Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
A new book on the 2008 presidential season with lots of behind the scenes goodies has a lengthy excerpt bit on the New York magazine size, where John and Elizabeth Edwards get seriously toasted: entitled “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster” if that gives you a heads-up. It’s pretty brutal. The line that kept coming [...]
(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend) Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist. Really. Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in [...]
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
Interesting articles on a speech given by the guy who ran McCain’s VP search; to wit, Sarah Palin did better on some matters when questioned about foreign policy stuff than a lot of the others (God knows what the seekrit answers were supposed to be) and that Joe Lieberman and the fusion ticket was indeed [...]
It wasn’t the ideology, it was (1) a major and constant sloppiness with factual statements (requiring the paper to apologize and run retractions over and over again when caught), (2) heavy use of using the column for advocacy of his pet pols who he’d fed ideas to, and (3) smacking around the NYT in public [...]
Right here. I think they picked the right one, personally.
No more Polaroid film. Digital’s killed it. Whole Paycheck Foods is having problems, and people are going for store generics everywhere in grocery stores. Mark Penn can’t imagine how he hurt the Clinton campaign for President. China is having serious upsets and problems due to the recession elsewhere; if nobody buys the stuff you make, [...]
http://images.newsmax.com/misc/2008_Election_Map.jpg And this one shows the change of color – er, votes in this election versus the last one in the state of Ohio – the bluer the county gets, the more it moved to the Democrats, and the redder, the more that county moved to the Republicans. The northwest went more Democratic, the area [...]
Obama: 325 McCain: 288 Barr: 2 Nader: 3 McKinney: 1 Baldwin: 1 Total registered in precinct: 781 Total votes: 625 Congress: Harper (D): 255 Biggert (R-Inc): 317 Green party guy: 17
The AP and others are now declaring Mark Begich, the Mayor of Anchorage (D), has beaten Senator Stevens for the Alaska Senate seat. The margin is too wide for a free recount, and it’s unlikely that the GOP will pay for it or Stevens can – or that it would make any significant difference. The [...]
Excellent editorial in the NY Times on the auto bailout, along the lines of what I was talking about. At the same time, Congressional Democrats and President-elect Barack Obama, who are pushing for many billions worth of emergency aid for the nation’s least-competent carmakers, must ensure that tough conditions are attached to any rescue package. [...]
Begich (D) is up 814 votes over Senator Stevens (R), with another 38,000 votes to go – in strong Democratic districts in Alaska.
Alaska Senate: 221,173 votes were already counted; a new estimate shows that the uncounted votes there are around 90,600 – about 30% of the total! (PDF with the details as to what sort of votes and from where) And this isn’t complete; absentee votes are still trickling in in the mail. They’ll start counting these [...]
Panic in various circles over the mistaken notion that ‘Obama’s going to shut down gun shops and confiscate our guns‘. Various people who were proclaiming Obama’s victory in OMG terms now doing a ‘never mind’ response. Dogs are adopting kittens in Jiangmen, Meredith’s home town in China, but you can’t adopt or foster children if [...]
Alaska: Still 81,000 uncounted ballots (absentee, some early ballots and the ‘provisional’ ballots) to go to be checked out in the next couple of weeks. The gap is presently around 3,200 out of 210,000 cast. (PDF of where the present votes came from) Minnesota: With a 221 vote gap out of 2,500,000 ish voting, there’s [...]