Instajamas

Instapundit has been incorporated into Pajamas Media. James Joyner doesn’t understand what is in it for Reynolds:

I don’t see what Glenn gets out of it. He’s easily the most well known and highly trafficked solo blogger out there. One would think he already enjoys whatever synergies come with being a PJM founder and board member. His feed is now prominently placed on the PJM page but one would think there’s pretty high overlap between InstaPundit readers/subscribers and those who visit the PJM portal.

I imagine it’s easier to sell ads in a bundle. And Glenn probably doesn’t have to do too much administrative work on his end. Win-win, if they’ve made a deal to split the revenue equitably.

Voting For A “Half-Breed”

A reader writes:

In your post "Email In West Virginia", you close with "When people simply refuse to deal with fact, something else is going on." I’ve been thinking about what’s going on for a while. This FT piece set me off . At the end of the article, they quote a young West Virginia man who "insisted he was not racist", but said "I want someone who is a full-blooded American as president".

At first, I thought this was standard anti-immigrant stuff.  Then I had an epiphany.

Remember "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner"?  A rich, highly educated, well-spoken, widely respected, black doctor freaks out his girlfriend’s progressive, liberal, elitist, white parents?  Yes, that was 1967, but how far have we really come since then?

My own grandmother was a liberal atheist.  She campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment.  She came from a progressive, politically active, elite liberal farming family in Iowa.  She believed in civil rights for all.  She treated Native Americans with respect at a time when they were still considered dirty Injuns.  And she had no problem getting along with blacks in Seattle before she died.

What my grandmother absolutely would not tolerate, however, was miscegenation.

  Blacks, Asians, Jews – all of these were perfectly respectable associates.  But marrying one, for a "white person", was completely unacceptable.  The ultimate taboo, really.  For older people, and people who live in areas that have long been predominantly white, the miscegenation issue is the last bastion of knee-jerk racial identity.  And whites are not alone in this.  Every well-defined racial and cultural group has this taboo actively at play, even today, regardless of political bent.

When an older female Clinton supporter refuses to believe Obama is not muslim, or a young West Virginian hankers for someone a bit more "full-blooded" than Obama, they are using code-words for the ultimate threatening "other", the other that sneaks into your home and screws your daughter and destroys your bloodline.

The very qualities that allow Obama to cross racial and cultural divides with his message of unity, that make him a "non-threatening black man", also make him anathema.

West Virginia

Clinton65

The exit polls reveal what the demographics have long foretold, and what the polls last February predicted, with just a few wrinkles. The race factor seems to have tipped very heavily toward Clinton in West Virginia. In Indiana, 16 percent said race was an important factor for them; in Pennsylvania, 19 percent; in West Virginia, 22 percent. The racial skew to Clinton does soar in West Virginia: 81 percent of race-based voters went for Clinton; in Pennsylvania, it was 55; in Indiana, it was 53 percent. Oddly, Obama did better among white Catholics in West Virginia than he has in the past. No idea if that means anything. My own sense is that WV voters are conservative and risk-averse and Obama suffered a great deal from unfamiliarity. Race compounded it; and if you listen to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, you’re likely to believe that Obama is a Muslim, racist, terrorist communist.

I note that John Edwards – a familiar white man who’s not running any more – got a healthy showing. Okay, West Virginia, we get the message.

The map above is explained here. The purple is where Clinton got more than 65 percent of the vote. It gives a good idea of the Clintons’ Appalachian strength. West Virginia confirms what we knew already – but Obama has not dented this so far. He has work to do.

For what it’s worth, I felt her victory speech was pretty obviously angling for the vice-presidency. Cuomo just put his weight behind the idea. I’m not sure, whatever the objective merits of the case, I could bear listening to her any longer.

The Sophistication Of Grand Theft Auto IV

Yes, it’s true:

"This may sound strange, but I found that Grand Theft Auto actually offered a less sensational portrait of gangland and ghetto streets than the one put out by most cops, politicians, policymakers, and even academics …  The game is a carnival of violence, deceit, and cruelty that makes you slightly nauseated after playing for only a few hours—I had to periodically rest and play a Neil Diamond song just to calm down. But I have to admit that I was surprised a video game had such a well-developed, fine-grained understanding of human nature."

What Ball Is That?

A reader writes:

I have a question about your Face Of The Day, Stuart Broad. He’s clearly playing a sport, throwing a ball, in a practice session, between England and New Zealand. My question is, what sport is he playing? Is it cricket? That would be my guess, since it is at Lord’s, and I remember from one of the Douglas Adams books that Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox travel through time 2 million years and end up at Lord’s Cricket Ground.

But I could be wrong.

Particularly since all I know about cricket is that it is played with a ball and a bat and wickets.

It’s cricket. Honest. But that’s not why I posted it, of course.