination, he would likely not win the general election without the backing of the party’s conservative base.

Guess what? I am not supporting, nor voting for the Mav. I would rather spend my energy working to get the right people into Congress. that’s where the battles are going to be fought. This Pyhrric victory syndrome we Republicans are engaged in is ridiculous.

There is a lot of weak tea rhetoric going out right now:

• Our duty as Republicans - we owe it to our party to vote for McCain no matter what
• McCain is better than the other two
• We can vote for McCain without violating our principles
• Four years of a Democrat in the White House will ruin the nation
• We should separate ourselves from the issues and just vote along party lines

Let me tell you - that’s crap. It is outright hackery.

• You want to know what we owe our party? The strength of our Republican principles.
• McCain is not better than the other two - he is unpredictable, which makes him much more dangerous. That is why they call him the Maverick, right? Politically, that’s what they are referring to.
• You cannot vote for someone who denounces your principles, and calls you foolish for having them, without having abandoned them. It is delusional to think that your vote does not directly correspond to your beliefs. That is a play right out of the John Kerry play book.
• Four years of a Democrat in the White House can be harmful to our ideas of government - if we abdicate the congress to the left as well. Work hard to support solid Republicans with solid voting records to the front line positions in the Senate and House. That is where the judicial nominations battles will be fought. That is where the health care battles will be fought.
• The party lines have been blurred beyond recognition by the likes of John McCain. With it, many of our pundits are dithering and quibbling about how “we gotta win”. There is no win in the White House this fall - triage this race and you will see what the choices are.

I am voting for Romney in the primary elections because I believe he is more open to input from constituents. I am not thrilled to do so, but I am beyond looking for political purity here. However, let me offer a prediction:

John McCain will get the Republican Nomination - and he will then choose Joe Lieberman as his running mate. This solidifies several things for him:

• “Proves” he can work across party lines
• Garners a lot of Democrat votes in key states
• Levels the polls playing field and throws the current statistical models out the window.
• Removes his need for conservatives in order to win in November.
• Creates the one scenario that neither Hillary, nor Obama can defeat with the relative ease the pundits think this race is going to exude

RNC, you are on notice. Strap a two-by-four to your back while you un-screw the motivations of Republican policy and recover your spine. We’re done with the status quo and not giving a dime until you get back on target of smaller government, individual freedom, less spending, and the sanctity of life. Call us together, when you are ready to talk.

I told you, there will be a Democrat in the White House in November. The question is whether or not that person is registered as a Democrat.