With the Obama Veepstakes poll now concluded and Gov. Bill Richardson as your chosen running mate (which was covered by the Santa Fe Reporter) it's time to take this a step further:

Who would you like to see in an Obama cabinet?

Today you can vote on the next Secretary of Commerce:

The Secretary of Defense runoff poll between Chuck Hagel and Jim Webb was a real nailbiter. Results below the fold.

With the Obama Veepstakes poll now concluded and Gov. Bill Richardson as your chosen running mate (which was covered by the Santa Fe Reporter) it's time to take this a step further:

Who would you like to see in an Obama cabinet?

Thus far, Joe Biden won the Sec. of State poll and Michael Bloomberg won the Sec. of the Treasury poll (results below the fold). Today you can vote on the next Attorney General:

This is number six in a planned series of 50 entries between now and November, looking at each of the 50 states in terms of every race on that state's ticket--Presidential, Gubernatorial, Senate, House, State legislatures--the whole can o’ beans. Special attention paid to identifying and promoting the most important contests per state.

This time, we look at Massachusetts, the bluest state of them all.

   Working as a farm hand here on what could pass for Brokeback Mountain I figured it was incumbent upon me to do the full cowboy thing, going to town on Saturday to (D)rink (U)p (M)y (P)ay.

    Being past forty and Buddhist this looks a bit different than you might imagine.

With the Obama Veepstakes poll now concluded and Gov. Bill Richardson as your chosen running mate (which was covered by the Santa Fe Reporter) it's time to take this a step further:

Who would you like to see in an Obama cabinet?

Yesterday, Joe Biden won the Sec. of State poll (results below the fold). Today you can vote on the next Secretary of the Treasury:

With the Obama Veepstakes poll now concluded and Gov. Bill Richardson as your chosen running mate (which was covered by the Santa Fe Reporter) it's time to take this a step further:

Who would you like to see in an Obama cabinet?

Today you can vote on the next Secretary of State:

UPDATE: jeepdad was kind enough to point out a new Rasmussen poll from today showing Obama beating McCain by 12 PTS. Link  That pretty much makes this diary irrelevant, although I had fun doing it.    

According to the latest poll of a hypothetical McCain/Obama matchup in Massachusetts, Barack Obama beats McCain by only 2% (the poll has a 4.2% MOE).  The poll was conducted by SURVEY USA from Apr. 11-13 and can be found here.

Now, considering that Hillary beat Obama by a sound margin in the primary, it should come as no surprise that she does much better against McCain than Obama.  But I was shocked to see Obama doing so poorly in a state generally assumed to be reliably Democratic (how soon we all forget Weld and Romney).  Does anyone seriously believe Obama will lose MA?  Not really.  But my curiosity prompted me to look for an explanation of why Obama does so poorly.  The surprising findings follow....

SUSA has new GE polls out for some states...yeah, I know we like to say GE polls don't matter now, but superdelegates are going to make their decision on who is electable vs. who won the most votes/delegates...that will most likely be Obama, but if he's trailing in important states, the superdelegates' decision will be harder and less certain.

Anyway here are the polls;

There was a student conference on global warming at Boston University this weekend with a day of lobbying in support of a bill in the state house on Monday, Mass Power Shift, a regional edition of an earlier national conference.  I went to the plenary sessions on Friday and Saturday nights (who says I have no social life?) and the workshops during the day.  Over 600 people, mostly students, registered but the plenary sessions, held far from BU at the Boston Convention Center, had audiences of maybe 100, almost all students except for a smattering of aged malcontents like myself.

Saturday afternoon, Senator Kerry and Representative Markey and various state legislators talked with the group.  The Saturday evening plenary speaker was James Woolsey, the former Director of the CIA, on climate change and energy.

There were workshops on electronic organizing, barnraising solar, local agriculture, the nuts and bolts of lobbying, and many other subjects.

There were none on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and no speaker took our present war(s) as a central topic.  The war, for all intents and purposes, did not exist at the global warming conference.

You've probably noticed all of the diaries (e.g., this one, and here, and another) about mandating the purchase of health insurance after Elizabeth Edwards' comment that she "trusted" Hillary Clinton's plan for changing the health insurance system more than Barack Obama's because it included a mandate.  For my part, I thought Edwards' comments were an opportunity to take a bit more in-depth look at the Massachusetts system and where it falls short.  In Part One, I outlined the basics of the system.  Today I want to go into some detail about what I see as the basic failings of the structure that the legislation put into place. I know that other diarists have covered some of this, but I wanted to add my perspective and emphasize that this conversation about mandates is kind of beside the point. While a mandate may expand access to coverage for some, it is hardly the cure for what really ails the health care system: the out-of-control escalation in costs.

There are a few kinds of partisan divisions on the issue of health care reform and two of them exist on our side of the spectrum. First, the Obama-Clinton divide on mandating employer based care and second, the left has a structural divide between advocates of single-payer and employer based health care.

