Wyoming

O.K., it’s only Wyoming. But Barack Obama’s commanding victory there over Hillary Clinton is significant for what it portends.

Clinton’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination depend on catching Obama in either the pledged-delegate count or the cumulative popular vote tally (or both) during the primary season. This would give her a moral claim to the loyalties of the undecided superdelegates who will ultimately put Clinton or Obama over the top.  read more »

We consume.  read more »

An irregular dispatch from our men's blog, The Cockpit:

Gaping Plot Holes Well, I finally went and saw that movie with the cowboys in love or the sheepherders in love or whatever. SPOILER ALERT: So it turns out they're gays! It's like The Crying Game, I guess, except they don't try to fool you into thinking Heath Ledger's a chick. But--SPOILER ALERT NO. 2!--one thing kept bugging me: Why didn't they do any fishing? I mean, there wasn't any crystal meth and Viagra in the Wyoming backcountry in the '70s, right? So sooner or later, you gotta crawl out of the tent and kill some time. And they're supposed to be a coupla normal red-blooded guys from the American West, except for the man-on-man stuff, which, whatever, that's where everybody wears chaps and womenfolk are scarce, so maybe that too, right, Kemosabe? Anyway. Point is, what else is there to do in the middle of nowhere all weekend? Get drunk? Shoot the shit? Have brunch? Whaddya think straight guys do on their fishing trips? They were even camped out by the riverside. Get out your poles, already, fellas! --Tom "Nice Pair on Anne Hathaway, Bro" Scocca

Brokeback Mountain is an American masterpiece.  read more »

If Jennifer Lopez continues to surround herself with real actors of serious distinction like Jane Fo  read more »

If Jennifer Lopez continues to surround herself with real actors of serious distinction like Jane Fo  read more »

The Observer has, at the greatest length here, followed Hillary's fight to steer resources from the Department of Homeland Security to rural fire departments and other agencies across New York State, which use them for things like buying pickup trucks and "hardening" the arena that is home to minor-league hockey's Albany River Rats.

The latest round were announced yesterday and, yes, Mumford is a big winner.

Post-Katrina, homeland security is obviously getting a lot of re-thinking. And grants to first responders sound all the more virtuous.

When you think about it, though, the thin, even layer of security spending spread across America looks even worse now. New Orleans, remember, was seen as being among the handful of places at the very highest risk of a catastrophe, because of its levee system. But Louisiana, like upstate New York, like Wyoming, only got its fair share of security money, and the upgrades of the levees proceeded, as has been painfully detailed, at a lesiurely pace.  read more »

So it still seems fair to wonder whether the $176,576 that Hillary has proudly dispatched to Stillwater reflects the best possible use of federal security money.

In December, we reported on how local politicians spend half their time denouncing the Bush Administration for sending Homeland Security grants to Wyoming, and the other half fighting for equally ridiculous grants for Upstate New York. The money winds up getting spent on things like anti-drug programs and pickup trucks for cash-strapped rural communites very, very low on Al Qaeda's target list.

Ontario County emergency management chief Jeffrey Harloff told us at the time: "If it's the federal government asking me, it is for the intended purpose of W.M.D. incidents and HazMat incidents. In reality, we're going to use it for everyday stuff in our office."

Now, Hillary has always been the master of the rich new field we called "security pork," and her press release yesterday couldn't have demonstrated the contradiction more clearly:

"SENATOR CLINTON ANNOUNCES OVER $2.6 MILLION IN FEDERAL FIREFIGHTER GRANTS FOR NEW YORK AND EXPRESSES SERIOUS CONCERN ABOUT DEVASTATING CUTS TO FIRE ACT IN BUSH'S BUDGET PROPOSAL"

Where are these grants going?

Albany (of course), Cayuga, Chenango, Clinton, Columbia, Erie, Jefferson, Kings, Montgomery, Nassau, Niagara, Onondaga, Oswego, Otsego, Suffolk and Wayne Counties.

We realize Senators see it as their job to fight for pork, but when it comes to the Department of Homeland Security, perhaps New York's representatives would be able to press the case for the city more convincingly if they weren't so busy handing out checks in Otsego County, where the top terror target -- we're not kidding, this is what they told us -- is the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Hillary couldn't quite bring herself to say that this is actually anti-terror spending. The best she could do in the press release was, "Every dollar that our local communities receive means extra resources not only to help them fight fires but to help them respond to other emergencies and ensure public safety."  read more »

But perhaps this money could be found somewhere other than the Department of Homeland Security, which we'd (we know, vainly) hoped was busy guarding actual terror targets. Like our city.

So if this is a program that directs federal security money to places like Chenango County (pop. 51,401), we say: Cut away!

In the year 2004, there is no more vital issue facing this country than homeland security.  read more »