IMPALIN’ — Stop Sarah Palin for President in 2012

There’s no doubt it was a rough Election Day for the National Rifle Association. The gun group spent millions of dollars supporting John McCain for President and trying to tarnish the image of Barack Obama — with little to show for it, given that Obama won Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other swing states where the NRA was most active. But if you look further down ballot, there’s even more evidence that one of the nation’s most storied lobby groups is becoming all muzzle and no bullet. The NRA not only failed to elect John McCain and Sarah Palin to the White House, but also failed to defend many of its leading advocates in Congress who were facing tough reelection challenges. In addition, the NRA threw its weight behind several challengers and open seat candidates whose efforts fell short of the mark. In a post-election, head-to-head analysis between federal candidates endorsed by the NRA and those endorsed by the Humane Society Legislative Fund , the puppy power clearly outshot the gun powder. The NRA had endorsed 278 federal candidates, and has won 240 of the 274 races that have been decided so far, with a success rate of 87.6 percent.  HSLF had endorsed 313 federal candidates, so far winning 293 of 310 contests for a 94.5 percent win rate. Both groups tend to endorse incumbents who have been allies on their issues in Congress, and the overall win rates are high because incumbents often don’t face competitive races. In fact, as surprising as it may sound, 96 lawmakers were endorsed by both the NRA and HSLF. Many of them - -like Reps. John Campbell (R-Calif.), Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), and Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) — recognize you can be for the right to bear arms and also for protecting animals from cruelty and abuse, and are often the bridge-builders who find a balancing of interests between diverse groups. Of this group, 89 candidates won, six lost, and one race is still too close to call — NRA and HSLF both backed Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) who leads by 215 votes but is facing a recount — for a win rate of 93.7 percent. But the most important comparison, perhaps, lies in the 39 races where the NRA and HSLF went head-to-head and endorsed opposing candidates. Both groups generally throw their weight behind candidates who are viable, so these were all competitive contests, and some were decided by very narrow margins. Two of them are so close they have not been decided yet — Mary Jo Kilroy against Steve Stivers in Ohio’s 15th District, and Charlie Brown against Tom McClintock in California’s 4th District. Of the 37 races that have been decided, HSLF won 28 and NRA won only nine — meaning HSLF was the victor 75.7 percent of the time to the NRA’s 24.3 percent. In three out of every four races, the HSLF candidate edged out the NRA candidate. HSLF went five for five in the head-to-head Senate match-ups — winning in what would typically be considered the strong NRA states of Colorado, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Oregon. On the House side, voters ousted NRA loyalists such as Reps. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.), Bill Sali (R-Idaho), and Tim Walberg (R-Mich.). The gun group fared just as poorly with its crop of challengers — including Dean Andal (R-Calif.), Tim Bee (R-Ariz.), and Andy Harris (R-Md.) — who misfired. Some of the NRA’s staunchest loyalists did hang on — including Reps. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Sam Graves (R-Mo.), and Don Young (R-Alaska). But the NRA’s influence seems on the wane. Their hardcore ideology on gun rights and defense of extremely inhumane and unsporting hunting practices appeals only to a small slice of the electorate and provides no road map to appeal to women, suburban voters, or minorities — all massive and increasingly important constituencies. In fact, their positions and ideology are driving these constituencies precisely in the opposite direction. HSLF, on the other hand, speaks directly to all of these constituencies, largely because our message of kindness to pets and compassion and decency toward all animals has universal appeal. And because the NRA reflexively opposes sensible HSLF policy reforms — such as the trade in bear parts for the black market, banning captive trophy hunts , and halting the aerial gunning of wolves — the NRA will further alienate core voting blocs and allow us to connect even more powerfully to these mainstream voters. In addition, the NRA’s intransigence will force recorded votes in the House and Senate that we can use in future elections to brand lawmakers as unreasonable and out of step when they side with the NRA instead of with their animal-friendly constituents. The NRA puts its loyalists in a political box and the group’s narrow-minded orthodoxy will continue to be its undoing.

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Michael Markarian: NRA Is Firing Blanks

When President-elect Obama said he’d reach out to the Republicans and all Americans, he was telling the truth. Apparently some people on the left hoped he was lying. Obama’s “sin” in their eyes is that he is keeping his promises. Other than the perpetually aggrieved paranoid cranks on the far right — FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, James Dobson etc., — most Americans (no matter who they voted for) are just glad that someone brimming with confidence, intelligence and good will is in charge of our rescue, at last ! (Watching President-elect Obama’s recent press conferences, one could hear a collective sigh of relief from sea to shining sea.) Nevertheless, a few critics from the left are now demanding progressive purity from President-elect Obama that is not in keeping with his clearly stated campaign promise to bring all Americans together, and to put governance and competence ahead of ideology. In that sense they are working against the aims of his presidency. A few progressive critics are bewailing the fact that President-elect Obama’s cabinet is “too centrist,” or made up of “too many former Clintonites,” or that he’s working with the Republicans, or that he is “too hawkish on Afghanistan.” Turns out some Pharisaical progressives are into guilt by association; “Look at the bad company he’s keeping!” they groan. General Jones?! Clinton?! Gates?! The sky is falling! As someone who escaped the fever swamp of the Religious Right many years ago — I know fundamentalism when I smell it, be it religious or secular. And the criticisms of President-elect from the left stink to high heaven of fundamentalist orthodoxy, albeit with a “progressive” twist. Here are a few examples of the fundamentalists of the left trying to make Obama fit their political “theology:” Chris Bowers writing in Open Left (Nov 21): “I know everyone is obsessed with the ‘team of rivals’ idea right now, but I feel incredibly frustrated… Why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely.” Cris Hayes writing in The Nation (Nov 21): “Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one.” William Greider in the The Nation ( Nov 25) ” A year ago, when Barack Obama said it was time to turn the page, his campaign declaration seemed to promise a fresh start for Washington. I, for one, failed to foresee Obama would turn the page backward… Obama’s [cabinet] selections seem designed to sustain the failing policies of George W. Bush.” And this from Noam Chomsky, the grand old man of the left himself, on Democracy Now! . (posted on Alternet Nov 28) “Rhetoric we know, but what are [Obama's] actions?… The first choice was the Vice President, Joe Biden, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq… The first post-election appointment was for Chief of Staff, which is a crucial appointment; determines a large part of the president’s agenda. That was Rahm Emanuel… again, a longtime Washington insider. Also, one of the leading recipients in congress of funding from the financial institutions hedge funds… Obama’s choices… [include] Robert Rubin and Larry Summers… among the people who are substantially responsible for the crisis. One leading economist, one of the few economists who has been right all along in predicting what’s happening, Dean Baker, pointed out that selecting them is like selecting Osama Bin Laden to run the war on terror…” What is the message from these cheerless Scrooges of the left? Joy? Celebration? The hard work of actual governance? Ba Humbug! We don’t do winning! We don’t do actual governance! We only do permanent opposition! Coal in everyone’s stockings… again! Before I continue please note: There is a line between opposition to say, a specific policy and undermining our new President-elect’s overall efforts by casting doubt on every selection he makes (or doesn’t make) for his team, let alone pitting his rhetoric against his actions in a manner that implies he is lying. This “line” matters, even if it’s fluid and hard to pin down because this is a critical — perhaps fatal — moment in American history. That said… There is a reason that the likes of Saints Kucinich (from the left) and Huckabee (from the right) are not the President-elect: most Americans don’t want the Church Ladies of the right or the left running the country. Sunday school is one thing, the presidency another. Our country is not so much “center-right” or “center-left” as fundamentally anti-ideological. (Which, by the way, is one reason why the Sarah Palin nomination backfired so badly for McCain.) There are two kinds of people, those that allow reality and experience to define and constantly modify their ideas and those who insist that their ideas define reality. The first kind make things work. The second type (be they right wing creationists, or progressive purists) stand on the sidelines wringing their hands and criticizing the doers for their “heresy,” because doing anything in the real word always equals compromise, learning and change. What they of the purist left want from Obama is an ideological orthodoxy of thought and action that does not actually exist, except in their imaginations. And where do they think they are living? This is America and that means that Obama will be trying to govern a country so diverse that Sarah Palin and Noam Chomsky both have a fan base here! Moreover many of Obama’s legion of young and energetic supporters have not heard of, nor do they care about, the Noam Chomskys or James Dobsons of this world. History is moving on. Obama is bigger than the pundits. He’s bigger than the movements that have divided us. Believe it or not — this is a new day. As Thomas B. Edsall wisely noted in the Huffington Post (Nov 29) in Battle Royale: Center-Right Versus Center-Left In the Democratic Party : “A close examination of the data suggests that the political and policy-making environment is more complex than either side [in the left/right debate within the Democratic Party] acknowledges, and that thinking in terms of a left-right dichotomy may distort policy options.” Under the surface gloss of the left wing criticism of Obama there is, I suspect, something else: the critic’s psychological need to feel indispensable, not to mention superior to those of us who like, trust and will follow President-elect Obama because he strikes our gut as likable, trustworthy and deserving of loyalty based on the self-evident merits of his outstanding character. It’s just not in their genes to ever be so “ordinary” as to become team players, even when their side has just won. They would rather be in permanent opposition than ever be accused of — horrors! — being mainstream. Again; I know about this form of messianic mental illness all too well from my own delusional days as a leader in the fundamentalist evangelical world back in the 70s and early 80s. We were proud of being outsiders, yet resentful of not being included, and yet again weirdly and moralistically haughty because of our self-imposed outsider status. For the fundamentalists of the left, it’s no good just getting the job done, let alone doing it in a way that mirrors this diverse, complex and one-size-does- not -fit-all country we live in. From the point of view of the ideologically pure of heart, the only way to get the job done is an in-your-face crusade that humiliates former opponents. This is the don’t-forgive-Lieberman “reeducation” theory of political change: it’s not enough to just win then change things, you need to do so in a way that leaves anyone who ever disagreed with you punished and out in the cold, furious and plotting your downfall. Here’s the right wing ideologue’s nightmare : What if President-elect Obama keeps being truthful and doing what he said he’d do? What happened to all those on the right who have been proven wrong about things they said during the campaign, for instance the right-wing Jews who said Obama would be surrounded by anti-Semites, and then the first thing he does is make Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff? And what are the right-wing evangelicals, who said he’d be a socialist appeaser and friend to terrorists, to do now that President-elect Obama has appointed a pragmatic economic team, and persuaded Gates to stay on for a year at Defense and General Jones to advise him? And what will the anti-abortion community do when Obama does what he said he’d do and initiates programs that actually reduce abortions by lifting women, families, teens and children out of poverty? Here’s the left wing ideologue’s nightmare : President-elect Obama does not bring the emotional and psychological baggage of my boomer generation’s schoolyard fights with him. He meant it when he said he doesn’t see a “red” or “blue” state America but the United States of America. He’s of the left but without the I-told-you-so smarminess of we boomer culture warriors. He’s progressive but without the need to punish former opponents. He won handily but is not interested in putting his political foes in their “place.” He actually seems to want to serve all Americans, even the “wrong” kind, even the “other.” President-elect Obama is smarter than his critics and a better and more strategic politician than his rivals. As my friend (blogger and commentator) Frank Gruber wrote to me; “Every move he makes is confident. He is in charge and thinking ten moves ahead. If I was a rival politician, left or right, I’d feel overwhelmed — what’s he going to do next? It’s even more baffling because Obama tells you in advance not only what he’s going to do, but what you’re going to do. Think about that debate when he told Senator Clinton he was looking forward to getting advice from her after he became president. At the time I’ll bet she dismissed that as mere rhetoric. Wrong! Who is going to be Secretary of State? Or what about when he gave that speech at the beginning of the summer of 08 outlining every tactic the McCain campaign would use against him?” As for we self-proclaimed commentators, we have a President-elect who has more intellectual firepower than all the punditry put together. How confusing! That’s good for America. But that’s something a whole class of professional carpers will never forgive. And so expect mirror image left/right attacks from the class of talkers to whom the glass is always half empty, because they insist that any water that might be in the glass is inferior if they didn’t personally invent it! One reason that President Obama is going to be a very successful President is precisely because his understanding of the cosmos is that his ideas (political, philosophical or theological) do not define it. That’s called wisdom. That’s called humility. And that is the very wisdom lacking in Obama’s ideologically driven left wing critics, who never seem able to complete and paragraph with the words, “But I could be wrong.” That is why their posture is already a crouch of disappointed expectation, even before President-elect Obama has been sworn in ! When President-elect Obama said that he will try to do what works, regardless of the ideological label or where a good idea comes from, he was telling the truth. Most Americans know how lucky we are to have this remarkable, pragmatic, subtle, thoughtful man for our President-elect. Most of us also know how lucky we are that our next president — unlike our current White House occupant — is more interested in being a good president than in proving his “side” right about everything. And most of us also know that the stakes are sky high and that now is a time to stand with our new President-elect, come hell or high water or, perhaps, because of the hell and high water we’re already neck deep in. Frank Schaeffer is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back . Now in paperback.

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Frank Schaeffer: Obama’s Critics From the Left: As Wrong as His Critics From the Right

Gov. Sarah Palin is putting her conservative Republican fame to work in Georgia, stumping for Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who is in a tough runoff for re-election. I wonder if she knows the true measure of the man she is eagerly helping. … Gov. Palin’s eldest joined the Army and has been deployed to Iraq. As a justifiably proud military mom, she might ask herself why she is using her conservative star power to support such a reprehensible Republican chicken hawk.

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Palin Slammed By Hometown Paper For Georgia Campaigning

Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to discuss how they tricked the media by creating a fake McCain adviser named Martin Eisenstadt. The duo were able to fool such reputable news organizations as The New York Times , The New Republic , and, most famously, MSNBC, whose anchor David Schuster reported live on air that Martin Eisenstadt had been identified as the McCain adviser who leaked that Sarah Palin was unaware Africa is a continent . Schuster quickly retracted the report. (Fox News’ Carl Cameron was the first to report on the Palin-Africa story, and he has said that his source was not the phony Eisenstadt.) Watch a clip from Reliable Sources.

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Filmmakers Behind Fake McCain Adviser Discuss Tricking The Media (VIDEO)

CELEBRITY chef Gordon Ramsay revealed to mistress Sarah Symonds that he had TWO other lovers. The married TV star, who this week denied cheating, confessed to extra flings during his seven-year affair with Sarah - who today tells her sensational story. “I was his confidante - more than a mistress,” she says. “He even called me his ’soulmate’.” Ramsay’s mistress today exposes astonishing details of their affair–and tells how he also cheated on wife Tana with a SECOND lover AND a woman he met through his Hell’s Kitchen show.

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Gordon Ramsay’s "Mistress" Speaks: He Had Many Lovers

Last weekend, 18 days after Barack Obama decisively defeated their candidate for president, a mostly Republican crowd of self-described conservatives received their first introduction to someone many prominent members of the GOP think could be the party’s own version of Obama. Like the president-elect, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is young (37), accomplished (a Rhodes scholar) and, as the son of Indian immigrants, someone familiar with breaking racial and cultural barriers. He came to Iowa to deliver a pair of speeches, and his mere presence ignited talk that the 2012 presidential campaign has begun here, if coyly. Already, a fierce fight is looming between him and other Republicans — former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who arrived in Iowa a couple of days before him, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who is said to be coming at some point — for the hearts of social conservatives.

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Republicans See Jindal As GOP’s Obama

It’s almost certain. The holidays come with drinking. Whether it’s celebratory, stress related, or just part of the program, alcohol finds its way into many of our livers during the last two months of the year. Holiday drinking in my family happens about as often as Sarah Palin is spotted reading the New York Times. Neither of my parents are big drinkers, probably because they each had a parent that was. Because of this family history, a dusty bottle of Peach Schnapps dated around 1978 lives in the kitchen cabinet, out of sight above the fridge. Next to it is a lonely unopened bottle of cheap vodka. This makeshift sad excuse for a liquor cabinet, only reachable by my 6′3″ father, was selected for its exclusive ability to keep my brother and me from sneaking into it. The scratching noise of dragging the chair to stand on provides plenty of warning for a policing parent to investigate potential nonsense. To support a weak but acceptable alibi, there was luckily also a can of Ovaltine in the cabinet, my Dad’s morning breakfast. We always swore when we were busted that we just wanted a cold glass of chocolate milk. Yeah, right! A holiday or two ago when I was home visiting I decided it was time to finish off that bottle of Peach Schnapps once and for all. I dug around for the blender, gathered the family in the kitchen and announced we were going to get wasted. What happened next was a swirl of giggles, storytelling, and brain freezes. If the bottle gets the better of you this holiday season I’ve got a few yoga moves that can ease the pain. Try this short routine aimed to shake your hangover a bit, or at least lessen the blow so you can make it through the day. Let me know if it helps! Happy Holidays!

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Tara Stiles: How To Deal With Your Holiday Hangover (VIDEO)

Thanksgiving is always a wonderful time of year, but this year for the first time in a long time we’ve got a lot to be thankful for on the political level. Here’s just some of the things worth celebrating today: 67 million: The number of votes cast for Barack Obama Less than 8: The number of weeks left in the Bush Presidency 140,000: The number of American troops serving in Iraq who can begin looking towards the day they will return home. $700 billlion : The size of the FDR-style stimulus plan being considered by some Senate Democrats 66% : Percentage of young voters who supported Obama 42 : The maximum number of Republican Senators 255 : The minimum number of Democratic Representatives 29 : The number of Democratic governorships 6.5 million : The number of donations made online to Barack Obama’s campaign $80 : The average size of those donations. Half a billion dollars : The amount of money raised by the Obama fundraising juggernaut At least 6: The number of solo national TV interviews conducated by Sarah Palin since the election. 3: The number of solo national TV interviews conducted by Palin before the election. 0: The number of press conferences held by Sarah Palin during the campaign. More than 0 but less than 1 : The number of press conferences held by Sarah Palin since the campaign ended. 4: My favorite excuse in Dave’s top 10 list of Sarah Palin’s turkey slaughter excuses. Infinite: The amount of laughter Sarah Palin’s post-election foibles have brought to America. 35% : Percentage of CT voters who say they would re-elect Joe Lieberman in 2012. 4 out of the last 5: Presidential elections in which the popular vote was won by the Democratic candidate. 4 out of last 4: Days in which the stock market has gone up 4 out of last 4: Days in which Barack Obama has made a major economic policy announcement. 13 out of 24 : Seats held by women in New Hampshire’s state senate 27 : Number of state legislatures in which Democrats control both chambers 0: The number of turkeys pardoned by this post. 0: The number of turkeys slaughtered by this post. 54: The number of days until Barack Obama is President of the United States Of America Happy Thanksgiving…and add to the list!

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Thanksgiving By The Numbers, 2008 Edition

We’re taking one of the newly re-built Von Dullen streetcars out for tonight’s Rescue Ranger run. On board are vcmvo2, ybruti, a synthetic cubist, taylormattd, jlms qkw, and joyful, with YatPundit at the controls. Tonight’s krewe waded through numerous diaries to bring you the unsung cream of today’s crop. Please enjoy, comment, and recommend. aztronut reminds us to share what we have in Please Donate to Your Local Food Bank [Updated w/ Donation Link] . (jlms qkw) ChristieKeith brings the passion of a personal experience to Harvey Milk Lives . (jlms qkw) teacherken recalls the life of a little-known abolitionist in Happy Birthday, Sarah Moore Grimke . (a synthetic cubist) Lize in San Francisco shares a sweet remembrance in Love, Politics, and Cranberry Sauce (with poll) . (jlms qkw) ACLU has the bestest news today in Something to Be Thankful For . (jlms qkw) Thoughts on tomorrow’s holiday: jgilhousen celebrates by Meditating on Thanksgivings Past . (joyful) bobscofield reminds us why we should Be Thankful this Thanksgiving. (vcmvo2) Asinus Asinum Fricat brings us terrible news that there was More Melamine Found, This Time in Africa . (joyful) pragprogress enthusiastically supports public spending on public goods in Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Plan: Now We’re Talkin’!!! (ybruti) Land of Enchantment introduces us to Congressman Raúl Grijalva as a potential pick for Secretary of the Interior in AZ Republic Roots For Grijalva at Interior . (vcmvo2) professorfate writes a primer on how to ignore free marketers’ whining about taxes while improving the economy in Toasters, the Titanic, and Cow Tipping: They Make More Sense than Derivatives . (vcmvo2) massive not passive gives us well-researched news of the Top 10 Election Day Surprises for the Democratic Party . (joyful) AgnosticTheocrat analyzes conservative philosophy and its recent manifestation in the modern Republican Party: The History of Conservatism and Why “New Conservative Ideas” is an Oxymoron . (vcmvo2 & ybruti) In Of Welfare Queens And Whistles: A Little Story About (R) , psomniferum dissects a classic Republican smear. (a synthetic cubist) Stoneleigh ponders ponzis From the Top of the Great Pyramid (Scheme) . (joyful) Jotter has High Impact Diaries: November 25, 2008 . emeraldmaiden brings us Top Comments 11-26-08 - Thanksgiving Eve . Please join Diary Rescue by suggesting your own picks in this Open Thread.

