All posts by Rand Simberg
Hope Remains
Regardless of the outcome of today’s primary, Fred Thompson says that he’s going on to Florida.
Why not? Unless he seriously underperforms the polls tonight, he’s still got a significant amount of support, given that the winner is unlikely to even get a third of the vote. When people drop out for various reasons, their votes have to go somewhere. Where will Huckabee’s voters go? Where will McCain’s, if the only reason to vote for him is his Vietnam record and the war and they ignore his other positions? Not Huck. Probably not Romney. Though Rudy is a possibility. I don’t think that this race will be anywhere close to settled this weekend.
There are a lot of people who will continue to send money to Fred as long as they think he has a chance. And there’s still a non-zero possibility that this thing could go all the way to Minneapolis with no clear winner, which means that in a brokered convention, Thompson could have an edge. If this is true, and he remains in, I might even put up a Thompson sign on my lawn in Boca Raton.
Living And Dying
…by identity politics:
The union’s rank and file, the panelist explained, features a very large Hispanic contingent and there was simply no way this bloc was going to support a black candidate, no matter what the union’s leadership urged.
I remember thinking at the time how extraordinary this admission was, and how nuts the media would have gone if it had been uttered by a Republican voter. Instead, one black member of the focus group made what seemed a pretty half-hearted retort (really, a mild press for more of an explanation from the Hispanic panelist, if I’m remembering this right) before Luntz, looking uncomfortable (though maybe I’m projecting) cut the discussion off quickly and threw the coverage back to the Fox studio, where no one seemed anxious to wade into the matter.
It was remarkable to see members of the Party that lives and breaths racial and ethnic bean-counting slough this off as if it were just a fact of life. And maybe it is.
I continue to find the ongoing crack-up of the race/gender-obsessed Democrats fascinating. And I confess to no little amount of schadenfreude.
Words Don’t Mean Things
Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.
OK, what kind of a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul? I can’t think of any position that he takes that could be considered “moderate.” He’s what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a “moderate,” or someone whom the AP would call a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.
And frankly, I find people who call themselves “moderate” to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither “liberal” or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than “moderate.”
* Not that there’s anything wrong with that–so am I, on many issues. I’m just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.
Words Don’t Mean Things
Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.
OK, what kind of a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul? I can’t think of any position that he takes that could be considered “moderate.” He’s what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a “moderate,” or someone whom the AP would call a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.
And frankly, I find people who call themselves “moderate” to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither “liberal” or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than “moderate.”
* Not that there’s anything wrong with that–so am I, on many issues. I’m just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.
Words Don’t Mean Things
Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.
OK, what kind of a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul? I can’t think of any position that he takes that could be considered “moderate.” He’s what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a “moderate,” or someone whom the AP would call a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.
And frankly, I find people who call themselves “moderate” to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither “liberal” or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than “moderate.”
* Not that there’s anything wrong with that–so am I, on many issues. I’m just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.
The Ex-Golden State
I didn’t want to leave California, which I consider my real home state, though I was raised and spent the first quarter century of my life in Michigan. But I also have mixed feelings about moving back. Victor Davis Hanson, a true native, explains why:
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world’s richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace
Unanswered Questions
OK, CalOSHA has fined Scaled Composites for not training its employees properly in the handling of nitrous oxide. But there’s still no explanation of what caused the explosion, or really, how to prevent it in the future. At least, not in this story.
This can’t be good news for the SS1 propulsion system.
Scumbag
The Wikipedia entry on the title of this post is pretty minimal. I think that it could be usefully expanded and improved by pointing out this creature as a prominent example.
I expect too-frequent commenter “Jim Harris” to be along to defend him any minute.
He Gave Them A Cigar?
He spooged on their dress? He suborned perjury from them? He got Vernon Jordan to offer them a job with Revlon? What?
Obama’s racist black minister says that Bill Clinton (the first black president) gave blacks the Monica treatment:
Man should not put limits on what God can do, but that’s what people always do, he told the crowd. Just as God made five loaves and two fishes feed thousands, God has provided liberators for blacks in the past – from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and now Barack Obama. But, Wright said, there were always reasons not to follow them.
Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton “because her husband was good to us,” he continued.
“That’s not true,” he thundered. “He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.”
I eagerly await further elaboration.
I’m going to run out of popcorn, watching the so-called “progressives” finally immolating themselves in their vile identity politics.