I have just received word from the Director of Online Communications for the Democratic National Convention Committee that KnoxViews/TennViews has been selected as the official credentialed Tennessee blog for the August 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Part of the deal is that yours truly will be seated alongside the Tennessee delegation on the convention floor ("one of the best seats in the house") to live-blog the greatest political event in recent history.

Developing...

UPDATE: DNC Chairman Governor Dean Announces Blogs Selected For 2008 Democratic National Convention 'State Blogger Corps'

"Similar to the record-breaking voter turnout our Party has seen during the primary season, the demand for these coveted blogger positions is yet another indicator of the tremendous interest in this historic Convention," said Governor Dean. "The Internet has played a critical role in connecting Americans to elected officials and candidates seeking office. The DemConvention State Blogger Corps will continue to foster this dialogue - in all 50 of our states and our territories too - as we head towards this year's historic election and elect a Democrat to the White House."

Follow the link for the full press release and list of blogs.

UPDATE: Square State, the official Colorado blog, interviews Howard Dean about the State Blogger Corps.

UPDATE: Associated Press

UPDATE: Howard Dean welcomes state bloggers:

Sen. Lamar Alexander announce his "Manhattan Project" energy plan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory today. My commentary at TennViews.

UPDATE: Mike Padgett responds with "Energy 2.0"

WBIR:

Taxpayers and tax preparers are discovering that anyone who elected to have tax preparation fees deducted from their tax refund will not receive rebate checks via direct deposit.

The problem relates to funds being routed to the tax preparer's third-party bank.

UPDATE: Based on the additional information in comments and thinking about this a little further, the IRS is handling this exactly right.

What it boils down to is that some taxpayers, either by getting a refund loan or having preparation fees deducted from their refund, had the third-party preparer's bank account listed as their direct deposit bank, and the third party is then responsible for disbursing the funds to the taxpayer.

In the case of the "rebate," the third party preparer may not be setup to accept it or disburse it, so the IRS is doing the only other thing they can do which is to mail those taxpayers a check directly instead of depositing it in some tax preparer's bank account.

So this sounds like one of those "that's a feature, not a bug" situations, and the right thing to do.

UPDATE: This and other questions answered in a recently updated IRS Economic Stimulus Payments FAQ.

After anointing Obama as the nominee on Tuesday, the media narrative has shifted to the West Virginia and Kentucky "Appalachian" contests. They are reduced to quaint curiosities in which poor, white, uneducated mountain people from a "bygone era" have been trained to make their way to a school gym and push a button just like real people for the delight and amusement of the media elite.

Internet Fraud Loss For 2007 Tops $239 Million

Sounds low to me. I would have guessed ten times that.

OK, then.

RCP North Carolina average: Obama +8. No recent poll has shown an advantage for Clinton. Obama has overcome a Clinton lead of 24 points in November.

RCP Indiana average: Clinton +5. Only one recent poll shows an advantage for Obama. Obama crept up to a slight 3 point advantage in late April, but Clinton has since erased it.

There are 72 delegates at stake in Indiana, and 115 in North Carolina. Obama currently has 1737 delegates, and Clinton has 1607 (Green Papers estimate). Neither candidate can get to the 2025 needed to nominate today, even if one were to win 100% of the vote in both primaries.

And so it continues.

(The encouraging news is that nearly 32 million people have voted for a Democratic nominee so far, v. 18.5 million for a Republican.)

A New York food company is recalling more than 286,000 pounds of meat and poultry because it might be contaminated with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes.

Thirty-five different products that "were sent to food service and retail establishments nationwide" are listed in the recall.

That's a lot of meat/poultry product. Personally, I'm not familiar with these products. Of course, if deli chains use these products I might be in trouble and not know it.

"At the beginning of the 21st century, the typical American suburb is just about the safest place that has ever existed in the history of the world - yet it's full of terrified people.

Statistics have little power in the face of a media environment in which extraordinarily rare events, such as strangers kidnapping children, are presented as commonplace by profit-hungry "news" outlets, for whom the bottom line is that fear sells.

