"Hillary Clinton can't win a national general election". This is conventional wisdom among people who know about these things. As is so often the case with the conventional wisdom, this assessment is based on a very rich and consistent amount of data, collected and analyzed over years.

It stands to reason, however, that she also has loyalists; given that New York is her present base of operations, they're rather thick on the ground here. These loyalists rather recently were giddy over polling results showing her able to just break over the 50% hurdle in a national election. I said at the time that this was an announcement bounce, in a very customary and well-known pattern.

And so it was. Polling data released earlier this week and month shows Hillary losing New Jersey, and barely holding New York and Connecticut. Read on.  read more »

That Democratic wave you're hearing so much about? It's solidifying, with a Political Wire reporting a new poll that shows Bob Menendez leading would-be Bush enabler and whimpering sycophant Tom Kean by 48% to 39%.

That just goes to show that the charge of "you're a republican" is more lethal than "you're a crook". Which is as it should be.

Before getting into the details, here's the dictionary definition of terrorism:

Main Entry: ter·ror·ism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun
: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion
- ter·ror·ist /-&r-ist/ adjective or noun
- ter·ror·is·tic /"ter-&r-'is-tik/ adjective

The New York Times reports that the office of a New Jersey State Senator was shut down after about 60+ callers made assorted threats of violence, including death threats, against the Senator. The threats were made by talk-radio listeners standing up for the inalienable right to have a heart attack.

Angry telephone calls over her proposal to ban restaurants from using a type of cooking oil blamed for increasing people’s cholesterol levels prompted a New Jersey state senator to close her office early on Friday.[...]

Many calls were threatening, Senator Karcher said.

“They said that I should be pushed off a bridge, that I should be stabbed, that I am a Communist and several other things,” Ms. Karcher said.  read more »