May Day means various things to various people. If you're on a ship's radio, it means "help!" (may have been from the French "m'aidez!" or "help me!"). If you're a pagan, it means spring has sprung, and a fertility festival (come on, what exactly did you think a "May pole" represents?). If you're just about anywhere else on the planet outside the United States, it means Labor Day (we didn't want to celebrate our Labor Day with all those no-good commies, so we picked a different day). Today, in America, it meant the West Coast was closed to shipping.

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John McCain should be taken at his word. He just gave a major speech in which he unveiled his "new" idea for how to fix health care in America (which is actually just recycled Bush policy). To prove he knows what he is talking about, I challenge him to be the first to voluntarily do what he is asking all Americans to do: give up his employer-based health care, and purchase his own health insurance on the open market as a private American citizen.

You heard that right -- the only idea Republicans have for our broken health care system is to take away the only thing workers have relied upon for decades -- employer-based health insurance -- and replace it with a tax credit. McCain doesn't specify who would get this tax credit or how exactly it'll be paid for, but no matter. Borrow-and-spend Republicans can just put it all on the Bank of China credit card we've been running our government on for years, I guess.

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[Note: Due to everyone else blathering about it, I am going to write this column without once mentioning Barack Obama or Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I am also going to break this blog's motto and escape reality-based politics for one day. Hope you don't mind.]

I invite you to enter an alternate reality with me. One in which the media was in a feeding frenzy over religion in American politics, a presidential candidate had to give a major speech about his religious affiliation in order to fight back hard against a guilt-by-association campaign against him, in order to assure Americans that his religion was "normal" and not something to be afraid of.

This may sound familiar -- but remember, I said an alternate reality.

In this "What if?" universe, Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president. It's not so very hard to imagine this outcome -- John McCain, having never recovered, sank into obscurity, and Mike Huckabee was eventually overcome by Romney's financial advantage in the race.

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299 superdelegates on the wall,
299 superdelegates.
If one of those superdelegates should happen to fall,
298 superdelegates on the wall.

My apologies. Whoever created the song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" shares some of the blame (along with John Yoo) for redefining the word "torture" for the American public. [I should note that some sing a different third line in this charming ditty -- Take one down and pass it around -- but I felt that was a wee bit inappropriate when talking about Democratic superdelegates. Ahem. And it would be even more accurate to change it to "on the fence" rather than "on the wall," now that I think about it. But I digress....]

Anyone who has ever been on a school field trip bus, or even the backseat of the family car on a vacation road trip knows exactly what I mean about this song. The cyclic (and seemingly endless) drip-drip-drip of counting down from ninety-nine to zero is enough to drive anybody crazy. And that's starting from less than 100.

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It was a telling sign that neither Democratic candidate saw fit to visit Punxsutawney before the Pennsylvania primary. Nobody wanted the press to remember Bill Murray's Groundhog Day in any way, shape or form. But even without stump speeches next to Punxsutawney Phil, it's hard not to think of living the same day over and over and over again when looking ahead to the nine contests that remain. Because nothing much is likely to be decided by them.

I wrote yesterday (sorry for the blatant blog plug) a detailed analysis of why I don't think the remaining primaries are going to be all that important, and how I think Barack Obama is going to "close the deal" -- when he passes Hillary Clinton in the superdelegate count. But, unlike the primaries, this is not a scheduled date. It could happen very soon, and then again it could happen after June 3rd, when the last primary takes place. It might not even happen at all -- maybe Hillary will miraculously survive until the convention. But I don't consider that likely.

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The smart bet all along in the Democratic primary race (at least since Super Tuesday) has been that the superdelegates will decide the race. Even with all that has happened since, this central fact hasn't really changed. And it's not likely to change in any of the remaining seven state contests, either. But there's a milestone approaching, and it just may be what Barack Obama needs to "close the deal" (as the current pundit-speak will have it) on the whole race.

Because while all the attention for the past three months has been on each state contest as it happens -- complete with numerical projections galore about the pledged delegates from each primary -- everyone has been largely ignoring the real "numbers story" to be told: the superdelegates.

There has also been a lot of attention paid to various numbers which are utterly meaningless. The Clinton camp has been making the argument that the "national vote count" may be crucial to her argument for winning. The Obama camp has been making the same argument about "number of states won." Neither is going to ultimately mean a thing. Because it's all about the delegates. In other words, we need to focus on the only numbers that are important -- the ones that will give the nomination to one candidate or the other at the Democratic convention.

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House Republicans today massively defected from President Bush's harsh new Medicaid rules, always an interesting event in an election year. Two-thirds of House GOP members voted with all the Democrats to impose a one-year moratorium on implementing the new Medicaid rules which the Bush White House recently re-wrote. The vote was astounding -- 349 to 62 -- which is well beyond the veto-proof margin needed.

Of course, it still has to go through the Senate. But nonetheless it is a milestone of sorts, being an issue that Democrats have enticed most of the Republican Party members to cross the aisle to support. It's easy to see why -- all fifty state governors also oppose the new rules, meaning there is almost-universal support for the Democrats' defiance of the Bush administration's position on the issue.

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[Note: this is my first experience in "liveblogging" -- providing continuous rolling commentary -- so we'll just have to see how it goes. Posts will be made throughout the night, with newer posts at the top. If you're reading this for the first time, start at the bottom and work your way up. And don't forget to refresh your browser (reload the page) every once in a while, in order to see new postings.]

11:35 PM (EDT)
Hillary Clinton -- 1,148,600 votes -- 55%
Barack Obama -- 947,730 votes -- 45%
[precincts reported] -- 93%

This is going to be my final posting on this liveblog. It's been an interesting experience, I have to admit.

It doesn't look like the numbers will change much at this point, at least not until the wee hours of the morning. The last 7% of the votes will trickle in, but it's looking like Hillary may be able to claim exactly what everyone was saying she needed to viably stay in the race for now -- a double-digit win in Pennsylvania. People who predicted a win for her of around 200,000 voters turned out to be amazingly accurate.

The delegate count hasn't changed much in the last half-hour, so while this may be the real story here, we will not know the results of that story until tomorrow. Over half the delegates have not yet been awarded, so there's still room for some movement here one way or the other.

So the race continues. The next contest will be on May 3. On to Guam!!

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Since we've got a primary tomorrow, it's (once again) time to "put up or shut up," and make a prediction for Pennsylvania. Plus, since it's also appropriate, we'll continue the contest to pick the date when the nomination will be locked up, and what the outcome will be, at the end of the column.

It's been a long six weeks since we last played this game, and I'm just relieved that in the intervening time, the media and both campaigns had enough time to accurately identify and portray the relative positions of each candidate on a range of important issues on which they have honest differences; issues that everyday Americans actually care about as being relevant to their lives.

Ha! (Belated) April Fool!

No, instead, we got more of the same. Sigh.

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The twenty-first debate of the Democratic presidential nomination race happened this week. Much fulminating in the blogosphere immediately followed.

I must admit, I was kind of surprised at the ferocity of the response, myself. Because I actually expected exactly what happened during the first hour of the debate -- shallowness and insipid "gotcha" questions. This is, after all, the mainstream media we are talking about. Did anyone really think it was suddenly going to morph into PBS on debate night?

What surprised me is that the second half of the debate got such short shrift in the reaction. The second half of the debate was actually about issues, and some things got said during it which will be repeated over and over again in the future -- long after the controversy over the first half has been forgotten by all but a few.

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