With votes counted from 90 percent of Kentucky’s precincts, Clinton was gaining 65 percent of the vote to 30 percent for Obama.
Almost nine in 10 ballots were cast by whites, and the former first lady was winning their support overwhelmingly. She defeated her rival among voters of all age groups and incomes, the college educated and non-college educated, self-described liberals, moderates and conservatives.
Read More...Chumps.
That’s what Illinois voters are. We got a healthy reminder of that today when we were treated to the latest outrage about an old, old story—the sweet deal that some insiders wrangled from state government to build a fancy hotel in Springfield. The deal was that if the hotel didn’t make a profit, the insiders wouldn’t have to pay off a state loan they got to help build the palace.
Naturally, the hotel failed, the state ended up taking it over and the investors got away without having to pay back almost all of the dough. That’s a $15.5 million loan, from us taxpayers.
Chumps. Patsies. Suckers. That’s what we are. This deal has been haunting us since it was worked out in 1985 at the highest levels in state government. It raised “serious questions” at the time, but we voters, blockheads that we are, still go about electing ... Read More...
If you watched the entire speech John Edwards gave in endorsing Barack Obama, you might have been struck by the first five or six minutes, which sounded almost like a nominating speech for Sen. Hillary Clinton. This was neither incidental nor accidental.
With the nomination all but wrapped up—despite the protestations from the Clinton camp—one of Obama’s top priorities is to reach out, embrace and win over the votes of Clinton’s key constituencies.
As all the polls showed, following every primary a large cluster of Clinton voters said they would be unhappy if she didn’t get nominated. They threatened to vote for John McCain or sit out the election. Obama voters make similar vows, while history shows that eventually most Democrats come together—but sometimes not all do, as witness 1968.
A key demographic among Clinton voters is, of course, late middle-aged and older women who spent decades awaiting a woman ... Read More...
Well, Michael Sneed, as usual, is, at best, half right: Article 1, Section 2, of the U. S. Constitution, prior to Sneed’s amendment of today, stated, “No person shall be a Representative …who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen.”
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Sneed’s homework assignment tonight: Read the Constitution. She might find it even more appealing than Desperate North Shore Housewives, soon to be showing at…
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Dumbsville No. 1
The nice thing about working for the Chicago Sun-Times, if you are Michael Sneed, is that you can often write dumb things and nobody- at least nobody in a position of authority over Sneed at the paper- will notice or give a damn. You might think an editor would catch Sneed’s errors. Think again.
Read More...After wife Michelle was attacked last week in a video produced by the Tennessee GOP, Sen. Barack Obama sent a warning to the troublemakers on Monday to “lay off my wife.”
No matter the outcome of the presidential election, the contest has served to permanently vault Michelle Obama from relative obscurity to fame, as she has taken on major fund-raising and surrogate speaking roles on behalf of her husband, even phoning superdelegates to try to close the deal for him. Michelle Obama has her own chief of staff and press secretary, and campaign advance staffers handle her larger events, where she has turned out to be a significant draw in her own right.
Read More...I wrote a short item a few days ago when the polar bear was placed on the list of threatened species. Today I will expand on my claim that the bear is not threatened, but capitalism is.
The government of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, where a large percentage of the world's polar bears live, will not list the animal as threatened. They live with the bears, but what do they know? I realize that some will criticize Nunavut when they read that the territory feels their hunting industry will be threatened, but keep in mind that Ducks Unlimited, which works to ensure healthy duck populations, is run by hunters. They don't gain by wiping out a species.
Not everyone agrees that the ice the bears live on is threatened to the extent that has been alleged. Keep in ... Read More...
President Bush and the Democratic Congress are locked in fierce conflict over approval of U.S. free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. Presumptive presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain hold sharply different views on the merits of free trade and globalization. Whether we’re prepared for it or not, a major national debate on these issues is looming for the fall campaign and beyond.
Meanwhile, our venerable House of Representatives, in the context of the Colombia agreement, has recklessly changed the rules for congressional action on trade legislation. By rejecting long-settled procedures that prevented congressional sidetracking of trade deals negotiated by presidents, the House has hamstrung U.S. trade policy and created the gravest threat to the global trading system in decades.
Read More...