I live in Massachusetts and as a blogger at this site I am seriously disappointed that partisans of all varieties continue to trash and defame my state's efforts to address costs by mandating coverage. I am particularly incensed when partisans don't tell the truth about my state. And I think we need to have this discussion honestly because if we can't get real national reform that works for actual people in the next administration then we'll be ready for the proverbial fork.

I read the Why Elizabeth Edwards is Wrong diary and I think the diarist owes a correction, several of them actually. But this diary is not about Mrs. Edwards as she can speak for herself. This diary is about us having an honest dialog.

As detailed in this diary (and this one too), Elizabeth Edwards' comments about "trusting" Hillary Clinton's plan for mandated health insurance more than Obama's plan has reopened the debate here and elsewhere about requiring the purchase of health insurance.  Since I'm a Massachusetts resident with some familiarity with this topic,  I thought that now would be a good time to jump in and share some of my own conclusions (backed by a good deal of research) about what we can learn from the Massachusetts model. In taking us down this road, I want to make it clear that I DO NOT necessarily think that Obama's plan is really all that superior to Clinton's; I'm writing here to make it clear that this debate over mandates is probably not all that meaningful until our lawmakers finally reach the conclusion that a more wholesale kind of change is needed. Because there's a good bit of territory to cover, I'm going to break this up into a couple of parts, but if you're ready, follow me into Part 1, which lays out the design (in Part 2 tomorrow, I'll dissect how I think this model falls short)...

The fourth installment of the Grand Theft Auto series is due to be released in about 3 weeks, so it comes as no surprise that legislation restricting access to video games is back in the news. Because if you want to grandstand for votes, nothing says pandering like passing bills that claim to protect children & have virtually no chance of surviving a court challenge.

Debates about the content of movies, television, music, and video games & its effect on society, seem to occur in cycles. Either some kid shoots up a school, adolescent crime or sex statistics show a rise, or interest groups see an opening to start screaming about the need of protecting children, and armchair psychiatrists everywhere rush to judgments about what could possibly be corrupting young minds. Inevitably the wheel of public scrutiny turns to debating the effect of Jack Bauer, listening to hip-hop, or playing "Halo."

But is it really anyone else's responsibility to care about what children may see, except for parents who just maybe could monitor what their kids are watching? So in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, they've decided to take action.....

A prominent group of female politicians from Massachusetts is threatening to withhold support for the Democratic nominee should key superdelegates and Obama supporters to back revotes in Michigan and Florida.  Boston Globe columnist Joan Venochi reports in a particularly self-serving manner to perpetuate that Michigan and Florida are being thwarted by non other than Barack Obama.

We held caucuses in Massachusetts today to choose the delegates to the Democratic National Convention...and I bet you thought that was all taken care of on Super Tuesday...Find out the real story below the fold.

I did not make this up:

John,

My mom was a delegate in Dallas this past weekend. She arrived at 7AM and didn't get to leave until 8PM. She said that it appeared the Clinton delegates were trying to drag things out so long that people would have to leave. She thought they challenged about 3,000 delegates and each of them had to go through the credentialing committee.

One of the Clinton delegates from her group challenged the validity of entire precincts. One of the precincts she challenged was almost entirely African American. Towards the end, after this group was credentialed they came by and shook their fists at the Clinton delegate and chanted "we're still here" in her face. My mom said it was a little tense.

The Chairman of the Committee on the Environment, Representative Frank Smizik, hosted a meeting on Peak Oil at the Massachusetts State House on Monday, March 31.  The hearing room was standing room only and there were Reps and Sens from Belmont, Boston, Somerville, Falmouth, and Arlington.  This was in preparation for the establishment of a Massachusetts Peak Oil Caucus.

Presentations were by Richard Lawrence, Co-Founder, ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak
Oil), Roger Bezdek, President of Management Information Services, Inc. and one of the co-authors of the Hirsch Report on Peak Oil [pdf alert], John Kaufman, member of the Portland, Oregon Energy Task Force,  Senator Bob Duff and Representative Terry Backer from the Connecticut General Assembly, co-Founders of the Connecticut Legislative Peak Oil & Natural Gas Caucus.

I am starting an electoral college projection, based on State polls. There are 10 designations that States can be given, as you can see by the key. The designations are determined by State polls, with a bit of judgment thrown in. The State polls ultimately dictate what a State’s designation will be, however instead of using a formula, designations will simply be changed whenever there seems to be sufficient reason to do so. This way, hopefully one outlier will not determine a designation, but at the same time we can be responsive to shifts confirmed in more than one poll.

Currently, the preponderance of State polls has John McCain at a slight advantage in the electoral college, mainly because Obama is having difficulty in the Industrial midwest. According to recent polls, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are all leaning slightly towards McCain. In Michigan and Florida, the mismanaged Democratic primaries also seem to be helping McCain. If Michigan alone flips to Obama, the race becomes a 269-269 tie.

EI Electoral College Projection: 3/24/2008