This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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February 2008
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WFB

First Myron Cope, now William F Buckley Jr..

Goodbye Myron Cope

I never followed sports and so was not a fan and did not spend any time listening to or watching his work… but for a brief time around 1995 or so I worked part time at the radio station where he was based and bumped into him a few times and I think I even worked with him once when I produced one of the football games. (Something I only did once or twice.) He was as much a character in person as he was on the air.

Anyway, I know a lot of folks from the ‘Burg have fond memories of Myron cope, so I thought I’d pass this along.

Steelers Announcer Myron Cope Dies
(Alan Robinson, AP on Seattle Times)

Myron Cope, the screechy-voiced announcer whose colorful catch phrases and twirling Terrible Towel became symbols of the Pittsburgh Steelers during an unrivaled 35 seasons in the broadcast booth, has died. He was 79.

Cope’s tenure from 1970-2004 as the color analyst on the Steelers’ radio network is the longest in NFL history for a broadcaster with a single team and led to his induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2005.

Delegates from Nowhere

CNN has a bunch of delegate changes today. This kind of thing really makes me wish they had a specific change log, or that each day I was printing out the state by state totals so I could identify exactly where the changes are. But I haven’t been doing that, so I can just report the changes and speculate.

Hillary must really hate how her week is going. There isn’t even an election this week, but she keeps falling further behind anyway. CNN added 47 more delegates to their counts today. 33 were for Obama, 14 for Clinton. Now, as I said above, I don’t know where exactly they are getting these from. Maybe they just finished a new poll of the superdelegates and this is more superdelegates declaring preferences? Or maybe this is more results from stage 2 or stage 3 of the delegate selection process in the states with multi-stage processes? Or maybe this is just CNN adding official results from states from earlier in February where they only had partial counts before? I dunno. Like I said, this makes me wish I was printing the full stats out each day so I could see exactly where the differences were coming from. There, I printed today’s. Just in case there are more changes before Tuesday’s primaries.

In any case, Obama does widen his lead here. We are now at Obama 51.2%, Clinton 47.8%, Edwards 1.0%. Obama needs 665 more delegates to win. Clinton needs 756. Edwards… well, Edwards could win every delegate still outstanding and it would not be enough. Sorry Edwards.

OK, the Republican side is even more interesting. There is a net gain of only 5 delegates. However, there has also been a redistribution of delegates. Romney LOST 24 delegates today. Presumably this is the result either of second stage caucuses where some Romney supporters from the first round changed their votes and elected non-Romney delegates in round two, or just Romney delegates publicly stating they had changed their preference. As before though, there is no easy way to tell by looking at CNN’s summary page EXACTLY what happened yesterday. In the end though, the result was that Romney lost 24, McCain gained 23, and Huckabee gained 6. This gets Huckabee within spitting distance of overtaking Romney in the delegate count. I’m sure Huckabee really hopes this happens before McCain reaches the magic number, so he can claim that he came in second and then drop out.

Totals at this point… McCain 65.8%, Romney 17.3%, Huckabee 15.8%, Paul 1.1%. McCain needs to get 197 more delegates to finally have the majority of delegates coming into the convention.

There were some vague rumors of Romney jumping back in if the lobbiest affair scandal caused McCain to implode. Yeah, good luck on that Romney.

I must say though, the politics-as-sports junkie in me would be THRILLED if McCain imploded after he got a majority of the delegates, but before the convention… giving the delegates a chance to change their minds and just pick someone else at random. That would be very very cool.

Ohio Debate

I just finished watching it on a bit of a delay… Obama just kept his cool the whole time. Clinton kept trying to get in punches, but none of them seemed to take hold, and certainly none got under his skin and got him to respond hottly.

Clinton did nothing to help herself here. I stand by my earlier prediction that she will lose Texas… probably by a decent margin, and that she will possibly lose Ohio as well… but even if she pulls out a win in Ohio, it won’t be enough. And I don’t think she’ll try to push forward further if that happens. If she does she’ll start looking like Huckabee (even though the margins won’t be nearly that large) and only further damage her Senate career. She will know it is time to cut her losses.

She will drop out within 48 hours of the polls closing Tuesday. Probably on March 5th.

She can go on to be the Senate Majority Leader. That will be a fine spot for her.