First and foremost, Mitt Romney, who already had over half the total delegates selected, has further extended his delegate lead, by winning more convincingly in a larger state.
She completely blew Obama among Hispanics, notwithstanding his bragging about getting that vote in the senate race against Alan Keys. The only segment of the electorate to go for Keyes is the batsh#$ insane one.
She won 4 out of 6 of the special caucus locations on the strip.
I think that Edwards is done. He did not break double digits, and the data is fairly clear, though quite surprising to me, that Edwards voters will go Clinton as a second choice.
Obviously, we have South Carolina, where Obama is favored, but I think that these, and the generally superior organization of Clinton, will mean that she seals the deal on February 5.
Of cours, my predictive powers only marginally exceed Alan Keyes sanity, so don’t put any money down on my predictions.
Mitt Romney has volunteers who are lobbiests, but they are not paid staff, like a number of other candidates, including McCain.
In fact, McCain got stenography when he said that tathat tax cuts always raise revenues (not true since Kennedy lowered the max marginal rate from over 90% to 70%), but The New Republic, that bastion of fabulists from Glass to Shalit to Siegel, has to call out the New York Times on its stenography.
It will be very interesting to see what will happen if Hillary and Mitt win, how on earth will the kule kidz make up their minds when they hate both candidates?
Maybe they’ll all become cheerleaders for Mr. Bloomberg.
(numbers reflect delegates to state convention, not total votes) It’s pretty much, “put a fork in Edwards, he’s done”, which if you look at the polls, benefits Clinton (Edwards voters, as strange as it sounds go to Hillary with him out of the race).
Barack Obama has warned about the dangers of gambling — that it carries a “moral and social cost” that could “devastate” poor communities. As a state senator in Illinois, he at times opposed plans to expand gambling, worrying that it could be especially harmful to low-income people.
sanctimony, and anti-gambling self-righteousness won’t go over well in Nevada.
That being said, the fact that it’s taken Clinton’s campaign so long to find this indicates that just perhaps, she is surrounded by a bunch of drooling idiots as political advisers *cough* Mark Penn *cough*
Obama, an avid poker player, developed a reputation in Illinois as a critic of gambling. He voted against a 1999 measure to extend riverboat gambling to include boats stationed at dockside.
But Obama was not dogmatic. In submitting campaign questionnaires in 1998 and 2002 for the anti-gambling group Illinois Churches in Action, he left himself room to back the industry, answering “undecided” on whether he favored adding riverboat and land-based casinos. On a 2002 questionnaire bearing his signature, the words “not sure” were penciled in as answers to questions about several forms of expansion, such as moving casinos from rivers to land and raising the gambling age to 21.
Asked about Obama’s stance on gambling, his presidential campaign sent a list of quotations from the candidate in which he distinguished between Illinois and Nevada when talking about the industry.
In the comments cited by the campaign, Obama cast the industry’s effect on Nevada in a positive light. For example, he told the Associated Press last month that gambling could be a “successful economic model” as long as it was “properly regulated.”
Sanctimony, and hypocrisy.
Sorry, when someone serves up a softball like this, you need to hit it out of the park.
I think that the last time this happened, a political operator paid a few hundred people to go into the gallery and chant an obscure governor’s name, and he got the nomination, and won the presidency, even though he was not a candidate when the convention started.
John Edwards is apparently a figure of the voters’ imagination, though it appears that NY Times Ombudsman Public Editor Clark Hoyt shares the public’s delusion.
I could make some sort of pithy statement about corporate media, but instead, I’ll just call the coverage wankeriffic.
It’s also very, very savvy, it strokes the ego of her press corps. She played flight attendant over the loud speaker, welcoming people aboard “Hil Force One”, and declaring, among other things, that, “FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) regulations prohibit the use of any cell phones, BlackBerrys, or wireless devices that may be used to transmit a negative story about me”.
No major GOP candidate has set foot in the state for two onths, and some Republicans are bracing for a possible surprise first-place showing by long-shot Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the only Republican to broadcast TV ads in Nevada.
My guess as to why no Republican has campaigned in Nevada? It requires too much outreach to non-Cuban Hispanics.
And as Harry Truman once said, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like one, the people will vote for the real Republican every time.”
His talk to Reno Gazette editorial board exemplifies this.
Barack Obama and I are alike in some significant ways.
We are nearly the same age, he was born in 1961, and I was born in 1962, and we both missed the 1960s, we was in Hawaii and Jakarta during the decade, and I was in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau (though after August 1969, I was in Virginia for a time.
As such, we were in some very real ways separated from the cultural goings on of the 1960s by virtue of geographic separation.
We thus both became politically aware at the same time, though I might have done so earlier, as both my parents were politically involved, and I had a summer without cartoons while my mom watched the Watergate hearing.
