Why all the hubbub about John Kerry being the target of dirty tricks? When the arrows were flying in Howard Dean's direction the media made not a peep. The only dirty trick so far against Kerry is the doctored Hanoi Jane photo. I'm not counting as a 'dirty trick' the story about Kerry's intern problem because it has not been disproved.
       Who are the tricksters? Where there's smoke there's fire, so let's run through a quick listing of all the tricks I can find and see who benefited--

Seattle: Deaniacs catch incorrect delegate counts for many precinct caucuses	Beneficiary: would have been Kerry
Seattle: Kucinich caucus delegates are incorrectly recorded	Beneficiary: Kerry
Iowa: Man claiming to be from Massachusetts discourages Dean caucusers at the front door.	Beneficiary: Kerry
Iowa: Late night calls from "Dean campaign" give out wrong caucus address	Beneficiary: GQ says Kerry
Iowa: As Dean narrows gap with Kerry, push-pollers ask voters "if they knew" Judy Dean is Jewish, "if they knew" Dean performed abortions, "if they knew" he dodged the draft, "if they knew" he supports gay marriage.	Beneficiary: Kerry
New Hampshire: Kerry mailing brands Dean "unstable and unqualified", Clark a "Republican"	Beneficiary: Kerry
New Hampshire: Rumors spread that Dean cut down 1000s of Vermont trees	Beneficiary: ABC says Kerry

Draw your own conclusions.

Sidebar: Here's a piece from Alternet that parallels some of the things I've written about how Howard Dean has basically been screwed by the Democratic establishment.

More on the Scream: in an article picked up by a few ABC affiliate websites, Diane Sawyer describes how Dean was just yelling along with his supporters, but that his microphone, like those used by reporters, served to isolate his voice from the crowd noise. But TV and radio didn't include that. They just played the Scream over 600 times.

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Just to show you how careful we have to be about trusting our voting to electronic systems, see today's Seattle Times article, about the naughty boys to whom they literally handed (yes: literally, not figuratively) the keys to the elections department. Their company, Global Election Systems, printed absentee ballots for King County. Their work was so good that they were contracted to create software for use in managing voter registration, candidate filings and voting district boundaries. That was before company head Jeffrey Dean was discovered to be a convicted embezzler, and one of his employees a convicted drug dealer.
       The story was originally broken by Bev Harris on her excellent site blackboxvoting.org. Guess how Dean carried out his theft: through the sophisticated alteration of computer records. And Harris also revealed that Dean helped program Diebold's v1.96 optical scanning system used in Seattle. Dean's company was eventually sold-- to Diebold. The county ended the contract, and is now set to buy another system. But we must still be watchful, as the new system is made by-- Diebold.

Speaking of irregularities, you may (or may not) be surprised that problems have been reported with the tallying of votes in last weekend's Democratic caucuses. The paper votes and delegate allocations are taken to a central location in Seattle, where they are entered into a spreadsheet. But it seems there is no process for verifying that the paper data matches the spreadsheet data. Two intrepid Deaniacs from the 36th District went to check the vote for their caucus. They discovered it was recorded completely wrong, with 1 (Howard) Dean delegate entered into the spreadsheet when there ought to have been 4. The delegate count (precinct 1699) now shows the correct 4 delegates. Errors were also found in a dozen other precincts. Note that Dean only beat Kerry in the 36th District by 12 delegates. See two posts at radio guy Mike Webb's site for the firsthand account.  

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As promised, I made an appearance at my precinct caucus, held along with many others in the lunchroom of the lovely Northgate Elementary School. It was phenomenal, several hundred people packed into the room, with 30 neighbors and myself just from our precinct. Statewide, TWICE as many citizens caucused than had been expected, for a total of about 200,000.
       The statewide results were Kerry on top with about 48%, Dean another disappointing second with 30%, and Kucinich a welcome third with 8%. In my precinct, the delegate breakdown was Dean 2, Kerry 2, Kucinich 1, and Uncommitted 1. Actually, Dean won the three most densely populated legislative districts, the 36th, 43rd and 37th. But it appears Kerry and the Electability Express ran away with it everywhere else.
       So in the national scheme of things, is Dean finished? Probably. But he still has the 2nd most delegates, and his views need to be heard. Kerry has shown every indication that he'll try to make Dean irrelevant during the rest of the process, in favor of Edwards or Clark. Huh. Kerry, Edwards and Clark-- all so-called moderates acceptable to the Demo Leadership Council. But in my view they all have something wrong with them: Kerry-- insider, in pocket of lobbyists; voted for the war. Edwards-- imagine Bush repeating the words "trial lawyer" ad nauseum. Clark-- ran the School of the Americas, didn't reform it; may have tolerated war criminals in the Balkans. What grates on me more is how Sharpton (managed, we now know, by a GOP dirty-tricks operative) started sticking pins in Dean over minority Cabinet appointees in Vermont, and Kerry and Edwards (and Gephardt and Lieberman, etc.) just stood there and let him bleed. No, only Carol Moseley Braun stepped up to defend Dean.
       No, Kerry will have to be on the convention dais in Boston waving to the crowd with the figurative crown on his head before I'll support him.

Sidebar: In remarks to the AP's David Bauder, CNN General Manager Princell Hair has admitted that airing Dean's 'scream' 633 times was overplaying it. But, Hair said "It was a big story... the challenge in a 24-hour news network is that you try to keep all of your different viewers throughout the day informed without overdoing it." In the same story CBS News President Andrew Heyward agreed that 'I Have A Scream' was covered more than editorially justified. "It's just inherent in the structure of the news media today, especially with the role that 24-hour cable plays." Oh, boo hoo.