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Open Thread and Diary Rescue

Take a look at Salon’s new section, Open Salon . It’s another free for all, (a “social content site”), of sorts, for unprofessional commentariat of all stripes. Much in the same way The Huffington Post cemented the importance of crowd-sourced (anyone can write) journalism and punditry with its successful initiative Off the Bus, Open Salon and other like-minded ventures are banking on the stabilizing power of devoted, unpaid contributors. These collaborative ventures—de facto think tanks—can sometimes offer a barometric reading of a political demographic. Crowd-sourced think tanks are enjoying heady times. President-elect Barack Obama’s multimedia campaign brought a slew of young, educated people into the blogosphere, and the election season itself bristled with commentary and analysis from every possible source. (Yes, plenty of it was garbage, but you take the lumps with the good. Major blogs, such as Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish and Talking Points Memo, logged millions of page views through the campaign season. Those numbers will drop down somewhat, of course, but the two-year slog of an election cycle dragged the general public’s attention more firmly into the blogosphere and beyond. Their eyes are, more than ever, wide open to group blogs, social-networking platforms, RSS feeds, and the like.) Fiercely partisan (too much for this liberal to handle, sometimes) site DailyKos is one of the more complete success stories of the Internet’s current state. Indeed, the site has been the progressive netroots’ flagship for years now, hosting the annual conference Netroots Nation. Anyone can sign up and maintain a diary on Kos, and members recommend better posts up to the front page. Markos Moulitsas, the site’s founder, is as widely linked a political writer as they come. It’s a fierce community that embodies the “angry Left” stereotype as well as serves as an ever-dependable punching bag for right-wing pundits. But the site is not simply about blogging and commenting from afar. It is a political fundraising machine, pouring money into campaigns big and small, local and national. The site’s base is so devout that when Moulitsas gives the word (with plenty of reminders), sometimes thousands to tens of thousands of dollars pour into whichever progressive campaign needs it most. This can seem like chump change, but an overnight boost of five, six, 10 thousand dollars for a state rep or House campaign can make a crucial difference. And it has. When Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann ran with the Gov. Sarah Palin-inspired meme of real-vs.-unreal America, her opponent woke up the next morning with close to half a million dollars in donations and another million from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. DailyKos was not entirely responsible, but that sort of rapid response is a hallmark of the site: When Republicans grossly overstep the lines of decency, there’s hell to pay. (Unfortunately, Bachmann kept her seat; score one for unbridled ignorance.) Obviously Republican America’s grassroots is not without its deep pockets. The Mormon Church pumped around $17 million into California in a successful attempt to ban gay marriage and propagate its bigoted views. Evangelical radio and megachurches routinely drum up huge sums of cash, usually employing the same type of race-, gender- and class-baiting employed by Palin and her ilk. And let’s not forget the Republican Party is home to big, big business. But the party is now far behind the Democrats in Internet grassroots organizing and fundraising; it doesn’t have a lighting rod—both politically and ideologically—like Kos. The term “circular firing squad,” describing the current state of the Republican Party, is the meme of late fall, and everyone from the big cable networks to The New York Times is writing about it. The election of Obama was a refutation of the politics of the past eight years—from which Sen. John McCain and Gov. Palin could not possibly extricate themselves—as well as a crossroads for the Republican Party. Standing athwart that crossroads is Sarah Palin. At The National Review , the schism couldn’t be clearer: support (or lack thereof) for Palin was the line drawn in the sand. Some of the publication’s best-known names, David Frum and Christopher Buckley, left because of the clash. uot;_blank”> Light polling more than suggests the Alaska governor is fresh in the minds of the Republican base. For the growing number of conservative pundits who refuted Palin and her divisive politics, these numbers are not good. All this infighting is indicative of a tension between what it is to be Republican and what it is to be conservative: party vs. ideology, falling in line vs. speaking out. Religion is the engine of this tension, as the Christian bloc in the Far Right keeps the party’s politics mired in such issues as abortion, school prayer, gay marriage and the deviously effective red herring of “patriotism.” President George Bush has taken significant flak from his own party for blowing up the national debt, overseeing a massive expansion of government and enhancing a prescription drug benefit for the elderly—not exactly part of the traditional conservative agenda. A good number of those dissenting voices are what make up the vanguard of conservatism’s intellectual voice. They are the ones who saw the Palin pick as gross electioneering, sexist and a disaster waiting to happen (which did happen), who sharply criticized McCain and endorsed Obama. The Atlantic has some of the most prolific of these voices in its stable: Marc Ambinder, Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan. Culture 11 is a new conservative (more right-leaning than the Atlantic writers) group-content site that offers sober and level-headed commentary. David Frum, who wrote columns for National Review for six years, is launching his own group blog . A recent editorial from The Economist puts the Republican Party’s concerns in stark detail : “There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.” For this liberal, the hope for the Republican Party is that these editors, columnists and bloggers will predicate a conservative grassroots movement removed from the Christian arm of the Party—a base as responsive, both intellectually and politically, as the Daily Koses and Culture 11s of the Web. Hope for the Republican Party resides in its ability to come to terms with its warring factions, to become once more a party of ideas. From the same Economist piece: “Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasized entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.” Barack Obama is a man of ideas. He steadfastly rejected Clinton triangulation and caused a major dust-up from his own party when he praised Ronald Reagan; he garnered endorsements from across the political spectrum. No doubt his administration’s agenda will be a progressive one—best evidenced in the selection of Rep. Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff and former Sen. Tom Daschle as head of Health and Human Services—but his staff is growing into, to use the fall’s other hopelessly ubiquitous buzzword, a “team of rivals” (a la Abraham Lincoln). To my mind, we can expect the above separatist conservatives to flourish. The reasonable members will find fertile territory in Kos-styled sites; Culture 11, The Next Right, David Frum and the core conservative Atlantic writers have found, or are starting to find, massive audiences. But an Obama administration will prove as beneficial. There will be fierce policy parsing—they are conservatives, after all—but also a respect for a diverse Cabinet and a level-headed President who thinks initiatives through to the end, who respects academic integrity no matter its origin. Here’s to the expected lively and intellectual civil war in the Republican Party; here’s to the hope that a greater debate is born of it, that we become a country of ideas. This column originally appeared at Splice Today .

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Andrew Sargus Klein: Conservatism’s Hope: the Tubes

Here’s one more thing thing to be thankful for: Sarah Palin is still Governor of Alaska. Meanwhile, Keith O. narrates through the unblurred video of the Palin Turkey ‘Pardon’ Press Conference:

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Late Afternoon/Early Evening Open Thread

While Democrat Jim Martin gets Bill Clinton and Al Gore campaigning for him and a radio ad from Barack Obama…Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss gets the retreads of the GOP’s abominable 2008 slate. That would be disastrous vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin of Alaska and equally disastrous presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Star power, indeed . Sarah Palin will be headed to Georgia on the eve of the state’s closely watched Senate runoff to rally Republicans to the polls for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) … “I was thrilled when I got the call that Gov. Palin would be able to make the trip to Georgia to campaign with me the day before the runoff election,” Chambliss said in a statement. He was thrilled, also, you betcha. Also. Jim Martin is winning the battle of surrogates so far - Obama has apparently also recorded a robocall, though he hasn’t visited the state. Obma’s support is critical, because so far (in early voting), black turnout is severely depressed, and it is obviously critical for the Martin campaign to get a large number of black voters to the polls: But for Democrat Jim Martin, the only surrogate who can help him drive voters to the polls is President-elect Barack Obama. Martin is dependent on high African-American turnout to win. The Martin campaign has been reaching out to Obama’s transition team, but it is very unlikely that he will make a last-minute stop down to Georgia. And the early voting tally continues to be somewhat discouraging for Team Martin: Of the 237,000 voters who have cast ballots so far, only 22.5 percent are African-American. In the presidential election, black voters composed about 30 percent of the electorate. Those are ominous early-voting numbers, indeed, and it’s on the shoulders of every Democrat who cares to do all in their power to help Jim Martin close strong. Turnout will decide this election. Phonebanking is critical. Donating is critical. The stakes are no less than the balance of power in the Senate, and the prospective difference between Senator Saxby Chambliss and Senator Jim Martin cannot be overstated. On the web: Jim Martin for U.S. Senate Orange to Blue ActBlue Page MyBO Phonebanking

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GA-Sen: Palin, Giuliani, Romney to stump for Chambliss

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE… The Framer Speaks Jeffrey Feldman has been an important voice at Daily Kos for more than four years. It was here that he began his popular Frameshop diaries, which led to the creation of his own site at frameshopisopen.com . He’s also the author of Framing the Debate (2007), and Outright Barbarous (2008). Today, against a background of turkeys being slaughtered, C&J has a little heart-to-heart with Jeffrey in our latest installment of Yes, We’re All Staring At YOU! Cheers and Jeers: How long have you been blogging and what brought you to Daily Kos? Jeffrey Feldman: Late 2004 I was writing 5 LTEs per day—caught in a permanent state of derangement because of the media. Then I saw a brief TV spot that mentioned Daily Kos and thought, Hey! A website that’s all LT and no E—perfect! Where were you when the networks called the race for Barack Obama and how did you react? I was three sheets to the wind by that point—we popped corks when they called Ohio and I was trying to juggle booze, pizza and large pink rabbits while liveblogging for Huffington Post . When Blitzer called it at 11:01pm, I jumped up and hugged my wife, which turned out to be a lamp. You have a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. How would you describe cultural anthropology in terms that someone like, say, Sarah Palin could understand? The Cultural Anthropology is a game where great U.S. Americans like Joe the Plumber stand on their porches and watch witches in other countries shop at Neiman’s. What kind of music makes you feel invincible to the GOP horde? Eddie Vedder could floss his teeth and the sound would make me feel invincible to the GOP horde. What is your favorite presidential speech of all time? What would be the runner up? Dubya’s 2003 ‘Yellow Cake’ SOTU is my favorite, even though I’m really a chocolate cake guy (unless there’s pumpkin pie, in which case, I’ll have that). I also love Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address because I once saw a copy of it written on a grain of rice. What’s the one book every Kossack must read? Books are for elitists–write them, burn them, but never, under any circumstances read them. Movies! The court scene in the Coen Brother’s Intolerable Cruelty is the best writing of the past 100 years. You’re the curator of the popular Frameshop blog at frameshopisopenn.com. What grade would you give the Obama and McCain campaigns for their framing prowess during the 2008 presidential campaign? McCain gets an A+++ for reframing the GOP as “We stabbed it with a stake, but OMG it’s still alive!” The Obama campaign—losers. They get a “See me after class…and bring your mom.” But they did successfully reframe Will.i.am as Yoda by beaming him to CNN from the Jedi Temple to talk with Anakin Cooper. Finish this sentence: In the kitchen I make a mean… …dirty dish badass clean, but I do it without a dishwasher because our co-op won’t allow them. And fried eggs. You’re the author of two books, Framing the Debate and Outright Barbarous . Do you have a routine when you write, and how do you deal with writer’s block? My routine involves fretting and procrastinating and annoying my wife for 6 months, until she threatens to beat me senseless with a blunt object—at which point I make coffee, take out my crayons, and start “writing.” No waffling here: dogs or cats? Cats, then waffles. I have one question left, but President-elect Obama needs me to help him decide on a PIN for the nuclear launch codes. What, like Sasha and Malia are too busy to do it? Please ask and answer the final question yourself… What’s your perfect Sunday? January 18, 2009. Cheers and Jeers starts in There’s Moreville… [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

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Cheers and Jeers: Monday

The Economist has some opinions on the current state of the GOP’s intellectual leadership: There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South. The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans… Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda. Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour. Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research. The author of that piece has some important observations, but is mixing up whether, on the one hand, the GOP effectively appeals to educated people with whether, on the other hand, they’re a party of ideas and intellectual heft.  But voters typically don’t cast votes based on the sophistication of a party’s policy platforms or stated view of government and society.  And being smart and educated doesn’t mean that one will not succumb to appeals that are intellectually vacuous or politically irresponsible; Nader voters probably have higher average levels of education than voters for either the Democrats or the Republicans.  There are a lot of smart people who dumb things.   While it certainly helps to have a robust intellectual and policy apparatus and party intellectuals who produce impressive analyses, manifestos and works of learned scholarship for the reading and thinking public, it’s certainly not necessary in order to win elections, or at least to get a lot of votes.  In 1968 George Wallace won 46 electoral votes, and while it’s certainly true that his campaign was devised and run by some clever people, it was certainly not a campaign of “ideas” and appeals to the intellect.   Furthermore, much of the GOP’s ascendancy during the 80’s, leading to their eventual takeover of Congress in 1994 and consummated with their 4 years of complete control over the Federal government from 2003 through 2007 was built not on ideas, but on resentment.  The “angry white male” who helped propel the Gingrich revolt not only wasn’t reading works of political theory or the policy white papers of GOP thinkers. The typical Angry White Male was reacting against the changes wrought by liberal policies, by societal changes, and to the economic insecurity as deindustrialization wracked the nation’s traditional bases of mass employment like manufacturing.   There was also a strong element of racism at play in the Republicans’ rise from the 60’s through the 90’s. From Nixon’s Southern Strategy (formulated in part by Kevin Phillips, a GOP intellectual who eventually broke from his party and has become on of the most vociferous critics of the entire Bush family), through the Reagan team’s decision to kick off their 1980 general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi—location of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner—through voter suppression of African-Americans in 2000 and 2004, the GOP has benefited from dividing white and black voters.  A lot of voters who didn’t value intellectual sophistication and the pronouncements of academic and government elites had been voting Democratic in the Jim Crow solid South. After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts opened up the franchise to African-Americans in the former states of the Confederacy, a lot of those voters didn’t become less intellectual than they had been.  They simply switched allegiance to the party that picked up the mantle of state’s rights.   Finally, it didn’t take accomplished and serious intellectuals to lead the GOP and the broader conservative movement to electoral success.  There were a few legitimate conservative intellectuals who were important to the rise of conservatism.  The godfather of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, did not hide his erudition.  A few thinkers important to conservative thought, like the social scientist James Q Wilson and the essayist Russell Kirk deserve their reputations as serious thinkers.   But as John Judis showed in The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests and the Betrayal of the Public Trust , the conservative movement was largely a reaction to the New Deal, and the “ideas” that came forth to question the New Deal were mostly the product of corporate-funded think tanks like Heritage and The American Enterprise Institute that produce ideologically-driven shoddy work that demeans and discredits empirically sound social science.   Even the most prominent “intellectuals” associated with the GOP have tended to be hacks.  For instance, David Brooks is a moderately clever guy, but intellectually he’s an embarrassment; his forays in to pop sociology are laughably inept.  And look at this career path of possibly the most credentialed and influential GOP party intellectual, William Kristol : I remember back in the late ’90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers. Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. “I oppose it”, Irving replied. “It subverts meritocracy.” The Economist is right that voters rejected the anti-intellectualism of the GOP. But far more important was that for the first time since 1920’s, the Republicans both controlled all the levers of the Federal government, and (unlike the two years of GOP control of Congress that overlapped with the Eisenhower administration) were waging war on the New Deal.  When they achieved that authority over the government, the Republicans didn’t demonstrate the compelling force and appeal of their ideas, but instead revealed the destructive results of their intellectual vacuity and contempt for government: the “Brownie” response to Katrina, a failed war, a failed effort to privatize Social Security, attacks on science and social tolerance, and what could become the worst economic crisis since Hoover’s response to the Great Depression.   Voters sometimes make bad decisions.  Those bad decisions are often helped by losing parties that do a poor job of governing, of articulating their ideas or offering up compelling candidates that voters find trustworthy and deserving of their vote.  Preventing such failures will remain a challenge for progressives and Democrats. But the GOP didn’t win elections in recent decades because of their ideas and suddenly lose in 2006 and 2008 because they ran out of ideas.  They lost in these last two elections in large part because their complete control of the Federal government from 2003 through 2007 exposed their paucity of ideas, desire to roll back the New Deal and contempt for responsible governance.  

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The Republican Party Was Never the Party of Ideas

There’s always an election more or less around the corner, and in this case, 2009 and 2010 should be exceptionally interesting years in term of the balance of power in the Senate, and the control of governorships prior to the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting. So here’s an early look at how 2009-2010 races appear at the outset. Everything is speculation at this point, of course, but if you’re curious about specific races and possible candidates, here’s a little bit of information. In the first of several instalments on the 2009-2010 races, let’s look at the first eight states alphabetically - Alabama through Delaware. We’ll know more every month from now until the filing deadlines in 2010, but here’s how things look at the moment. Alabama At the statewide level, the biggest race is expected to be the Governor’s race, where two-term incumbent Gov. Bob Riley is term-limited. There’s a Senate seat up as well, currently held by 76-year-old Republican Richard Shelby. That race is unlikely to draw as much attention unless Shelby retires, and it’s currently looking as though he won’t. Even if Shelby did retire, Riley (a former Congressman) would be in excellent position to run for the seat himself, and he’d probably scare most Democrats out of the race if he did. The major concern about the Governor’s race is that it’s rumored that the state’s best political talent - Lieutenant Governor Jim Folsom, Jr., Rep. Artur Davis, and former Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks - are all interested in the race. Davis was mentioned for a Cabinet position in the Obama administration, but with the Attorney General position having gone to Eric Holder, his sights appear to be focused on the Gov race. Davis would be the first African-American elected Governor in modern Alabama history if he ran and won, but he might have difficulty getting elected. Barack Obama carried just 10% of the white vote in Alabama. Davis being an Alabama native and much more centrist than Obama, he would probably fare better, but it’s unclear whether he’d be able to garner the white support necessary to win statewide. Folsom - a former Governor himself and son of one of the state’s most beloved Governors, Big Jim Folsom - is well positioned for a run, if he gets through the Democratic primary. He would likely have a significantly better shot than Davis in the general. With Alabama’s exceptionally large black population, however, Folsom may have difficulty winning the primary with Davis in it. That difficulty would be compounded if Sparks - a populist with strong support among progressives - were to run. Sparks opted against a U.S. Senate race in 2008, and probably regrets it now. He’d be a very good statewide candidate, having already won election for two terms as Ag Commissioner. However, he was reluctant to run in the primary in 2008 against a weaker candidate than Davis or Folsom. Would he enter a primary with both heavyweights in it? The best case scenario would probably be something like this: if Senator Shelby retires, and the three candidates run for the top three officers - one for Senate, one for Governor, one for Lieutenant Governor. At the House level, the races which currently look like they might be competitive are: AL-02 , where Democrat Bobby Bright beat Republican Jay Love by just 1,500 votes in 2008; AL-03 , where Republican Mike Rogers squeaked by Democrat Josh Segall in 2008, 53-47, and might well be vulnerable to a second challenge; and AL-05 , where freshman Democrat Parker Griffith will surely face a decent Republican challenger here. Alaska Although Governor Sarah Palin’s favorables and job approvals have dropped significantly, she’s still exceptionally popular and is the overwhelming favorite for reelection, and unlikely to draw a particularly strong challenger. Incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski isn’t in the same boat - she won her 2004 reelection by just three points against former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles - but it’s still a Republican state. The same could be said by long-time Rep. Don Young, who despite considerable legal and ethical problems, managed to win reelection by five points over Democrat Ethan Berkowitz. Can a Democrat beat any of these three? Sure, the right Democrat could potentially take out Young or Murkowski - neither of them performed especially well in their last race, it won’t be a presidential election year and turnout should be lower Palin should be pretty safe regardless. Berkowitz might run again for something. Former state Rep. Eric Croft would be a pretty decent candidate as well. Anyone else? Arizona The news that Governor Janet Napolitano is favored for a position as head of the Department of Homeland Security is doubly bad news for these races. First, it means that Republican Jan Brewer will get a head start in the race for Governor , as she will take over from Napolitano if and when Napolitano is sworn is at DHS. Meanwhile, John McCain is running for reelection to the Senate , and while Napolitano wasn’t a sure bet to challenge him, she was possibly the only one who could have beaten McCain, and the strongest candidate by far. So with Napolitano out, and McCain consequently getting a free ride, the attention shifts to the Governor’s race. If Napolitano served out her term, the race was shaping up to be a fun one and a real barn-burner, between Brewer, the current Secretary of State, and the presumptive Democratic nominee, current Attorney General and former Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard . It remains to be seen how much of an effect Brewer’s two years of incumbency would have on the race. In the House , Republicans will probably try and mount challenges to freshman Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick and second-termers Gabrielle Giffords and Harry Mitchell. There’s a chance for an exciting special election here if Rep. Raul Grijalva is indeed going to be the next Secretary of the Interior (he’d be an excellent choice, and the most liberal person yet tabbed for the cabinet). There’s no danger of losing Grijalva’s seat, so the replacement would be all about electing the most solid progressive in the primary. Beyond these races, Democrats may take a flier on trying to beat Republican John Shadegg, who got just 54% against Dem opponent Bob Lord in 2008. That’s a tough race to win, and maybe it can’t be done, but you never know. Arkansas Should be the Most Boring State In The Union Electorally, once again, in 2010. All four Representatives - three Democrats and one Republican - should be safe. Democratic Governor Mike Beebe should be reelected. Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln should be reelected as well. Republicans could surprise us by nominating some exceptionally strong candidates, but we’ll have to see it to believe it. California This, on the other hand, should be exciting. Senator Barbara Boxer is up for reelection, and she ought to win, unless she happens to face an exceptionally strong candidate like, say, term-limited Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. I feel that Boxer would beat the Governator (who has also been mentioned as a possible candidate for a Cabinet position) in a head-to-head race, but it would be quite a lot of fun to watch. Perhaps not as much fun, however, as the Democratic primary for Governor is expected to be. Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi is already running. Other possible or expected candidates include: • Attorney General, former Governor, former Presidential candidate and former Mayor of Oakland Jerry Brown. • U.S. Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein. • San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom • Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa • U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez • U.S. Rep. Hilda Solis And those are just the Democrats . On the GOP side, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is expected to run, and we can only hope that Conservative Icon Tom McClintock might get into the race, whether or not he wins in the House. Speaking of the House, there probably won’t be too many top-tier races to begin with, but as we saw this year, there are a number of California districts where upsets are plausible. Among them: CA-03 , where Republican Dan “the Sacramento ‘49er” Lungren received under 50% of the vote in 2008. CA-04 , where we still don’t know who the next Representative will be (though it’s not looking good for Democrat Charlie Brown). CA-26 , where incumbent Republican David Drier pulled just 53% in 2008 CA-44 , where Democrat Bill Hedrick nearly shocked the world by pulling off a stunning upset of Republican Ken Calvert, in a race no one saw coming. CA-45 , a moderately Republican district and home of Democrat Mary Bono Mack. CA-46 , where Republican Dana Rohrabacher got just 53% against Democrat Debbie Cook this year. Meanwhile, it’s likely Republicans will take another crack at Jerry McNerney in CA-11. It’s likely neither party will gain any House seats in California in 2010, but you never know. Colorado Incumbent Democratic Governor Bill Ritter and Senator Ken Salazar look pretty good for reelection. Ritter may actually face Tom Tancredo, a potential candidacy which has “Epic Fail” written all over it. Salazar could draw a decent opponent, like Secretary of State (and Congressman-elect) Mike Coffman. He could also be nominated Secretary of the Interior, and while I would much prefer…well, anyone else, it would enable Ritter to potentially replace him with a more progressive Democrat. In the House, Democrats are out of targets, as they now control five of seven House seats. The most vulnerable incumbent Democrats are freshman Rep.-elect Betsy Markey in CO-04, and John Salazar in CO-03. Salazar has now won three elections and is pretty well entrenched, but Markey has yet to beat someone not woefully unpopular, like vanquished Rep. Marilyn Musgrave. It’s an R+8.5 district, so Markey will have a big target on her back. Republicans will certainly be gunning after this one. Connecticut Chris Dodd is up for reelection. There’s one Republican who can beat him - popular Governor Jodi Rell . As long as Rell doesn’t run, Dodd is completely safe. He could win if she does run, but the race would instantly be one of the most hotly contested and closely watched in the country. If Dodd runs for governor, see above. Assuming he and Rell both run for reelection to their respective offices, Dodd is safe, and Rell is basically safe. State attorney general Richard Blumenthal - who has kicked around the idea of running for Governor or Senate for most of his twenty years in the AG’s office - would be a very, very strong candidate, but even he might not have the mojo to take out Jodi Rell. And, of course, he would have to actually run, instead of thinking about it and deciding not to. Two-term Reps. Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney both won convincingly in their bids for reeelection, and ought to be in good shape. The race to watch is in the Fourth District, where freshman Rep.-elect Jim Himes will face some kind of challenge - perhaps from State Sen. John McKinney, son of the district’s former Representative Stewart McKinney. Delaware The action here will revolve around the special election for Joe Biden’s seat. Whoever is appointed to fill it, there will be an election in 2010. The best Republican for the race is Congressman and former Governor Michael Castle…but he’ll be 71 in 2010, and has health problems as it is. Castle may even retire, which would mean a likely House pickup for Democrats.

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Next Year’s Model: An Early Look At Next Cycle’s Races

Sarah Palin continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. The poll is, of course, meaningless. We haven’t even gotten to Jan 20th, let alone serious thoughts about 2012. Polls like this also rely heavily on name recognition. Nonetheless, Gallup sez : Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are most interested in seeing Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2012. Those three received the highest scores among the 10 possible candidates evaluated in a recent Gallup Panel survey. Given that a contemporaneous poll (the exit poll) says: and Gallup at the beginning of the month says : the Republicans have not gotten serious about understanding where they went wrong. Did you notice that Republicans are different than everyone else? They haven’t.