For most of my generation, any political awareness came around the time of Jimmy Carter, who was, and is, truth be told, a depressingly sanctimonious downer.*
So there are a lot of people, and I am not one of them, who have some fondness for Reagan, if just because Carter was so depressing.
I remember him running a blatantly racist campaign, and opening up the White House for the personal profit of his friends.
He won by keeping the hostages in Iran until after the election.
In any case, he gave a talk to the Reno Gazette editorial board on Monday, and it was caught on tape for posterity.
In any case, he gave a talk with Here is a transcript of the relevant portion of his talk, (H/T Open Left)
I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s
This, of course would be the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicare, the opening of social welfare programs to black and brown people, and to a large degree the elimination of childhood malnutrition in the United States?
Yep, that’s REALLY excessive.
and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.
You like how the American people forced the US to withdraw from a wasteful, stupid and useless war?
You mean like how a corrupt and dictatorial President was forced from office because the American people would not tolerate a crook in the White House?
When people like Ronald Reagan refered to the excesses of the 1960s, they mean that they did not want people with your complexion to be able vote in the South, and that Lynching and church bombings were the God given right of the white man.
You think those were excesses?
Well, Ronald Reagan certainly made it explicit that he was running on behalf of people who that that they were.
No, Ronald Reagan didn’t appeal to people’s optimism, he appealed to their petty, small minded bigotry and selfishness. Jimmy Carter told people to tighten their energy belts and act for the good of the country; Ronald Reagan told them they could guzzle gas with impunity and do whatever the hell they wanted. He kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about “state’s rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964’s Freedom Summer. He thus put up a welcome sign for “Reagan Democrats,” peeling off white voters who were unhappy with the multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party.
One of his first acts was to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 — one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century. And his vision of deregulation didn’t free the country up for entrepreneurship, it opened it up for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis. He popularized the notion that all government is bad government and in eight short years put in place the architecture for decades of GOP graft and corruption.
There’s enough hagiography of Reagan on the right, I don’t think Democrats really need to go there.
*I also consider him a war criminal, along with Zbigniew Brezinski, for quite literally buying a civil war in Afghanistan just to screw with the Soviets.
I came away with one conclusion, that listening to the inane and hacktackular questions of Brian Williams and Tim Russert was on par with being waterboarded. I thought that Natalie Morales was a bit better, but I have less experience with here, and in the case of TV Newsies, familiarity breeds contempt.
I thought that it was a wash, though Clinton nailing Obaba on his vote for the Bush/Cheney energy bill (WTF!) was a good zinger.
John Edwards seemed a bit more energetic. Obama and Clinton seemed a bit tired.
The best questions were asked by the candidates by each other, but that was a very low bar.
There’s something else going on here. I strongly suspect that Barack Obama is being asked to condemn Louis Farrakhan not because there’s some bogus two-degrees-of-separation thing going on, but because Barack Obama is black, and because black politicians are supposed to condemn Louis Farrakhan before they can be trusted. This isn’t racism, but it’s an implicit double standard, under which black politicians have a higher hurdle to jump before they deserve public trust than white ones. More generally, this is a bad, wrongheaded, and even dangerous article. Richard Cohen shouldn’t have written it, and the Washington Post shouldn’t have printed it.
I will go further. This is explicitly, and intentionally racist.
I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.
Richard Cohen is a shanda before the goyim, and a miserable excuse for a human being.
This explains why he works writing openions for the Washington Post.
I’m not sure of the legalities, but he was offered a spot, and then it was withdrawn, and he had made arrangements to be in Las Vegas for the debates, so I think having him in the debate is the right thing to do.
It would appear that the judge made his ruling based on some sort of implied contract, and the public service requirement for broadcasters, but I’m completely unequipped to evaluate the law here, I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit*!
His plan for people who might lose their homes is a subsidy, when a better and far cheaper solution is to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of the loan, as they do for vacation and rental homes. (It also hits the bad lenders where it hurts, which should be a goal).
I do approve extending unemployment benefits though, and the aid to municipalities who are hemorrhaging property tax money.
That being said, e have bridges falling down, and we need massive investment in alternative energy, and his primary thrust is cutting taxes.
A better solution is stepped up infrastructure repair, and money for alternative energy programs. The money these people will earn will be spent more quickly, and it is the velocity of money that causes a recession or a recovery.
The dynamic of the back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is interesting, and I think that Hillary had the better of the exchange, which, according to sources in both campaigns is now officially over.
Obama’s campaign is designed around a goal, to prevent the voting public from thinking of him as an angry black man who cries “wolf” about racism.
As Ezra Klein and John Aravosis have said, this exchange undercuts Obama’s primary message, that he is a new kind of politician who can bring people together, because people are hearing what they see as the same old tired litany (it’s not really tired, because we are a bigoted society) of accusations of racism.
