THE DAILY BLADE: McCain Wins MS
With John McCain (R-AZ) the last presidential candidate standing on the GOP side, it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to win the MS primary. But the victory shows he is getting traction – or, at least, resigned acceptance - amongst conservatives. Perhaps that “red phone” ad Hillary Clinton (D-NY) aired before the last round of state contests had the effect of clarifying what’s at stake better than McCain has been able to.
McCain won 78.9 percent of the vote; Mike Huckabee (R-AR), who is out of the race but was still on the ballot, got 12.5 percent). According to exit polls, three-quarters of Republican primary voters were satisfied with McCain as the GOP nominee, though 40 percent said he is not conservative enough.
On the Dem side it was same old, same old: Barack Obama (D-IL) beat Hillary by a huge margin in yet another Southern state (this time, by 60.7 percent to 37.1 percent), in large part because MS has the highest black population of any state (36 percent) and Obama won 91 percent one of those votes. As always, Hillary got the white vote (72 percent), the old vote and the old white women vote. Obama got everyone else. Yawn.
The only mildly interesting development is that in the open primary, 13 percent of the voters in the Dem primary were Republican – and 78 percent of them voted for Clinton. Perhaps they were acting on radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion that Hillary would be the easier candidate to beat in the general election (30 percent of Republicans who participated in the exit polls said they listen to conservative talk radio frequently).
Hillary certainly will be the easier candidate to run against – at least, according to former NY Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, because she’s white and you can say anything you want about her, whereas you have to walk on eggshells with Obama lest you be called a racist.
Gee, she sounds more like an aggrieved Republican than like a Dem. She’s also departing from the PC script in another way, as she makes clear in this interview with The New York Times:
“I am livid at this thing. Any time you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack. I don’t want [the Clinton campaign] to reach out to me. I’m exercising my First Amendment rights. If they don’t like it, tough. I don’t intend ever to have anybody tell me that I can’t say what I want to say.”
Wow. Free speech. What a concept.
Is This One Of Those Jobs That “Americans Won’t Do?”: Part VII
A low-speed, low-impact fender-bender that caused minor damage to the plaintiff’s car made it to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which affirmed the trial judge’s determination in Hisenaj v. Kuehner that biomechanical engineering data derived from human crash test dummies was scientifically reliable enough to introduce into evidence. In case you missed the important part of the previous sentence The Stiletto will reiterate: Americans are working as human crash test dummies, either as research volunteers (video link) or in the employ of automobile accident reconstruction experts. At the trial, defense expert Harold Alexander based his testimony on 17 studies over a 34-year period that used 203 volunteers to recreate accidents similar to the 8-mph rear-end collision that Hajrie Hisenaj claimed resulted in her degenerative disc disease and bulging and herniated discs, reports New Jersey Law Journal. In his opinion, the minor crash could not have caused her injuries.
Editorial Note: You’d be amazed at some of the jobs Americans are doing. To read previous posts in the “Is This One Of Those Jobs …” series, click click here (third item), here (third item), here (second item), here, here and here.
Well-Chosen Words: Part II
Are you a douchebag? If you are, The Stiletto really doesn’t want to know – but apparently an outfit promoting travel to Las Vegas does. Check out its ad campaign. Unlike “frickin,” which is an acceptable alternative for a vulgar expletive (third item) – just as “darn,” “dang” and “drat” are surrogates for the once-verboten “damn” – “douchebag” is a distasteful and offensive word that does not belong in an advertisement. And you won’t get an argument from South Pasadena, CA – at least during the first week of March every year, when the town becomes a “cuss -free zone.”
Here are more words about other words in the news these days:
† Are you were wondering why Barack Obama (D-IL) advisor Samantha Power had to resign after calling Hillary Clinton (D-NY) a “monster” in a Scottish newspaper interview (second item), but Hillary’s spokesperson Howard Wolfson remains in his post after likening Obama to Ken Starr - the scariest bogeyman Dems can think of? Here’s Hillary’s explanation, according to The Boston Globe: “Clinton at first said the media had made the Starr reference. Reminded that it was her spokesman who had done so, Clinton said, ‘One is an ad hominem attack, and one is a historical reference.’” Thanks for straightening that out, Hill. By the way, columnist Andrew Sullivan calls the Clintons “a horror film that never ends,” – which is sorta like calling them monsters. It’s a good thing he’s not a political operative, or he would have had to fall on his sword.
† Waterboarding has been around for more than 100 years, writes New York Times columnist William Safire, only it used to be called water cure and water treatment when used against U.S. P.O.W.s by Filipino insurgents during the Spanish-American war of 1898 and by North Korean soldiers in the 1950s. Safire quotes Reed College professor Darius Rejali, author of the book “Torture and Democracy” about why the name of the “harsh” interrogation technique morphed over the years: “There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters.”
† With parents trying “friend” their kids on Facebook, the kids are resisting what they regard as an intrusion on their privacy with “No Parents on Facebook” groups on the site, as well as by “rely[ing] on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families," reports The New York Times:
Text messaging, in particular, has perhaps become this generation’s version of pig Latin. For dumbfounded parents, AT&T now offers a tutorial that decodes acronyms meant to keep parents at bay. “Teens may use text language to keep parents in the dark about their conversations by making their comments indecipherable,” the tutorial states. Some acronyms meant to alert children to prying eyes are POS (“parent over shoulder”), PRW (“parents are watching”) and KPC (“keeping parents clueless”).
Addendum: This guy is definitely a douchebag.
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