Obama’s 25 point victory over Mrs. Clinton marks six straight. I’m going to file this under “who’d a thunk it?”

No, it’s not over yet. But, it sure is starting to feel like it.

For many of us on the Right, there is a bit of Hillaryfreude. Watching Doyle and Henry resign, and Maggie (Vince Foster) Williams take over Team Hillary, brings back memories of everything we loathe about the Clinton machine. Still, if Senator Gravitas is able to hold off Hillary’s last firewall in Texas and Ohio, think of all the opposition research that will go to waste.

I guess it’s time to get busy putting together the Obama File. Please feel free to post your best links.

General Motors Corp. (GM) (GM) reported a $38.7 billion loss for 2007 on Tuesday, the largest annual loss ever for an automotive company, and said it is making a new round of buyout offers to U.S. hourly workers in hopes of replacing some of them with lower-paid help.

The earnings report and buyout offer came as GM struggles to turn around its North American business as the economy weakens.

But GM Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said that the company made significant progress in 2007, reducing structural costs in North America, negotiating a historic labor agreement and growing aggressively in Latin America and Asia.

The Detroit-based automaker said it was offering a new round of buyouts to all 74,000 of its U.S. hourly workers who are represented by the United Auto Workers.

GM won’t say how many workers it hopes to shed, but under its new contract with the UAW, it will be able to replace up to 16,000 workers doing non-assembly jobs with new employees who will be paid half the old wage of $28 per hour.

source

From the Associated Press:

On the Republican side, Mormons comprised a quarter of those attending Nevada’s GOP caucuses, and more than nine in 10 were voting for Romney. Romney is a Mormon, and his religion has been cited as a problem by some Republican voters.
About half of Romney’s overall vote in Nevada came from Mormons.

This would seem to be a clear-cut case of “identity politics.” Fine with me. I don’t give a hoot why a voter chooses to vote for a particular candidate. It isn’t any of my business. It isn’t anybody else’s business either.

Mike Huckabee has been criticized and reviled by a large number of conservative pundits and molders of conservative opinion for “identity politics.”

NRO’s Kathryn Lopez’s , in a post-Iowa Caucus piece captures the truly dramatic rhetoric from Michigan congressman Pete Hoekstra, who says he is “scared.” According to the Congressman, the identity politics of the Huckabee campaign, and the implied bigotry of Christians who will not support a Mormon candidate causes divisiveness, is a threat to world peace, apple pie, and the Rule of Law.

Republicans “need to stick up for our principles,” Hoekstra told National Review Online on Monday afternoon. We’re about “freedom and opportunity” — we don’t exclude people based on such things as race or gender, class or religion. But Hoekstra sees the Huckabee campaign as a divisive vessel of religious and class warfare.

No doubt Hoekstra, Lopez, Lowry, et al, have a perfectly reasonable explanation for the fact that 9 out of 10 Mormon voters in Nevada supported the Mormon candidate. And, we can be absolutely sure that it has “nothing at all to do with religion.”

After hearing CAIR deliver that same line for the last 6+ years, hearing NRO use jihadist rhetoric will be strange, to say the least.

But with NRO’s implicit support of Congressman Hoekstra for using Al Sharpton’s rhetoric, then I guess we really shouldn’t be too surprised.

Update: (1/21)
Chas Johnson calls Huck a Leftist. This time last year, there was a lot of buzz over there as to whether or not the social conservatives would support Rudy if he won the nomination. I thought so, at that time. Seeing this come from the self-proclaimed leader of the counter-jihad, I am now not so sure. You don’t win support by trying to marginalize potential allies. But, since Rudy has been invisible in the Republican race up to this point, I suppose Johnson is just releasing some pent-up energy, and the same can probably be said of Tammy Bruce’s statement that she would vote for the donk candidate rather than vote for Huck.

So, Johnson and Bruce join the NRO-WSJ chorus, accusing Huck of being unable to expand his base. The unspoken irony is that none of the leading candidates have been able to do so.

cross posted here

Heh. Yup, no kidding. File this under who’d a-thunk it?

From Reuters…

There’s no sign of a family reunion planned, but U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama are distant cousins.

So says the vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, who said she discovered that her husband of 43 years is eighth cousins with the senator from Illinois.

The two men could hardly be more different. Cheney is an advocate for pursuing the war in Iraq to try to stabilize the country, while Obama wants to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.

Mrs. Cheney told MSNBC on Tuesday that it was “an amazing American story that one ancestor … could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths.”

The common ancestor was Mareen Devall, who the Chicago Sun-Times said was a 17th century immigrant from France.

Mrs. Cheney said she discovered the link through family research for her new book, “Blue Skies, No Fences,” about growing up in Wyoming.

File this under “who’d a-thunk it?”

ODDEST couple of the decade:

Lifelong Democrat Andrew Stein and arch-conservative cutie Ann Coulter.

The former city council president (when there was such a title) first took Coulter - author of “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans” - to the black-tie Lincoln Center Film Society gala two weeks ago, where they turned heads. More recently, they were at Soho House “in passionate liplock,” according to a witness. Stein told Page Six: “She’s attacked a lot of my friends, but what can I say, opposites attract!”

So do blondes with ultra-long legs.

Yup.
NYP