Badger Blog Alliance

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Friday, May 30, 2008

Will the Democrats contest Florida?

Will they even bother?

Reason for asking #1, what looks like at least a partial disenfranchisement of Florida's primary voters:

(CNN) — A Florida court threw out a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Democratic Party's decision not to seat delegates from Florida — as litigants prepared to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Political consultant Victor DiMaio and his lawyer Michael Steinberg had compared the party's decision to earlier prohibitions against allowing African-Americans to vote and invoked the trauma of the Florida recount in the 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, both arguments also used by Hillary Clinton to support the seating of the state’s delegates.
The lawsuit; the DNC's Rules Committee meeting; the national convention in August. All these will conspire to keep this story fresh in Floridians' minds well into the Fall.

Reason #2 for asking, the Castro Endorsement:

The latest unsought praise for the Democratic front-runner came from Fidel Castro, who wrote in a column for Cuba’s Granma newspaper Monday that Obama is “the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency.”

Never mind that the column was used to criticize Obama for wanting to uphold the U.S. trade embargo. The Florida GOP seized on it, posting an article about it on their Web site and blasting out an e-mail titled, “Fidel Castro Endorses Obama.”
Whatever criticism Castro leveled at Obama is more than negated by the praise. Florida's large and important Cuban population will not be - in fact, probably isn't - amused.