We've been hearing a lot of procedural questions in the last few days, so in an act of serious selflessness, we decided to do a little paging through the WGA Constitution so you don't have to.

Here are the questions we've been hearing most:

Can the Board lift the restraining order (meaning the strike) without a general vote of the membership?

Yes. In Article IX, Section 3b, it states that the

This email was just sent to strike captains. It contains info on the NegCom vote, the Board and Council votes, the pending vote to lift the strike, and the pending vote to ratify the contract.

DEAR STRIKE CAPTAINS,

This morning, the WGA Negotiating Committee unanimously and unconditionally recommended the terms of the proposed 2008 MBA to the WGAW Board and WGAE Council. The Board and Council

Emotions are flying fast and furious around this issue: do we hold a ratification vote before we lift the strike? Or do we go back to work as quickly as Monday, and hold the vote afterwards?

To get our position up here as quickly and accurately as possible, we decided to do separate grafs signed by each of us, and combine them into one post.

We're all coming at this from different perspectives

This was sent out today by the WGA:

LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK – The membership of the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) today voted overwhelmingly in favor of lifting the restraining order and ending their 100-day strike that began on Nov. 5. 3,775 writers turned out in Los Angeles and New York to cast ballots or fax in proxies, with 92.5% voting

From tonight's captains' bulletin:

To cast your ballot in person: Vote at the Writers Guild Theater, 135 S. Doheny Drive 90211. Tuesday, February 12, 2008 from 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm.

If members can't cast a ballot in person: Proxy ballots are available. To vote by proxy, download this form and fax to 323-421-9177. Proxies must be faxed in by Tuesday February 12, by 2 pm, or dropped off at the WGAW

I've been avoiding a few big-time classics for awhile, mainly because they are so long.

I've decided to buck up and read at least one of them, and, since I'm so bad at making decisions, I thought I'd leave it up to you. With that I bring you Reading Faceoff, Round One: Classics Edition. Voting ends in two days, so vote now! Feel free to comment to further explain your choice.

UPDATE: Voting is closed! I didn't mean to delete the poll, but I did and I guess life just sucks, doesn't it? Take my word for it: Anna Karenina won, with a whopping (not really whopping, but I like the word) 40% of the vote.

I don't expect to have finish it too too soon...procrastination is still my forte, and I've been putting this one off for years. So, expect a post on it...soonish.

Everyone here at The Sports Flow is encouraging you to get out and vote at your states primary or caucus today. Exercise your right to vote, there is nothing more fundamental than our very own right to vote. This year, your vote matters more than ever. More and more people are turning out to vote, people want change. Our country is pretty divided right now, so your vote does indeed matter more than ever this year.

People keep asking me who I'm planning to vote for Tuesday and I didn't have an answer -- it was a very tough call. Then I saw an ad last night in which Robert Kennedy Jr. endorses Hillary, and that sealed the deal.

I'm voting for Obama.

Jack is too dignified to engage in blatant blog-self-promotion, so I'll step up. Balkinization is on the list of ten finalists for best law blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards. You can vote here. It's a nice way to thank Jack, Marty, Sandy and the rest of the group for all the hours they have expended in producing high quality commentary on legal issues of the day.

This was sent today to WGA members from Presidents Verrone and Winship:

To Our Fellow Members:

On Tuesday, members of the Writers Guilds East and West voted by a 92.5% margin to lift the restraining order that was invoked on November 5th. The strike is over.

Writing can resume immediately. If you were employed when the strike began, you should plan to report to work on Wednesday. If you're not

Future Majority, a blog that reports on youth voting, put together a set of tips for reporting on "the youth vote."

Tip #1 is my favorite:
The youth vote is not synonymous with students. In fact, students make up only a small part of the eligible youth vote. Only 21% of all 18-29 year olds are currently attending a college or university. That means that when you report on "students", you are leaving out the other 79% of all the individuals that make up the "youth vote." These people serve in our military, are struggling to raise families - and yes, have very different concerns from college students. I understand that makes it difficult for you to cram them into a cookie-cutter story about student aid activism and tuition costs, but you do them and your readers and our democracy a disservice when you limit your coverage to students.

In the coming days, we'll be running pieces on the proposed contract.

We'll include our own takes on what's good and bad, the official "pro" and "con" statements that will be issued by the Guild, and -- we hope -- op-ed pieces submitted to us here by readers.

