Harold Ickes just said the Clinton campaign would contest the committee decision regarding Michigan at the convention. Clinton supporters are heckling the committee. At one point they were chanting “Denver, Denver.” Ugly stuff.

The decision that Florida votes would be split by the primary vote and votes will count for half was accepted unanimously, even by Clinton supporters on the committee.

Update: The Clinton supporters are trying to disrupt the committee meeting, which just voted (19 yes, 8 opposed) on a Michigan plan that I’m not sure I understand completely, but I think it provides for a 69-59 split in favor of Clinton with half votes in Michigan, with Obama guaranteed two add-on superdelegates.

Correction: The bobbleheads are pointing out that Ickes said Clinton “reserves the right” to contest the decision to the credentials committee of the convention, not that the Clintons necessarily would really do that. But I think the Clintons will not back down.

Update: Chuck Todd just said the meeting revealed the DNC no longer belongs to the Clintons. Obama won the outside game and the inside game, and it’s his party now.

Update: Georgia 10 has the Chuck Todd quote in full:

You know, there is a big thing we should be getting out of this party tonight, and that is the Democratic National Committee is not somehow controlled by the Clintons. Not by the Clinton campaign any more. We may have started this campaign believing that the Clinton campaign controlled, but this is Barack Obama’s party now. He’s already been winning the outside game, he now won the inside game. Yes it’s true that Harold Ickes can threaten this stuff about the credentials, but Don Fowler really did signal today by being for the Michigan compromise that, “Guys, it’s over.”

Update: Representative of the party?

One of the Clintonistas’ arguments for their candidate is that she gets fewer votes from independents and is therefore more representative of the Democratic Party. Well, be sure to catch “Eating a Reuben Amongst a Crowd of Clintonites” by Sam Stein. Conversations from Clinton supporters:

“[Obama] is a cult. His campaign is an anti-woman cult.”
“I will actively campaign against him.”

“You know who is backing him is George Soros. It’ll be George Soros, not Obama, who is running the country.”

“South Dakota is totally rigged for Obama because of Tom Daschle. Obama’s going to win South Dakota because he’s buying it and rigging it.”

“[Obama] is a socialist! You know what the Nazi Party was before it was the Nazi Party? It was the Socialist Party.”

***

It was not all that different from the mood outside, where signs read, “At least slaves were counted as 3/5ths a Citizen,” and some pamphlets detailed Obama’s supposed dealings in drugs and gay sex.

“Would you rather have a president who had an affair [Bill Clinton] or one who was a murderer [Obama]?” Eve Fairbanks, a reporter with The New Republic, was asked by one protester.

These people are representative of the Democratic Party?

Update: Here’s one now —

Alex Kopelman waded into the crowd of protesters outside the Dem rules committee meeting, and says most of the people he spoke to are not so much Clinton supporters as they are people who think legitimate primaries have been discarded by the Dems for no discernible reason.

In other words, they have absolutely no clue what’s actually going on with the Florida and Michigan votes, but they’ve been stirred up by Clinton’s rhetoric to believe that shady do-good scoundrel politicians have cheated them out of their votes. See also Eve Fairbanks at TNR.

I never did hear a final count of how many protesters were there.

At MSNBC, Chuck Todd explains the technical issues in some detail and discusses a range of remedies. Josh Marshall, however, gets to the heart of the matter (emphasis added):

What doesn’t get mentioned, however, is this: it was widely reported and understood in both Florida and Michigan that the results of these primaries would not be counted. And based on that knowledge, large numbers of voters in both states simply didn’t participate.

If the DNC were now to turn around and decide to make these contests count after all, these non-participating voters would be disenfranchised no less than the people who did turn out would be if the DNC sticks to the rules and doesn’t seat any of the delegates. The simple fact is that large numbers of people, acting on accurate knowledge and in good faith, decided that there wasn’t a real primary being held in their state on the day in question and on that basis decided not to participate.

See also Eric Kleefeld, who works out via statistical modeling that —

Bottom line: As these numbers clearly show, if these two states had held recognized contests with turnout in line with the best-fit curve for the other states, it seems likely that many more voters would have turned out — possibly as many as one million in Florida, and over half a million in Michigan — and we simply can’t know how those people would have voted. These simple facts render both contests, especially Michigan, seriously dubious as actual measurements of the will of each state’s electorate.

There are all kinds of reports now that the committee has pretty much settled on a solution for Florida — allow 50 percent of the Florida votes. As explained by Marc Ambinder:

Under the “concession” proposal floated by Obama and the one that (probably) will be accepted by the committee, Clinton would get 52.5 delegate VOTES and Obama would get 33.5 DELEGATE VOTES for a NET of 19 DELEGATE Votes. Note that Clinton will seat a NET of 38 people who are delegates, but since each gets a half a vote, she will get 19 DELEGATE Votes. Clinton would seat 105 actual people; Obama would seat 67. The superdelegates would each get a half of a vote as well, but, obviously, those votes are counted independently of the pledged delegates.

There are also all kinds of reports that the Obama camp will accept this, but the Clinton camp won’t.

Update: Oliver Willis on the Clinton demands:

It’s kind of like a track athelete demanding the gold medal after someone whacked everyone else’s knee with a baseball bat right after the starter’s pistol has been blown.

The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee is meeting right now to sort out the Florida-Michigan primary vote squabble that Senator Clinton caused when she backtracked on her earlier agreements about whether those votes should count. Joe Sudbay is liveblogging at AMERICAblog. So far, he says, the 10,000 righteously furious Clinton supporters who are to protest the meeting have not shown up. There are only a couple hundred protesters, he says. Maybe the other 9,700 are still at breakfast and will show up later.

Until something happens, see M.S. Bellows, “The Trap: Clinton’s ‘Briarpatch’ Strategy For The DNC Rules Committee Meeting.” Very basically — and I suspect this is true — Clinton is making demands she knows good and well won’t be met just so she can keep the controversy alive all the way to the convention.

Barack Obama and Howard Dean are about to walk into Harold Ickes’ trap tomorrow, and they aren’t likely to even realize their mistake until Hillary Clinton cries “foul!” next week and announces that “justice” and “voters’ rights” are forcing her to carry her campaign all the way to the Democratic Convention next August.

One of the commenters imagined SenatorPresident Obama’s inauguration — Senator Clinton will rush the stage and try to snatch away the Bible.

Update: MSNBC also counted about 200 protesters. These included a couple of Obama supporters with a sign that says “Change the Rules Until I Win.”