esrosedotblog

COMET



This little gif, to the right, is a great slow-motion picture of a comet's core on today's Astropic.

For the big closeup cringe-when-it-comes-at-you version go to Stardust Flyby of Comet Wild2.

If you do not look at it today, you may have to go to the archives for 011904.

SPIN

Here we go. Iowa starts it all. A cluster of candidates and all of them spinning the stories; trying to both raise and lower expectations at the same time! It is a paradoxical business.

Now we have the pre-spin; the best being this from the LiberalOasis Hard Count (in the center column) that describes the difference between hard count and poll count. If we look at the hard count; Dean is in.

Soon we will have the mid-spin; but we will not see much of this as it will happen all to quickly and behind the semi-closed doors of the caucus itself. Then there will be the post-spin in which the weirdness of the Iowa system will allow anyone to make the most outrageous claims about even the most meager results.

It is clustered so tightly that I cannot imagine we will lose anyone out of this; but it is pretty well agreed that if Gephardt does not get a good 'ahead' out of it, he is toast and may be anyway. He is sorta out of money. My guess is that Kucinich will not be dropping out no matter what.

I see that Jimmy Earl made Howard go to church before he would stand up and admire him out loud (no endorsement); a high price to pay--two days off the campaign trail and having to sit still for a sermon.

A nice aside: I read today that Dean quit the Episcopalians when the Church would not allow a bike path through some property they owned. He is a Congregational which makes his defection even tastier. This is an old New England split; the Congos being the dissenters from the mother country's church/statism. This is where we came in, isn't it?