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Gallup: Palin Tops The GOP’s Dream Ticket

It’s always dangerous for a conservative to mess with the Republican Party’s evangelical Christian base. During his 2000 presidential campaign, John McCain criticized Jerry Falwell and lost to George W. Bush in the Republican primary. Prior to his 2008 presidential run, McCain made peace with Falwell. Apparently, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker hasn’t learned McCain’s lesson, and she isn’t in a conciliatory mood. Parker had first stirred up controversy on the right back in September, when she said that Sarah Palin wasn’t qualified to serve as vice president. That position earned her brickbats from her readers and even some colleagues. But Wednesday, in a column for the Washington Post, she went all in, arguing that the GOP needs to shake off its association with evangelicals to maintain it’s long-term electoral viability. While she was at it, she tossed in a few insults directed at the faithful within the party, writing:

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Conservative Columnist Kathleen Parker: GOP Should Give Up On God

It’s not too soon to start to look for markers that change is not only coming to Washington and politics but to the arts. They say that artists and designers channel the zeitgeist better than the rest of us, that even if they are not actively talking with each other, somehow, similar themes pop up like ground squirrel burrows. Cindy Sherman, photographer extraordinaire, has always had her incisive gaze focused firmly on herself, yet it has been the self of a thousand faces. Having taken us through women as B movie stars, clowns, and fairy tale heroines to list a few, Sherman began working on a series of well-heeled divas early in 2008 that presage the end of this era of opulence in both patronage and fashion. (It’s no accident that this past Sunday, the New York Times featured cheap-ish shopping bags of famous designers instead of the $2,000 variety that has driven much of the luxury goods business in past years.) Untitled, 2008 … by Cindy Sherman As arts institutions hurriedly shore up year end commitments from their recently depleted trustees, (one infamous one — Alberto Vilar — is under current jury review and may go to jail for thievery), and all eyes are on Obama and what he might (or might not) be able to do about the arts on a federal level given the current economic meltdown, to see Sherman’s typically ingenious re-creations of a series of rich ladies, bejeweled, be-gloved, be-pearled, be-lip-outlined (hello Sarah P!) and be-gowned, set against opulent theaters, villas and gardens or with their dogs, is to juxtapose money, aging, artifice and reality in a Sherman’s March that also ends with not a few corpses. Untitled, 2008 … by Cindy Sherman Are they anonymous? No one knows for sure. Some of us thought we recognized actual people, but that is Sherman’s genius — she makes archetype look entirely familiar. Interestingly enough, Sherman’s opening night party (did you know Cindy and David Byrne were bf and gf? How terminally cool is that?!) was a total pre-meltdown blow out at Per Se, the Thomas Keller restaurant at the Time Warner center, itself a symbol of excess, yet where we were all allowed into the kitchen to help ourselves. Talk about yin and yang! Nobody, though, could spot Sherman: she is as invisible and nondescript as ever, the diminutive girl from Glen Ridge, New Jersey via Buffalo. Yet Sherman isn’t derisive about these women any more than she was about film actresses, she is just entirely, totally accurate. Not a bauble or bouffant escapes her unerring eye. (Nor do crepe-y cheeks and upper lips). Though a couple of photographs upstairs at Metro Pictures are of a more dowdy, bow-tied, dowdy sort, most are large scale images of wealthy women that almost seem to have their haughty eye on you, you poor, shabby example of hum-drum humanity. Untitled, 2008 … by Cindy Sherman Sherman still does all of her own set design, costume design and production, and it’s no wonder she once tried her hand at film-making; her return to still photography however, a perfect marriage of medium and message. Many (myself included) prefer the smaller, but no less artfully posed black and white images Sherman used to make, but the larger format and highly saturated color are totally appropriate to this subject matter — these women see themselves as larger than life. Some of us had already started going the other way these last years. My own retreat into La Vie de Boheme well pre-dates the current economic retrenchment, yet seems now to be utterly of a piece with downsizing (more on this in coming weeks). Don’t forget art galleries are FREE — wherever you live — and a welcome respite from getting hammered by current events. (Another jewel in Chelsea right now is a show of early, unknown Eva Hesse, De Kooning and Lucio Fontana work at Andrea Rosen . Lots of seventies artists have also percolated back up in Chelsea — is this another sign that we are in retreat?) In the meantime, take the virtual tour of the Grand Tier with Cindy but don’t forget to put on your lipstick before you do. All images courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

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Patricia Zohn: Culture Zohn: Cindy Sherman Channels the End of an Era

You want evidence that Gingrich will be seeking a bigger national stage, perhaps as RNC chair or 2012 candidate? He’s put aside his usual “ideas” schtick to engage in some good, ol’ fashioned hate and division . O’REILLY: OK, now, the culture war. I know you’ve been flying around the country, and you’re doing stuff. In the last three or four days, this is really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper — we’re gonna show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We’re gonna show you the video on Monday of that — we have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We had boycotts called on restaurants. I mean, it is getting out of control, very few days after the election. How do you assess that? GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it . I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact. And, frank — for that matter, if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that these secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they’re the opposite, of what you’re taught in Sunday school. Gingrich, he of the multiple wives, multiple affairs, the divorce papers as his first wife recovered from cancer, yadda yadda yadda, is now going to talk about “Sunday school”? Yup, homeboy wants to move up, and he has to play the Palin/Huckabee/Dobson game in order to bring the crazies along. Of course, the GOP’s big problem remains. They’ve demonized gays, blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Asians, northeasterners, Californians, San Franciscoans, people in Hollywood, Muslims, atheists, latte sippers, Volvo drivers, arugula eaters, city dwellers, youngsters, and women. Railing against the gays and “secular fascists” may help get you the RNC chairmanship or the 2012 nomination, but it does nothing to solve the GOP’s fundamental problems. So hopefully Newt keeps it up! Update : Weird. This thing posted to the diaries. Must’ve been a tech glitch.

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Gingrich steps to the plate

Do you hate it when good things happen to the worst people ever born? If so, you’ll probably be pretty pissed to hear that Sarah Palin is about to land a book deal that could earn her an estimated $7 million. Yup, 300 pages of sarcasm is worth that much. Can’t wait. Don’t know how far along they are in settling a deal, but we did get our hands on the proposed table of contents for the tome. Take a gander below to find out what kind of horseshit you’ll be able to buy at Barnes & Noble next Christmas: Presented By: Expedition Week Continues Tonight Seven nights of one great discovery after another continues tonight at 9P e/p only on National Geographic Channel. From the ancient pyramids to the ocean depths, from lost cities to outer space, travel with the latest generation of intrepid explorers as they make one great discovery after another. Expedition Week, only on National Geographic Channel. www.natgeotv.com/expedition   Ads by Pheedo

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236: Sarah Palin Getting $7M To Prove She Can Read And Write

Do you hate it when good things happen to the worst people ever born? If so, you’ll probably be pretty pissed to hear that Sarah Palin is about to land a book deal that could earn her an estimated $7 million. Yup, 300 pages of sarcasm is worth that much. Can’t wait. Don’t know how far along they are in settling a deal, but we did get our hands on the proposed table of contents for the tome. Take a gander below to find out what kind of horseshit you’ll be able to buy at Barnes & Noble next Christmas: Presented By: Expedition Week Continues Tonight Seven nights of one great discovery after another continues tonight at 9P e/p only on National Geographic Channel. From the ancient pyramids to the ocean depths, from lost cities to outer space, travel with the latest generation of intrepid explorers as they make one great discovery after another. Expedition Week, only on National Geographic Channel. www.natgeotv.com/expedition   Ads by Pheedo

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236: Sarah Palin Getting $7M To Prove She Can Read And Write

Prince and Michael Jackson are top of the fold on blog pages like HuffPo, CNN.com and MSNBC.com. Is this 1988 or 2008? The Obama team have now dominated 5 days - that is 120 hour-long internet news cycles- with one story. Will the Clinton’s be secy-of-state(s)? Breaking news flash: Sarah Palin is sunbathing. No wait, it must be an old slideshow- she is landing on ice in Alaska. Wait no, its a book deal. Or is it? The world does not know what to do with its primed intellect, having just covered the election of a lifetime. What now? No sooner have we started to wrap our minds around what the 44th President’s government will look like than we are left without news shaping our curiosity. What happens when you remove Obama from the news? Is the country still interested or do they go back to their old viewing habits, pre-Obama. This is the test of news organizations on the internet and cable today. Can they remain relevant and in fact compelling in the absense of this story? It shows that Obama is more than a political sotry, he is THE NEWS. That is why the transition team is putting out the rules: YOU LEAK, YOU GO. One reality is that Obama will have to enforce this to be successful. When you are this hot, you have to know how to control the temperature. If you can’t, you could become a victim of your own success. The key now for the media is to find a way to report about things other than Obama and Sarah Palin when the news is not there, and keep those two fresh for real political news days. Or, to put new voices on that reflect different opinions than the ones we have heard so many days before. Presented By: Expedition Week Continues Tonight Seven nights of one great discovery after another continues tonight at 9P e/p only on National Geographic Channel. From the ancient pyramids to the ocean depths, from lost cities to outer space, travel with the latest generation of intrepid explorers as they make one great discovery after another. Expedition Week, only on National Geographic Channel. www.natgeotv.com/expedition   Ads by Pheedo

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Jennifer Donahue: Is this 1988 or 2008?

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say. Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’ “Sixty Minutes” on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring. According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language. “Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.” The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off.” The President-elect’s stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. “Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also,” she said. Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times , and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com .

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Andy Borowitz: Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

Reports are that the vote was rather lopsided. Sad. But good for the blogging business, the way a Sarah Palin victory would have been good for the late night comedy business. UPDATE: Sources say just two Senators spoke in opposition to Lieberman’s continuance in the chair. No word on any actual “punishment,” including any of the alternatives earlier discussed. Oh, and no “apology” was made, at least not publicly. So Evan Bayh and Amy Klobuchar are left holding that bag, which I think we all suspect was empty to begin with, and will always stay that way. That was a foolish limb for them to climb out on, just from a personal credibility standpoint. Not that they’ll suffer for that. Certainly not in this caucus.

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Lieberman survives.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE… Okay, class, settle down… After months of painstaking research and asking around, I now feel reasonably comfortable asserting that Kossack and Recommended Diaries denizen teacherken is in fact a teacher named Ken, and not a “tea cherken.” (This would explain the long pauses by Lipton customer service representatives when asked what a cherken does.) Now that we’ve cleared that up, Ken will now teach you a thing or two in  today’s installment of C&J’s never-ending series, Yes, We’re All Staring At YOU! Cheers and Jeers: How long have you been blogging and what brought you to Daily Kos? Teacherken: I started on educational listservs and bulletin boards about a decade back. During 2003 I was posting on Dean’s Blog for America. The weekend after Thanksgiving that year I was in New Hampshire on Dean’s behalf and someone introduced me to Daily Kos, which fascinated me with the mix of the political and the personal, and the interactive nature of the virtual community. I began reading, posting comments, and posted my first diary in January of 2004. Where were you when the networks called the race for Barack Obama and how did you react? I was at National Democratic Club in Washington DC, with my wife and a lot of Democratic activists. The actual call at 11 was somewhat anticlimactic, because there was no doubt in my mind that Obama would win, the only question was the size of the victory.  And when Pennsylvania was called as soon as it closed, we all knew. Still, when it was “official” we were all exuberant, and we all celebrated with a glass of champagne. What must one do to receive detention from teacherken? Why should I be punished by the misbehavior of a student? I don’t hold detention. A student has to be deliberately disruptive for me to have her removed from my class by the administration and put in in-school suspension or sent home, and that it is an admission on my part that I have not been able to reach that student. Since often students misbehave because they don’t understand the work and are embarrassed to admit it, I am likely to have the student come to me for extra help—thus it is supportive, not punitive, which is how I would view detention. What kind of music makes you feel invincible to the GOP horde…a horde, we would note, that now consists of Sarah Palin, Karl Rove and a plumber? I like a broad range of genres of music. I was trained as a classical musician (piano, cello and singing), have made money doing rock, folk, cocktail, and have conducted a capella church choirs. Depending upon my mood, it could be Anne Murray, Willie Nelson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Chanticleer, Sviatislav Richter playing Brahms, Andras Schiff playing Bach or Schubert. I suppose if I really wanted to feel invincible, it would be listening to the final three piano sonatas by Beethoven, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. If you had the president’s ear, who would you demand he nominate for Education Secretary before you gave it back? I know that some of the names I am hearing I would strongly oppose—Arne Duncan from Chicago, Joel Klein from New York, Roy Romer from LA. I shudder to think what they might mean for the future of public education. But the issue is less the “who” than it is the vision—what is the purpose of our public school system? And how willing are we to radically reexamine how we do schooling in order to achieve meaningful education for all of our students? Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford is a favorite of many in the educational community. Two former state commissioners, Doug Christensen of Nebraska—who was on a panel at Yearly Kos in Chicago—and Peter McWalters of Rhode Island both have demonstrated that it is possible to have high levels of achievement without reducing everything to tests. I would hope that whoever is in charge, that we move away from our obsession with testing and refocus on the learning needs of the individual students. What’s the one book every Kossack must read? I am going to suggest a book about teaching. It is called The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer . It won’t take you that long, and Palmer is a very clear writer. Hopefully it will stretch your mind about the nature of the educational process, and what teaching really involves. What tips do you have for Kossacks who really really really really really want to make it on the Recommended Diaries list? Change your name to Jerome a Paris or nyceve? Finish this sentence: In the kitchen I make a mean… Pile of dirty pots and pans? I do pretty well with an orange beef, and my wife loves my gazpacho. Rarely have time to cook during the school year. As a Quaker, what’s been your reaction to the way the Bush administration has blurred the line between church and state? Do you think Obama will make that line more distinct again? I would quibble a bit. First, my reaction is independent of my being a Quaker. Second, I have no problem with religion having a role in the public square—after all, it was religious people advocating for Civil Rights and before that for Abolition. I see the Bush administration manipulating religion for political purposes, and the blurring to which the question refers is thus more a political stratagem than an explicit theological position. As for Obama, I think he will attempt to affirm the role religions plays in the lives of individuals, and how it shapes their responses. He will certainly acknowledge that people can have a moral basis independent of religious belief or affiliation. And as a former professor of Constitutional Law, I expect he will insist upon his administration maintaining both prongs of religious freedom, no establishment and free expression. And I would also suspect that this area would be of interest in considering appointments to the Supreme and other Federal Courts. No waffling here: dogs or cats? By background and preference I am a dog person. When I was six months old my sister was given a six-week old black cocker spaniel, and Charcoal and I shared everything.  Since then my orientation has been more canine than feline. If how I live and work allowed, what I really want is a large black Newfoundland—and Leaves on the Current (spouse) rightly notes that the relative proportion of a Newf to my current size is an attempt to return to those halcyon days of my early childhood.  I did for more than a decade have a brilliant and wonderful Sheltie named Elspeth. Until I give up teaching, however, I am away from home for too many hours to be fair to a dog. I have become somewhat bispecial—and we are delighted with our five rescued felines, who are the true owners of our household.   I have one question left, but I have to go tutor Sarah Palin on the difference between a country and a continent. Please ask and answer the final question yourself… Name one person from American History with whom you would like to have dinner, and explain why. I go back and forth on this, but I think nowadays it would be Bobby Kennedy, because he grew so much as a person during his adulthood. He started in public life as a staffer to Joe McCarthy, and yet at the end of his life he had become a healer, as we can see in the remarks he made in Indianapolis, informing the crowd of King’s assassination. He was transformed by tragedy, and turned into something special, something that gave hope to many until his own tragic death. It was a sense of hope, of change, illustrated by the changes in his own life. I’d like to learn from that. Gee it’s been great, but if I don’t get the papers graded and returned to my students, perhaps they will give me detention? Peace. Cheers and Jeers starts in There’s Moreville… [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

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Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday

Watching the battle for the future of the Republican Party never gets old . Some conservatives want a return to basics, arguing that President Bush abandoned conservative principles by expanding government and driving up spending. Others draw just the opposite conclusion, warning that Republicans have tried to appeal to too narrow a base and that the party must update the focus of conservatism, especially at a time when voters are thinking more about issues like jobs and health care than about abortion and gay rights. Translation? Republicans can’t decide whether they should return to pretending to be all about fiscal responsibility and small government, or to continue pretending they care about God, guns and gays every two years.   At this point, it seems that that ever-dwindling breed, the moderate Republicans, aren’t getting much traction with their suggestion that if the Party didn’t tie themselves to the flat-earth, furthest extremes of rightwing whack-a-doodlehood, they could get some of moderate and independent voters on their side. Instead: Several conservative leaders said in interviews that they were heartened to have a bench of conservative politicians that they could look to in the coming years, mentioning names like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Representative Mike Pence of Indiana and Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina — as well as Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska… With that bench, the GOP will be riding the pine for years to come.

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It Never Gets Old

It’s been about 26 years since Sarah Palin attended her high school prom, but that didn’t stop her from sporting a corsage at a celebration for Alaska’s 50th anniversary on Friday night. Below, Palin, wearing a pink and black ensemble with the white wrist corsage in question, sits for a photograph with past Alaska governors. What kind of flower could it be? A gardenia? A white rose? One thing’s for certain: it does not appear to be Alaska’s state flower, the Forget-Me-Not . Former Alaska governors Bill Sheffield, left, Walter J. Hickel, Frank Murkowski, Tony Knowles, Steve Cowper, and Keith Miller, right, with Governor Sarah Palin, front left, and Territorial Governor Mike Stepovich, front right, talk as they wait for a ceremony to honor Alaska governors as part of Alaska’s 50th anniversary in Anchorage, Alaska Friday Nov. 14, 2008. (AP) A corsage close-up Flashback: Palin at her high school prom with Todd, seemingly sans corsage

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Sarah Palin Brings Back The Corsage At Alaska Anniversary Ball

She failed to save John McCain from presidential election doom, but Sarah Palin, the Republican senator’s controversial running mate, may yet emerge as the saviour of the American publishing industry. Literary agents are queueing up to sign her to a book deal that could earn her up to $7m. With Barack Obama’s election victory certain to generate dozens of volumes from politicians, strategists and journalists - and with another shelfload of memoirs expected from members of President George W Bush’s administration - Palin’s personal account of her tumultuous introduction to national politics is widely regarded as the book most likely to repay a multi-million-dollar advance. “She’s poised to make a ton of money,” said Howard Rubenstein, New York’s best-known public relations adviser. “Every publisher and a lot of literary agents have been going after her,” added Jeff Klein of Folio Literary management. Keep Reading -or- “Joe The Plumber” Book Deal Details Emerge

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Palin Book Deal Said To Be Worth $7 Million

She failed to save John McCain from presidential election doom, but Sarah Palin, the Republican senator’s controversial running mate, may yet emerge as the saviour of the American publishing industry. Literary agents are queueing up to sign her to a book deal that could earn her up to $7m. With Barack Obama’s election victory certain to generate dozens of volumes from politicians, strategists and journalists - and with another shelfload of memoirs expected from members of President George W Bush’s administration - Palin’s personal account of her tumultuous introduction to national politics is widely regarded as the book most likely to repay a multi-million-dollar advance. “She’s poised to make a ton of money,” said Howard Rubenstein, New York’s best-known public relations adviser. “Every publisher and a lot of literary agents have been going after her,” added Jeff Klein of Folio Literary management. Keep Reading -or- “Joe The Plumber” Book Deal Details Emerge

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Palin Book Deal Said To Be Worth $7 Million

Sarah Palin’s stylists sure had to work hard to drop $150,000 on dressing the former Republican V.P. candidate. Vanity Fair’s fashion department took Sarah’s budget and came up with a dream wardrobe that would fit the bill. (They threw in her husband Todd’s $40,000 budget, too, just for good measure.) Even if Sarah was outfitted with a Valentino dress, an ostrich weekend bag and a croc handbag, a Patek Philippe watch, and an Hermès silk scarf, there would still be about $100,000 left over. And what about Todd’s spending spree? That’s equivalent to nearly six Ralph Lauren Purple Label suits. See, no matter how you slice it, it’s not all that easy to spend that kind of cash! Sarah Palin: Ralph Lauren Klondike jacket $4,598 Ralph Lauren Collection jacket $4,798 Ralph Lauren Collection wool turtleneck $855 Armani Collezioni cashmere jacket $1,925 Armani Collezioni blouse $755 Armani Collezioni skirt $960 Armani Collezioni twill jersey jacket $1,325 Armani Collezioni twill jersey skirt $715 Armani Collezioni jersey jacket $1,635 Armani Collezioni jersey tank jacket $1,065 Giorgio Armani quilted jacket $4,375 Loro Piana chinchilla and cashmere sweater coat $5,395 Loro Piana Dolce Vita cashmere turtleneck $755 Loro Piana velvet pants $675 Loro Piana Promenade storm trench $3,695 Dior Leather trim jacket $2,385 Dior Leather trim skirt $1,375 Valentino origami front dress $3,750 Valentino cashmere jacket $3,990 Valentino jacket that Palin wore at the 2008 Republican National Convention $4,990 Valentino skirt that she wore at the R.N.C. $1,490 Dolce & Gabbana herringbone pants $950 Dolce & Gabbana herringbone vested jacket $3,595 Dolce & Gabbana chambray blouse $395 Nina Ricci piped jacket $3,190 Nina Ricci leaf-print blouse $2,290 Nina Ricci piped skirt $1,290 Chanel suit $11,755 Carine Gilson bra $580 Carine Gilson briefs $275 Carine Gilson chemise $968 Wolford Body shirt $370 Wolford bodysuit $220 Wolford stockings $46 Fogal cashmere stockings $365 Louis Vuitton Alzer 80 suitcase $6,550 Hermès carry-on suitcase $4,400 VBH ostrich weekender bag $6,975 Christian Louboutin simple pumps $575 Christian Louboutin croc pumps $4,300 Manolo Blahnik pumps $595 Valentino Histoire tote bag $1,795 YSL Muse bag $1,295 Chanel large classic flap bag $2,875 Valextra croc handbag $20,000 Valextra croc wallet $2,000 Hermès silk scarf $375 Bulgari sunglasses $430 Kazuo Kawasaki glasses $375 Patek Philippe watch $22,000 TOTAL $152,335 Click here to keep reading! Related: Cindy McCain’s Wardrobe Costs

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How Did Sarah Palin Spend $150,000?

Ah, don’t you love Republican infighting? Not only was Sarah Palin’s press conference an awesome display of her (frightfully deficient) intellect, but GOP governors were ticked off that she stole the limelight. Frank Rich takes a closer look at the back biters in Sunday’s NYT: ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it’s two thumbs up! Over at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren has been trashing the credibility of her own network’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for his report on Sarah Palin’s inability to identify Africa as a continent, while Bill O’Reilly valiantly defends Cameron’s honor. At Slate, a post-mortem of conservative intellectuals descended into name-calling, with the writer Ross Douthat of The Atlantic labeling the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec a “useful idiot.” Rich goes on to illustrate in graphic detail the Republican crackup, concluding with an important warning: The bad news for Democrats is that these are the exact circumstances that can make Obama cocky and Democrats sloppy. The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead. It’s a good reminder that a certain amount of internal dissent is not only acceptable, but it’s also necessary — as long as the dissent is centered on substance. The problem the GOP has is that for the most part, their squabbling is as petty as was their 2008 campaign.

