THE DAILY BLADE: “Rocky” Makes It To The Next Round
Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY) won the Dem primary in PA – an important swing state - with a respectable 10-point margin (55 percent to 45 percent) over her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (IL).
Both Hilary and Obama held onto their core supporters, and neither made inroads into the other’s base. Women, senior citizens and less educated voters went for Hillary, whereas men, those under age 30 and highly educated voters clung to Obama. But considering that Obama spent $11.2 million on TV ads - more than twice the amount his rival spent - he should have been able to “close the deal,” as Hillary put it.
Exit poll data from voters in 40 precincts across PA showed that one in 10 – half of them Republican, half of them independent - changed their party registration so they could vote in the state’s closed primary. Sixty percent of them said they voted for Obama.
Other exit poll results:
† Although the candidates spent six weeks campaigning in PA, 20 percent of voters decided for whom to vote within the last week. Nearly 60 percent of them supported Hillary, suggesting that his weak performance in last week’s debate and the ensuing tit-for-tat advertisements the two candidates ran had a negative effect.
† According to 2005 census data, PA is 86 percent white, and Hillary won 60 percent of these votes, including two-thirds of those without college degrees and an equal number of those whose household income was less than $50K. She also beat Obama amongst white men by a 10-point margin. For his part, Obama won 9 out of 10 black votes overall, and had a strong showing in Philadelphia - which has a large black population - as well as in the city’s suburbs, home to well-educated, liberal whites.
† Gun owners – roughly four out of 10 voters – regular churchgoers and those living in rural areas of the state residents all supported Hillary by 60 percent to Obama’s 40 percent.
† With the candidates bashing each other’s brains out all week, Dems are becoming increasingly polarized between the two. Roughly half of each candidate’s supporters say they could support the other candidate in the general election.
Hillary overwhelmingly won the votes of Reagan Dems in the NE part of the state – particularly in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area – voters who are the likeliest to cross over to John McCain (R-AZ) in the general election, should Obama be the alternative. Hillary’s win adds weight to her claim that she is better able to defeat McCain in the fall. The pressure is now on Obama to win decisively in IN and NC on May 6th – meaning, he must significantly erode Hillary’s blue collar support regardless of the margin – so as to render moot her argument to the superdelegates that he is unelectable.
Thinning Ranks Of Armenian Genocide Deniers At The Wall Street Journal
Less than five months after Rupert Murdoch took the reins of The Wall Street Journal, the paper's managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, has resigned. Publisher, Robert Thomson, formerly editor of the Times of London, will step in as interim managing editor. Regular readers of this blog will recall that Brauchli made it a point to hire Armenian Genocide denier Douglas Frantz as The Journal’s Middle East bureau chief in Istanbul, after his controversial tenure at the Los Angeles Times. With Tunku Varadarajan – another of the paper’s stable of Armenian Genocide deniers (third item) – now safely ensconced in academe where he no longer has the bully pulpit, perhaps The Journal will slowly find its way toward covering Turkey objectively, instead of being its slavish shill.
Global Warming Is A Vegetarian Plot
In case you forgot to mark your calendar, yesterday was Earth Day. Citing a recent study published in the Lancet and the “State of the World” report from the Worldwatch Institute, Boston Globe reporter Derrick Z. Jackson suggests that “with the planet being at stake, you must eat less steak”:
With fatal food riots in poor nations, and with China rapidly approaching Western levels of consumption, we in the obese United States must redefine what constitutes, to borrow from McDonald's, a “happy meal.” Scientists are concluding that along with more fuel-efficient cars and curbing industrial pollution, the simple act of eating less meat could help slow global warming.
For the world's higher-income populations, greenhouse-gas emissions from meat eating warrant the same scrutiny as do those from driving and flying," according to the authors of a study last fall in the Lancet.
Outfits like the Worldwatch Institute keep a close eye on world population – more people means growing more food crops and feed, raising more farm animals and generating more greenhouse gas emissions, which some believe is a significant cause of global warming. If “save the planet” types had their druthers, carnivores would all be eating Soylent Green.
The Stiletto Scoops Townhall.com
Go far enough back in history and you’ll find virtually every ethnic or racial group in our multicultural nation has been enslaved at one time or another in their ancestral lands. Go only as far back as the 20th century and you’ll find white ethnics - Armenians, Jews and Ukrainians – were subjected to genocide, the most extreme manifestation of racism possible. … Can Obama even begin to appreciate how galling it is for Americans whose relatives perished as a result of state-sponsored genocide to hear Rev. Wright’s bogus claims of plots by our government to wipe out blacks with AIDS and crack cocaine?
- Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race, The Stiletto Blog, March 26, 2008
[M]any of us did carry legacies from the old country, of hunger and persecution, of watching family members and villagers murdered by atheistic regimes. … [M]any of the whites in previous generations also had experienced persecution and hunger and worked in dangerous, dirty, and degrading jobs.
- Yes, Barack Obama, We Are Bitter, Mary Grabar, Townhall.com, April 20, 2008
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