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...was the girl I took to my senior prom. This is instructive vis-a-vis the Democratic Presidential race, bear with me.
       Brunhilde was distracted. "Do you think Yitzhak would go out with me, even though I'm German?" Brunhilde (not her real name) was an incredibly gorgeous blonde Aryan type, and sharp as a tack academically. In fact, she was Harvard-bound and today, I'm told, a principled attorney. But at this point she was still a typically insecure 11th grader, albeit one with enough extracurricular accomplishments and school spirit to give her the cool points to be accepted in several cliques. In fact, she bestrode three cliques like... well, like a female Colossus: The English Literaturati, the Journalistas/Student Councillors, and the Jocks.
       For my part I had managed to become looked upon with favor by the first two. I had already discovered Cliffs Notes, so I had the ability to sit quietly in the back of English Lit class, occasionally waking up long enough contribute comments that sounded like I'd read the book. You know the person who would say things like "David Balfour struck me as a character too naive to be believable in the 'adventure' genre"? That was me. I gained entrance into the Journalistas because I was into photography at the time; it was sort of like joining Drama Club to operate the light board. But my pictures ran in the school paper (and, eventually, a few times in one of the city dailies). More importantly, I got to arrange my schedule so that I had a three-hour lunch every day of my senior year: 4th period journalism, 'official' lunch, then TV production.
       Others had worked out the same arrangement, and we would pair off to sneak off-campus to the Pizza Pete or the deli (one of only two actual delis in town at the time). Often my lunch partner was Brunhilde. She liked Yitzhak (also not his real name), another hyper-intelligent type like herself who, I suppose, could have been called handsome. But it was one of those situations where Yitzhak acted like he didn't know Brunhilde was alive-- or if he did, that she was female.
       Thus her concern that her Germanic heritage was the source of his Jewish disinterest. "Well Brun," I replied, resisting the urge to remark about Yitzhak annexing her Sudetenland, "I hear he has a girlfriend who goes to another school." She thought about this for a while, but then turned the conversation to her best friend Kerry who, for some reason, I was sort-of-dating and had already asked to the prom. "Do you know where you're taking her to dinner?" was what Brun might have asked me next, but I can't be sure because I was probably distracted by her tube top.
       Because the truth was that SHE was the one I wanted to take to the prom. But I was "sure" that Brun would never go with me, so, desperate to NOT be stag at the prom I hooked up with Kerry. And so when the big night came, I was miserable as I watched Brun dance with her date-- OF COURSE-- Yitzhak. Miserable, even though I now see Brun was not my type at all despite her great looks-- self-important and not very sensitive. In short she was an image, and not the person I thought she was. I know now that had I switched dates I would have been even more miserable.
       Here's where my story becomes relevant to the Democratic primaries.
       OF COURSE John Kerry is the current frontrunner, it's what the DNC has always wanted. If you think back to the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, there was a drumbeat of anti-Dean rhetoric that with hindsight was undoubtedly choreographed. All the six other candidates were ganging up, Dean even remarked at one point that he was tired of being a pincushion. When he did, that was the first hole in his armor, immediately you began to read commentaries about Dean's "quick temper". Caution about Dean's supposed thin skin and stubbornness were suddenly everywhere. "Is he Presidential? Is he electable?"
       Today Dean is portrayed as self destructing; "imploding" is the label in vogue. But the infamous "I have a scream" speech so widely portrayed as the beginning of Dean's end is NOT the root of it, because it came AFTER Iowans had cast their votes. He had already lost. So the damage to Dean was not self-inflicted, it came from what we now can call Operation Pincushion. And you can bet that Terry McAuliffe, the man who took Dubya too lightly and blew the 2000 election, was behind it. McAuliffe, the DNC and its DLC shadow have never been comfortable with Dean, Vermont has few electoral votes and Dean as Governor showed himself willing to buck the party line. The DNC probably decided Dean had to be stopped because being a D wasn't enough, he had to be one of their Ds. On the inside. One of the boys. Someone they've done favors for, and who owed them favors in return.
       John Forbes Kerry is one of the boys. Witness the disclosure that he is one of the biggest congressional recipients of special interest money in the last 15 years. Why IS he considered "electable"? Because of his stands on defense and foreign affairs? He voted for the Iraq invasion. On health care? He's received big bucks from HMOs and Big Pharmaceutical, how can he be an effective reformer? Maybe it's because he's got good hair, is reasonably good-looking (and I've been told by a Kerry cousin that he definitely isn't using botox) and his initials are JFK.
       The whole "electability" thing is maddening. Has everyone been watching too much so-called Reality TV? The Democratic primaries are being played out as if it should be called "Joe Candidate". Will America choose the hard-working Average Joe candidate who's a good talker and is right on the issues? Or are they going to go for the hunk the producers bring in as a surprise to shake things up? Hey people: your candidate is electable if enough of you vote for him (don't give up you Kucinich people). Despite the media's deathwatch over his campaign, the fact is that Howard Dean is in second place in the delegate count. He's still right there in it.
       So I'm not going to support Kerry unless he gives me a reason to, or until he locks up the nomination. Therefore, I'm going to do the same thing I did at the prom-- I'm going to dance with the one I brought. So this Saturday I'm going to my precinct caucus and support Howard Dean. Because the U.S. Presidency is not a high school-level popularity contest. OR Reality TV. Evidence to the contrary.

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In a recent entry I lamented suffering SIX flats since putting Specialized's "Turbo Pro Classic ATB" tires on my everyday bike. That was an average of 20 miles between flats. Well I am now pleased to report that their successors, the "Tom Slick 1.0" by Ritchey have completed a full week and 40 miles without giving up any air. Cheers to Ritchey, and nothing but Jeers for Specialized.

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