the rules

The popular vote total needs to include Michigan and Florida - according to the rules, anyway.

...The popular vote totals in Florida and Michigan must be honored unless a revote is done. The DNC has no, nada, zip authority to discount the popular vote. That the media, the DNC and the Obama campaign have been complicit in this clear misrepresentation of the rules and blatant attempt to silence voters is reprehensible and wrong.

Obama must gain 2209 pledged delegates, or else the entire thing is to be decided by superdelegates. Not superdelegates who are honor-bound to vote for the pledged delegate leader, but superdelegates who are honor-bound to vote for what is best for the party. Their judgment is the basis of their decision.

I actually don't care which set of rules we use - let's be super technical or let's try to discern the will of the voters; either standard is okay with me. But I would like it to be one standard, applied consistently.

It's clear that Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida all violated the same rule and should be treated the same. But that's not what happened. While the rules designate a 50 percent delegate reduction, the DNC imposed the death penalty - a 100 percent reduction - on Florida and Michigan. Amazingly, the other "rule-breakers" got no penalty at all.

But we are told that rules are rules and the rules say certain key DNC members can throw out the will of the voters as much or as little as they like. But why then the whining about Michigan's vote not being "fair"? Hillary Clinton won the most votes in those states. Sorry if Obama doesn't like that fact. But nobody forced Obama to take his name off that MI ballot.

And the DNC is downright shady when it suggests that, by stripping all the delegates instead of only half, they are also stripping the popular vote count. Who gave them the right to do that?

The rules cannot tell a state or its voters whether the results of a legal election are valid; they only govern the selection of delegates to the national convention...

...The rules do not say that the votes of Florida Democrats do not count. Indeed, the penalty established by the DNC's own rules is based upon the results of the primary; therefore, the results of the primary must be valid.

Oh - and, either way, the damage may already have been done. The DNC looks crooked. The election looks rigged. And a significant number of people are going to be joining the protest vote against Obama if he is the nominee, and, yes, for a lot of people that's going to mean voting for McCain. (But don't worry. A lot of people will be voting for McCain just because they honestly think he's better than Obama.)