Popular Vote or Electoral Vote?

If I look at the states that Obama has won I see small states Red states not blue states, So. Carolina, No. Carolina, Missisissippi, Louisiana, Kansas,oklahoma, Nevada, etc. Most of the states he has won will not vote Democrat in November, Illinois forgettaboutit. In the states that Hillary won, many of them states with large populations are traditional Democratic states. I can't see giving the nomination to Obama based on the delegates as the ones he won were primarilly caucus states which I hope after this years debacle will go straight voting.Interesting piece below.
______________________________________

Projection: Clinton Wins Popular Vote, Obama Wins Delegate Count
March 28, 2008 02:31 PM ET Michael Barone
The Clinton campaign has taken to boasting that its candidate has won states with more electoral votes than has Barack Obama. True. By my count, Clinton has won 14 states with 219 electoral votes (16 states with 263 electoral votes if you include Florida and Michigan) while Obama has won 27 states (I'm counting the District of Columbia as a state, but not the territories) with 202 electoral votes. Eight states with 73 electoral votes have still to vote. In percentage terms, Clinton has won states with 41 percent of the electoral votes (49 percent if you include Florida and Michigan), while Obama has won states with 38 percent of electoral votes. States with 14 percent of the electoral votes have yet to vote.
The Clinton campaign would do even better to use population rather than electoral votes, since smaller states are overrepresented in the Electoral College. By my count, based on the 2007 Census estimates, Clinton's states have 132,214,460 people (160,537,525 if you include Florida and Michigan), and Obama's states have 101,689,480 people. States with 39,394,152 people have yet to vote. In percentage terms this means Clinton's states have 44 percent of the nation's population (53 percent if you include Florida and Michigan) and Obama's states have 34 percent of the nation's population. The yet-to-vote states have 13 percent of the nation's population.
Thus the Clinton campaign could argue that Obama cannot win states with most of the nation's people even if he wins all the remaining eight primaries. Could argue—but I don't think that's going to persuade any superdelegates that Clinton is the real winner.
_______________________________________

Join the Club A new poll shows Obama's unfavorability rating is similar to Hillary Clinton's.
By Mark Blumenthal and Charles FranklinUpdated Friday, March 28, 2008,

Yesterday we wrote about a new poll (PDF) that suggested Hillary Clinton's unfavorability rating reached a new high of 48 percent, while Barack Obama's rating was significantly lower at 32 percent. Considering Obama's rough press coverage over the past few weeks because of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons, this was a blow to the conventional wisdom that Obama's candidacy had been harmed by Wright's rhetoric.
However, a new SurveyUSA poll shows the two candidates' unfavorables to be much closer. Obama and Clinton have similar numbers in this poll, with Clinton polling unfavorably among 42 percent of voters. He is viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of the voters. She is viewed favorably by 35 percent of voters, while Obama is viewed favorably by 38 percent of voters.
_______________________________________
Op-Ed: Did Your Grocery List Kill a Songbird?