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The Elephant In The Circular Firing Squad

Turncoat Democrat Zell Miller’s out there these days campaigning for Saxby Chambliss , and this put me in mind of the title of his book, written about the Democratic Party which brought him to prominence. It was entitled “A National Party No More”. In the wake of Barack Obama’s impressive victory on November 4, I wonder how he feels about that now. The truth is that one of the major parties is essentially reduced to regional-party status, and it is the Republican Party. One of the easiest ways to gauge Obama’s performance in individual states this year - and get a sense of trends evolving in that state - is to compare Obama’s improvement there over Kerry (since he improved almost everywhere relative to Kerry) to his improvement over Kerry nationwide. For example, Obama outperformed Kerry in both Montana and South Carolina. But while he enjoyed a 17-point positive swing over 2004 levels in Montana - nearly winning the state - his improvement over Kerry in South Carolina was slightly less than his improvement nationwide, indicating that the state may not have caught the national tide as much as most others. So let’s take a look at the numbers for all states - Obama’s performance, Kerry’s performance, the “swing”, and the “swing” relative to the national swing. On average, the “swing” from 2004 to 2008 was 10 points in favor of Democrats - Kerry lost by three points, Obama won by seven points. So there’s the baseline. We’ve noted the home states of Obama, Biden, John McCain, Sarah Palin, John Kerry, John Edwards, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton, as the “native son/daughter” effect could be in play. Included are Hawai’i (for Obama) and Arkansas (for Clinton). State     2004     2008     Swing     Swing Relative to Average USA       R+3       D+7       D+10       0           AL         R+26      R+22     D+4        -6             AK         R+25      R+22     D+6        -4  (Palin HS) AZ         R+11      R+9       D+2        -8   (McCain HS) AR         R+9        R+20     R+11      -21 (Clinton HS*) CA         D+9        D+24    D+15      +5 CO         R+5        D+8      D+13      +3 CT         D+10      D+23     D+13     +3 DE         D+7       D+23     D+16      +6  (Biden HS) FL         R+5        D+2       D+7        -3 GA         R+17      R+5      D+12      +2 HI         D+9       D+45     D+36      +26 (Obama HS*) ID         R+39      R+25     D+14      +4 IL         D+11      D+25     D+14      +4 (Obama HS) IN         R+21      D+1      D+22      +12 IA         R+1        D+9       D+10      0 KS         R+25      R+16     D+9       -1 KY         R+19      R+17     D+2       -8 LA         R+15      R+19     R+4       -14 ME         D+9       D+17     D+8       -2 MD         D+7       D+23     D+16     +6 MA         D+25      D+26    D+1       -9  (Kerry HS) MI         D+3       D+16     D+13      +8 MN         D+3       D+10     D+7      -3 MS         R+20      R+14    D+6       -4 MO         R+7       R+1       D+6       -4 MT         R+20      R+3      D+17      +7 NE         R+33      R+17     D+16      +6 NV         R+3       D+12     D+15      +5 NH         D+1       D+9      D+8       -2 NJ         D+8       D+15     D+7        -3 NM         R+1       D+15     D+16       +6 NY         D+19      D+25     D+6        -4 (Clinton HS) NC         R+12      D+1      D+12       +3 (Edwards HS) ND         R+27      R+8      D+19       +9 OH         R+2       D+4      D+6        -4 OK         R+32      R+32     None       -10 OR         D+4       D+16     D+12       +2 PA         D+2       D+10     D+8        -2 RI         D+22      D+28     D+6        -4 SC         R+17      R+9      D+8        -2 SD         R+21      R+8      D+13       +3 TN         R+14      R+15     R+1        -11 TX         R+23      R+10     D+13       +3  (Bush HS) UT         R+46      R+29     D+17       +7 VT         D+20      D+35     D+15       +5 VA         R+8       D+6      D+14       +4 WA         D+7       D+17     D+10       0 WV         R+13      R+13     None       -10 WI         D+1       D+13     D+12       +2 WY         R+40      R+32     D+8        -2 (Cheney HS) For reference, here are election results from previous years 2004 (Bush/Kerry) 2000 (Bush/Gore) 1996 (Clinton/Dole) 1992 (Clinton/Bush) So what do we take from this? The West apparently loves Obama , especially the most populous areas of the West. Obama showed marked improvement over both Kerry and Gore in the West - he seems to be about as popular as Bill Clinton was in much of the West, more so in certain areas, less so in others. Obama won Colorado by eight points, Nevada by 12 points, and New Mexico by 12 points. Obviously, those are dramatically better numbers than Gore or Kerry put up, and Bill Clinton had only one performance in these states that more or less matched these, an 8-point 1992 victory in a three-person race in New Mexico. He won nailbiters in Nevada both elections, and lost Colorado in 1996. Obama did slightly worse than Clinton in much of the rural West, oddly enough…but again, far better than either Gore or Kerry. Obama’s improvement over Kerry in the West exceeded the national average improvement almost everywhere; in California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Utah, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. The only Western states where Obama did not exceed the “average improvement” were John McCain’s home state of Arizona, and Wyoming. It’s hard to say why Obama’s jump in Wyoming didn’t match the national average jump, or the average jump in the West. The slight underperfomance here may well have hurt Democrat Gary Trauner in his quest to win the state’s at-large House seat, but outside of Obama campaigning in Wyoming - which would have been essentially pointless - it’s hard to see what could be done about that. The improvement in the West is really significant, and if it holds up, Arizona, Montana and maybe the Dakotas will be swing states in 2012, while Nevada and New Mexico will be blue states. “Moderately” blue states loved Obama/Biden . Kerry won the following states by 10 points or less: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin.   Obama won them all by double digits, and with the exception of Minnesota and New Jersey, his improvement in each of these states significantly outstripped the average. The blue states where Obama showed the least improvement were Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island…likely because those three states had already gone so strongly for Kerry, there weren’t many persuadables left. What’s up with Arkansas? Obama lost the state by twenty points - even Kerry only lost by 9. It was by far his worst performance, in terms of trend, in any state. Arkansas is a solidly Democratic state, however, at the state level and even the federal level. I wonder if there was not some resentment for Obama beating Hillary Clinton in the primary here; even years after leaving Arkansas, she remains immensely popular in the state. If you’re looking for real live PUMA’s, they’re probably in Arkansas. The “Appalachia effect” which DHinMI noted during the primaries appears not to be limited to Appalachia. Rather, it seems to hold for the entire white rural South and areas outside the South which are demographically and culturally similar. Some Southern states balance this out up to a point because they happen to have large black populations. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina are examples of this. But Obama lost ground, relative to his average improvement, almost everywhere in the South, as well as in West Virginia and Mississippi, with four exceptions: Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia . You know what these states have in common? They all have fairly large black populations (and in Texas’ case, a large Hispanic population), and they also have experienced great population growth in the last decade, and have a generally better educated, more affluent, more urban and suburban white population than seen in other Southern states. DemFromCT posted this graphic example of this phenomenon in his excellent piece on Tuesday . This is a graphic representation of how counties performed relative to Kerry: chart from NY Times Apparently, the areas which showed the least improvement for Obama - or showed improvement for Republicans - are in Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, West Virginia, rural Missouri and Kansas, much of the rural South, and McCain and Palin’s home states. Without speculating on why those areas are the most resistant to Obama’s candidacy relative to those of less successful Democrats, it seems that those are the areas Democrats have to focus on going forward. As DemFromCT said, this isn’t to get into South-bashing. It’s not as though the South absolutely won’t vote for a Democrat - Gore did relatively well in several Southern states he wound up losing fairly narrowly. He outperformed Obama, a much more popular candidate nationwide, in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.  Bill Clinton won several Southern states, including Georgia and Florida once each, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee twice each, and two very narrow losses in North Carolina. Someday, a Democratic candidate is going to match or exceed Clinton’s success in the South once again. Nor is it necessarily that a black candidate can’t perform well in these states - just two years ago, a black candidate nearly won election to the U.S. Senate in Tennessee, for one example, a state where Obama actually underperformed Kerry. It’s clear, though, that whatever the reason, the white rural South - and demographically and culturally similar areas in the lower Midwest and Appalachia - are regions where we should be focusing on building the party. The Republicans are now reduced to being essentially a regional party; the South is the only region where McCain won by less than 10 points. It’s now our job to find a way to sell a Democratic message in their Southern stronghold. Zell Miller entitled his book about the modern Democratic party “A National Party No More”. The truth is, it is the Republicans who have lost the nation; while Democrats have expanded from their coastal/northern base to include much of the Midwest and West, Republicans have essentially retreated into a Southern fortress, and can’t be bothered to try and include the nation in their model for governance.

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A Regional Party No More

Ever since Barack Obama won the primary the question has been asked, “What will Hillary do?” The assumption has been that President-elect Barack Obama would offer her some significant position for several reasons: He respects her intelligence and grit. It is better to have her on the inside than on the outside, in keeping with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s portrait of Lincoln in “A Team of Rivals.” She deserves it, having been the good soldier and campaigned for him vigorously in the last two months. Her supporters continue to care passionately about her and expect her to be elevated to top position There are only two jobs that he could actually offer her that she could accept. One would be the Supreme Court, but she has already made it clear that she is not interested and it is easy to understand why. If she accepted a seat on the court she would have to become a political nun, removed from the politics that she relishes. She is a public person who wants to remain engaged in the hurly burly of politics. The other would be Secretary of State, one of the top three cabinet posts. She could not accept anything less, like Secretary of Health and Human Services or Ambassador to the UN. She has moved far beyond those more circumscribed roles. Moving from the Senate to the State Department would not likely entail the loss of a Senate seat because New York Governor David Paterson would name a Democrat to fill the vacancy. As a former Hillary supporter I would be delighted to see Hillary Clinton as the next Secretary of State. And, I know that thousands of women, not only those who voted for her, would agree. In just a short period of time, the position of Secretary of State has been filled by two capable women: Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. It seems only fitting for President-elect Obama to follow this tradition, but not only because she’s a woman, but because she is the best person for the job. She has traveled widely as First Lady, established good relationships with world leaders, and gained universal respect. And unlike Sarah Palin, throughout her primary campaign, no one questioned whether she was qualified to be President. Surely, then she is qualified to be Secretary of State. This was originally posted at Chelsea Green . Madeleine M. Kunin is the former Governor of Vermont and was the state’s first woman governor. She served as Ambassador to Switzerland for President Clinton, and was on the three-person panel that chose Al Gore to be Clinton’s VP. She is the author of Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead from Chelsea Green Publishing .

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Madeleine M. Kunin: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? Yes!

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is batting down the hype that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin heads into 2012 as the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. Palin energized the Republican base after GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) tapped her as his running mate and she has tried to preserve her high public profile since Election Day.

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Newt Gingrich: Sarah Palin Will Not Be The Future GOP Leader

Since the Weekly Standard launched in 1995, there’s one scenario the conservative magazine hasn’t yet faced: Democrats in control of both the White House and Congress. But that’s what lies ahead in just two months, leaving staffers there and at other media outlets on the right bracing for a period on the outside, looking in. The Weekly Standard has long supported the national ambitions of John McCain, going back to the 2000 primary race, and boosted Sarah Palin a year before she was well known to the Lower 48. Nevertheless, editor William Kristol, speaking from the Republican Governors Association meeting, seemed to be taking the loss in stride. “We’re not going to sit around sniping and wailing and wish, ‘if only things had gone differently,’” Kristol said. “We’ll try to be cheerful.”

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Kristol: Right-Wing Media Will "Try To Be Cheerful"

On “Saturday Night Live,” Jason Sudeikis, playing Joe Biden, mocked the vice president-elect’s tendency to make gaffes and strained to emphasize that he’d be just as entertaining as Sarah Palin. “You don’t think I can give a train-wreck interview with Katie Couric? Just name the time and the place and Joe Biden will bring the train!” WATCH IT NOW:

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Biden Mocked On SNL: How High Was That Gaffe On The Blunder Scale?

It was surely an odd bit of timing on Monday, November 4–just the day before one of the biggest presidential elections in American history–that the Alaska State Personnel Board issued a finding by its chief investigator, Timothy J. Petumenos, that Republican vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, did not breach state ethics laws when she fired Alaska public safety commissioner Walt Monegan in July of this year. This last minute finding appeared to exonerate Palin of any legal culpability in the so-called “Troopergate” scandal that dogged her throughout her ill-fated, two-month run on the Republican ticket. Palin boldly claimed it a “vindication,” while headlines throughout the world declared that she had been “cleared” of any wrongdoing. That was hardly the case. Composed entirely of political appointees–and all Republican–the Personnel Board was hell-bent on clearing Palin from the get-go. It’s findings were neither final nor impartial. And they leave many questions about her behavior, along with that of her husband’s and her staff’s, unanswered. Perhaps the most significant questions that remain are whether or not Governor Palin and her husband, Todd, committed perjury in their sworn affidavits to the personnel board. There is significant circumstantial evidence that they did. Less than a month before the Personnel Board’s findings, of course, a Republican investigator of the bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council declared that while Palin broke no laws in firing Monegan, she had, in fact, violated the state’s Executive Ethics Act by actively pursuing the firing of her former brother-in-law, Alaska state trooper Mike Wooten. Palin put the lean on Monegan to fire Wooten. He didn’t. So he was fired instead. As Governor, Palin had the executive right to fire Monegan. On that fact, both the Legislative Council and Personnel Board agree. What they disagree about is whether Palin, her husband, and her staff had the right to hound Monegan about the firing of Wooten. The Personnel Board said that she did have the right; the Legislative Council’s reading of the Alaska Ethics Act says she did not. And hound they did. More than three dozen times in less than two years. In the aftermath of Mengan’s dismissal, Palin gave at least four different reasons for it–all of which seem spurious, at best, and concocted, at worst. And there is strong evidence contradicting every one of her four explanations. But even more troubling is the absolutely obsessive pattern of strong-arming Monegan about Wooten that began immediately once Palin took office. Within two months of her December 2006 inauguration, Palin and her husband, Todd, contacted Monegan a half-dozen times about firing Wooten. Then Palin’s staff members began the assault. Then more contacts from the Palins. Then more from staff. The pressure was unrelenting and continued right up until the time that Monegan was fired. The record on that–emails, notes, even taped phone conversations–is quite clear. Perhaps the most troubling piece of evidence is a February 7, 2007, email from Gov. Palin to Monegan. It’s a long, rambling missive that concludes with a return to her obsession with Wooten: “Just my opinion — I know you know I’ve experienced a lot of frustration with this issue. I know Todd’s even expressed to you a lot of concern about our family’s safety after this trooper threatened to kill a family member…” Both Palin and her husband swore under oath that they did not have conversations with Monegan a month earlier (in January 2007) about the Wooten matter. Yet the February 2007 email proves concretely that Palin was aware that her husband had conveyed concerns to Monegan and, by implication (”I know you know”) that she had as well. It also clearly establishes the pattern of her trying to use her influence to get Wooten fired from her earliest days in office. Palin further contradicted her own testimony by saying that her husband complained to her so frequently about the handling of the Wooten matter that she had to tell him to stop, and then shortly thereafter contended that she knew nothing about his activities to get Wooten fired. Implausible? Absolutely. Perjury? That remains for a legal body to decide. But will one? I contacted Monegan’s talented attorney in Anchorage, Jeffrey Feldman, of Feldman, Orlansky & Sanders, to ask him about the state of the case and what were the next legal steps in this matter. “No one knows the answer to that question,” he declared. Since the Personnel Board made a finding of “no probable cause” and denied Monegan’s request for a hearing, there “is nothing currently pending before the Personnel Board.” Feldman indicated that Monegan’s legal options are also limited. He “could file an action in court either challenging his dismissal, asserting defamation claims, or seeking a due process name-clearing hearing,” but as of now that’s uncertain. That leaves the Alaska Legislature. When it goes back into session in January, there are a variety of options it could pursue. Although there’s a bipartisan majority caucus in the state Senate, Feldman said, it’s uncertain whether Senate President-designate, Republican Gary Stevens (not related to the convicted U.S. Senator), will follow up on any matter dealing with Troopergate. That, to me, would seem to be a dereliction of the Legislature’s duty. The Alaska Legislature has the right–and I believe the obligation–to follow-up on the findings of its own investigation and to censure Governor Palin for what was a clear pattern of abusing her power. Moreover, the Legislature also has the power to seek contempt charges against Palin and other state officials who willingly ignored the Legislative Council’s subpoenas during its investigation of Troopergate. And it also has the power to hold hearings on whether or not Palin and her husband committed perjury. There’s troubling evidence that they did. Come January, someone needs to show Alaska’s first family that they are not above the law.

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Geoffrey Dunn: Half-Baked in Alaska: Palin’s 11th Hour "Troopergate" Exoneration Was a Lie

ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it’s two thumbs up! Over at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren has been trashing the credibility of her own network’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for his report on Sarah Palin’s inability to identify Africa as a continent, while Bill O’Reilly valiantly defends Cameron’s honor. At Slate, a post-mortem of conservative intellectuals descended into name-calling, with the writer Ross Douthat of The Atlantic labeling the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec a “useful idiot.”

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Frank Rich On The Conservative Crackup: "The Cockfight Among The Losers Has Only Just Begun"

Dear Ask Molly, I live in Philadelphia, and BYOBs are very popular here. Problem is, I never know what my date is going to order! What wines are versatile enough to be predictably tasty when eating unpredictably? -Never knowing what to expect in Philadelphia Dear Never Knowing, There is no one magic wine that would suit if your date is picking at the house salad while you carve up a lamb shank, and that’s a fact. Your fondness for each other might bridge the gap, but no wine could do it. But there’s hope! White Burgundies and unoaked reds have light weight and bright acidity in their favor, and should serve unless you plan on going to a restaurant that specializes in spicy cuisine. In which case, bring beer. White Burgundies are steely and racy, with subtle toast notes, whiffs of gravel and agreeable, fresh fruit. There are few foods (and few dates!) that couldn’t succumb to its charms. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, they grow good grapes in the small villages of Burgundy, though unlike Palin’s small-town people, Burgundian wines can be unapologetically elitist, fetching universal admiration and high prices. If you’re careful to buy from a wine store with a commitment to quality, you can find good ones for under $20. Look for wines from Chablis, Mâconnais, Pouilly Fuisse or simple Bourgogne Blanc. While they’re awesome with seafood, vegetables, and light meats, these wines would be rotten with a steak. You need to consider red wine if your date is a committed carnivore. Freshness distinguishes a food-friendly red, and by “freshness” I mean tingly acidity and vibrant fruit flavors. For wines in the under-$20 range, this quality can reliably be found in unoaked reds. Aging wine in oak can add complexity and toasty, spicy flavors to wine, as well as additional tannins and texture. It can make a wine taste bigger, but big wines tend to be harder to pair. Unoaked reds aren’t be as great with a steak as a big California cabernet or Bordeaux blend, they’d do the trick if you’re also planning on eating vegetables or lighter meats. Some unoaked or lightly oaked wines I’ve enjoyed recently are Marielle et Frédérique from La Tour Boisée, in Minervois, France, and a wine made from the Agiorgitiko grape from Domaine Harlaftis of the Nemea region in Greece. Since it isn’t possible to know the wine making process by looking at a bottle label, you have to ask your trusted wine seller. Have a burning question about wine & wine drinking, perhaps in ways that relate to your love life? Post it in the comments! (Cross posted at http://laasinvineyard.wordpress.com/)

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Molly Laas: Wine for (Most) Occasions

I can’t. I won’t. Because it won’t matter. There is nothing I can say here that won’t be picked apart in to a million bits by those that are looking for more grist for their mills. I said words deemed profane by the FCC over commercial radio at a time when I have always been historically off the air, during a break. Not an excuse; a fact. The engineer left the mike hot and left the board, and thus the dump button to prevent my obscenity-laden, Tourette’s-like outburst. Because of the airing of this outburst (and the cut off statement which became perverted in to a death threat), two people lost their jobs and the station may be fined by the FCC. Haters hated, some of them through actual violence or vandalism, supporters supported, some seen as supporters bolted and some seen as detractors came to aide. Why? I said words deemed profane by the FCC over commercial radio at a time when I have always been historically off the air, during a break. Not an excuse; a fact. The engineer left the mike hot and left the board, and thus the dump button to prevent my obscenity-laden, Tourette’s-like outburst. Because of the airing of this outburst (and the cut off statement which became perverted in to a death threat), two people lost their jobs and the station may be fined by the FCC. During the national election I became a story. Why? I said words deemed profane by the FCC over commercial radio at a time when I have always been historically off the air, during a break. Not an excuse; a fact. The engineer left the mike hot and left the board, and thus the dump button to prevent my obscenity-laden, Tourette’s-like outburst. Because of the airing of this outburst (and the cut off statement which became perverted in to a death threat), two people lost their jobs and the station may be fined by the FCC. I’ve apologized. I’ve accepted responsibility. Why? I said words deemed profane by the FCC over commercial radio at a time when I have always been historically off the air, during a break. Not an excuse; a fact. The engineer left the mike hot and left the board, and thus the dump button to prevent my obscenity-laden, Tourette’s-like outburst. Because of the airing of this outburst (and the cut off statement which became perverted in to a death threat), two people lost their jobs and the station may be fined by the FCC. And with that, I’ve said enough. I am sorry that during an election cycle the media was dumb enough to pervert this in to a national story. I’m sorry that anyone thought I really wanted anyone dead. I won’t apologize for my speech during a break, off air. Like it or not, even I am an American. I can say adult words and yes, even make off color statements (and, partial or not, it truly was a dumb thing to say since I didn’t mean it. Yes, I’m an idiot at times). There is still a First Amendment in this country, however limited. It was a mistake, a dumb mistake, and I realize now that I am the only broadcaster ever in history to make such a blunder. It’s not like I said I wanted to cut the nuts off a candidate for President or anything (ah, Rev. Jackson). And where’s that dialogue? If I had said this on satellite radio would this blog post be needed? If I had said this on the Bill Maher program would we be having this national outrage? The fact is, if you can afford cable TV or satellite radio, the speech you hear is free (with a $19.99 a month price tag or whatever it costs these days). If you can afford a WiFi radio from CCrane you can listen to radio from other lands, and get truly unregulated speech. If I had said this in Europe, there’d be no controversy at all. Well, except for the off color remark, but not the F-bomb. But if you are an American that doesn’t want to pay, that listens to commercial radio or watches commercial TV, the religious right and puritans still have a hold on what you hear, when and why, and act as these guardians in your name, in the name of common decency. Common decency? Whom did I offend, really? Joe? Nope, his publicists said, and I quote from the letter they sent me: Karel, I’m so sorry to hear about your suspension. Let me throw out an idea that might possibly help: If you can provide me the e-mails of the appropriate individuals, I will contact your supervisors and say that you made a proactive effort to contact us before you were aware of your suspension. I will say that I am satisfied you are not a credible threat to Joe Wulzbacher, and I will suggest an interview with The Press Office on accidental celebrities and advice for ordinary people who are thrust into the spotlight. We wouldn’t even need to discuss Joe at all at that point if that isn’t desired, but rather focus on the domino effect of publicity and even address how accidents like yours quickly mushroom out of proportion. It may help you and your station do damage control. If you’ll give me that contact information, I’ll give it a try. Take care, The Press Office And that’s the real absurdity. These good conservatives and liberals who have distanced themselves from me, taken me off their station, removed my writing, what is their outrage? John McCain and Sarah Palin called Barack Obama a terrorist by association. They put his life in danger by raising racial tensions and anti-Islamic sentiment towards him. That was allowed. George Bush called for death to anyone that was not for us. Period. Whatever that meant. On a national level. Death to the Evil Doers, whomever they may be. Hate crimes rose against Muslims. Right now politicians and “clergy” are legislating actual hate in many states, amending documents that protect rights to take them away from tax paying Americans based on nothing more than a religious condemnation. They do this by calling people abominations, not right with the Lord, lesser individuals. They say on TV that these people can be “fixed” or “repaired,” negating their whole lives, calling them nothing more than an illness. They say “Rev.” in front of their name and say the most hateful things. I said on air I wanted someone dead (not really, but let’s go with what you heard). They say on air every day that I will burn forever in hell if I don’t see things their way. I have been told by good conservatives I should die of “AIDES.” Yes, I know it’s spelled wrong, but that’s how the bigot wrote it in red paint on my garage door during all this: “Die of AIDES.” Guess his speech is protected as well. You want to talk about hateful speech? Any “Yes on Prop 8″ rhetoric is pretty damned hateful. You want to talk about hateful , damaging, go back and listen to some Palin and McCain rallies. Listen to their supporters on tape, live, on the web, on TV , on radio talk about “the blacks” taking over, about “Muslim” agendas. Go through the papers the day after Obama won and look at the hatred and vile racism described as political punditry. Yes, I said, “”Fuck goddamn Joe the God Damn Motherfucking Plumber! I want motherfucking Joe the Plumber dead!” I didn’t mean it literally and I apologized immediately. I didn’t make a campaign platform out of it. I didn’t make it the focus of my final show the next night. I moved on. Because ultimately the only person I hurt was myself. My engineer hurt himself (and me and the station), as did I. But no one else was harmed. In fact, I gave many papers, bloggers, radio hosts, TV hosts, lots to talk about. Another non-issue that proves nothing. And here’s the difference: John McCain, Sarah Palin and all the zealot conservatives meant what they said. They still mean it, and they’ve never apologized for it. That’s not an excuse for me. I’m fired, I’m taking my lumps. But perspective, people. Someone telling you they’re taking $700 billion of your money in a press conference harms you more than my screaming “Fuck!” Love me. Hate me. What you see and hear is what you get. If you are around me off air, you know my language is a bit “blue.” Oh well. Some of us curse, some don’t, I do. It’s all language to me. I have never, ever cursed on air, radio, TV, ever in over 20 years. Ever. So now I have. I often say “off with their heads” or “they must perish!” because I’m a drama queen with a real passion for the Founding Fathers and Henry VIII (lived for The Tudors on Showtime). Every day I say, “Oh, he should just die.” I don’t mean the people. I mean the idea. Sink into a tar pit like a dinosaur. No one that knew me thought for a moment I was serious. I now realize you must speak at all times on air to people who don’t know you. I was wrong to say I want anyone dead on the radio, in jest or not. If my friends know the difference, fine, but some nut out there…well, it’s just not good to do and I won’t ever again. For the 1,245,359th — and final — time: I’m sorry. I am sorry anyone thought I wanted a real person dead, I did not. I am sorry that anyone has to go through any trouble over what I said while making tea in my home studio with my always live mike. I wonder if this will be a chapter in Joe’s upcoming book. Maybe a track on his album. Glad I could help.

