up and at ‘em!

This week, I teach two “yoga classes” though I have NOT been on top of things. It should be interesting.

In a few minutes I am off to the gym for swimming and cycling.

Update: 2200 yards of swimming, 12.5 of cycling, then 20 minutes of yoga on my own. Everything went ok, though I tend to cramp up in the front hip joint (where the upper thigh meets the hip).

Elections

I did some number crunching from the election statistics and found the following in Peoria County (both the City and the Coutny):

22662 people cast ballots for a Democratic candidate and 19451 for the Republican. This is interesting, given that the Republicans had a congressional contest (US Congress) that would, in effect, determine who is going to represent us in Ray LaHood’s old set (Aaron Schock won big with over 70% of the vote).

In the Democratic contest, Obama got 15066 votes for 66.5% (73% within the City of Peoria) and Clinton got 6975 votes for 30.8% (25% in the City of Peoria).

In the Republican contest, McCain won 9421 votes for 48.4%, Romney 30%, and Huckabee 15.8%.

Democratic Election: The “Ready From Day One” candidate didn’t know how the Texas Primary worked, until this month!

There’s a very interesting article in tomorrow’s edition of The Washington Post, where it discusses the approach of the Clinton campaign to Texas. Here’s one telling graph:

Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state’s unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.

* slinkerwink’s diary :: ::
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The Clinton campaign strategists just figured this out this month? If they’d bothered to read insignificant netroot blogs like Burnt Orange Report, Texas Observer, and here at Dailykos, they would’ve realized what a cluster-fuck the hybrid-caucus system is, and how that might benefit Obama since:

What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa’s heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts in Dallas and Houston — where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support — could yield three or four times as many delegates.

Under rules described in the 37-page Texas delegate selection plan, two-thirds of the state’s 228 delegates will be chosen based on the vote in each of 31 state Senate districts. The remaining delegates will be chosen based in part on the outcome of caucuses held on election night after the polls close.

Texas Democratic Party officials said there is a good reason that some senatorial districts yield two or three delegates while others yield seven or, in one Austin district, eight. The numbers are determined by a formula that is based on the number of voters in each district who cast ballots for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) in the 2004 presidential campaign and for Chris Bell, the Democratic nominee for governor in 2006.

Note: when I made my Obama calls, I was calling the area that Clinton targeted. Evidently Obama puts local people to work in areas that are promising and leaves the “national callers” to focus on the remnants. That also happened when I called Wisconsin; I already had Republicans on my list. That is a good sign, though that made for some uncomfortable calls.

What took the Clinton campaign so long to figure this out? Obama’s campaign was already on top of this from the beginning, and they’ve signed up over 150,000 volunteers to help on election night. It will be a miracle if Clinton manages to lead in delegates in Texas on March 5th.