Feel free to submit your analyses of the deal points and your opinions about the contract to unitedhollywood@gmail.com. We won't be able

Last night I received a very nice email from Victoria G., a nice 10-year-old girl from Massachusetts, who also happens to be a Red Sox blogger. Victoria alerted me to the fact that she is in the running for the position of Captain of Red Sox Kid Nation.

Red Sox Kid Nation currently having the vote to determine the final 12 Captains, and there are 25 kids currently in the running, between the ages of 10 and 14, including Victoria. They were originally selected from a pool of 700 contestants, from all over the United States. Victoria has done some wonderful things to help people in her neck of the woods, like raising money for breast cancer research, helping her local baseball team and helping feed hungry people. And of course, she is a dedicated fan of the Red Sox.

To find out more about the Red Sox Kid Nation Captains contest and how to vote for Victoria, go here.

It appears that John McCain is the anointed (at least by the press) nominee of the Republican Party, not least becasue he carried a number of Northeastern states in which he basically stands no chance of winning in November and because he won 33% of the vote in Missouri and, apparently, 44% of the Republican vote in California. As to the former, the winner-take-all feature had been engineered to slingshot Rudy Giuliani into the lead. Obviously, things changed. (California is not winner-take-all for the Republicans.) Missouri is also a winner-take-all state, which means, by definition, that a candidate rejected by 67% of the relevant electorate can nonetheless "win" because of being first-past-the-post. Perhaps McCain might have won in a run-off or alternative transferrable vote, but there is certainly reason to doubt this in Missouri.

This past Wednesday, I entered a contest over at the great web site Surviving Grady, as Red and Denton asked fans to write in with "the one person you'd love to spend a day with at Fenway Park." It could be anyone, living or dead, and you had to explain why. The winner gets the new 6-DVD set, "The Essential Games of Fenway Park."

The site got hundreds of entries, and the boys had a tough time narrowing it down to five. So, they expanded it to ten, and this morning, they announced on their site the finalists.

And my entry is one of the ten finalists.

I'm really blown away that it was chosen. If you go over to Surviving Grady, you can read it. It's not hard to figure out which is mine, but if you go to the fifth of the ten, "Dear Friend," that's mine.

This is reprinted from the LA TIMES. If you're interested in seeing John Ridley's original Op-Ed piece defending his position, it's here. If you'd like to see Craig Mazin's brief aside on Ridley's choice, go here. Personally, I'd just like to add one thing that people never quite seem to grok about going fi-core -- it means you can't vote on any contract (or anything political within the Guild)

Tomorrow afternoon, the baseball writers will announce their choices (if any) for the 2008 class for the Baseball Hall of Fame. There are a few worthy candidates on this year's ballot, and one I really hope finally gets the call is one James Edward Rice.

With all the hubbub going on about "The Steroids Era" and The Mitchell Report, this should work into Jim Rice's favor this season. He was simply one of the best hitters of his era, and a bit underappreciated. His vote totals have gone up in recent years (even if they did recede slightly last year), as many writers have taken a second look at his accomplishments.

National Pubic Radio does a lot of those person on the street interviews with prospective primary voters, and while they are not good for my blood pressure, they force me to confront an inconvenient truth. Here are the Republican voters I've heard recently:

• A guy whose number one priority is getting the U.S. out of Iraq. He has decided to vote for John McCain because McCain's a military veteran, and that means he's the guy who knows how to end the war and bring the troops home. One major problem with that theory is that McCain has absolutely no intention of bringing the troops home. On the contrary, he says that he doesn't mind if they stay there for 100 years.
• A woman who says that she's going to vote for Mitt Romney because "he's a committed Christian, and he isn't ashamed of it." Uh, lady -- I've got news for you.
  

A recurrent discussion, provoked especially by Brian Tamanaha in this venue, has involved explanations of judicial behavior. Many political scientists view judges as simply "politicians in robes" who vote to implement their preferred views on public policies. Many law professors believe that judges operate within what Ronald Dworkin termed "the forum of principle." One might, of course, argue, as Jack and I have, that judges can be explained by reference to their "high politics," which is distinguishable from a "lower" kind of politics that focuses, for example, on helping out one's own political party.