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Charles Karel Bouley: Explain? How Do You Explain Saying

BOSTON — Gay rights supporters waving rainbow colors marched, chanted and danced in cities coast to coast Saturday to protest the California vote that banned gay marriage there and urge supporters not to quit the fight for the right to wed. Many cast it as a civil rights issue. Crowds gathered near public buildings in small communities and major cities including New York, San Francisco and Chicago to vent their frustrations, celebrate gay relationships and renew calls for change. “Civil marriages are a civil right, and we’re going to keep fighting until we get the rights we deserve as American citizens,” Karen Amico said in Philadelphia, holding up a sign reading “Don’t Spread H8″. “We are the American family, we live next door to you, we teach your children, we take care of your elderly,” said Heather Baker a special education teacher from Boston who addressed the crowd at Boston’s City Hall Plaza. “We need equal rights across the country.” Massachusetts and Connecticut, which began same sex weddings this past week, are the only two states that allow gay marriage. All 30 states that have voted on gay marriage have enacted bans. Protests following the vote on Proposition 8 in California, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, have sometimes been angry and even violent, and demonstrators have targeted faiths that supported the ban, including the Mormon church. However, representatives of Join the Impact, which organized Saturday’s demonstrations, asked supporters to be respectful and refrain from attacking other groups during the rallies. Seattle blogger Amy Balliett, who started the planning for the protests when she set up a Web page three days after the California vote, said persuasion is impossible without civility. “If we can move anybody past anger and have a respectful conversation, then you can plant the seed of change,” she said. Balliett said supporters in 300 cities in the U.S. and other countries were holding marches, and she estimated 1 million people would participate, based on responses at the Web sites her group set up. “We need to show the world when one thing happens to one of us, it happens to all of us,” she said. The protests were widely reported to be peaceful and the mood in Boston was generally upbeat, with attendees dancing to the song “Respect.” Signs cast the fight for gay marriage as the new civil rights movement, including one that read “Gay is the new black.” But anger over the ban and its backers was evident at the protests. One sign in Chicago read: “Catholic Fascists Stay Out of Politics.” “I just found out that my state doesn’t really think I’m a person,” said Rose Aplustill, 21, a Boston University student from Los Osos, Calif., who was one of thousands at the Boston rally. In San Francisco demonstrators took shots at some religious groups that supported the ban, including a sign aimed at the Mormon church and its abandoned practice of polygamy that read: “You have three wives; I want one husband.” Chris Norberg, who married his partner in June, also referred to the racial divisions that arose after exit polls found that majorities of blacks and Hispanics supported the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. “They voted against us,” Norberg said. Demonstrators in Washington marched from the U.S. Capitol through the city carrying signs and chanting “One, two, three, four, love is what we’re fighting for!” A public plaza at the foot of New York’s Brooklyn Bridge was packed by a cheering crowd, including people who waved rainbow flags and wore pink buttons that said “I do.” Protests were low-key in North Dakota, where people lined a bridge in Fargo carrying signs and flags. Mike Bernard, who was in the crowd at City Hall in Baltimore, said Proposition 8 could end up being a good thing for gay rights advocates. “It was a swift kick in the rear end,” he said. In Chicago, Keith Smith, 42, a postal worker, and his partner, Terry Romo, 34, a Wal-Mart store manager, had photos of their wedding ceremony which they held even though gay marriage is not legal in Illinois. “We’re not going to wait for no law,” Smith said. “But time’s going to be on our side and it’s going to change.” ___ Associated Press writers Rupa Shenoy in Chicago, Adam Goldman in New York, JoAnn Loviglio in Philadelphia, Sarah Brumfield in Baltimore, Blake Nicholson in Bismarck, N.D., and Kamala Lane in Washington contributed to this report.

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Gay Rights Rallies Held Nationwide To Protest California Marriage Ban

Cross posted, of course ! Sure, sure, everyone loves Rachel Maddow and her sexy lesbian librarian glasses. But the best new political pundits minted in 2008 were not on cable news, or even on Huffington Post. They were Margaret and Helen, the two octogenarians whose blog caused a sensation with Helen’s post: Sarah Palin is a Bitch … There I said it . Margaret and Helen — friends for sixty years, as their banner problems — pride themselves on being old ladies who speak their minds . In practice, Helen does most of the speaking, since Margaret never actually posts and just calls Helen to make comments about their newfound conversation with America. Here is Helen kicking it all off with thoughts on Sarah Palin: Look. I am going to say what everyone at CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC is thinking but is afraid to say. Governor Palin is a stupid, conniving bitch.  And it’s not because she is a strong woman - I like strong women… worship them… It’s actually the opposite.  She is a weak, pathetic woman who thinks big hair,  winking, baby talk and self deprecation is somehow becoming of a woman who wants to lead the free world.  My god, where is Margaret Thatcher when you need her! Oh and my favorite - my husband Todd (the first dude) and I sit around the kitchen table wondering about the cost of college like many of you …  oh really. Your oldest son went from high school into the military.  Your next oldest is pregnant with plans to be married to some hockey jock at age 17.  Seems to me you’ve got lots of time before you have to worry about college tuition especially being college doesn’t seem to be a priority in your family. Please take your ridiculous hair, your over lipstick-smacking mouth, your Lenscrafter look smarter glasses and your poorly fitted designer jackets back to Alaska.   And when you get there, shove a piece of the pipeline up your considerable ass.  I’ll be damned if we’ll put our children’s future in your hands.  And the same thing goes for McCain - the ass wipe who gave her this national platform effectively pushing the woman’s movement back into the dark ages - knowing McCain that might have been his plan all along. The post was accompanied by a graphic made by Helen’s grandson, which said: I CALL BULLSHIT. This was in early October. The election was in fever pitch. Not surprisingly, Helen’s rant drew attention. Thousands of hits and hundreds of comments. Her response: Hello world. Well where do I begin?  I am shocked at the response to my little rants. You sure do know how to make an old gal feel special. Of course there is another woman out there who feels special, but that’s only because she’s been shooting caribou out the window of her Straight Talk Express on the way to her next Republican hillbilly rally. For crying out loud America. How bad does it have to get? Senator McCain is practically crumbling to dust before our very eyes while Governor Palin is out in the hinterland screeching about some 60’s hippie who bumped into Obama once or twice over the years. This from the woman who panders to secessionists in Alaska. Please, dear God, somebody throw a stone because that glass igloo needs to be shattered! And so it continued. Margaret and Helen, whose grandson taught her how to “blog” so as to keep up with her best friend for more than six decades, wound up offering the most concise, funny and even analytically astute commentary on an election where everyone had something to say. She fulminated about The View’s Elisabeth Hasslebeck . And called Elizabeth Dole a jihadi . On the eve of the election, Helen asked everyone to share thoughts on their grandma as the best way to honor Barack Obama . (Unhappy thoughts about grandmas were referred to Dr. Laura’s blog.) After it was over, the 82-year-old lady from Texas said all that ever needs to be said about California’s Proposition 8: I posted yesterday that love is about the heart not the body. Trust me, if it was about the body a lot of us would be in a world of trouble. You can’t legislate love between two consenting adults.  You just can’t no matter how hard you try. If you want to save marriage, marry someone you love. That post, like all the others, was signed off with. “Thanks for stopping by. I mean it.  Really.” With the election done, there’s less to get riled up about in the papers each day, and Helen says she feels like she is running out of steam. Now that the election is behind us I have tried my best to keep up the hospitality, but watching The View everyday is too much to ask.  I mean I love you and all but that show is torture. Luckily, the old ladies have a plan to speak their mind on the topics of our choosing: So Margaret and I have been talking and we wanted you to know that we have enjoyed your comments - your conversation - as much as you seem to be enjoying ours. In that spirit we have asked my grandson to add a page where you can leave ideas and ask questions for us to write about on this web page blog. But be warned.  We are not Dear Abby or that other one - her sister.  We call ’em as we see ‘em.  We won’t hold back no matter how much we like you! So let’s all provide Helen and Margaret with fodder for keeping us all humbled and entertained. They want you us to sop by and leave a comment . They mean it. Really.

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Joshuah Bearman: Margaret and Helen Are Taking Requests!

White House chief of staff-designate Rahm Emanuel took some time off from the transition Friday night to hurl barbs at his longtime pseudo-nemesis Stephen Colbert (as well as Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Joe Lieberman, et al…) Colbert was roasted as part of a charity event for the Spina Bifida Association, organized every year by Judy Woodruff and Al Hunt. (Click here to donate to the cause .) We’ve posted some text highlights from Emanuel and Colbert below, and videographer/journalist Liz Glover was kind enough to pass along video of the event (note: the first minute or so is choppy). Enjoy: Some highlights from Rahm’s speech: On Joe Biden: “Unfortunately, Joe Biden couldn’t make it here tonight. Joe’s the one who predicted that President-elect Obama will be tested by a crisis in the first six months of his presidency. What he didn’t mention: the crisis will no doubt be over something Joe said.” On Steny Hoyer: Stephen is a guy who knows that no matter how smart or successful he is, he’ll always play second fiddle to Jon Stewart. If he thinks that’s humiliating, try standing behind Steny Hoyer. On Barack Obama: Of course, Stephen and I do have our differences. Stephen believes the messiah is Jesus Christ. In my briefing books, that’s Barack Obama. On Sarah Palin, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Lieberman: “I’m scared of Stephen Colbert. I’m not alone. My colleagues in Congress, political operatives, the top minds in Washington, even some of the people in this room — we’re all scared of Stephen Colbert… We’re scared of Stephen Colbert in the same way Sarah Palin is scared of a geography bee. We’re scared of him the same way that John Edwards is scared of the National Enquirer . Mary Matalin is scared of Stephen, and she’s seen Carville naked! … Even Hillary Clinton is scared of Colbert, and this makes no sense to me — she is a woman who braved sniper fire at the Battle of Bosnia’s Airport. We’re frightened of Colbert, but we know that deep down, underneath the Republican character you see on TV, there’s still a good man, there’s still hope for him. It’s the same way we feel about Joe Lieberman.” On Sen. Orrin Hatch’s musical talents: “Did you know that Orrin is a songwriter much the way Joe is a plumber?” On DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton: “In Congress, Eleanor is allowed to speak, but doesn’t have a real vote or a final say. So she has the same role I used to play with Nancy Pelosi.” On Mark Shields: “He’s been called one of the funniest, wittiest political analysts in Washington, which is like being called the sexiest member of the Supreme Court.” * * * And from Stephen Colbert’s speech: On Judy Woodruff: “Judy, great to see you tonight. I love Judy’s work, I haven’t seen you lately, where have you been? PBS? Oh that explains it. It’s a great place to get away from it all — especially all the viewers. It’s essentially the witness protection program for journalists. If you testify against the mob, they send you to Newshour. Is Jim Lehrer here? Jim Lehrer, the man brave enough to be boring. … The important thing, Judy, is you’re doing good work — you are helping millions of elderly go to sleep every night. Well, technically it’s dozens, a lot of people use the Weather Channel instead.” On Alan Greenspan: “Alan Greenspan is here, and we’re in the middle of a once-in-a-century financial meltdown, so of course the question everyone is asking is, How did Alan Greenspan land Andrea Mitchell? Seriously. Keep kissing him, Andrea, he’s going to turn into a prince one of these days.” On Ben Bradlee: “Ben Bradlee is here — nice to see you Ben. Congratulations on your latest children’s book, ‘Grandpa, What Was Print Media?’” On Chris Matthews: “Chris Matthews is here tonight, thank you so much for coming here tonight. People are asking, how did he come here, doesn’t he have a show? Well what people don’t know is that many nights, Chris just puts a blond wig on a potato and nobody notices. You’re a good man — good luck in Pennsylvania on that run.” On Dana Perino: “Dana Perino is here, what an honor to be roasted by the spokesman for the president. Dana Perino, wonderful to see you. I always knew Scott McClellan would hatch into something beautiful. When you crawled out of the McClellan cocoon, did you have to devour the shell for nutrients or is he still lurking around someplace? … I loved it when you told Helen Thomas that the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner should have read, ‘Mission Accomplished For These Sailors Who Are On This Ship On Their Mission.’ I certainly hope you had a banner for that explanation. Do you get sore the next day after shoveling it that hard? I kid, I kid, but no, Dana, you are the one person who I don’t mind slamming me on this entire podium, because I know for the last year and a half you haven’t meant anything you’ve said.” On Bill Clinton: (Speaking to Rahm) “Can I be in your cabinet? If Hillary says no, can I be Secretary of State? I promise I’ll be good, I’ll just sit in the back of the room, I won’t say anything! No special conditions, I’ll agree with everything that you say. And I promise, unlike Bill Clinton, if I say something nice about Barack in public, I won’t look like I’m trying to pass a stone.”

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Rahm Emanuel Roasts Stephen Colbert (VIDEO)

Planned Parenthood has a blog and they’re understandably pissed off at the Bush-Cheney-Palin-McCain axis of evil and ignorance for, well, for a shitload of reasons as you can imagine. The most recent being as the economy crumbles, families are evicted from foreclosed homes, two unresolved trillion dollar wars rage, and the ranks of the unemployed balloon, the Nutjob-in-Chief has his priorities in order: denying healthcare to women by redefining birth control as abortion . Two teams of astronomers have directly imaged two separate sets of exo-solar planets : For the first time, scientists have produced images of multiple planets orbiting a star other than our own sun. There have been three reports in the past two months purporting to show images of planets in solar systems around nearby stars. Which empty head of the GOP hydra are we to believe these days anyway? The one supposedly pondering how to make itself over to resemble something that can pass for rational , or the more traditional lunatics frantically clawing at the air like grizzly bears on acid? A night launch seen on TV of the STS cannot do justice to witnessing the actual event in person. It’s spatially huge : The horizon and half the sky bursts into ghostly reds, pinks, and yellows. The flickering tongue of flame rises above the tree tops, it’s bright , like an eye searing meteor in reverse, throwing wildly racing shadows across the ground and then through the clouds above as it punches through. You can watch it past SRB sep, and right into orbit. There won’t be many more, so if you get a chance to venture down south, do it while you can. Just in case anyone thinks this post was too pointed in its criticism of current NASA Director Michael Griffin , I received feedback from well informed sources absolutely blasting the man to bits and complaining I was way, way too ‘fair and balanced.’

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This Week in Science

At last night’s Broadway opening of Billy Elliot, Rosie O’Donnell spoke out to “Extra” for the first time since Barack Obama was elected president - expressing her excitement about his historic win and even praising the woman who could have been vice president. Admitting she’d like to meet Governor Sarah Palin, O’Donnell comments, “I’d like to have a beer with her. I’d like to meet her kids. She seems like a pretty nice woman. Although I have to say, I am thrilled her party did not win. [But] you got to give it to her for spunk.” She continues, “I think I probably would like her [Palin] if I met her….She had an amazing life for herself and her family in Alaska. Very successful. Before you knew it, she was the most famous person in the country…” As nice as Palin might seem, O’Donnell exclaims, “If [John] McCain won…I would be in the depression unit of the ICU.” About Obama’s victory, O’Donnell says, “It’s really beyond what I had hoped could happen…I can’t really recall feeling the way that I did about our country. About the promise of democracy….Seems as though the last eight years have been nothing but a dark, funky depression…Hope is possible and change is here. Way to go America!” Reacting to the passing of Proposition 8, which overrides the decision to recognize same- sex marriages in California, O’Donnell comments, “I was married four years and I was annulled three years ago, so for me this fight is not new. Prop 8 is nothing new for me. This has been a long journey…and eventually the world will catch up.” Rosie O’Donnell’s primetime show, Rosie Live, airs on NBC on November 26th.

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Rosie O’Donnell: "I’d Like To Have A Beer With" Sarah Palin

1,061 . Stevens (R) 136,466 Begich (D) 137,527 That’s another 10,000 counted, leaving roughly 28,000 or so ballots left, most from Begich-friendly districts. Update : And more numbers come in: Stevens (R) 137,937 (47.37%) Begich (D) 138,959 (47.02) That’s a margin of 1,022, so it has shrunk a bit. That’s probably Wasilla (Palin-land) checking in. They were due today. So we’re at .35 percent. If Begich gets over 0.5 percent, any recount would have to be paid by the GOP. Under that, and the state pays for it.

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AK-Sen: Begich’s lead increases

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s truncated, confused press conference at yesterday’s Republican Governor Association meeting in Miami. Don’t look now, but the national Republican Party is on the verge of becoming the California Republican Party. And that ain’t a good thing. Unless you’re a Democrat. Looking at the debacle of the just concluded Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami, the national Republican Party looks more and more like the California Republican Party. Which can’t win a statewide election unless it’s running an Austrian-born action movie star and would have no relevance whatsoever absent California’s strange two-thirds legislative vote requirement on budgetary matters, which it shares with only two other states. And now, that party is mostly minus Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who can barely stand to talk with his fellow California party leaders at this point. One of whom, state Republican chairman Ron Nehring, a protege of notorious anti-government lobbyist Grover Norquist — whose whole career, naturally if not ironically — is built around Washington, seeks to become the next Republican national chairman. Sarah Palin denies her earlier statement to right-wing fundamentalist leader James Dobson that “God will do the right thing on November 4th.” Sarah Palin, not to put too fine a point on it, made a fool of herself yesterday in Miami. She stole the show yesterday at the Republican Governors Association’s woe-is-us-Republicans session in Miami. Everyone, including an amazing 220 members of the press, was waiting on her every word. Yet … she essentially recycled her old stump speech. And her ballyhooed press conference? She took only four questions, delivering very vague answers, before getting the hook from Texas Governor Rick Parry. As the national GOP moves to emulate the CRP, the right-wing California paradigm seems on the verge of passing from the scene. Thanks to Barack Obama’s crushing 61% to 37% defeat of John McCain in the Golden State, much bigger than any landslide ever won by the sainted Ronald Reagan, who was actually far more pragmatic and worldly than his current would-be acolytes. And to the redistricting reform initiative championed by Schwarzenegger, which is designed to come up with at least a few more moderate members of the caucus through an end to legislative gerrymandering of legislative districts. Sarah Palin talks, unintentionally amusingly, with “French President Nicolas Sarkozy,” actually a very over-the-top radio comedian from Montreal. The current version of the California Republicans is insular, derived from the extremist Young Americans for Freedom, and much enamored of the nasty hyperpartisan Sarah Palin. Who herself is now trying to be bipartisan, not that anyone will buy that reinvention routine. Palin dominated the Republican governors meeting, which can only count as an early Christmas for President-elect Obama. I’ll say it right now. If Palin runs against Obama, it will be a major wipe-out in favor of the Democrats. Which is not what the right-wing base of the Republican Party imagines. Their imagination, frankly, runs to the extremely delusional, as last week’s confab of far right leaders at Brent Bozell’s home in Virginia came to the bizarre conclusion that the problem with the McCain campaign was that it was too liberal. Sarah Palin, in her devastating interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, discusses American relations with Russia. The word she is groping towards is “caricature.” That points to their extreme level of crisis for Republicans in the wake of Obama’s decisive election, which their captive echo chamber media in the talk radio and blogosphere realms all absolutely insisted would never happen. Those folks foolishly imagined that a tenuous relationship between Obama and long ago Weather Undergrounder-turned-respected Chicago professor Bill Ayers would mean more to voters than McCain’s long record of supporting President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Wrong. Wrong. Very, very, wrong. The California-style illusion of the far right faction now dominating the Republican Party continued today with former California Attorney General Dan Lungren, now Sacramento area Congressman Dan Lungren, making his campaign for the House minority leadership official today. He is challenging Ohio Congressman John Boehner. I ran into Boehner on the campaign trail. While he is assailed by right-wingers as insufficiently conservative, I can assure you that by any objective measure, he is quite conservative. Lungren, even in his currently gerrymandered district, had some trouble getting re-elected, defeating Dr. Bill Durston, a Vietnam War vet, by a 50-44 margin. Lungren is an amiable fellow, son of Richard Nixon’s personal physician, who ran for governor of California in 1998 and was blown away by Gray Davis. The election was one of the biggest landslides in California history, with Davis crushing Lungren, 58-38. I knew Lungren had a big problem when I recorded him saying: “Californians are even more conservative than they know.” If the national GOP moves further in the direction of the California GOP, here is what is likely to happen. Permanent marginalization. The national GOP has already seen its red state coalition shattered, with Obama taking away nine red states from the Republican ticket while losing no blue states. This has left the Republicans — who carried no age group under the age of 65 — pushed back into redoubts of the Deep South and the rural Plains states. I’ve seen this movie before, here in California. Through their narrow majority on the California Republican Party executive board — at the motion of a far right ideologue and blogger named Jon Fleischman, the Southern California party vice chairman — the party leadership voted to block any move to open the California Republican presidential primary to independent voters. This was a move to help Mitt Romney, the heavy favorite of the Orange County conservative money crowd who provide the financial underpinnings of Fleischman’s Flash Report, and to block more moderate Republicans such as McCain and Rudy Giuliani. But the move, ultimately, was a failure, as McCain swept virtually all of California’s delegates despite the exclusion of independent voters. (Many of whom found another form of disenfranchisement in the Democratic primary, where many independent votes have still not been counted.) Which left Schwarznegger — the constant target of attacks from the Fleischman/Spence/Mike Schroeder faction of far right Republicans — and McCain and their joint operatives in the catbird’s seat. Once again. Not surprisingly, since my New West Notes readers know that even core Republican voters agree more with the Arnold view of politics than with the YAF view of politics. Not that it helped at all in the wake of the Obama wave. Fleischman and far right California Republican Assembly leader Mike Spence’s declarations last year in the NWN Forum section that the very existence of the minimum wage equates to socialism were an early presaging of the extremist, talk radio-style declarations that emanated from the Republican campaign this fall. As were the absurd assertions that then Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez is a Communist fellow traveler. All fringe stuff. Vlad and Boris present “Song For Sarah (For Mrs. Palin).” ( h/t William Gibson ) Ironically, Hugh Hewitt, the Southern California radio host and blogger, Mitt Romney’s hagiographic biographer no less who played a key role in the right-wing blogosphere’s failed campaign of character assassination against McCain as well as Obama, claimed that Sean Hannity’s endorsement of Romney was far more important than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, in California as well as nationally. Jon Fleischman, the Southern California Republican party vice chairman who runs the far right Flash Report web site (key for state Republican conservatives though not a mass communicator), gratuitously penned this piece of advice for McCain, that he send Schwarzenegger to the East and avoid him in California. Fleischman, incidentally, backed by California state party chairman Ron Nehring, authored the resolution to block independents from voting in the California Republican primary. Talk show host/blogger Hewitt claimed, absurdly, with regard to McCain and Romney: “If you had to chose, either guy would rather have Sean Hannity and his national reach” than Arnold Schwarzenegger. And Fleischman — whose web site is the go-to spot for the California far right — falsely claimed that Schwarzenegger is very unpopular with California Republicans and, unsolicited, advised McCain on his blog to have Schwarzenegger campaign for him in the East. Meanwhile, in the real world, many undoubtedly don’t know who Sean Hannity is. And in the real world, Hannity fawns on camera over Schwarzenegger. You see where this is going. Further and further away from reality. Deeper into the alternate universe echo chamber of America’s far right. But to check in on reality, you can check things out during the day on my site, New West Notes.

