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Samizata blogs on the attempt to control thermostats in CA.
Hillary has had the bad luck to attract the attention of Camille Paglia again.
… Hillary’s willingness to tolerate Bill’s compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause — which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.
It’s no coincidence that Hillary’s staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary’s rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let’s not forget Hillary, the governor’s wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock. …
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… The Clintons live to campaign. It’s what holds them together and gives them a glowing sense of meaning and value. Their actual political accomplishments are fairly slight. The obsessive need to keep campaigning may mean a president Hillary would go right on spewing the bitterly partisan rhetoric that has already paralyzed Washington. Even if Hillary could be elected (which I’m skeptical about), how in tarnation could she ever govern?…
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… Hillary herself, with her thin, spotty record, tangled psychological baggage, and maundering blowhard of a husband, is also a mighty big roll of the dice. She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark (“Cue the tears!”). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary’s real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same.
The Captain says Kerry announced for Obama.
…This seems strange on a couple of different levels. Kerry hardly ran as the insurgent candidate in 2004; that was Howard Dean. Kerry represents the Establishment in the Democratic Party, a quasi-Brahmin who has remained in the Senate largely through the offices of Ted Kennedy instead of any legislative accomplishments of his own. The man who authored six whole bills in twenty years hardly qualifies to speak about transformational change. What has he ever done to affect it himself? …
Karl Rove’s New Hampshire analysis was in the WSJ.
What would Shakespeare’s Jack Cade say after the New Hampshire Democratic primary? Maybe the demagogue in “Henry VI” would call for the pollsters to be killed first, not the lawyers.
The opinion researchers find themselves in a difficult place after most predicted a big Obama sweep. It’s not their fault. The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary. The unpredictability of who will turn out and what the mix of voters will be makes polling a primary election like reading chicken entrails — ugly, smelly and not very enlightening. Our media culture endows polls — especially exit polls — with scientific precision they simply don’t have.
But more interesting than dissecting the pollsters is dissecting the election returns, precinct by precinct. Sen. Hillary Clinton won working-class neighborhoods and less-affluent rural areas. Sen. Barack Obama won the college towns and the gentrified neighborhoods of more affluent communities. Put another way, Mrs. Clinton won the beer drinkers, Mr. Obama the white wine crowd. And there are more beer drinkers than wine swillers in the Democratic Party.
Mrs. Clinton won a narrow victory in New Hampshire for four reasons. …
Gail Collins gets in for just one line.
Whatever your politics, people, you have to admit this is one great presidential race. What next? Fred Thompson takes Florida on a sympathy vote from retirees? (They like a leader who’s really, really rested.) John Edwards finds a new emotion for South Carolina? (Anger is so cold weather.) I don’t think anyone can top Mike Gravel’s speech to the New Hampshire high school students when he told them to avoid alcohol and stick with marijuana. But really, we’re ready for anything.
If you’re a fan of democracy, Hillary Clinton’s primary victory this week has to be a good thing. You don’t want the whole election decided on the basis of a strange ritual in Iowa that resembles Red Rover with votes, along with the considered opinion of a small state full of idiosyncratic New Englanders. We want a turn! South Dakota wants a turn!
George Will on the campaign so far.
Like the Roman god Janus, from which this godforsaken month takes its name, the two parties’ voters in two states have looked in different directions. After six months of intense campaigning, in just six transformative days Iowa spoke and contrarian New Hampshire said: On the other hand …
These states perhaps started a marathon — it might not reach a decisive crescendo on Feb. 5 when 22 states choose — between two formidable Democratic candidates with ardent constituencies. Meanwhile, Republicans, illustrating this year’s elemental asymmetry, may be contemplating a choice among John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. …
John Fund notes nothing says Bush has to spend the earmark money.
This week President Bush will make one of the most important decisions of his remaining time in office. It won’t get headlines or lead the news, but it could play a major role in deciding whether this country ever gets any kind of grip on the constantly growing federal budget.
Just before Christmas, Congress sent Mr. Bush a $516 billion omnibus spending bill stuffed with 8,993 special-interest earmarks. To make matters worse, most of the earmarks aren’t even in the language of the law itself. They were slipped into a 900-page “committee report” that represented the wish-lists of the Senate and House appropriations committees. Almost no one got a chance to read that report before the budget was passed late at night and with barely a day for members to review it.
Mr. Bush agreed to sign the budget but said he was disappointed at Congress’s failure to overcome its earmark addiction. He announced he was asking his budget director, Jim Nussle, “to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill.”
What Mr. Bush knows, and Congress doesn’t want the taxpayers to know, is that the vast majority of the offending earmarks–the ones that aren’t part of the actual budget law and were instead “air-dropped” into the committee report–aren’t legally binding. A Dec. 18 legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service found that most of the committee reports have not been formally passed by both houses and “presented” to the President for signing, and thus have not become law. “President Bush could ignore the 90% of earmarks that never make it to the floor of the House or Senate for a vote,” says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has read the CRS report. “He doesn’t need a line-item veto.” …
So how do they count tigers in the wild?
Wild tigers in India are under increasing threats from poachers, and seven of the country’s 28 reserves can barely sustain a breeding population, according to a Sunday article in the Miami Herald. The article went on to note that “no one is sure how many wild tigers remain in India, but most estimates put the total at only 3,000 to 3,500. Some believe it’s closer to 1,500.” How do wildlife researchers count tigers? …