For the past couple of weeks I've been blogging about how, regardless of how many states Senators Clinton and Obama each "win" tonight, the Democratic primary system is not like the electoral college -- winner does not take all -- and therefore neither one of them is likely to emerge from today as a prohibitive favorite in terms of actually securing a majority of delegates. Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers has now run some numbers, and he calculates that the largest possible delegate spread between the two candidates after this evening is likely to be no more than 75 delegates, and that as of tomorrow morning both candidates will need to win over 1000 more delegates for a majority -- probably more than 1100 -- with only 1428 pledged delegates remaining to be chosen in primaries and caucuses. Thus, in order to win the nomination without the aid of "superdelegates," either candidate would need to win more than three-quarters of the remaining pledged delegates, something that is virtually inconceivable.

What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”

And, folks–Becca was nice enough to nominate Booking Through Thursday for a Blogger’s Choice Award–while you’re here, why don’t you head over and vote for us, too. Because, a vote for BTT is a vote for all of us who play each week!

Today's Washington Post has an article that discusses "The Downside of Obama Strategy," i.e., that he actually has the audacity to believe that every Democrat's (and, perhaps, every American's) vote should count equally. The article notes (accurately) that Clinton has done better in large, electoral-vote-rich states than has Obama, which has ostensibly provoked fears about the prospects of his winning in November. It doesn't matter that he has received more popular votes than Clinton in contested elections--which allows us to omit Michigan and Florida--and, of course, that he has won more delegates. All that matters, according to a number of quoted Clinton supporters, is the vote in large states. So what we have is an attempt to apply to the nominating process the Electoral College's effective disenfranchisement of those unlucky enough to live in states where they are the political minority and the insane emphasis on a relatively few "battleground" states . One gather that Clinton will lose to Obama in today's caucuses in Wyoming. But, hey, it doesn't matter what Wyoming Democrats think, because they live in a Republican state.

Rich Gossage was elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame today. He received an astounding 86% of the vote, and was the only player on the ballot who was elected. Congratulations to him.

Jim Rice was denied for the 14th time. He fell just 16 votes short, and now has just one final chance to make it from the baseball writers before his eligibility runs out. He received 392 votes, or 72.2% of the votes cast. Bert Blyleven, another very worthy candidate, was denied yet again, too.

The travesty for both continues.

I am sure you have all seen the headlines – the big Democratic turn out, the big Obama win, the big Clinton loss, and the religious right’s single-handed miracle of a Huckabee win – but what happened in Iowa last night holds far more secrets about what is to come than those headlines.

I caucused with the Democrats so I will have to limit my comments to what I saw there, although from my understanding, the Republicans go, pledge, pray, vote, and go again -- home to watch the Orange Bowl (Kansas was playing after all). The Democratic caucus procedure is much more involved, but more on that later.

Our government is now unable to say whether it would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions for the Iranian government to waterboard a downed U.S. airman. How do officials such as Brigadier General Hartmann sleep at night, I wonder? How many decades will it take to undo this damage? Kudos to Lindsey Graham, whose disgust is really the only appropriate response. Now, if he can only muster some of his colleagues to support a two-thirds vote to override the forthcoming presidential veto of the law that would end the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques."

QUESTION: Since I have been pregnant my husband and I have made a concerted effort to eat and drink organic foods and drinks. The first thing we switched to was organic milk. I noticed right away that the organic milk had a longer shelf-life than regular milk did but couldn't figure out why. Well today I found the answer:

Tomorrow being Thursday. Please don't forget to contact your representative and insist on a vote to override the veto of the the FY 2008 Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations conference report.

Enter your zip code in the Capitol building icon right under Chimpy, click and off you go. Do it for the children.

C.C. Sabathia beat out Josh Beckett to win the 2007 AL Cy Young Award today. They had very similar years, but I thought the vote total would be even closer than it was. Sabathia got 19 first place votes, while Beckett got 8. John Lackey finished third and Fausto Carmona finished fourth.

Here's the vote tally:

1st 2nd 3rdPoints
C.C. Sabathia Cleveland Indians 19 8 — 119
Josh Beckett Boston Red Sox 8 14 4 86
John Lackey Los Angeles Angels 1 5 16 36
Fausto Carmona Cleveland Indians — 1 4 7
Eric Bedard Baltimore Orioles — — 1 1
Roy Halladay Toronto Blue Jays — — 1 1