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William Bradley: Miami Blues: Palin And National Republicans Look Like The Sad California Republican Party

An abbreviated version of Sarah Palin’s press conference on Thursday: Some factoids: She took four questions and spent a grand total of 2 minutes, 8 seconds answering those questions. Her first answer was 25 seconds long. Her second answer was 51 seconds long. Her third answer was 28 seconds long, and her final answer was 24 second long. She spent most of the time saying she didn’t want to review the 2008 presidential campaign. She then went on to deliver a speech in which she mostly reviewed the 2008 presidential campaign. Half of the GOP governors showed up. They see her as the leader of the party. I’m loving it. More, please!

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Here’s Why Palin Didn’t Give A Press Conference

Saying “I think of myself as a blogger on tv,” Rachel Maddow gets all of our backs against Sarah Palin’s “I was brought down by bloggers in pajamas in their parents’ basements” schtick: Thank you, Rachel, and we love you. And what’s so wrong with pajamas? Has rightwing opposition to pleasure in its many forms extended to soft comfy attire? Let me tell you, the first thing I do when I get home tonight will be put on pajamas. I see nothing wrong with this. All I’m sayin’ is, pajamas have their place. It’s not in the Senate , or in most workplaces. But when you’re home, curled up on your couch with a purring cat and your laptop? Seems just about right. Shoot, at least I bought my own damn pajamas and didn’t get the RNC to buy not just clothes for me but underwear for my kids.

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In Defense of Pajamas

According to Gallup , only 45% of Americans want to see Sarah Palin stick around on the national stage. We know voters think Palin’s not qualified, even the ones that voted for her . Oh, sure Republicans like her. Last week, 64% of Republicans wanted her to run in 2012, according to Rasmussen. That led Paul Begala to quip, ‘yeah, and 100% of Democrats’. So, she can stick around if Republicans want her to. But when she does (and not every Republican is falling over them self in encouragement), the media is going to have to adjust to the fact that what the minority party wants isn’t determinative in American politics these days. That will take some getting used to.

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Thanks, But No Thanks

Appearing on last night’s Rachel Maddow show, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) offered this up , with regard to Joe Lieberman’s campaign activities for the McCain/Palin ticket, as well as against fellow Democratic candidates for Senate: [Y]ou have got to expect an apology, a sincere apology, and you have got to keep — to tell him, look, we’re going to give you a chance here. But if you don’t do the right things as chairman, if, you know, we see any continuation of this kind of behavior, well, then, at that point, you know, the game is up at that point. Allow me just to make brief mention of the Senatorial Steak Sauce baloney about how the Democrats can kick him out of his seat later, if necessary. It seems particularly relevant to note that it was Bayh I was talking about the first time I coined that Senatorial Steak Sauce line. So maybe it should come as no surprise that he’s pouring it on again in this case. The fact is that it would require adopting a resolution on the Senate floor to strip Lieberman of his gavel later on, so it’s not quite as simple as snapping your fingers. If he’s creating enough problems for his Democratic colleagues that they finally resolve to get rid of him, do you think the Republicans will be eager to help with that, or will they filibuster that resolution? They may very well opt to be inexplicably courteous about it and let it slide. But is that a safer bet than taking care of business right now? But I have a more important set of questions about that apology Senator Bayh thinks he’s entitled to. For one thing, can we expect Bayh to vote against Lieberman retaining the chair if it isn’t forthcoming? I’m doubting it, which means Bayh was probably blowing smoke up your ass with that one. The other questions are for Lieberman. I’m wondering what he’ll be willing to apologize for, versus unwilling. Will he apologize for attending the McCain/Palin rallies which the Secret Service said created a spike in death threats against Obama’s family, including his children? Or will he just give us some pablum about how the rhetoric may have gotten out of hand in the heat of the campaign, and “mistakes were made”? I think we all know the answer to that. But personally, I think an observant Jewish man like Lieberman — and really, we ought to expect the same from any socially and historically conscious adult — has some thinking to do about how he campaigned in support of a ticket that was inciting neo-Nazi threats of mass murder that specifically included a racially-motivated death threat against the Obamas. Who thinks we’re going to get that apology?

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What should Lieberman apologize for?

They’re missing the story again. Remember when Hillary was a lock to win the Democratic nomination? And so was Romney? And watch out for Fred Thompson? Obama winning? Not a chance. Conventional media wisdom has been wrong much much more than it has been right. So when 14 million people are out of work, the American auto makers are about to close up shop and Secty. Paulson appears to have lost his mind… When President Barak Obama is putting together his administration at a time of great emergency…why is it that all I see is Sarah Palin? I mean, I like watching Republicans make fools of themselves as much as the next guy, something they have, thankfully, not ceased even for a split second. I suppose she thinks she’s saying things that people like her want to hear, but she looks like a polar bear on an ice floe, floating out to sea, bellowing on her way out. Note to TV and radio news directors and producers: We nevah liked her. When Peggy Noonan says, “It’s over,” upon setting her eyes on Palin… When Palin’s negatives went so far South, you’d think they were in Brazil looking for summer… Maybe you should consider covering something else. A demolition derby. A lost dog…. Or an Obama administration that is about to sweep away as much of the Bush administration as it can, as fast as it can.

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Tom D’Antoni: Sarah, We’d Like to Miss You, but You Won’t Go Away

WASHINGTON — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday she would consider serving in the Senate if God gave her the opportunity and Alaskans wanted her to take the job. The state’s senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens, fell behind as the count resumed in his re-election bid. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, led by more than 3,000 votes when the Election Day count ended last week. He dropped 814 votes behind his Democratic challenger, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, early Thursday as Alaska election officials began tabulating an estimated 90,000 absentee and provisional ballots. Tens of thousands of ballots remained to be counted. Even if he is re-elected, Stevens could be ousted by the Senate for his conviction on seven felony counts of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts, mostly renovations on his home. If Stevens loses his seat, Palin could run for it in a special election. She also could challenge incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010. Palin, who was the GOP vice presidential nominee, has two years left on her term as governor. She told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that she wants to serve her constituents the best she can. “At this point it is as governor,” she said. “Now if something shifted dramatically and if it were, if it were acknowledged up there that I could be put to better use for my state in the U.S. Senate, I would certainly consider that but that would take a special election and everything else,” she said. “I am not one to appoint myself or a member of my family to take the place of any vacancy.” Pressed in a separate interview with CNN’s Larry King about whether she would serve out her term as governor, Palin said, “I will do what the people of Alaska want me to do.” She added, however, “if they call an audible on me, and if they say they want me in another position, I’m going to do it. … My life is in God’s hands. If he’s got doors open for me, that I believe are in our state’s best interest, the nation’s best interest, I’m going to go through those doors.” While she was on the GOP ticket, Palin put aside questions about Stevens’ Senate seat.

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Palin Leaves Door Open For Senate Run

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE… Oh! More Things I Know: The Supreme Court needs to intervene in the 2008 post-election process. As in, Chief Justice John Roberts needs to march into the Oval Office this afternoon with Barack Obama and a Bible in tow, and say to George Bush: “Out!” A good way for Sarah Palin to learn the countries in NAFTA would be flash cards. The thing I’ll miss most about the campaign season is watching Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham standing behind John McCain, nervously waiting to swoop in and correct him when he screws up. I’ve never seen senators hold their breath so long. Prediction: To revive his political career, Jeb Bush will change his last name to McGillicutty. Democrats need a majority of 60 seats in the Senate to pass their progressive agenda, but Republicans didn’t need 60 seats in the Senate to pass their conservative agenda. Darth Vader says we don’t know the power of the dark side. After the last eight years I think we kinda do. I’m not really interested in John McCain’s medical records anymore. Whatever kind of dog Sasha and Malia get, they shouldn’t feed it too much or it’ll get fat and die of some kind of thrombosis. Ralph Nader hasn’t returned the fifty dollars worth of Aquaman boxers his handlers bought for him during the campaign. If the youth vote is so important, how come they weren’t represented on any panels during the election coverage? Because the adults didn’t want to be upstaged, that’s why. I say we turn the country back over to the Native Americans. They never trashed the place. In fact, they kinda respected it. A good way for Sarah Palin to learn about Africa would be listening to President Bush, who once said: “We spent a lot of time talkin’ about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.” Learnin’s fun! One of the first things Barack Obama should do is appoint a task force to find out where Dick Cheney hid the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, this may involve a vice-presidential full body cavity search. The audacity of Cheers and Jeers starts in There’s Moreville… [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

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Cheers and Jeers: Thursday

UPDATED on November 13 at 1:29 AM EST: The gap has now widened to 814 votes between Mark Begich and Ted Stevens in the Alaska Senate race: Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, the titan of Alaska politics convicted of felony charges last month, fell behind by more than 800 votes Wednesday as the count resumed in his re-election bid. Democrat Mark Begich, the two-term mayor of Anchorage, began the day down more than 3,200 votes but went up by 814 as officials resumed their counting of early and absentee ballots. The tally was 132,196 to 131,382. Neither side was claiming victory or conceding defeat, with tens of thousands of outstanding ballots. “I’ve always said that this would be a close race,” Begich said in a statement. “I’m confident that Alaskans, like the rest of the country, want a new direction in Washington, and ultimately that will be reflected in the results.” Stevens’ campaign did not immediately return a call seeking comment. And those neck-and-neck Senate races get even closer. The three Senate races that will determine whether the Democrats gain that coveted 60-seat majority are still deadlocked - by the slimmest of margins from 3 votes in Alaska to 200 votes in Minnesota and a tense runoff in Georgia. In Alaska, per the Associated Press : Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, a titan of Alaska politics convicted of felony charges last month, fell behind by three votes Wednesday as the count resumed in his re-election bid. Democrat Mark Begich, the two-term mayor of Anchorage, began Wednesday down more than 3,200 votes but closed the gap as officials resumed counting early and absentee ballots. The tally was 125,019 to 125,016. Neither side expected to be able to claim victory Wednesday. By late afternoon, officials had counted more than 44,000 of the roughly 90,000 outstanding ballots. In Minnesota, where the recount will stretch into mid-December , per the Associated Press : After the two candidates spent nearly $40 million combined - most of it on ads tarring the other - Coleman leads by about 200 votes out of almost 3 million cast. An automatic recount is to start next week. “This is an extraordinarily close and bitterly fought election, and both candidates have reason to think that they may have won,” said Kathryn Pearson, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “They’re not going to let the final stage of this go down without a fight as well.” In Georgia, per the Wall Street Journal : In Georgia, Mr. Martin, a former state legislator, stunned political observers by forcing the runoff with Sen. Chambliss, whose seat not long ago was considered safe. The incumbent had a $12 million war chest that dwarfed the $3 million raised by Mr. Martin. The combination of anti-Republican sentiment and Sen. Chambliss’s lethargic early campaigning and support for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout changed the dynamics of the race. Final results haven’t been certified, but the latest tally released by election officials showed Sen. Chambliss with 49.8% of the vote to Mr. Martin’s 46.8%. Libertarian candidate Allen Buckley received 3.4% and won’t be in the runoff, which is scheduled for Dec. 2. He hasn’t endorsed either of the other candidates. Sen. John McCain is scheduled to join Sen. Chambliss at a rally Thursday in Atlanta, and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is scheduled to campaign for Sen. Chambliss on Sunday. A Chambliss spokeswoman said the campaign hopes to get several other big-name Republicans to visit the state, such as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

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Neck And Neck: Senate Races Deadlocked

Sometimes, watching FOX is just so much fun: Dick supports his claim with these assertions: McCain overperformed among white women. Dick fails to note that while Bush won 55% of white women, McCain won 53% . He also fails to note that while the Bush to McCain drop-off among white men was 1.4 million, it was 1.5 million among white women. Dick also incorrectly states that the drop off in net margin from Bush to McCain among white men was 11 points. It’s actually 9 points. McCain’s alleged overperformance among white women is attributable to Palin. Even if Dick’s first claim were true, he doesn’t explain why Palin should get the credit. Without Palin, McCain loses by 9 instead of 6. McCain is losing by 7 points , not 6. I have no idea where Morris gets 9 from, but if white women had voted just like white men, McCain would have lost by less, not more. Without Palin, GOP loses an additional 5 senate seats. Words fail to debunk this one. He’s in la la land. Here’s some other random strange claims: There was no increase in youth turnout. While Dick has a point here (youth turnout increased from 17% to 18%, a smallish change), he misses the most important point, which is that two-thirds of young voters cast their ballots for Obama, a huge increase over 2004. MoveOn.org has been at work for 15 years. Um, make that ten .

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Dick Morris: Palin Saved GOP From Disaster

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, a titan of Alaska politics convicted of felony charges last month, fell behind by three votes Wednesday as the count resumed in his re-election bid. Democrat Mark Begich, the two-term mayor of Anchorage, began Wednesday down more than 3,200 votes but closed the gap as officials resumed counting early and absentee ballots. The tally was 125,019 to 125,016. Neither side expected to be able to claim victory Wednesday. By late afternoon, officials had counted more than 44,000 of the roughly 90,000 outstanding ballots. “Right now we’re cautiously optimistic,” said Bethany Lesser, spokeswoman for the state Democratic Party. “There’s obviously more votes to come in, but it goes to show how hard we worked to get the vote out early and how important that was.” Stevens’ campaign did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Last month, a federal jury in Washington convicted Stevens of lying on Senate disclosure forms to conceal more than $250,000 in gifts and home renovations from an oil field services company. That might have spelled quick political doom for a lesser figure, but the 84-year-old Stevens is revered here for his decades of public service _ and especially for scoring the state enormous sums of federal money. Begich would be the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Alaska since the mid-1970s and a win would put his party one step closer to a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate. Democrats are also trying to unseat Republicans in unresolved contests in Georgia and Minnesota. Fellow senators have called on Stevens to resign, and he could face expulsion if he doesn’t _ in which case a special election would be held to determine his replacement. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, fresh from her failed run at the vice presidency, said Wednesday she’d be interested in serving in the Senate. Should the result remain close a recount is possible. In Alaska, the losing candidate or a collection of 10 voters has three days to petition for a recount unless the vote was a tie, in which case it would be automatic. If the difference between the candidates is 0.5 percent of the total votes cast, the state pays for the recount, to be started within three days of the recount petition. The state Elections Division has 10 days to complete the recount. ___ Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor in Washington contributed to this report.

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Stevens Trailing By 3 Votes In Alaska Senate Race

WASHINGTON — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday she would consider serving in the Senate if God gave her the opportunity and Alaskans wanted her to take the job. The state’s senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens, held a dwindling lead as the count resumed in his re-election bid. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, led by just over 3,000 votes when the Election Day count ended last week. His lead narrowed to less than 1,000 votes Wednesday as Alaska election officials counted the first 28,000 of an estimated 90,000 absentee and provisional ballots. Even if he is re-elected, Stevens could be ousted by the Senate for his conviction on seven felony counts of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts, mostly renovations on his home. If Stevens loses his seat, Palin could run for it in a special election. She also could challenge incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010. Palin, who was the GOP vice presidential nominee, has two years left on her term as governor. She told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that she wants to serve her constituents the best she can. “At this point it is as governor,” she said. “Now if something shifted dramatically and if it were, if it were acknowledged up there that I could be put to better use for my state in the U.S. Senate, I would certainly consider that but that would take a special election and everything else,” she said. “I am not one to appoint myself or a member of my family to take the place of any vacancy.” Pressed in a separate interview with CNN’s Larry King about whether she would serve out her term as governor, Palin said, “I will do what the people of Alaska want me to do.” She added, however, “if they call an audible on me, and if they say they want me in another position, I’m going to do it. … My life is in God’s hands. If he’s got doors open for me, that I believe are in our state’s best interest, the nation’s best interest, I’m going to go through those doors.” While she was on the GOP ticket, Palin put aside questions about Stevens’ Senate seat.

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Palin Back In The Lower 48, Leaves Door Open for Possible Senate Run

Sarah Palin is not ruling out a White House run in 2012, but history is working against her : But a look back at recent history shows that the track record of vice presidential running mates on the losing ticket who ran for their party’s presidential nomination in the next election cycle is not a promising one. Four years ago, John Edwards was in much the same situation Palin finds herself in right now. Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate on the losing ticket in 2004, and officially launched his presidential bid in this campaign in December of 2006 — only to come in second in the Iowa caucuses this January, followed by a third place finish the following week in the New Hampshire primary. The former North Carolina senator withdrew from the race for the White House on January 30. Go back another four years and it’s a similar story. Sen. Joe Lieberman was Al Gore’s running mate on the losing ticket in 2000. Lieberman launched his own bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, but dropped out on February 3 of that year after losing six straight primaries. Another factor working against Palin is her favorability ratings have deteriorated . Under half the American public views her favorably, and close to that many view her unfavorably.

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History Working Against A Palin 2012 White House Run

In his “Political Memo” today in The New York Times titled “Dean Seeks a Share of Credit in Obama Victory,” political guru Adam Nagourney draws some bizarre conclusions and makes some strange inferences about alleged internal conflicts and petty beefs inside the Democratic Party. It’s interesting that at a time when the Republican Party is facing its most bitter and vindictive internal battles, so bad that Newt Gingrich and David Brooks liken it to a “circular firing squad,” Nagourney chooses to ignore that story and jumps head first into “analyzing” non-existent antagonisms within the party that just won a sweeping mandate from the American people not more than two weeks ago. As far as Howard Dean’s role is concerned in pushing the 50-state strategy as Democratic National Committee chair, Nagourney writes: “A year in which Democrats were running against a party freighted by the most unpopular president in history - and amid an economic collapse - is probably not the best laboratory for measuring the success of his experiment.” Sniff, sniff. Nagourney even dredges up the old beef between the Obama and Clinton campaigns in the Democratic primaries over the delegations in Michigan and Florida as “evidence” of still simmering internal divisions inside the Democratic Party and between the Obama campaign and the DNC. That’s a pretty weird “analysis” of the current state of the Democratic Party. But what do you expect from a reporter who was writing front-page love letters to John McCain and his campaign in the early days of the race? The only quotation Nagourney uses from a political strategist in his article is from Katon Dawson, the South Carolina Republican chairman, as if the views of South Carolina Republicans are really important when assessing conflicts within the Democratic Party. He does not bother to get a quote from either a member of the Obama campaign or from Howard Dean or anyone at the DNC to corroborate his theory. And you know why? Because people from both Democratic camps, still savoring their historic victory of November 4th, would have informed Nagourney that he is barking up the wrong tree and seeing “conflicts” where in fact none exist. Nagourney seems to be consciously trying to drive wedges between factions of Democrats ignoring the fact that the party is more united today than it has been in many, many years. Nagourney closes his piece with a final volley implying that Dean, who is poised to join President-Elect Obama’s cabinet, is somehow in conflict with the Obama White House staff: “[T]he man with whom Mr. Dean fought bitterly over his 50-state strategy was Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and whom Mr. Obama named last week as his chief of staff.” Nagourney closes with this line to imply future problems - no doubt to be fanned by future Nagourney “analyses” - between the Obama White House and the DNC. That’s bizarre because Obama himself will be appointing Dean’s successor at the DNC. I guess Nagourney believes that Obama is going to appoint someone to head the party who is at odds with his own administration’s agenda? Nagourney here is creating straw men to give the impression of disunity in Democratic ranks. But why does he choose to do that? The President-Elect hasn’t even been sworn in and Nagourney apparently wants to give Times readers the impression that it is Democrats, not Republicans, who are in a “circular firing squad.” Nagourney’s time would be better spent if he focused that laser-like brain of his on the very real and profound identity crisis and recriminations going on within the Republican Party’s ranks right now. Or maybe he thinks the GOP will do better in 2012 under Sarah Palin’s leadership and after the fluke of the election of 2008 (which he believes is not a good indicator of Democratic success) fades from memory? I think Nagourney, who likes to play amateur historian at times, should look into the interesting historical parallel I’ve noticed between the Savings and Loan scandal that broke out in the last two years of Ronald Reagan’s second term (and after the Republicans lost the Senate in 1986), and the current financial meltdown that began in the last two years of George W. Bush’s second term (and after losing both the House and the Senate in 2006). It looks like a pattern wherein the cronies and profiteers associated with the last two-term Republican administrations “get in while the gettin’s good” and rip off federally insured deposits in the waning days of GOP rule. The Reagan era S&L scandal cost taxpayers at least $125 billion and that was after years of the Reconstruction Trust Corporation selling off assets and spending countless time and money that could have gone into other more beneficial pursuits. The current crisis is costing taxpayers $1.3 trillion and counting - but of course it would be expected that George W. Bush’s people would go big and outdo Reagan’s people. The point is, Nagourney should focus on what brought the nation to this terrible state of affairs in the first place and on the circular firing squad now devouring the Republican Party instead of exaggerating non-existent squabbles in his own head that he claims plague the Democratic Party. Next we’ll probably be hearing Nagourney on the Charlie Rose show telling us about how much Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama hate each other. The fact is the tables have turned in the United States; the electoral map has changed; former Bush states that have turned blue will not be easily turned back to red; and mainstream journalists like Nagourney should figure it out: the Democrats are united under the leadership of Barack Obama; the Republicans are disunited under the pseudo-leadership of Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty and any other backbencher who surfaces. Now that’s a story worth writing about! Get Real Adam!

