Just made a buck on Intrade

Bought three shares of Clinton at 19 last night. Just sold at 23. I'm a rich and wealthy miser.

Huck's out

Too bad. It was a fun ride while it lasted.

Ballot shortages

Basically every primary and caucus so far has experienced historically high voter turnout. Is it really possible at this stage in the game that a county could be caught off-guard and not have printed enough ballots?

Current weather in Ohio

How does this affect turnout?

Delegate calculator

Slate has a delegate calculator - plug in what you think the vote in an upcoming primary or caucus will be, and they'll give you the estimated number of delegates each candidate gets. Pretty cool.

Jonathan Alter plays with some numbers and determines that even if Hillary Clinton sweeps the remaining contests, Obama is still the leader in pledged delegates. She can only become the nominee if the remaining unpledged superdelegates split strongly for her.

Ohio and Texas

I had a campaign consultant come speak to one of my classes today. He seemed to think that Obama will sweep Clinton on Tuesday, even though the polls have them pretty much tied or even give a small lead to Clinton (Disclosure: He works for Obama). His rationale behind this is that all the major polling firms are using their tried-and-true models of voter turnout to predict who will show up to vote. However, those models are substantially underestimating turnout by young voters and African Americans this year. Pollsters, he figures, have figured this out by now, and probably have much more Obama-friendly numbers in their private records, but they're not releasing these data publicly since it relies so much on hunches. They at least have scientific rationales for the numbers they're releasing now.

We'll see. Meanwhile, one of my students is urging me to buy some Clinton stock on Intrade and then selling right after her anticipated win in Ohio. She's selling at 19 right now, so it's not a bad buy. I'm tempted.

The joys of parenting

Make no mistake - being a parent is hard work. Long hours, lots of aggravation, etc., and sometimes it's hard to remember why you wanted to do it in the first place. But then, there are those wonderful moments when it all becomes worthwhile. Like when your son wants to learn the ways of the Force: