Hillary Clinton is now demanding that the Florida primary be counted towards the presidential nomination.  For those of you who don’t know by now, Florida and Michigan’s primaries were thrown out of the running because they decided to push their primaries up sooner into the process against the wishes of the national Democratic Party.  All the candidates in the Democratic Party took a pledge not to campaign in those states, but now Hillary has decided that that pledge does not matter if it costs her an election.  Kinda makes you wonder what value her campaign promises have for her?

Anything, anything, anything to win an election, period.

Dean Baker, writing for TPM Media, gives us a glimpse of what a real recession might be. In the comments, someone also makes the additional point that this time around, it is the banks specifically that are taking the brunt of the damage. That means that the institutions that normally balance out recessions are in deep trouble, and so are we.

Sleep tight, kiddies:

What Will the Recession Feel Like? | TPMCafe

In the event that the recession proves to be severe and looks more like the 1980-82 downturn, then we will be looking at an increase in the unemployment rate of almost three percentage points. The rise in the unemployment rate for blacks and teens will be close to five percentage points, and for black teens the increase will be nine percentage points. We still will not have recovered to current unemployment rates by the time of the next presidential election in 2012.

Eric Massa has been needling incumbent Randy Kuhl over that representative’s support of the president against the SCHIP bill, which would have expanded support of children’s health care under the Congressional plan.  Because the president vetoed the recent bill, and because Congress has been unable to muster a override in part because of representatives like Kuhl, the SCHIP program not only did not get expanded, but was actually defunded.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been receiving mailers from the Massa campaign wherein he’s challenged Kuhl to a debate, which now according to the most recent mailer, looks to be possibly happening in March sometime.  If it actually happens (I have my doubts), it should be an interesting exchange.  It will change nobody’s mind on much of anything, I don’t think, but it would be great to see a nice pre-election debate on the issue.

In These Times has a great report about the predatory lending schemes currently employed by the credit industry, often on people who thought they’d been responsible, careful debtors. Changes are happening in the wake of the current recession crisis that many people aren’t figuring out they’ve been gamed until they check their credit card bills, only to find whopping interest rate hikes and penalties for things they didn’t even know they’d done wrong. But worst of all is the “Universal default” clause written into many a credit contract:

Killer Credit — In These Times

Universal default is another vicious innovation. If applied, one lender can raise the terms of a loan to the default rate (27 percent, on average) when a customer fails to pay another lender, even if the customer’s record is perfect with the original bank. In theory, a technical error or fraud could trigger rate hikes on every card someone owns, a scary thought considering the average American has seven credit cards in his or her wallet. Roughly half of the banks that issue credit cards have universal default language in their contracts.

RochesterTurning is reporting that there may be a retirement coming on the Republican side of the New York State Senate this year.  If so, that’s one of only two more seats needed for the Democrats to take control of the Senate.  As one commenter there points out, Joe Bruno is unlikely to be sitting idly by while this happens, so it remains to be seen what comes next.

And I can tell you for certain that the Conservative Party in this state, upon whose largess most Republicans get elected, is absolutely digging it’s heels in on CMCE, so they’re going to be very, very concerned as well.

More’s to come, certainly.  Stay tuned!

TPM Media put together a compilation of the Hillary “Smack-Down” that hit the air waves Sunday morning.  Good thing I had better things to do than to watch this whole thing, or I’d really have been turned off:

I tell ya, the Bill and Hillary thing is a tough nut to crack.  But if you think for one second you can call South Carolina a “bitter rebuke of the Clintons,” then you didn’t pay attention in Iowa and New Hampshire.  This thing isn’t over by a long shot, in fact, many are predicting (I think once again, prematurely) that even by the convention, things may not have settled into a victory for one camp.

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Of course, if anyone likes to project their opinions on their readers, it’s the D&C.  True to form, the D&C anoints Hillary Clinton as the all-but-decided leader in New York State in this article.  Of course, we all know that “likely voters” is a very subjective term for a season in which we have seen record numbers of Democratic voters, so it’s pointless to put too much thought into polls.

But most distressing of all is this line: “Clinton just beefed up her forces in the state in hopes of securing the 151 delegates up for grabs.“  That makes it seem like the winner of this contest gets all the delegates, and this is simply not true.  To me, that seems like a way to subtly depress the turnout for Obama and Edwards supporters by making it seem like there’s no point in coming out for a guy who’s not going to gain anything for the effort.

A very surprising move, I’d say, for Ted Kennedy.  He’s supporting Barack Obama, whereas I had sort of figured he’d support the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton.

City is endorsing Barack Obama for the Democratic ticket for president this year.  The article is a very well thought-out piece that goes into the reasons not to endorse Hillary, Kucinich or Jon Edwards as well as discussing their reasoning for endorsing Barack.  I tend to agree with the article on all points, since of course I endorsed Barack as well.

BTW, for those of you who don’t know and are wondering whether your vote in the primaries will even matter, take heart!  While I would certainly argue that your vote always counts, keep in mind that this is not an Electoral College style vote.  The winner does not take all, rather each candidate gets a proportion.  This article lays out the way it works fairly well, but the point is that the delegates you’re casting votes for are awarded to the candidates proportionately, meaning that if the candidates split the state 33%, 33% and 34%, they each get that many delegates.

More delegates are awarded by the state Dem Party leaders and others by a committee of Democrats.  Those will likely go to Hillary, of course, but that’s not guaranteed.   And a large chunk of delegates are up for grabs by all the candidates.  So, even if your candidate doesn’t “win” the state, they still get a boost going into the Convention that might just push them over the top!

I don’t often comment on COMIDA, since STLO7 over there at RochesterTurning.com seems to mostly have that subject pretty well tied up.  But Rachel Barnhart reports on the WHAM13 blog about a parking garage doing so poorly that I’ve never even known it was there.  Guess what?  It’s another great COMIDA project that turns out to have been a waste.

I mean for one thing, how many jobs can a parking garage possibly generate?  Three or four jobs per shift?  I’d always kinda thought of COMIDA as having at least the pretense of being a job creator. . .