Andrew Clem home
Andrew Clem banner

Blog post


Monthly archives
(all categories)


February 5, 2008 [LINK / comment]

Super-duper Super Tuesday 2008

What an extraordinary confluence of "super" days: Super Bowl Sunday, and today Shrove Tuesday / Carnaval / Mardis Gras, coinciding with the Super Tuesday primary elections. Par-TAY!

I don't really have a strong favorite in this campaign, so today's Super Tuesday election results don't matter all that much to me. What makes me glad is that none of the five remaining major candidates has locked up the nomination thus far. Hillary Clinton has held off the challenge from Barack Obama, who had been gaining momentum in recent days. Mike Huckabee picked up a few southern states, showing that he is still a serious force and chiding Mitt Romney for presuming that it was only a two-man race on the GOP side. Obama's victory in at least six states doesn't necessarily mean that much, because the Democrats award convention delegates in proportion to the percentage of votes each candidate gets, whereas it's winner-take-all on the Republican side, for the most part. Barring a decisive win by one of the candidates in California or other western states, it appears that for at least the next few weeks, there will be a real contest. With any luck the candidates may be forced to debate actual issues, as opposed to besmirching each other! It would have been a shame for the primary season to end on Super Tuesday, before the Virginia primary was even held. Now we folks in the Old Dominion may actually matter!

Speaking of which, the "Mountain-Valley Republicans PAC" that was recently established by State Senator Emmett Hanger and his supporters will be holding a forum on presidential primary race this Friday, February 8, at the Government center in Verona, South Board Room, at 7:00 p.m. See augustarepublicans.com.

The "dynamic" map below will be updated during the evening and into tomorrow morning.

Super Tuesday 2008 GOP

Compare election/caucus results from the two parties:
Republicans ~ Democrats

Dole vs. El Rushbo

Rush Limbaugh really took umbrage at the letter to him sent by former Senator Bob Dole, going so far as to portray Dole as a dupe of the McCain campaign. [Dole vouched for McCain's credentials as a conservative, which was a nice favor given the fact that many would offer a contrary opinion on that. Say what you will about McCain, but what Rush said today was] an insult to Dole. For more, see politico.com, via Instapundit. Bad blood within the Republican ranks is not new, but saying that it would be better for Hillary to win than a "liberal" Republican like John McCain is just plain dumb. As I suggested before, Rush may be "losing it." There is a very real chance that Democrats will be running clips of Rush criticizing the Republican nominee in their ads this fall...

I like Bob Dole. Bob Dole doesn't talk nonsense. Bob Dole means what he says. The Republican Party would be better off if more people respected Bob Dole.

Stimulus gridlock

I was watching the Senate on C-SPAN this morning, and I have to give a lot of credit to Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) for refusing to buckle under the pressure to pass a feel-good stimulus bill full of pork barrel goodies. Sen. Harry Reid got in plenty of cheap-shot jabs, appealing to his constituents who cry out "Gimme, gimme!" As the Norfolk Examiner (link via Instapundit) rightly observes, "The whole enterprise is misguided." It is a prime example of how "gridlock" often serves a very useful purpose, exactly as the Founding Fathers had intended.

Posted (or last updated or commented upon): 05 Feb 2008, 11: 32 PM

(unformatted URL)
      .



This post is over a week old, so comments are closed.


© Andrew G. Clem. All rights reserved. Your use of this material signifies your acceptance of the Terms of use.


Hits on this page (single blog post) since July 2, 2007:

Category archives:
(all years)



This (or that) year's
blog highlights

Blog highlights have been compiled for the years 2010-2012 thus far, and eventually will be compiled for earlier years, back to 2002.


Explanation

The "home made" blog organization system that I created was instituted on November 1, 2004, followed by several functional enhancements in subsequent years. I make no more than one blog post per day on any one category, so some posts may cover multiple news items or issues. Blog posts appear in the following (reverse alphabetical) order, which may differ from the chronological order in which the posts were originally made:

  1. Wild birds (LAST)
  2. War
  3. Science & Technology
  4. Politics
  5. Latin America
  6. Culture & Travel
  7. Canaries ("Home birds")
  8. Baseball (FIRST)