THOUGH a consumer may not be able to tell the difference, a striking red and blue Thomas the Tank Engine made in Wisconsin is not the same as one manufactured in China — the paint on the Chinese twin may contain dangerous levels of lead. In the same way, a plump red tomato from Florida is often not the same as one grown in Mexico. The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States.
In this case, the victims are North American songbirds. Bobolinks, called skunk blackbirds in some places, were once a common sight in the Eastern United States. In mating season, the male in his handsome tuxedo-like suit sings deliriously as he whirrs madly over the hayfields. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 percent in the last four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.
The birds are being poisoned on their wintering grounds by highly toxic pesticides. Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, captured bobolinks feeding in rice fields in Bolivia and took samples of their blood to test for pesticide exposure. She found that about half of the birds had drastically reduced levels of cholinesterase, an enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells — a sign of exposure to toxic chemicals.
Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States. In countries like Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador, researchers have found that farmers spray their crops heavily and repeatedly with a chemical cocktail of dangerous pesticides.
In the mid-1990s, American biologists used satellite tracking to follow Swainson’s hawks to their wintering grounds in
Argentina, where thousands of them were found dead from monocrotophos poisoning. Migratory songbirds like bobolinks, barn swallows and Eastern kingbirds are suffering mysterious population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. A single application of a highly toxic pesticide to a field can kill seven to 25 songbirds per acre. About half the birds that researchers capture after such spraying are found to suffer from severely depressed neurological function.
Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an environmental problem hidden to consumers. Testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United States. Some but not all pesticide residues can be removed by washing or peeling produce, but tests by the Centers for Disease Control show that most Americans carry traces of pesticides in their blood. American consumers can discourage this poisoning by avoiding foods that are bad for the environment, bad for farmers in Latin America and, in the worst cases, bad for their own families.
What should you put on your bird-friendly grocery list? Organic coffee, for one thing. Most mass-produced coffee is grown in open fields heavily treated with fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. In contrast, traditional small coffee farmers grow their beans under a canopy of tropical trees, which provide shade and essential nitrogen, and fertilize their soil naturally with leaf litter. Their organic, fair-trade coffee is now available in many coffee shops and supermarkets, and it is recommended by the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.
Organic bananas should also be on your list. Bananas are typically grown with one of the highest pesticide loads of any tropical crop. Although bananas present little risk of pesticide ingestion to the consumer, the environment where they are grown is heavily contaminated.
When it comes to nontraditional Latin American crops like melons, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries, it can be difficult to find any that are organically grown. We should buy these foods only if they are not imported from Latin America.
Now that spring is here, we take it for granted that the birds’ cheerful songs will fill the air when our apple trees blossom. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we ensure that fewer and fewer songbirds will return.
Bridget Stutchbury, a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, is the author of "Silence of the Songbirds."
_______________________________________

Land Deal Could Open Alaska Wildlife Refuge to Oil Reuters
Wednesday 26 March 2008
Anchorage, Alaska - A controversial land swap proposal could open portions of an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, dividing Alaska natives and stoking opposition from environmentalists seeking to protect the bears, moose and birds that live there.
Supporters of the plan to exchange land in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, which lies just south of the more-famous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, say they would like the plan to be approved by the administration of US president George W. Bush before the election in November.
"The window is the election," Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, a staunch backer of the plan, said at an Anchorage news conference. "We'd like to have an executive order out of the administration before they leave office."
The proposed land trade would give 110,000 acres of hydrocarbon-prone uplands within the refuge, plus mineral rights to another 97,000 acres, to Fairbanks-based Doyon Ltd. In exchange, the refuge would gain 150,000 acres of bird-friendly wetlands now owned by Doyon, plus 56,500 acres on which Doyon has pending land claims.
Doyon, owned by Athabascan Indians of interior Alaska, has long envisioned such a trade to give economic benefits to its shareholders while preserving traditional culture and the environment on which it depends.
"You can have both the subsistence lifestyle and the protection of that lifestyle, and you can have oil and gas exploration," said Norm Phillips, Doyon's resource manager.
But many people living closest to the potential development - many of them Doyon shareholders - oppose the plan because of the likelihood of oil pollution and the possibility of social upheaval such as a flow of drugs, alcohol and poachers over new roads.
"Usually, the indigenous people are at the losing end of any sort of oil development," said Dacho Alexander, first chief of the Gwichyaa Zhee Gwich'in Tribe in Fort Yukon, a village of 600 near the proposed exchange parcels.
Alexander said the dispute illustrates the perennial clash between corporate goals and non-economic Native values.
The Yukon Flats basin holds an estimated 173 million barrels of oil - accounting for less than nine days of US consumption at current rates - along with 5.5 trillion cubic feet of gas and 127 million barrels of natural-gas liquids, according to the US Geological Survey.
It also holds unique ecological values.
Straddling the Arctic Circle, cradled by two mountain ranges and bisected by the Yukon River, the refuge encompasses boreal forests that support moose, grizzly and black bears and many other mammals.
Its network of lakes, streams, ponds and sloughs attract Alaska's highest concentrations of breeding ducks. It has some of Alaska's coldest winter days and, thanks to around-the-clock sunlight, scorching summer temperatures as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest for this latitude in North America.
Fran Mauer, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and prominent critic of the land exchange, says the trade plan violates the refuge's conservation mission.
"I just don't see that it's in the public's interest to do it," he said.
But Doyon officials say that no matter what land the corporation ends up owning, oil and gas drilling is inevitable in the Yukon Flats.
"Even if the land trade doesn't happen, Doyon is still going to move forward with exploration out there," Phillips said.