Meanwhile,
Al Gore Resurfaces for the DSCC...(Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee)

http://tinyurl.com/3m4mvz

There's more...

On C-Span, this morning,
Representative Brown CLEARLY explained that
the Florida legislation
set the date for the democratic primary.

And the Florida legislation is REPUBLICAN.

The FL democrats could do nothing about this.

And the DNC IS PUNISHING Florida Democrats
and denying them of their right to have their
votes counted.

Brown also clearly explained that Florida democrats
 wanted a revote.  They could not achieve this because
OBAMA OPPOSED THIS REVOTE.

I ask you.  Why is Obama fit to be president of this
democracy?

It is clearly time to get the DNC back from cultists,
and into the hands of the democrats.

It is clearly time to elect a true democrat.

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It's clear what the Clinton campaign wants out of tomorrow's DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting:

Also on the conference call, the campaign repeated what it said it earlier in the week: that it wants the full Florida and Michigan delegations to be seated; that it wants them seated according to the January primary votes in each state; and that the "uncommitted" votes in Michigan can't be given to Obama -- they must remain uncommitted.

"We are hopeful and confident that after hearing all the arguments and hearing all the facts ... that all the delegates will be seated and all of them will have a full vote," Ickes said.

Greg Sargent clarifies Ickes's point:

Ickes' position is apparently not that these delegates never go to a candidate. It's that the Committee can't pick which candidate they go to -- at the Convention, the uncommitteds can support whomever they wish. Of course, under this scenario, they wouldn't count in Obama's column in the short term, while hers would count.

Does anyone really think Clinton will get what she wants? Not even Clinton supporter Lanny Davis appears to as he has proposed some alternate solutions for Michigan's delegates.

The fairest would be to allocate those 57 [uncommitted] pledged delegates, to Clinton and Obama by the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary. Or perhaps one Solomonic compromise, more generous to Obama than to Clinton, would be to divide the remaining delegates approximately 50-50 between the two of them, 28-27 (giving Clinton the extra delegate since she led in all the latest statewide polls prior to Jan. 15).

Marc Ambinder seems to think the latter is the most likely scenario.

Based on reporting and some guesswork, here is one possible scenario... and note, the numbers aren;t exact, but they're approximately correct: Florida's delegation is restored in full. Each delegate gets a half of a vote; in this scenario, Hillary Clinton would pick up 62 votes and Barack Obama would pick up about 43 for a net gain of 19.

More later on the various FL/MI scenarios/behind the scenes machinations. I'm at the airport in between flights, on my way to Puerto Rico. Will be able to catch up and update later tonight.

There's more...

As we learned yesterday from The AP, DNC lawyers have confirmed that the Rules & Bylaws Committee is not authorized to restore the full delegations of Florida and Michigan even if it were inclined to do so:

A Democratic Party rules committee has the authority to seat some delegates from Michigan and Florida but not fully restore the two states as Hillary Rodham Clinton wants, according to party lawyers.

Democratic National Committee rules require that the two states lose at least half of their convention delegates for holding elections too early, the party's legal experts wrote in a 38-page memo.

"Lose at least half" is a slightly different scenario than FL DNC member Jon Ausman suggested this week was the likely result of Saturday's meeting:

"I think we're moving toward half votes for everybody," DNC member Jon Ausman said of his appeal to be heard Saturday by the DNC's rules and bylaws committee. That would mean superdelegates would have the same vote as pledged delegates.

In other words, Florida Democrats would have the same say in the presidential nominee as Democrats in Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands.

Considering just Florida, it's interesting to look at the difference between these two scenarios: cutting the delegations in half vs. giving the full delegations half votes. As Chuck Todd points out, the distinction has real world implications:

As for the actual meeting itself, there's one more angle you ought to be aware of: a 50% cut and a halving of the delegates is not the same thing. For instance, if Florida delegates are seated in their entirety, but only have their vote counted as a .5, then Clinton will net approximately 19 delegates out of the state. But if the delegation is cut in half, that's done in every congressional district as well as statewide, then suddenly Clinton's advantage is only a net of six. That's right, the complicated nature of the DNC delegate selection process will be a good reminder to math majors everywhere that a 50% cut is not the same as a halving of an individual number.

Of course, whether Clinton nets 6, 19 or the full 38 FL delegates  she hopes to get out of Saturday's meeting, she still won't catch Obama in the overall delegate count. As DemConWatch's handy chart demonstrates, even with FL & MI fully counted, Obama still leads Clinton by more than 100. But then again, for Clinton, the Michigan/Florida crusade ceased to be about delegates a while ago.

There's more...

In a possible preview of things to come on Saturday, The St. Petersburg Times is reporting that Florida DNC member Jon Ausman has revealed that the DNC is leaning toward giving Florida's delegates half votes at the convention (h/t TPM):

"I think we're moving toward half votes for everybody," DNC member Jon Ausman said of his appeal to be heard Saturday by the DNC's rules and bylaws committee. That would mean superdelegates would have the same vote as pledged delegates.

In other words, Florida Democrats would have the same say in the presidential nominee as Democrats in Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands.

Ausman, you may recall, is the author of one of the appeals being heard on Saturday. This is how Ben Smith described it in April:

Ausman's two-pronged appeal asked to reinstate all of Florida's 23 superdelegates, and to give Florida at least half of its pledged delegates back -- his reading of the rules dictates that stripping the superdelegates and reducing the number of pledged delegates by more than fifty percent is prohibited.

Many people have felt that this should have been the sanction levied against MI & FL from the beginning and Terry McCauliffe admitted on Hardball recently that if the DNC had merely stripped MI & FL of half of their delegates from the beginning, "we wouldn't be sitting here talking about Michigan and Florida today." But to the extent that it differs from the Clinton campaign's stated goal of a full seating of both delegations, one does wonder, assuming this is the best remedy Clinton can hope for out of the RBC meeting on Saturday, which I think it is, what her reaction to it will be. The upside for Hillary is that it would serve as an official ratification of January's primaries by the DNC, which by definition puts those popular votes in play. The downside is that it's, well, far short of what she's asked for, which from a practical standpoint means the delegate threshold Barack would need to cross to win the nomination is lower than the 2209 the Clinton campaign regularly touts, and hence more readily reachable.

Update [2008-5-28 3:47:58 by Todd Beeton]:Tommy Flanagan brings us news from The AP that we should not expect full restoration of the Michigan and Florida delegations out of Saturday's meeting. Ya don't say.

A Democratic Party rules committee has the authority to restore delegates from Michigan and Florida but not fully seat the two states at the convention as Hillary Rodham Clinton wants, according to a party analysis.

Party rules require that the two states lose at least half of their convention delegates for holding elections too early, Democratic National Committee lawyers wrote in a 38-page memo.

The memo was sent late Tuesday to the 30 members of the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee, which plans to meet Saturday to consider the fate of convention delegates from the two states. The party is considering plans to restore at least some of the delegates to make sure the two important general election battlegrounds will be included at the nominating convention in August.

There's more...