TUESDAY 7:45 PM

I spent dinner with another journalist discussing the middle east.

It seems that even some of the most seemingly intelligent people cannot fathom what the damn thing’s about and it gets me mad sometimes, but after a long discussion about that and the morality of near beer, I went down to the Fleet center to find out what the state of the race for tomorrow is.

Now as we political junkies all know, this was the state of affairs on Saturday:

Kerry 2713
Edwards 549
Dean 120
Clark 68
Kucinich 63
Sharpton 20

Now all the other candidates have released their delegates to whomever they wish to vote for, according to a delegate from Wisconsin, Dean told his people he wanted ALL his people to vote for Kerry in order to show unity and tell the Republicans he means business. The scuttlebut is that Dean is probably going to get about fifteen votes anywy, and maybe a few for Sharpton and someone else. Clark wants a cabinet job, so nobody's going to vote for him. Kucinich said something similier to Dean, but they voted unanimously to stay with their guy in the balloting, which is way cool. The only problem is that the people running the convention don’t want a divided result and have told the Kucinich people that their votes are going to be recorded as "present" instead. This is against the rules and we might not know what’s going to happen. An embarrassing walkout? Capitulation? Stay tuned folks, this may be the only interesting thing we might see between now and Edwards’ acceptance speech tomorrow night, although Howard Dean and keynoter Barack Obama, whom I heard speak this afternoon. He’s pretty good, actually, but more on that later….The tribute to Ted Kennedy starts in about twenty minutes, and he's gives good speech.