Pollster John Zogby was a guest yesterday on the Wisconsin Public Radio Ideas Network show "Conversations With Kathleen Dunn", primarily to talk about the poll released by his company recently, showing Nader at 5%.  However, Zogby also made a bold prediction, much to the astonishment of Dunn:

Zogby predicted that neither Obama nor Clinton would end up being the Democratic nominee coming out of the convention.  Since neither seems likely to win outright based on pledged and super delegate support, Zogby predicted that "party elders" would gather in Denver (he mentioned people like Jimmy Carter, Nancy Pelosi, etc., and danced around the idea of Gore being present, because Gore, he noted, might benefit from the outcome of such a meeting) and ultimately submit a compromise candidate for the Convention to nominate.

Certainly it's an intriguing idea, and it surprised the heck out of Dunn, and Dunn's following guest, Rachel Sklar, the Media and Special Projects Editor for HuffPo.  Not surprisingly, Sklar dismissed the prediction as pure fantasy.

Maybe, maybe.

The podcast is here, at the 9:00 am timeslot.

Cross-posted at MyDD.

If it seems too good to be true, it may still be true.  Today, Hillary Clinton garnered more votes than any other candidate in the Florida primary; more votes than all the candidates combined in the South Carolina primary.  Never-the-less, the dKos Obamagaga meme is that Hillary garnered nothing.  Won nothing.  Florida is irrelevant.  The votes of Floridians are irrelevant, and Clinton is a lying, dishonest, self-serving, cheating bitch for telling Floridians that she'd fight to have their votes count in Denver.  She may not have campaigned, or advertised in Florida they way Obama didn't, but she's still a lying, dishonest, self-serving, cheating bitch, by god.

Since voter disenfranchisement is a Republican franchise now being bought by some Democrats, it seems only fitting to offer up yet another pie recipe.

Yes, it's true! This past weekend was a bonanza for Presidential candidates, as they all picked up BIG ENDORSEMENTS IN IOWA!

As the race in Iowa comes down to the wire, with the top tier candidates entangled in a messy three-way (get yer minds outta the gutter!  Bill Clinton is not one of the candidates this year, and I'm not talkin' 'bout Ghouliani - we're talking Dem candidates here!), Big Endorsements are starting to fly fast and furiously.

So, which of our outstanding Dem candidates garnered BIG ENDORSEMENTS over the weekend, and who endorsed them?  Follow me across the chasm!

I don't know about you, but I'm in a rut.

Time was, some forty or fifty thousand UIDs ago, that one could log onto dKos and find several good pie recipes posted on a daily basis. "Old-timers honored the unspoken dictum that if a poll did not have a "pie" option, pie must be provided in the comments!  

How did "pie" come about?  Too many kossacks don't seem to know the answer to that, but, as is often the case, dkosopedia is our friend and provides the answer.  

Unfortunately, the Great Partisan War of '07-'08 has changed everything.  All-too-often there is, alas, no pie.  Even worse, I've begun to discover that, when I address a comment in a diary with a poll that has no pie, I'm finding myself using the same three or four recipes over and over, to make my point:  "Transparent Pie", "Water Pie" and "Hypocrite Pie", most especially.  Put another way, I'm in a rut, folks, and I need some help expanding my Pie Recipe Box!

And so, on the other side, I present to you a beginning Pie Recipe File, using some of my old standbys, with usage guidelines:

Today is the 9th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance - a day to take a bit of time to acknowledge some of the transgender individuals who have been murdered or died in some fashion, simply because of who they are.

Because TDR falls so close to the Thanksgiving break this year, here in Madison we held our remembrance events last Thursday, with the public reading of names on the campus "quad" during the day; that evening we had more: a couple of speeches, a performance artist and a short candlelight vigil with another reading of names.  Those events were part of a 9-day long "Transgender Awareness Week", with some amazing events and programs, including a well-attended "Transgender Monologues" event, presenting experiences from local trans people.

Transactivist wrote a diary on TDR in Minnesota yesterday.  Make sure to check it out, then join me for a bit more after the break.

Today is the 11th National Coming Out Day I've celebrated as an "out" gay man, and while that's been an important part of my personal growth, it places a distant second from my other "coming out" experience - the fall of 1998, when I finally understood that coming out, for me at least, had to mean something far more than simply telling people "I'm gay".  It meant taking a stand and advocating for those who, for whatever reason, might not be able to come out, or suffer negative consequences for coming out.

