{"id":52585,"date":"2012-01-31T14:51:53","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T19:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=52585"},"modified":"2012-01-31T14:58:19","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T19:58:19","slug":"constriction-and-flow-chaos-the-florida-primary-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/politics\/constriction-and-flow-chaos-the-florida-primary-and-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"Constriction and… flow? chaos? The Florida primary and beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news<\/a>, world news<\/a>, and news about the economy<\/a><\/p>\n

Today is the Republican primary in Florida. It’s generally considered a big deal in the primary process; perhaps more intriguing to astrologers is that it is the last major election event in the US while Neptune is still in Aquarius. We have a real-time, live example of what it’s like to act as an individual in a group, smack in the last fraction of the last degree of Neptune’s era-defining journey through this sign.<\/p>\n

Strangely, if we consider a state an ‘individual’ in the ‘group’ of this country, Florida has actually compromised its importance in this group with regard to its power in the Republican National Convention. Florida pushed against RNC rules for a much earlier primary than they’re allowed, and by doing so, lost a significantly large number of delegates to the convention. If you have 15 minutes, watch the segment if last night’s Rachel Maddow show for a little context. <\/p>\n

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In the meantime, Mitt Romney has run more than six times the number of ads as Newt Gingrich has in the expensive Florida media market — but to what effect? Neither one has a commanding lead in terms of delegates now allotted to them at the convention later this year; the vast majority of delegates are as yet unclaimed, and will only be decided state by state. So there’s a bottleneck of sorts today in Florida, which seems to then give way to a possibly wider-open field. Maybe Romney, by sheer virtue of the money at his disposal, really is the foregone winner. <\/p>\n

Until the RNC this summer however, we have candidates like Ron Paul ignoring Florida in favor of campaigning in states like Maine and Nevada. These states, unlike Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, have a system of municipal caucuses rather than primaries. A caucus is a system of local gatherings where voters decide which candidate to support and select delegates for nominating conventions; primaries are a statewide vote in which voters cast secret ballots; some states use a combination.<\/p>\n

So there is some back and forth between what might be seen as the narrowness of a primary vote versus the open, dispersed decision-making of a caucus in this process; one form of Transpluto (narrowness) opposite Neptune (a wider view). Yet the poles are not clear-cut: one could also say that the secret ballot of a primary is more Neptunian or that the public nature of a caucus requires the self-sufficiency\/self-esteem of Transpluto.<\/p>\n

In any case, how is this for a strange illustration of Neptunian delusion and Transplutonian over-focus? Gingrich accused Romney <\/a>on Monday of disregarding the religious rights of Americans:<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, I think we need to have a government that respects our religions. I\u2019m a little bit tired about respecting every religion on the planet. I\u2019d like them to respect our religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Momentarily ignoring the apparent contradiction between “our religions” (plural) and “our religion” (singular), how exactly does Mr. Gingrich expect that one-sided respect might work? Really, only one religion deserves respect — and it belongs to “us?” Granted, this comment is out of context; it seems Gingrich may be complaining about more respect being paid to religious beliefs in other countries at the expense of religion in the US. Even if that’s the correct interpretation, however, the US is home to people of many, many world religions — not some single “native faith.” And it is certainly not the United Church of Newt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Today is the Republican primary in Florida. It’s generally considered a big deal in the primary process; perhaps more intriguing to astrologers is that it is the last major election event in the US while Neptune is still in Aquarius. We have a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[762],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}