Politicians realize this too. The ongoing overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is only the most vivid example of how our leaders cynically exploit our fears by making wildly exaggerated claims, such as that Islamic terrorism poses an "existential threat" to America."

If you agree with this line of thinking and would like to see more of it on the Supreme Court for another generation, vote for McCain in 2008.

No, seriously. I'm not making that up:

To pay for the tax credit, McCain would eliminate the tax exemption for people whose employers pay a portion of their coverage, raising an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues, Holtz-Eakin said. Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks. McCain would also cut costs by limiting health care lawsuits.

Clinton responds:

"The McCain plan eliminates the policies that hold the employer-based health insurance system together, so while people might have a 'choice' of getting such coverage, employers would have no incentive to provide it. This means 158 million Americans with job-based coverage today could be at risk of losing the insurance they have come to depend upon."

Uh, Hillary, divorcing health insurance from employment is the only sane part of McCain's plan.

Obama says:

McCain is "recycling the same failed policies that didn't work when George Bush first proposed them and won't work now. Instead of taking on the big health insurance companies and requiring them to cover Americans with preexisting conditions, Senator McCain wants to make it easier for them to reject your coverage, drop it, or jack up the price you pay."

I didn't get that part, but maybe it's in the details McCain hasn't provided. And Obama is standing up to the insurance companies how? By not making you buy their product?

According to this report, McCain said that he would "encourage state governments to create guaranteed-access plans" as a safety net for high-risk workers. Sounds like another unfunded mandate. And state Medicaid and SCHIP programs are already stretched to the breaking point.

At any rate, one thing all the candidates agree on is that insurance policies should be portable and available across state lines. We will have to wait for more details of McCain's plan, but it doesn't sound like there's a dimes worth of difference between any of the three proposals. OK, maybe fifteen cents. And the bottom line is that the President can't unilaterally enact any of this anyway.

New Clinton supporter is a potent symbol:

"It's an incredibly strong endorsement because Easley is popular among the blue collar 'Bubba' voters who are Democrats," said David "Mudcat" Saunders, a Democratic consultant who advised former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner on winning rural voters.

OK, then.

As you've probably heard, Barack Obama went on Fox News for an in-depth interview. He finally distanced himself from the left-wing barking moonbats and started talking some sense:

WALLACE: Over the years, John McCain has broken with his party and risked his career on a number of issues — campaign finance, immigration reform, banning torture.

As a president, can you name a hot-button issue where you would be willing to buck the Democratic Party line and say, "You know what? Republicans have a better idea here?"

OBAMA: Well, I think there are a whole host of areas where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea.

WALLACE: Such as?

OBAMA: Well, on issues of regulation. I think that back in the '60s and '70s a lot of the way we regulated industry was top-down command and control, we're going to tell businesses exactly how to do things.

And you know, I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, "You know what? If you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives, for businesses — let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution," and a cap and trade system, for example is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient.

Outstanding. Free markets work, and are more efficient. It's about time serious Democrats acknowledged this and started bringing the conversation back from the far-left fringe into the mainstream center with the DLC and the Blue Dogs where the business of America is business.

</snark>

In a Knoxville News Sentinel op-ed yesterday, Sen. Bob Corker says the government should pay for people's health care.

According to Sen. Corker, he only recently learned from speaking to a gentleman in East Tennessee that a lot of people don't have health insurance and end up going to emergency rooms for treatment.

Sen. Corker's solution is to provide every American "cash in hand," $2,160 for individuals or $5,400 for families, to purchase health insurance either through their employer or in the private market. He says it will be revenue neutral, but he doesn't explain how.

He also says that the alternative is "government-sponsored health care," which would "lower the quality of care, limit access to physicians and put a government bureaucrat between a patient and his or her doctor."

A couple of things.

If "government-sponsored health care" is such a bad thing, why he is proposing exactly that?

Second, Sen. Corker seems out of touch with regard to the cost of premiums. The average annual total premium cost in 2007 was $4,479 for single coverage and $12,106 for family coverage (source).