Wayne "Marriage is between one man and one woman" Allard's decision to retire has left Dems with a chance to turn purple Colorado somewhat bluer, with popular Representative Mark Udall (CO-2) preparing to face off against former Rep. Bob Schaffer (CO-4). Four years ago Schaffer lost a brusing primary battle against Pete Coors, for the opportunity to face-off against Ken Salazar in a battle to replace retiring Sen Ben Knighthorse Cambpell.

Military recruiting during wartime is hard werk, y'know.  Almost as hard a clearin' brush offa ranch that don't have no cows.

We've been hearing for some time that the military has had a rough time recruiting and there's been some hoopla made over the fact that recruiting standards have been lowered, but two recent new stories have suggested that it's now so bad that recruiters are trolling internet job sites and ... paintball businesses.

C'mon, paratrooper.  You know you wanna jump.

Nothing is more frustrating to me than the abuse of History.  History, like Science, presents certain fundamental points of reference - facts, if you will, although I recognize that the premise of Science is that there is no fact; only things which haven't been proved false.

Certainly, people interpret the meaning of facts, or the circumstances surrounding fact, in different ways, and usually in favor of whoever is doing the interpretation, but regardless of interpretation, fundamental truths remain fundamental.

Jump with me to learn more.

I've already told the story of how Weesie's Cookbook came to be, in the Chop Suey edition.  But if you're short of time, here's the Cliff Notes edition:

"Weesie" was my maternal grandmother, Lousie, who died in June, 2006. To everyone but her grandchilren, she was known as "Weesie" or "Aunt Weesie", and in a family of great cooks, she was widely acknowledged as "the best", and she collected recipes like mad.  In the mid/late-90s, as her eyesight rapidly deteriorated from macular degeneration, she asked my sister and I to enter some of her favorite recipes into our computers, enlarge the type and print them off for her so she could read them.  We began doing so during the 1998 Christmas season, and the project quickly grew into "Weesie's Cookbook".

So, turn the page to join my family, gathered in my Grandma's kitchen, the table covered with my laptop and hundreds of recipes - clipped from magazines, scribbled on envelopes, embedded in letters, handwritten on tattered, yellowing recipe cards - during the 1998 Christmas season:

Last June my family made a decision to remove my grandmother, Louise's (aka "Aunt Weesie") feeding tube.  It wasn't such a hard decision; she'd had a long, productive life, but had spent the last five years blind, in a nursing home and slowly sliding into dementia before a stroke put her into a comatose, paralyzed state.

Not surprisingly, her decline, and "Weesie’s Cookbook" both began with a diagnosis, in the late 90’s, of macular degeneration. As it turned out, it progressed rather rapidly and in another three years, she was completely blind and considered herself to be what she most feared - "a burden".  We, of course, didn't really see it that way, but how can one argue with grandma?

In her mid-80s at the time of the diagnosis, my grandmother wasn't terribly hip to the ways of technology, but she'd heard somewhere that "those computer things" could change font sizes, and so in November of 1998 I found myself talking on the phone to my sister.

Follow our conversation after the jump:

Reuters is reporting that a free-lance Somali journalist is claiming to have seen US troops "on the ground" working in collaboration with Ethopian troops.

"I was sure they were Americans in the helicopters, because we know they are in the area helping the Ethiopians. Then when we reached Kuldio, we saw them land, and the men got out.

The entire article can be found at Yahoo News

More on the dark side:

South Dakota voters, like voters in a number of other states this year, will be deciding on whether or not to amend the state constituion to prohibit not only same-sex marriage, but also, to paraphrase, "anything that looks like, smells like, or quacks like" marriage.  And it is looking like South Dakotans may give the hate-mongers a stunning set-back.  The full story is here:  http://www.365gay.com/...
Similar amendments, though some were not quite so extreme, were passed in 13 states during the last national election and it's not surprising that many putatively "liberal" pundits blamed gay marriage advocates, and the same-sex marriage spectacles in San Francisco, New Paltz, NY, Oregon, and other locations for drawing out "values voters" for Bush, by pushing too hard for same-sex marriage.  After all, we all remember that exit polling pinned votes against Kerry on gay marriage http://www.jsonline.com/...

That's all about to change, however....