Good post, good sourcing, Gov.  I think we're coming close to the endgame here.

Saturday's executive committee meeting may be most interesting and fun to watch.  Not fun enough, unfortunately, as I suspect they will try to be on their best behavior and a compromise is very likely.  Since Obama's solid win in NC, his campaign has been in a position that it can give up some delegates in any compromise and still be well ahead.

Your latter source had an interesting concept for Michigan.  Combined with the likely ruling that that the delegates in the two disputed states would be counted at the 50% level (as the Republicans did), this would define the final compromise as I believe it will end up:

Count HALF of the total delegations from both Michigan and Florida.  In Michigan, delegates will be apportioned as voted but allocating the large "uncommitted" vote among ALL of those candidates whose names did NOT appear on the ballot.  Since most of them have already endorsed Obama, he would at the end of the day wind up with most of the so-called "uncommitted" delegates.  Thus Obama would lose ground to Hillary in both Michigan and Florida, but not to a great extent.  Hillary could choose to fight such a compromise, but I think she would have a tough time getting too much sympathy for her postiion that both delegations be fully counted.  Even if she were to somehow win that point, I believe even with Florida and Michigan fully couted, Obama would still have a clear lead in delegates, even though the margin might at that point be getting uncomfortably slim (as far as the Obama camp was concerned).  However, his lead should still be sufficient to get him the nomination, with most of the superdelegates swinging in behind him.

Hillary may end up leading the popular vote nationwide.  However, only delegates elect the nominee; therefore, the popular vote total should be relatively meaningless.  Why the Democrats insist on talking about this is something of a mystery.  If they want to take that into account, fine; however, at that point, the whole Democratic nomination process begins to resemble Calvinball  (from the old Calvin and Hobbs comic strip).  Calvinball, you may recall, is a game where the rules are subject to change by any player, at any time during the game, without prior notice.

(For another good article - the one where I first read the Calvinball reference - check here:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjNmYzM3MWJhOWM4OGZiYWU0OWZhNTYyMThjOTdhOTU= )

MWL