Third, Sen. Corker is apparently unaware that insurance companies in Tennessee aren't required to write anyone an individual policy. So if you're not employed by, say, the Federal Government (like Sen. Corker), good luck. Not only that, but employers aren't required by federal law to offer insurance either. So a big check from the government isn't going to help you if you are unemployed, self-employed, underemployed, or your employer doesn't provide health insurance, especially in Tennessee.

Fourth, Sen. Corker, like many Republicans, believes we can fix anything in the tax code ("we make the tax code treat all Americans equally when it comes to buying health insurance"). Meanwhile, his colleague, senior Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, just recently called for eliminating the tax code and going to a flat tax. So how can we solve all our problems through the tax code if we don't have a tax code? Maybe Sen. Corker's people ought to get with Sen. Alexander's people and schedule lunch?

Finally (I guess that was more than a couple of things), I am not clear on how "government-sponsored health care" (which is ironically what he proposes) would "limit access to physicians" or how it would put a "government bureaucrat between a patient and his or her doctor."

The last time I checked, just about every physician and hospital accepts Medicare. And unlike most private insurance, which requires pre-approval by minimum-wage cubical clerks in call centers (in India?), standard Medicare requires no pre-approval. And study after study shows Medicare is more cost effective and has lower administrative overhead than private insurance. In fact, some studies say we could reduce our overall health care costs (another one of Sen. Corker's goals) by $200 billion to $300 billion per year by opening up Medicare insurance to everyone. In other words, we are already paying for "universal coverage," we're just not getting it.

Sen. Corker should study up on plans such as HR676, which accomplishes everything he says he wants and a lot more for a lot less, before floating more half-baked, recycled GOP talking point "solutions." The problem from Sen. Corker's point of view, though, is that a comprehensive single-payer solution doesn't benefit the corporate insurance company middle men and gatekeepers, who are the real beneficiaries of his plan.

Jimmy Duncan shows why he is a Repugnicant representing East Tennessee. Via Crooks and Liars:

...the evidence is overwhelming — abstinence-only doesn’t reduce teen pregnancies, doesn’t reduce sexually transmitted diseases, and doesn’t even lead minors to abstain from sex.

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.

More on this boondoggle from the "borrow and spend" GOP.

Lost in all the attention on the Democratic primary, there was also a Republican primary in Pennsylvania yesterday.

McCain won with 73% of the vote. Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul got 16%, followed by Chucklebee at 11%.

73% doesn't seem like a very strong showing by the presumptive nominee and savior of the Bush GOP legacy against two guys who already dropped out.

It sounds like a third party Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul/Mike Huckabee ticket is just what the GOP disaffected need. Democrats would be happy with that scenario, too.

Turnout was also interesting. More than 2.3 million Democrats voted, v. 804,000 Republicans. That's nearly three to one for Democrats. Of course, St. McCain is a lock so lots of Republicans probably stayed home. Hopefully they'll do the same in November.

Asked how Obama can outspend Clinton three to one and take total command of the airwaves in Pennsylvania for seven weeks and still not close the deal, Harold Ford Jr. offers Obama some free advice...

Yes, probably all that, but it's also like I said the other day. Clinton does well in states with a strong, established Democratic political machine. Ed Rendell is a one-man political machine.

Cable news is saying it's too close to call. They are writing Clinton's obituary on MSNBC. Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell agree that Ed Rendell will be the one who has to have "the talk" with Clinton. Looks like a long night for the Clinton camp. Obama is in route to Indiana for a rally...

UPDATE: NBC has declared Clinton the projected winner. With 1% reporting, they have Clinton 60% to Obama 40%. With 0% reporting it was 65%/35%. I guess the margin will continue to narrow as the returns come in. The talk all night has been how narrow, and what does the Clinton margin have to be for her to raise enough money to go on.

UPDATE: 3% reporting, Clinton 53% Obama 47%.

UPDATE: 4% reporting, Clinton 57% Obama 43%. It's a roller coaster ride!

UPDATE: Final result: Clinton by 10, 55% to 45%, net six delegates. On to Puerto Rico!

What do you think? My guess: Clinton by 10+.

Can the news about the Iraqi War be believed? Apparently not!

Since most of you Knoxviewians probably already knew this, you can ignore this post and go on to other things, but for those of you who lurk here from the other party, please remove your rose colored glasses and follow this link. Then come back when you see the light.

The Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) has launched Convention 101, a website that explains the nominating process that will take place leading up to and at the Denver convention (August 25-28, 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado).

It's presented in a tutorial format. Lesson one is "Convention Lead-up," and lesson two is "At the Convention." There are "extra credit" sections covering topics such as "What is a superdelegate?"

Commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court ruling over at Facing South.

Rachel Maddow lays it out so that it is easy to understand why the "bitter" comment is a red-herring thrown out by Obama's opponents. While on David Gregory's CNN show she explained it in clear, precise terms and still the talking heads like Scarborough and Gregory just haven't got the ability to grasp it.

See the video at Crooks and Liars.

Even when Scarborough finally seems to concede that she is right, he still pursues the "Obama is an Elitist" meme without skipping a beat. They just keep beating that dog to death and it still won't fly.

Are you ready? It's time again for Clinton and Obama to answer some questions.

ABC News, the National Constitution Center and WPVI-TV will host a Democratic Presidential Candidate debate in Philadelphia on Wednesday, April 16. The live debate, which is scheduled to run 90 minutes, will be moderated by ABC News anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos and will air from 8:00-10:00 p.m., ET/PT on the ABC Television Network.

I'm excited. I just can't wait to see how George Stephanopoulos will be as a moderator.

But the deal's not done yet.

If it goes through, the new airline will be called Delta, and Delta's headquarters would remain in Atlanta. Neither airline would close any hubs.

But closing their headquarters in Minneapolis could be a problem for Northwest because of penalties tied to state incentives and favorable airport lease terms in exchange for keeping their headquarters there. And there are several labor issues yet to be worked out. Then it will need the federal government's blessing. And shareholders will have to approve it.

Lots of hurdles, but the companies say they expect to close the deal by the end of the year -- "before the end of the merger-friendly Bush administration."

Analysts say the consolidation will be good for the industry if the new airline, which would be the world's largest, can reduce underutilized capacity to avoid deep discounting price wars that result from too much inventory for not enough passengers.

Fundraising, endorsements, and more.

Blockbuster offers $1 billion for Circuit City

Blockbuster says the offer is intended to "capitalize on the growing convergence of media content and electronic devices."

But neither company has an online digital delivery presence to speak of. Then there's this:

Last week news leaked out that Blockbuster had a set-top box under development that would stream video content directly into homes, which was seen by many as a last-ditch effort to adapt its business.

That's great, except you can already do that with Amazon Unbox and Tivo (which is pretty cool, except for the "one day only" rental aspect). Then there's this.

Knoxville based LAGtv Network is an internet based TV network with international reach.

The brainchild of Shane Latham, LAGtv is a "live internet television station with shows focusing on video games, online tournaments, pro-gamers, casual gamers, product and game reviews."

According to producer and writer Jessie Greene, also of Knoxville, LAGtv broadcasts from its studio in Knoxville. The network’s inaugural broadcast aired on February 1, 2008.

Looking around the site and some of the show archives, the productions are slick and the on-air talent appears to be having a lot of fun even if I don't know what they're talking about most of the time. If you are an XBox 360 fan, I'm sure it will make sense to you and you'll like it.

Apparently gamers can also participate live by way of their XBox 360 video chat and messaging features. Or if your XBox-fu is weak, you can join in the online chat room, send a plain old email, or just call in on the phone. Shows air live every day at 9PM.

LAGtv looks like another high score for Knoxville's reputation as an evolving center for creative broadcast video and internet production. Check it out.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak.

A new facility at Plum Island is technically a possibility. Signs point to a mainland site, however, after the administration spent considerable time and money scouting new locations. Also, there are financial concerns about operating from a location accessible only by ferry or helicopter.

Somehow this doesnt surprise me. The goverment is worried about "substantial money" (nevermind the fact that the administration has supported a soon to be trillion dollar war in Iraq) already spent scouting out different mainland locations for the new facility, so it is a 'done deal'? Being told that they can now control the virus/sterilization etc...much better than they could when the Plum Island facility was originally built doesnt instill confidence in me or the thousands of farmers who could see their herds destroyed.