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Joseph A. Palermo: The Times’ Adam Nagourney Sows Seeds of Conflict Inside Democratic Ranks Where None Exist

Comedy’s Obama Problem It’s been more than a week now since our historic presidential election, and comedians are suffering a serious case of Republican withdrawal. No wonder, given the feeding frenzy in the run-up to the election, when the Republicans served up Sarah Palin to previously flagging lampooners at Saturday Night Live and beyond. Not to mention Dick Cheney’s coughing fit endorsement of McCain, Palin’s wardrobe issues , McCain’s facial expressions , and Palin being punked by a fake French president. The GOP list goes on and on. The Democrats, not so much. Early attempts at humor bombed (the Obama New Yorker cover ) or simply fell flat ( Joel Stein in the LA Times). Chris Rock’s Kill the Messenger routine featured a brief poke at Obama, but it was soft and the least funny part of the show (and Rock endorsed Obama ). Jon Stewart tried to make hay out of Obama’s regal bearing, accusing him of posing for coin-dom. Joe Biden offered a richer vein (the bloviations , the hair plugs ), but no one really cared. So comedians shifted to a two-fold strategy: first, imaginary scenarios; second, deflection. Imaginary scenario In late October Bill Maher made a direct appeal to Obama to “be more black.” He pleaded with him to turn the White House into a Wilt Chamberlain-style love nest, and begged him to gain weight like Rerun Stubbs (the fat and happy sitcom character). Maher lamented the loss of funny-ness, said it is essential for people to be able to laugh at their leaders and explained our inability to laugh at Barack by saying that white liberals are scared to laugh at black people (the camera then pointedly cut away to Tim Robbins guffawing at Maher’s jokes). The following day, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opined that “Americans have rediscovered the virtue of seriousness,” an observation that must have turned the stomachs of political comedians everywhere. After the election, Maher told Larry King he was still looking for the funny in Obama: “He’s not stupid. He’s not angry. He’s not a phony. He’s not fat. He’s not cheating on his wife. Who needs a jerk like that around for the next four years? Come on.” Deflection A few days later, Stephen Colbert referred to McCain as possessing the “temperament of a rabid badger in first class,” which is just the sort of barb we wanted about all the presidential candidates. But the night Obama appeared on the Daily Show (a ratings high), there was Jon Stewart with a cartoon cornucopia of psychedelic flowers spewing from his mouth. In that moment the focus shifted from Obama, the candidate to be scrutinized and skewered, to Stewart, the acolyte poking fun at his own fawning enthusiasm for the candidate. The lead-up to the interview was more of the same, poking fun at Stewart (not Obama) for his desperate need for an exclusive, only to be thwarted by another interviewer at another show. The interview itself was genial and inconsequential, an opportunity for Obama to dismiss charges of socialism by saying “in kindergarten I shared my toys,” which got the biggest laugh of the night. The deflection strategy is also being employed to make Obama jokes at the expense of other pols . Here’s a post-election sampling. Conan O’Brien : “Thousands of pregnant mothers in this country are planning to name their baby Barack. That’s true. Yeah, after hearing this, Sarah Palin told Bristol, ‘Don’t even think about it.” Jay Leno : “As you know, President-elect Obama promised his daughters a puppy if they move to the White House. And he’s already getting advice on what the best breed of dog to get. For example, today, President Clinton told him the Oval Office is a great place for a husky female.” David Letterman : “Today, the big transition process begins, because earlier today, Barack Obama met with President Bush at the White House. So you had the president-elect and the president-inept, so they were there together.” After the election, The Daily Show featured a cute and cuddly (but not particularly funny) segment on the future White House dog. Jon Stewart announced that he was going to try out his Obama impersonation, and then went and impersonated George Bush. A few lame Obama jokes later he said, by way of explanation, “Boom shaka-laka — How are we gonna make this shit funny?” Nearly a week later, on Tuesday, November 11, he was still looking for an answer, poking gentle fun at Obama’s transition posse but only hitting his stride by suggesting that our lame-duck President Bush would be more than happy to have his successor take over now. During the primaries, comedians expressed their worries over an Obama comedy famine in the International Herald Tribune , with Jimmy Kimmel suggesting that jokes could focus on Obama’s ears. New York magazine is now wondering whether the Daily Show can survive the coming administration. And the Associated Press mourns that “soon there’ll be no President Bush to kick around.” Until comedians find their Obama funny bone, we’re all losers. As Maher says “People need to laugh at their president. It’s right in the constitution.”

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Sara Catania: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House– Not

Before it was clear that Barack Obama would be elected, John Podesta, the current co-chair of the White House transition team, laid out an agenda for the next president that was aggressive, assertive but politically practical. In excerpts of a book being released in January, “Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint For The 44th President,” Podesta describes the need for a chief executive that scores quick and decisive victories while exhibiting respect for Congress and some independence from the early demands of political interest groups. Writing in sometimes ominous terms about a future Democratic government, he emphasizes that the next president-elect must move aggressively on his agenda “regardless of the environment,” or face a revolt from voters. “[I]f the president and his administration do not take the time upfront to develop a clear and coherent blueprint for action — and find ways to move this agenda regardless of the environment — then they will quickly find the windows of opportunity shutting before their eyes and will face increased public frustration and disappointment,” he writes in the book’s introduction. In another portion of the book, Podesta and co-author Sarah Rosen Wartell detail how Obama can — and should — hit the ground running. “Sustaining political capital and momentum for the agenda requires early victories on key issues on which the president campaigned. To achieve early victories, the president needs to take advantage of the power of the executive branch to make change happen on its own. Executive orders, regulatory waivers, reallocation of appropriated program resources, and changes to program policies are routes available in many circumstances to show that change can happen quickly,” write Podesta and Wartell. Such a strategy, the authors note, requires resisting the demands of interest groups for various new legislative packages. Passing such policy through Congress can be a politically taxing task, and would keep the Democratic White House focused on the Republicans’ policy priorities. “With a change of party, some administrations have spent great energy in reversing the regulations and agency policies of the prior administrations. Some reversals will be important to show the change in direction the president wants to achieve, but the demands from interest groups to focus on policy restoration should be resisted. The reason: It lets the president’s predecessor and his political party continue to pick the issue around which the debate is held. Administrations are notoriously slow to get their own regulatory agenda into gear. Doing so is one of the best ways to shape the debate quickly, while legislative agendas are developed.” The passages provide some of the clearest indications yet as to how Podesta envisions a future Obama presidency. And as co-chair of his transition effort, he is uniquely situated to determine the layout of the future administration. The former Clinton chief of staff noted early this week that Obama will likely use executive orders to reverse some of the actions taken by the Bush administration. Moreover, the choice of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff seemingly aligns to the characteristics that Podesta and Wartell say are essential for the job. “[I]n any model it is the president’s best interest for his chief of staff to be a powerful decision maker on both process and substance on issues of significance, within parameters established by, and in service of the goals and strategies of, the president,” they write. “The new president should put special emphasis on having a staff with strong Capitol Hill relationships…. Disrespect of Congress’ prerogatives can give rise to enormous obstacles to the president’s goals, even if public support is mobilized.” In the nine-page chapter, titled “Managing the White House for a Successful Presidency,” Podesta and Wartell outline other administrative priorities and diagram the attributes that the next president (in this case, Obama) should take in staffing his administration. • The chief of staff should hire two deputies: one for policy purposes the other for White House management. • The president “should have some advisors who were with him on the stump.” • The next White House should “have some individuals with experience gained from working in government agencies, to balance the instinctive desire of White House staff to develop all policy internally.” • The National Security Adviser will serve in one of the most influential - but potentially problematic - posts. The chief of staff must recognize that he or she “has some unique statutory and operational responsibilities that differentiate the role from that of other policy advisors.” In other words: the NSA must be kept in the loop without consuming too much of the president’s agenda • The vice president “should be fully integrated into executive branch decision making,” and serve as a “principal on all policy councils.” Podesta wrote this chapter as part of a much larger project spearheaded by he and Mark Green, the longtime New York Democrat who helped advise Bill Clinton’s 1992 transition. “Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint For The 44th President,” was released, in part, on Monday. Over 600 pages and more than 50 sections long, it advises the next president on every major topic facing his administration. Podesta later recused himself from the project when he was tasked by the Obama campaign to help lead his post-election transition efforts.

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Podesta Sketches Out Vision For Assertive Presidency

During last night’s interview on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, John McCain said that: …Sarah Palin did not damage his presidential bid, and he dismissed as typical campaign sniping anonymous criticism aimed at her following their crushing defeat. Come on, John, the election is over (you lost), so maybe it’s time to reenter the land of reality : All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee. Granted, McCain’s own erratic shifts from day to day and his blatant pandering to the furtherest extremes of the rightwingnutosphere didn’t help, but to continue to deny that Palin was a major drag is nearly as delusional as the notion that John McCain is a straight talker. And “typical” campaign sniping? Does anyone else recall post-election criticism that included saying that the candidate for the vice presidency didn’t know that Africa was a continent? It’s not that there was any expectation that in the aftermath of his electoral rout, John McCain would suddenly start telling the truth, but does he really need to continue peddling this blatant crapola? The next thing you know, he’ll be claiming that Palin sold a plane of eBay.

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John McCain: Still Wrong

Sen. John McCain is scheduled to visit Georgia on Thursday to campaign for GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, and Sarah Palin may not be far behind. Mitt Romney on Tuesday gave $5,000 to Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman as he monitors a statewide recount. And the counting of absentee and mail-in ballots resumes today in Alaska. The campaign isn’t over yet in three Senate races, and the stakes are high: If Democrats win them all, they could secure a majority large enough to steamroll over Republican objections to their agenda.

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McCain To Hit Campaign Trail For Senate Races

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE… Poll Dancing Every now and agin’ we publish results of past C&J polls so we can rub our superior methodology in Gallup’s face. The number of votes is in parentheses: 51 percent voted before election day, 48 percent voted on election day. (21,292) - 43 percent think the Obamas should get a mutt, while 20 percent say they should get a retriever. (25,778) - Will Sarah Palin become a prominent leader in the Republican party? 34 percent say definitely or probably. 62 percent don’t think so. (28,793) - In terms of robocalls, 28 percent received a few or a lot, and 64 percent received none. (16,385) - Out of GA, ND, IN, VA, MO, NV, WV and NC, 32 percent wanted Obama to win Georgia purely for bragging rights. North Carolina and Virginia tied for second with 14 percent each.  Hey, two outta three ain’t bad. (31,247) - In the battle of nighttime TV hosts, 57 percent would prefer to watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert back to back, versus 37 percent who’d rather watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. (14,783) - As the Large Hadron Collider went online in Switzerland, 41 percent said it would lead to a greater understanding of how our universe was formed. 14 percent thought it would lead to an entire population of super-magnetic Swiss people. (7,577) - And of the 10 percent who have eaten a mooseburger, 90 percent thought it t’wer pretty tasty, thank ya. (13,117) As always, we bow to your collective wisdom. Cheers and Jeers starts in There’s Moreville… [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

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Cheers and Jeers: Wednesday

More pundits…   Stan Greenberg : I’ve been following Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, MI, for just about ever, and well… Before the Democratic convention, barely 40 percent of Macomb County voters were “comfortable” with the idea of Mr. Obama as president, far below the number who were comfortable with a nameless Democrat. But on Election Day, nearly 60 percent said they were “comfortable” with Mr. Obama. About the same number said Mr. Obama “shares your values” and “has what it takes to be president.” And the next county over is even more interesting. Harold Meyerson : Thank you Fox, for getting Obama elected by being so out of touch. In that sense, your work remains dangerous and disintegrative to the nation. But it is also, more narrowly, tactically, for now, a great gift to liberals and Democrats. You ensure the ongoing Palinization and marginalization — electorally, the terms are synonymous — of the Republican Party. Kathleen Parker : Columns will survive or not as the market dictates, but the blistering response to a dozen or so fellow turncoats reveals something deeply wrong with the conservative movement, such as it is. Or was. P.J. O’Rourke : We blew it. We conservatives unilaterally screwed up. Had we been competent… Aaron Glantz : It’s the war. Jonathan Cohn : It’s health care. Jack Shafer : Drudge roolz! So he’s wrong an awful lot. So what? Maureen Dowd :   The Alaska governor, who now thinks she is even bigger than her vast state, has certainly not missed an opportunity to throw open the door to the national press this week, letting them hang in her Wasilla kitchen as she makes moose chili and cake and baby formula and hefty servings of spin. Yael T. Abouhalkah : “Dear God, please tell Sarah Palin to run for president” Jack Cafferty : Who cares about Sarah Palin? Some of the best of the comments: Elizabeth writes: National “rubbernecking.” It is like driving by an accident. You don’t want to look, but somehow you just can’t help it. Diane from Barneveld, New York writes: She’s Bush in skirts. Andrew writes: There are two reasons: 1) She’s attractive. For better or for worse, people listen when pretty girls talk, no matter what nonsense may come out of their mouths. 2) Incompetence, by itself, is not entertaining. However, when the incompetent are supremely self-confident, full of certitude, and absent of insight, it’s absolutely compelling. Tom from Fort Lauderdale, Florida writes: Jack, they should leave this woman alone. Nobody cares how many countries there are in Ohio

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Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Sarah Palin is fond of saying the media get their facts wrong. She often accuses the media of being biased against her. “Why didn’t they just check with me first?” is a familiar refrain. Well, now we have the answer - because if they check with you, you’re going to give them answers that don’t match the facts. The video below is a small example, but it is indicative of how little preparation she goes through and how little regard she has for checking the facts. As you can see in the video, she throws around a “fact” in her last interview that isn’t even close to true: I’m a little amazed by this. Why would you state something like this as proof that the media has all their information wrong without making absolutely sure you were right about it? She undermines her own point better than anyone in the media ever could. Game, set and match. Sarah Palin defeats Sarah Palin. The topic in this case isn’t important but what it says about Palin’s regard for facts and preparation is. Anyone with any sense would check before the interview if the Harry Potter books really came out after she was no longer mayor of Wasilla. What’s funny and sad is how she thinks she outsmarted the media with this clever example. Mainly sad. She loses all credibility to challenge the media on their reporting when she makes such obvious and needless mistakes. Again and again. Watch The Young Turks Here

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Cenk Uygur: Another Silly Mistake by Sarah Palin

Before we get started with the handicapping and gloating, let’s make one thing clear. Although the battle for RNC chair may appear to be akin to a shit-flinging fight amongst aging, arthritic captive chimps for alpha male status in the Cincinnati Zoo’s Marge Schott Memorial Primate Enclosure, it will have a real and concrete impact on the future of our diminished opposition. This is, believe it or not, a contest that matters. Imagine if, in early 2005, the DNC chair had fallen to Martin Frost — or a similar crumbling pillar of the decayed Democratic establishment — rather than Howard Dean. As Markos points out , Dean’s triumph in revitalizing the party is virtually undisputed at this point, with even former DNC chair rival Harold Ickes conceding that Dean’s commitment to the 50-state strategy opened up the door to today’s national Democratic majority. Well, the Republican Party of 2008 is structurally in worse shape than the party that Dean inherited almost four years ago — and the next RNC chair is going to have a lot to say about whether it begins rebuilding for the 21st Century, or continues to implode in an orgy of hate. And with Bush already clearing brush (at least in his mind), Cheney on his way back to big oil, and nothing resembling a clear leader of the national party on the horizon (Palin? Boehner? McConnell? HA!), the new RNC chair won’t just be pushing a new agenda for the party — he (or she, but probably he) will be the public figure who speaks for the party more than any other person. So while there’s a temptation to ignore this contest as being roughly as relevant as the race for Student Council president at Ouachita Bible College, we gotta ignore the temptation.  This is really critical to the future of American politics. That said, it’s also hilarious.  We’ve already got Newt Gingrich reviving his “draft me! draft me!” half-assed Ross Perot-inspired campaign style (which attracted about zero support when he tried it during the primaries last summer), people mentioning former one-term Maryland Lieutenant Governor and failed Senate candidate Michael Steele largely on the strength of his being black and Republican (one would have to assume, since one-term ex-LGs of mid-sized states usually don’t get mentioned for anything sexier than state university trustee), and Mike Huckabee — whom a lot of folks, including me, thought might make a Deanesque run for the chair — instead pushing his campaign manager (it’d be like Dean deciding to stay in Vermont in 2005, but backing Joe Trippi for the hard job). Oh yeah, and Mike Duncan — the current chair — wants to keep his job , although I’m thinking that “stay the course” isn’t going to really play this time around. Chris Cillizza has a good rundown of the candidates listed above, as well as a couple of other names being bandied about. Basically, we’ve got Newt the “idea man,” Steele the symbol, the incumbent, the Huckabee Proxy, and a handful of Southern state chairs. In short, this ain’t the most inspiring applicant pool. Well, it may be a bit early to write a really informed cattle call for a race that won’t be decided until January, but there’s no harm in trying. 1.  Steele. The Republican Party isn’t all that sure what it stands for right now.  You’ve got Cato and friends crowing that the elections showed that American is crying out for a real libertarian movement.  At the same time, you’ve got the fundies arguing that Prop 8’s success demonstrates that the future of the party will be built on “a belief in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage.” Who can square this circle ? Isn’t it simplest just to put a cipher who appears to represent something new in charge of the party, and let the infighting continue behind the scenes? I’m guessing that’s what they’ll be thinking come January.  Plus, Steele is chair of GOPAC, so he’s got a nice piece of turf from which to launch his campaign. And he really does want the job . 2. Chip Saltsman. Saltsman, a/k/a the Huckabee Proxy, is actually a former chair of the Tennessee GOP, and clearly has enjoyed success running underdog campaigns. He benefits from lacking the stink of failure that clings to many of his rivals, and he’s associated with a philosophy — Huckabee’s happy Christian populism — that actually might work well electorally. And he seems like a charming guy . Unfortunately for Saltsman (but luckily for us), the race is going to be decided by the same Republican worthies who devised the current, incompetent party apparatus. They might not be the best judges of how to right the ship. 3. Newt. If you don’t run, you can’t win — and Newt’s not running yet. At least not publicly.  If he wants to win, he needs to actually admit that he wants the job. And even if he gets it, his time is passed — his gimmick has been exposed.  As Matt Yglesias said , “what Gingrich offers doesn’t really qualify as ideas. Instead, call them “ideas.” Instead of thinking about ways to solve problems in people’s lives, Gingrich is good at offering ways to package predetermined special-interest priorities as solutions to things that arise.” I couldn’t agree more.  And that’s why Newt would be great for the Democrats. Newt’s schtick worked well when the Democrats were ideologically spent — his “ideas” beat no-ideas.  But today, he faces an intellectually vibrant Democratic Party.  And real ideas trump “ideas.” Newt’s game is a dated as his idol, Alvin Toffler. We’ll revisit these guys periodically — for now, though, your thoughts?

Read the rest here:
RNC Chair Cattle Call! 11/11 Edition: Newt Plays Coy

Before we get started with the handicapping and gloating, let’s make one thing clear. Although the battle for RNC chair may appear to be akin to a shit-flinging fight amongst aging, arthritic captive chimps for alpha male status in the Cincinnati Zoo’s Marge Schott Memorial Primate Enclosure, it will have a real and concrete impact on the future of our diminished opposition. This is, believe it or not, a contest that matters. Imagine if, in early 2005, the DNC chair had fallen to Martin Frost — or a similar crumbling pillar of the decayed Democratic establishment — rather than Howard Dean. As Markos points out , Dean’s triumph in revitalizing the party is virtually undisputed at this point, with even former DNC chair rival Harold Ickes conceding that Dean’s commitment to the 50-state strategy opened up the door to today’s national Democratic majority. Well, the Republican Party of 2008 is structurally in worse shape than the party that Dean inherited almost four years ago — and the next RNC chair is going to have a lot to say about whether it begins rebuilding for the 21st Century, or continues to implode in an orgy of hate. And with Bush already clearing brush (at least in his mind), Cheney on his way back to big oil, and nothing resembling a clear leader of the national party on the horizon (Palin? Boehner? McConnell? HA!), the new RNC chair won’t just be pushing a new agenda for the party — he (or she, but probably he) will be the public figure who speaks for the party more than any other person. So while there’s a temptation to ignore this contest as being roughly as relevant as the race for Student Council president at Ouachita Bible College, we gotta ignore the temptation.  This is really critical to the future of American politics. That said, it’s also hilarious.  We’ve already got Newt Gingrich reviving his “draft me! draft me!” half-assed Ross Perot-inspired campaign style (which attracted about zero support when he tried it during the primaries last summer), people mentioning former one-term Maryland Lieutenant Governor and failed Senate candidate Michael Steele largely on the strength of his being black and Republican (one would have to assume, since one-term ex-LGs of mid-sized states usually don’t get mentioned for anything sexier than state university trustee), and Mike Huckabee — whom a lot of folks, including me, thought might make a Deanesque run for the chair — instead pushing his campaign manager (it’d be like Dean deciding to stay in Vermont in 2005, but backing Joe Trippi for the hard job). Oh yeah, and Mike Duncan — the current chair — wants to keep his job , although I’m thinking that “stay the course” isn’t going to really play this time around. Chris Cillizza has a good rundown of the candidates listed above, as well as a couple of other names being bandied about. Basically, we’ve got Newt the “idea man,” Steele the symbol, the incumbent, the Huckabee Proxy, and a handful of Southern state chairs. In short, this ain’t the most inspiring applicant pool. Well, it may be a bit early to write a really informed cattle call for a race that won’t be decided until January, but there’s no harm in trying. 1.  Steele. The Republican Party isn’t all that sure what it stands for right now.  You’ve got Cato and friends crowing that the elections showed that American is crying out for a real libertarian movement.  At the same time, you’ve got the fundies arguing that Prop 8’s success demonstrates that the future of the party will be built on “a belief in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage.” Who can square this circle ? Isn’t it simplest just to put a cipher who appears to represent something new in charge of the party, and let the infighting continue behind the scenes? I’m guessing that’s what they’ll be thinking come January.  Plus, Steele is chair of GOPAC, so he’s got a nice piece of turf from which to launch his campaign. And he really does want the job . 2. Chip Saltsman. Saltsman, a/k/a the Huckabee Proxy, is actually a former chair of the Tennessee GOP, and clearly has enjoyed success running underdog campaigns. He benefits from lacking the stink of failure that clings to many of his rivals, and he’s associated with a philosophy — Huckabee’s happy Christian populism — that actually might work well electorally. And he seems like a charming guy . Unfortunately for Saltsman (but luckily for us), the race is going to be decided by the same Republican worthies who devised the current, incompetent party apparatus. They might not be the best judges of how to right the ship. 3. Newt. If you don’t run, you can’t win — and Newt’s not running yet. At least not publicly.  If he wants to win, he needs to actually admit that he wants the job. And even if he gets it, his time is passed — his gimmick has been exposed.  As Matt Yglesias said , “what Gingrich offers doesn’t really qualify as ideas. Instead, call them “ideas.” Instead of thinking about ways to solve problems in people’s lives, Gingrich is good at offering ways to package predetermined special-interest priorities as solutions to things that arise.” I couldn’t agree more.  And that’s why Newt would be great for the Democrats. Newt’s schtick worked well when the Democrats were ideologically spent — his “ideas” beat no-ideas.  But today, he faces an intellectually vibrant Democratic Party.  And real ideas trump “ideas.” Newt’s game is a dated as his idol, Alvin Toffler. We’ll revisit these guys periodically — for now, though, your thoughts?

