Don't mess with it.
Barack Obama has picked up a few primary victories in states where Democrats often have a difficult time: Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia.
The biggest problem Obama will have will be the purple states -- states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, and others that barely went red or blue in 2000 and 2004. If McCain makes the case that Obama is too much a lockstep liberal and big-spending statist, the battleground states will make all the difference -- and McCain's maverick track record gives him the inside track for the center.
Republicans made up 6% of voters in Missouri's Democratic primary, 7% in Virginia's and 9% in Wisconsin's. (Most states make it harder to vote in the other party's contest.) The overwhelming majority cast their ballots for Sen. Obama, according to exit polls.
"Very rarely do you hear me talking about my opponents without giving them some credit for having good intentions and being decent people," Obama recently told U.S. News & World Report. "There's nothing uniquely Democratic about a respect for civil liberties. There's nothing uniquely Democratic about believing in a foreign policy of restraint. . . . A lot of the virtues I talk about are virtues that are deeply embedded in the Republican Party."
Was it wrong to hospitalize Britney Spears?
A Los Angeles judge orders pop star Britney Spears into psychiatric treatment. A lawyer says Spears is an adult and she's being denied her rights. A graduate student in Illinois goes off his medication and goes on a shooting spree. A judge in Virginia says a Virginia Tech student poses a danger to himself and others, but the law cannot hold him.
How society should treat its mentally ill citizens is once again at the fore of public debate. The sideshow surrounding Spears and the tragedy of Northern Illinois are two sides of the same question: Should mentally ill people be confined and treated against their will? Should states invest more in mental health programs? Should mental patients have different rights than everybody else?
The emptying of our public psychiatric hospitals has been the second-largest social experiment in twentieth-century America, exceeded only by the New Deal. The experiment, undertaken upon remarkably little data and a multitude of flawed assumptions, has received virtually no formal evaluation or assessment to ascertain whether it has worked. Once the spring of deinstitutionalization was wound, it just kept going and going and going. And it continues today -- disastrously.
In many states the laws regulating commitment to a psychiatric hospital requires that the individual is at a strong, fairly imminent risk of harming himself or others or to use a more popular phrase, is "a clear and present danger" to one's self or others. Perhaps to be even more direct, there has to be a very high suspicion that not placing a person in the hospital would result in suicidal or homicidal actions in the very near future. Consistent with our core beliefs as Americans, the law protects the rights of the individual, as it should be.
In the process of preserving one's basic rights, how far can we intervene to help preserve his or her very life?
Is he poised to go all the way?
Barack Obama soundly rival Hillary Clinton in the Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. in the primaries on Tuesday night. Look at the percentages.
Even after Obama gains ground in today’s contests in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., he will have only a slight lead in delegates. After that, what do Democrats have to hope for?
The salvation of the Democratic system has previously been the propensity for voters to unite around a winner early. John Kerry’s total victory was all but guaranteed after he won the
New Hampshire primary in 2004.
This time, the Democratic race has come down to just two candidates, either of whom could win. It is going into the late states, no matter what. It is an undemocratic game in which the voters are mathematically incapable of picking the winner without the help of unelected party elders.
If the pattern holds, Obama's February record will be 23 or 24 wins (depending on New Mexico) to 8 or 9 wins for Clinton.
Obama's post-Super Tuesday stats could well be 10-0. And his claim of national support is now epic in scope.
"(The) cynics can no longer say our hope is false," Obama said in Madison on Tuesday night. "We have won east and west, north and south, and across the great heartland of this country we love."
Clinton still holds out hope for a turnaround on March 4 in Ohio and Texas. But her campaign is going to have a tougher time convincing donors to cough up the money to compete in those multi-media market states with the win-loss ratio she is toting up in the longest month of what has turned out to be a hard, hard winter for the former front-runner.
Some of these people are still waiting in line to vote.
It's Super Tuesday night, and it looks to be a long one. The exit polls are showing some unexpected numbers for Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. The delegate fight is still a pitched battle for John McCain and Hillary Clinton.
(Our own Joel Mathis is liveblogging from the Kansas caucus.)
But don't forget, there are some major primaries and caucuses ahead. And even as the returns start rolling in across the country Tuesday, the Republican and Democratic campaigns are looking ahead to contests in Washington, Nebraska, Virginia, Ohio and Texas. The strategizing has only just begun.
Share your thoughts about how the race is shaping up in your state, how you voted, what surprised you and what you think will happen next.
Fred Barnes marveled on Fox News about Huckabee possibly taking “five states! five states!” Barnes called it a “remarkable comeback.” Before anyone gets carried away with talk of a Huck resurgence, though, most of his victories are taking place in states that aren’t winner-take-all. Whatever delegates he picks up in Georgia, Alabama, etc., will be more than offset by his zero showings in NY and NJ and his weak showings in California, Illinois.
While Obama has clearly caught up to, and perhaps passed, Clinton in the battle for the nomination, they continue to have complementary strengths and weaknesses. To win in November, Obama is going to have do much much better among the white working class--one can assume that he would get Clinton's female voters just as she would get his African American voters. Clinton, on other hand, looks very shaky among white men. There remains a question, too, whether the young voters and independents who have flocked to Obama's banner would vote for her in the fall.
This driver isn't texting. So why should you?
Some Virginia lawmakers want drivers to take their thumbs off the keyboards and put them back on the steering wheel while cruising down Virginia's roads.
They are tackling the problem of drivers who send, read and write messages on cellphones, PDAs and BlackBerrys. It's a thoroughly modern distraction dubbed Driving While Texting or DWT.
The General Assembly, which began its 60-day session Wednesday, is considering a pair of bills that would ban texting while driving a car, bicycle, motorcycle, moped or even an electric wheelchair.
You’re probably the problem when it comes to traffic safety; as you read your newspaper, brush your teeth, fail to turn your headlights on, tailgate and speed when you drive. The only one who is responsible for your safety on the road is you, not the cops, not the legislators, not the courts. You should be an active, defensive driver who takes responsibility for the circumstances around them and not be a victim.
Why come down so hard on texters? Drunken drivers are careless, selfish and disrespectful of other people's safety. Texters are all this, with an extra dose of arrogance. Not only is your safety unimportant to them, but it is secondary to their ability to receive personal information. I can't decide which is worse — whether I am endangered by one person's need to close a deal or another's desire to chat about hooking up.