Read more: 
RNC Chair Cattle Call! 11/11 Edition: Newt Plays Coy

I’m glad the election is over so that I can stop feeling guilty about not writing more about it. Oh, I wrote a few things. Some serious , some not . In the same spirit as Newsweek ’s Special Secrets Project , here are some of the things I did, thought or wrote in the last year that never made it to being published… • Back in summer 2007, I wanted to be a good political blogger and watch ALL debates, including the Republican ones. But I could only get part-way through the Republicans’ because what they were saying was crap and, anymore, the sight of a row of exclusively white men wanting to be president just seemed ridiculous and sad. Later, I felt bad for the camera operators at the Republican convention, who tried so hard, in vain, to find non-white faces to cut away to for reaction shots. • Early on, I asked a coworker, an African American woman, what she thought about the fact that while Barack is technically “African American” — you know, his father was from Africa, his mother from America — he didn’t share the same heritage of slavery and brutal discrimination as black Americans whose ancestors had been here for centuries. Pointed though it may seem, the question really did arise out of my fascination with genealogy and questions of “what it means to be American.” But I knew I was stepping into choppy, uncharted conversation waters. After we stared at each other for a moment, my coworker wanted to know in return why I was being so picky. Why did I want to get into those kinds of details? she asked. It didn’t bother her, no. Any person of color faces discrimination, so the specifics of his background didn’t matter. • At a Drinking Liberally event in D.C., a woman told me and another blogger how her husband, who works in the intelligence community, said the Republicans had hard evidence — audio and/or video recordings — proving that Hillary Clinton had had a lesbian affair during her husband’s administration. And she said “they” were prepared to use the tapes if Hillary became the nominee. She said all of this with a straight face. • Among my many election-related Facebook status updates, many of which lost me Facebook friends and caused people to doubt my sanity, this got the biggest reaction: “Scott Shrake: Even if Hillary found a cure for AIDS tomorrow the media headlines would be ‘Hillary Clinton Selfishly Grabs Attention from Barack Obama by Claiming to ‘Cure’ Disease That Was Likely Started by Her Husband, President Clinton, Anyway’.” • Gay people divided mostly along generational lines in who they supported in the Dem primaries. Most of those old enough to have voted for Bill Clinton in ‘92 remember how — and we can argue about specifics and betrayals and whatnot - he was undeniably the first president to have an advisor on gay issues and to reach out to the gay community. And Hillary was right there with him. Plus, she’s a superdiva. Meanwhile, under-30 gays, mostly oblivious to what things were like in 1992 (before “Will and Grace,” Ellen, and so on) and also too young to have appreciated the go-go late ’90s and therefore feeling no loyalty to the Clintons, supported Obama. Plus, he was “cooler.” Like Mr. Wilson and Dennis the Menace, I think a lot of Hillary’s supporters felt besieged for months by what seemed like bratty, bullying Obama supporters. One thing’s certain: Her supporters definitely internalized the Clintons’ well-developed victim complex. • I confronted the co-founder of the notorious PUMA s at dinner on his birthday in early June, asking him to what extent his fierce opposition to Obama was racial . Frankly, I can’t remember his answer exactly, but it must’ve satisfied me, because the dinner went on without incident. • A close family friend of the Bidens was telling me some of his favorite stories about them and referred to the “Biden Code” as though I should know what that is. Since I didn’t, he explained that it’s a code of total honesty that the whole family lives by. • One of the first things I thought about Sarah Palin, besides that I’m related to her and she reminds me of a female George W. Bush , is that, subtracting Hillary from the equation of course, if there had been a Democratic Sarah Palin , identical in every way to the Republican Sarah Palin but with impeccable liberal bona fides, she would have been an even bigger superstar for the Left than Republican Sarah is/was for the Right. Dems would have overlooked her weak qualifications just as quickly and easily as the Right did (at first) for their Sarah. In a New York minute, if you will. • At a house party held by some young Democratic operatives in early September, I noticed a “Bros before Hoes” sticker on the refrigerator, depicting Obama and Hillary. As too many people did so many times during this double-historic campaign, I let the sickening misogyny go by without saying anything. • Random comments from my liveblogging of debates, which I never posted anywhere because it seemed like twaddle when I reread it (still does, but here are some excerpts anyway): Hillary never holds onto Chelsea onstage. She always ditches her really quickly. Maybe it’s her instinct of keeping Chelsea OUT of the limelight. … It’s almost like Bill thinks he has to make up for Monicagate by standing up for HRC forever. … Michelle! I told you not to wear another pattern. … Obama really looks like a silent-film star. I think he draws his eyebrows on. … I hate it when people on stage being applauded “applaud back.” … Hillary and Bill always do the fake point-at-someone-they-”know”-in-the-audience-and-wave thing. … Obama freaks are unable to obey simple no-applause rule. … You get the feeling Obama cribs notes from his smart advisors. You get the feeling HRC has this stuff in her own mind. … • At the final debate, at 9:24 EST, John McCain said: “When Senator Obama was first asked [about doing town hall meetings], he said, ‘Any place, any time,’ the way Barry Goldwater and Jack Kennedy agreed to do, before the intervention of the tragedy at Dallas.” Not a soul in the world said anything about this odd non sequitur insertion of the topic of assassination into the discussion. But when Hillary Clinton mentioned the Bobby Kennedy assassination as a kind of time marker when talking to an editorial board in the late spring, the media and the Obama campaign went positively berserk on her with vile accusations she was subliminally calling for Obama to be assassinated. To me this is yet another proof that the Obama campaign was much harder on Hillary than it ever was (or had to be?) on McCain. • Even when I supported Hillary, I always liked Barack Obama — especially his wry sense of humor, born of his being an outsider as a kid, I think, which I can relate to - and I was proud and happy to vote for him on November 4. But I never campaigned for him. My fear of strangers kept me from canvassing, and I don’t like wearing campaign paraphernalia, etc. I didn’t actively campaign for Hillary, either, though I gave her about $50. Most of all, I just don’t believe in trying to tell other people how to vote. It’s not my job. • On election night, I took a bus home through the party atmosphere of Northwest D.C. The bus driver was honking nonstop in celebration, the mood on the bus was the same as everywhere: Unbridled conviviality and that special shared feeling that we were all going to be alright after all. A middle-aged black woman got on the bus and, in response to something the bus driver said about Obama winning, she said wearily, with all the weight of the world behind it, “What took so long?” and shook her head with a wan smile.

See the original post:
Scott Shrake: Shrake’s Own Secrets of the 2008 Campaign!

I’m glad the election is over so that I can stop feeling guilty about not writing more about it. Oh, I wrote a few things. Some serious , some not . In the same spirit as Newsweek ’s Special Secrets Project , here are some of the things I did, thought or wrote in the last year that never made it to being published… • Back in summer 2007, I wanted to be a good political blogger and watch ALL debates, including the Republican ones. But I could only get part-way through the Republicans’ because what they were saying was crap and, anymore, the sight of a row of exclusively white men wanting to be president just seemed ridiculous and sad. Later, I felt bad for the camera operators at the Republican convention, who tried so hard, in vain, to find non-white faces to cut away to for reaction shots. • Early on, I asked a coworker, an African American woman, what she thought about the fact that while Barack is technically “African American” — you know, his father was from Africa, his mother from America — he didn’t share the same heritage of slavery and brutal discrimination as black Americans whose ancestors had been here for centuries. Pointed though it may seem, the question really did arise out of my fascination with genealogy and questions of “what it means to be American.” But I knew I was stepping into choppy, uncharted conversation waters. After we stared at each other for a moment, my coworker wanted to know in return why I was being so picky. Why did I want to get into those kinds of details? she asked. It didn’t bother her, no. Any person of color faces discrimination, so the specifics of his background didn’t matter. • At a Drinking Liberally event in D.C., a woman told me and another blogger how her husband, who works in the intelligence community, said the Republicans had hard evidence — audio and/or video recordings — proving that Hillary Clinton had had a lesbian affair during her husband’s administration. And she said “they” were prepared to use the tapes if Hillary became the nominee. She said all of this with a straight face. • Among my many election-related Facebook status updates, many of which lost me Facebook friends and caused people to doubt my sanity, this got the biggest reaction: “Scott Shrake: Even if Hillary found a cure for AIDS tomorrow the media headlines would be ‘Hillary Clinton Selfishly Grabs Attention from Barack Obama by Claiming to ‘Cure’ Disease That Was Likely Started by Her Husband, President Clinton, Anyway’.” • Gay people divided mostly along generational lines in who they supported in the Dem primaries. Most of those old enough to have voted for Bill Clinton in ‘92 remember how — and we can argue about specifics and betrayals and whatnot - he was undeniably the first president to have an advisor on gay issues and to reach out to the gay community. And Hillary was right there with him. Plus, she’s a superdiva. Meanwhile, under-30 gays, mostly oblivious to what things were like in 1992 (before “Will and Grace,” Ellen, and so on) and also too young to have appreciated the go-go late ’90s and therefore feeling no loyalty to the Clintons, supported Obama. Plus, he was “cooler.” Like Mr. Wilson and Dennis the Menace, I think a lot of Hillary’s supporters felt besieged for months by what seemed like bratty, bullying Obama supporters. One thing’s certain: Her supporters definitely internalized the Clintons’ well-developed victim complex. • I confronted the co-founder of the notorious PUMA s at dinner on his birthday in early June, asking him to what extent his fierce opposition to Obama was racial . Frankly, I can’t remember his answer exactly, but it must’ve satisfied me, because the dinner went on without incident. • A close family friend of the Bidens was telling me some of his favorite stories about them and referred to the “Biden Code” as though I should know what that is. Since I didn’t, he explained that it’s a code of total honesty that the whole family lives by. • One of the first things I thought about Sarah Palin, besides that I’m related to her and she reminds me of a female George W. Bush , is that, subtracting Hillary from the equation of course, if there had been a Democratic Sarah Palin , identical in every way to the Republican Sarah Palin but with impeccable liberal bona fides, she would have been an even bigger superstar for the Left than Republican Sarah is/was for the Right. Dems would have overlooked her weak qualifications just as quickly and easily as the Right did (at first) for their Sarah. In a New York minute, if you will. • At a house party held by some young Democratic operatives in early September, I noticed a “Bros before Hoes” sticker on the refrigerator, depicting Obama and Hillary. As too many people did so many times during this double-historic campaign, I let the sickening misogyny go by without saying anything. • Random comments from my liveblogging of debates, which I never posted anywhere because it seemed like twaddle when I reread it (still does, but here are some excerpts anyway): Hillary never holds onto Chelsea onstage. She always ditches her really quickly. Maybe it’s her instinct of keeping Chelsea OUT of the limelight. … It’s almost like Bill thinks he has to make up for Monicagate by standing up for HRC forever. … Michelle! I told you not to wear another pattern. … Obama really looks like a silent-film star. I think he draws his eyebrows on. … I hate it when people on stage being applauded “applaud back.” … Hillary and Bill always do the fake point-at-someone-they-”know”-in-the-audience-and-wave thing. … Obama freaks are unable to obey simple no-applause rule. … You get the feeling Obama cribs notes from his smart advisors. You get the feeling HRC has this stuff in her own mind. … • At the final debate, at 9:24 EST, John McCain said: “When Senator Obama was first asked [about doing town hall meetings], he said, ‘Any place, any time,’ the way Barry Goldwater and Jack Kennedy agreed to do, before the intervention of the tragedy at Dallas.” Not a soul in the world said anything about this odd non sequitur insertion of the topic of assassination into the discussion. But when Hillary Clinton mentioned the Bobby Kennedy assassination as a kind of time marker when talking to an editorial board in the late spring, the media and the Obama campaign went positively berserk on her with vile accusations she was subliminally calling for Obama to be assassinated. To me this is yet another proof that the Obama campaign was much harder on Hillary than it ever was (or had to be?) on McCain. • Even when I supported Hillary, I always liked Barack Obama — especially his wry sense of humor, born of his being an outsider as a kid, I think, which I can relate to - and I was proud and happy to vote for him on November 4. But I never campaigned for him. My fear of strangers kept me from canvassing, and I don’t like wearing campaign paraphernalia, etc. I didn’t actively campaign for Hillary, either, though I gave her about $50. Most of all, I just don’t believe in trying to tell other people how to vote. It’s not my job. • On election night, I took a bus home through the party atmosphere of Northwest D.C. The bus driver was honking nonstop in celebration, the mood on the bus was the same as everywhere: Unbridled conviviality and that special shared feeling that we were all going to be alright after all. A middle-aged black woman got on the bus and, in response to something the bus driver said about Obama winning, she said wearily, with all the weight of the world behind it, “What took so long?” and shook her head with a wan smile.

Go here to see the original:
Scott Shrake: Shrake’s Own Secrets of the 2008 Campaign!

I’m glad the election is over so that I can stop feeling guilty about not writing more about it. Oh, I wrote a few things. Some serious , some not . In the same spirit as Newsweek ’s Special Secrets Project , here are some of the things I did, thought or wrote in the last year that never made it to being published… • Back in summer 2007, I wanted to be a good political blogger and watch ALL debates, including the Republican ones. But I could only get part-way through the Republicans’ because what they were saying was crap and, anymore, the sight of a row of exclusively white men wanting to be president just seemed ridiculous and sad. Later, I felt bad for the camera operators at the Republican convention, who tried so hard, in vain, to find non-white faces to cut away to for reaction shots. • Early on, I asked a coworker, an African American woman, what she thought about the fact that while Barack is technically “African American” — you know, his father was from Africa, his mother from America — he didn’t share the same heritage of slavery and brutal discrimination as black Americans whose ancestors had been here for centuries. Pointed though it may seem, the question really did arise out of my fascination with genealogy and questions of “what it means to be American.” But I knew I was stepping into choppy, uncharted conversation waters. After we stared at each other for a moment, my coworker wanted to know in return why I was being so picky. Why did I want to get into those kinds of details? she asked. It didn’t bother her, no. Any person of color faces discrimination, so the specifics of his background didn’t matter. • At a Drinking Liberally event in D.C., a woman told me and another blogger how her husband, who works in the intelligence community, said the Republicans had hard evidence — audio and/or video recordings — proving that Hillary Clinton had had a lesbian affair during her husband’s administration. And she said “they” were prepared to use the tapes if Hillary became the nominee. She said all of this with a straight face. • Among my many election-related Facebook status updates, many of which lost me Facebook friends and caused people to doubt my sanity, this got the biggest reaction: “Scott Shrake: Even if Hillary found a cure for AIDS tomorrow the media headlines would be ‘Hillary Clinton Selfishly Grabs Attention from Barack Obama by Claiming to ‘Cure’ Disease That Was Likely Started by Her Husband, President Clinton, Anyway’.” • Gay people divided mostly along generational lines in who they supported in the Dem primaries. Most of those old enough to have voted for Bill Clinton in ‘92 remember how — and we can argue about specifics and betrayals and whatnot - he was undeniably the first president to have an advisor on gay issues and to reach out to the gay community. And Hillary was right there with him. Plus, she’s a superdiva. Meanwhile, under-30 gays, mostly oblivious to what things were like in 1992 (before “Will and Grace,” Ellen, and so on) and also too young to have appreciated the go-go late ’90s and therefore feeling no loyalty to the Clintons, supported Obama. Plus, he was “cooler.” Like Mr. Wilson and Dennis the Menace, I think a lot of Hillary’s supporters felt besieged for months by what seemed like bratty, bullying Obama supporters. One thing’s certain: Her supporters definitely internalized the Clintons’ well-developed victim complex. • I confronted the co-founder of the notorious PUMA s at dinner on his birthday in early June, asking him to what extent his fierce opposition to Obama was racial . Frankly, I can’t remember his answer exactly, but it must’ve satisfied me, because the dinner went on without incident. • A close family friend of the Bidens was telling me some of his favorite stories about them and referred to the “Biden Code” as though I should know what that is. Since I didn’t, he explained that it’s a code of total honesty that the whole family lives by. • One of the first things I thought about Sarah Palin, besides that I’m related to her and she reminds me of a female George W. Bush , is that, subtracting Hillary from the equation of course, if there had been a Democratic Sarah Palin , identical in every way to the Republican Sarah Palin but with impeccable liberal bona fides, she would have been an even bigger superstar for the Left than Republican Sarah is/was for the Right. Dems would have overlooked her weak qualifications just as quickly and easily as the Right did (at first) for their Sarah. In a New York minute, if you will. • At a house party held by some young Democratic operatives in early September, I noticed a “Bros before Hoes” sticker on the refrigerator, depicting Obama and Hillary. As too many people did so many times during this double-historic campaign, I let the sickening misogyny go by without saying anything. • Random comments from my liveblogging of debates, which I never posted anywhere because it seemed like twaddle when I reread it (still does, but here are some excerpts anyway): Hillary never holds onto Chelsea onstage. She always ditches her really quickly. Maybe it’s her instinct of keeping Chelsea OUT of the limelight. … It’s almost like Bill thinks he has to make up for Monicagate by standing up for HRC forever. … Michelle! I told you not to wear another pattern. … Obama really looks like a silent-film star. I think he draws his eyebrows on. … I hate it when people on stage being applauded “applaud back.” … Hillary and Bill always do the fake point-at-someone-they-”know”-in-the-audience-and-wave thing. … Obama freaks are unable to obey simple no-applause rule. … You get the feeling Obama cribs notes from his smart advisors. You get the feeling HRC has this stuff in her own mind. … • At the final debate, at 9:24 EST, John McCain said: “When Senator Obama was first asked [about doing town hall meetings], he said, ‘Any place, any time,’ the way Barry Goldwater and Jack Kennedy agreed to do, before the intervention of the tragedy at Dallas.” Not a soul in the world said anything about this odd non sequitur insertion of the topic of assassination into the discussion. But when Hillary Clinton mentioned the Bobby Kennedy assassination as a kind of time marker when talking to an editorial board in the late spring, the media and the Obama campaign went positively berserk on her with vile accusations she was subliminally calling for Obama to be assassinated. To me this is yet another proof that the Obama campaign was much harder on Hillary than it ever was (or had to be?) on McCain. • Even when I supported Hillary, I always liked Barack Obama — especially his wry sense of humor, born of his being an outsider as a kid, I think, which I can relate to - and I was proud and happy to vote for him on November 4. But I never campaigned for him. My fear of strangers kept me from canvassing, and I don’t like wearing campaign paraphernalia, etc. I didn’t actively campaign for Hillary, either, though I gave her about $50. Most of all, I just don’t believe in trying to tell other people how to vote. It’s not my job. • On election night, I took a bus home through the party atmosphere of Northwest D.C. The bus driver was honking nonstop in celebration, the mood on the bus was the same as everywhere: Unbridled conviviality and that special shared feeling that we were all going to be alright after all. A middle-aged black woman got on the bus and, in response to something the bus driver said about Obama winning, she said wearily, with all the weight of the world behind it, “What took so long?” and shook her head with a wan smile.

Read the rest here: 
Scott Shrake: Shrake’s Own Secrets of the 2008 Campaign!

Sarah Palin’s youngest daughter and campaign sidekick Piper gave her first interview ever on Tuesday’s “Today” Show. As the governor made halibut and salmon casserole in the family’s Wasilla kitchen, Matt Lauer turned to Piper for her thoughts on the 2008 campaign. The 7-year-old reflected on the hardships of the campaign trail (”All the rallies”), how much school she missed (”A lot”) and weighed in on the 2012 question. **See Piper wear high heels during the interview** WATCH: **See more Piper Palin photos.

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Piper Palin Talks To "Today" Show About Missing School And 2012

Seeing Barack Obama and George W. Bush together Monday, acting all cordial , made me realize it was probably time to put down those commemorative post-election Chronicles for a minute, hit the pause button on our tear into the future and give the outgoing President the credit he deserves for helping elect the incoming President. I don’t mean because Mr. Bush hit an all-time high disapproval rating, according to the polls in the liberal media. Yes, his unpopularity and policies helped the Democrats a lot. But I’m talking about the impact on citizen state of mind when Mr. Bush appointed not one but two African-American Secretaries of State and the first African-American as Secretary of Education like it wasn’t any big deal. He also named the first Mexican-American as Attorney General. It doesn’t matter what you thought of Ms. Rice or Mr. Powell or the others as public servants. (The Chronicle had a huge beef with Alberto Gonzalez over the BALCO case.) Here was a very conservative good old Texas fundamentalist Republican breaking a racial barrier without even blinking , like it was the most natural thing to do and not some monumental moment in our cultural or political history. If you don’t think that made the election of the first African-American president go down a little easier for some voters, think about it just a little more. I’ll wait.

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Phil Bronstein: Bush: Breaking Racial Barriers

On this Veterans’ Day, it’s time to take a moment and remember the fine men and women who have risked, and given, their lives to keep our nation safe. Folks like Democratic Senate candidate Jim Martin , a Vietnam veteran, and the former holder of the seat he holds, Max Cleland. On April 8, 1968, during the battle of Khe Sanh, Captain Joseph Maxwell Cleland was severely injured by a fellow soldier’s grenade, so severely that he would lose both of his legs below the knee, as well as his right forearm. It takes a special kind of person to recover from such a tragedy, but Max Cleland is just that kind of person. Rather than letting his injuries hold him back in life, Cleland went home to Georgia and continued to devote his life to public service. He was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1971, and subsequently served as Administrator of Veterans’ Affairs (the precursor to VA Secretary) in the Carter Administration. Upon Carter’s defeat, Cleland won election as Secretary of State of Georgia, and in 1996 - nearly 30 years after the ordeal which nearly ended his life and left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his days - Max Cleland was elected to represent the state of Georgia in the United States Senate. Unfortunately, Cleland’s career in public service came crashing to a halt in 2002, shortly after his opponent, then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss, aired this ad: Here’s what Senator John McCain - like Cleland, a man who suffered a horrific and crippling ordeal in Vietnam - had to say about Chambliss’ ad: “I’d never seen anything like that ad. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful. It’s reprehensible.” Reprehensible though it may be, it was apparently not enough to stop Senator McCain from campaigning with Saxby Chambliss . Martin continued to tie himself to President-elect Barack Obama in new television ads, and his campaign has invited Obama to come to the state to campaign for the Atlanta attorney and former state lawmaker. Martin’s campaign is also using Obama’s ground troops in the runoff to get out the vote. McCain (R-Ariz.) will come to Georgia on Thursday to help Chambliss. Though details were still being confirmed Monday morning, McCain will likely appear in Cobb County on Thursday afternoon. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will also come to Georgia for Chambliss, and an invitation has been extended to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has not confirmed. It’s frankly very sad to see this from McCain. As he said, what Chambliss did in attacking Cleland’s courage was reprehensible. And it should be condemned, then and now. As Senate Guru notes , Chambliss not only received six deferments himself, but has been a shaky vote on veterans’ issues during his entire term in the Senate. So so this Veterans’ Day, support our veterans and our military by supporting Jim Martin. Show that Chambliss’ attacks against those who have given so much for their country will not be tolerated. On the web: Jim Martin for U.S. Senate Orange to Blue ActBlue Page

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GA-Sen: Veterans’ Day

Welcome to the 2008 Presidential Election post-season. And now for the All-Star Honors. It was a wild ride, shaped by all manner of unprecedented outcomes, unruly dynamics, and unexpected faces. What follows is the most sensational all-star election team in history. As expected, most of the spots went to the winning team. Most Valuable Player The 2008 Election MVP is #44, the 6′3″ left-hander from Hawaii. On his resume: raised more money than any campaign in history ($700M+); inspired 15M new or lapsed voters; singlehandedly ignited a tidal wave of global optimism; redefined modern campaigning with the Internet; defeated not one but several titanic opponents (Clinton, McCain) — and, oh yeah, overcame gi-normous historical barriers. The 44th President of the United States did all this without breaking a sweat. Not bad for someone with “no experience.” The Runner Up Never mind the naysayers: this man won’t stay down. Since Y2K alone, the Mac suffered a heartbreaking primary defeat, resuscitated himself within his party to launch a second presidential bid, lost his frontrunner status (and a good chunk of change), then rose from the ashes to snatch the GOP nomination. And for all the criticism, the former Navy pilot came within an economic meltdown of the 2008 Winner’s Cup. His incredibly gracious concession speech proves that the fundamentals of the man are strong. McCain returns to the Senate with a Goldwater-esque opportunity to transform himself from defeated presidential candidate to honored elder statesman. FIRST TEAM The Risk Takers JFK won a Pulitzer for his Profiles in Courage. 239,000 Iowans get an All-Star nod for theirs. On January 3, Iowa’s Democratic caucus-goers (most of them women) defied conventional wisdom and gave Obama a decisive victory in the primary’s opening round. Long before 65M other Americans joined in the chorus, residents of the Tall Corn State said, “Yes, We Can!” And when these mavericks of the Midwest embraced the half Kenyan son of a Kansan for the presidency, the whole world sat up and took notice. Lest history forget, we’ll always owe a debt of gratitude to the Hawkeye State for helping a young Harvard grad fell one of history’s great barriers. The Launcher Months before the bailout gave them something better to do, economists at the University of Maryland tried to quantify Oprah’s impact on Obama’s primary win. We may never know how the Queen of Talk altered the race for the Prince of Change. But what’s perfectly clear is this: the first major foray into politics by arguably the world’s most trusted face gave Obama incredible media coverage less than a month before Iowa. It also lent him a sparkle that ultimately drew voters, celebrities and leaders to his side. Our president wouldn’t be president if he hadn’t won Iowa. And make no mistake about it: Barack Hussein Obama wouldn’t have won Iowa without Oprah’s unusual and effective backing. “The chosen one,” as Lady O called him, was in small part chosen by her. The Wright Words No presidential campaign would be complete without (at least) one epic setback: Reagan (Iowa loss), Dukakis (Willie Horton), Clinton #1 (New Hampshire), Bush #2 (the recount), etc. This March, Reverend Wright was the fire that threatened to burn up Obama’s candidacy. As “God damn America!” ran 24/7 on cable and the Internet, Obama’s prospects in Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere seemed to melt away. Then came the second great American speech of the 21st century (a certain 2004 DNC speech was the first). Obama’s March 18th address on race at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia reset the campaign narrative — and media coverage with it. With the boil subsided, North Carolina and Indiana primary voters (just barely) cauterized the campaign’s wound and let the healing begin. The A Team Into the company of Lee Atwater, James Carville, and Karl Rove enters a chief campaign strategist for the ages. Don’t let the throwback comb-over fool you: the most forward-thinking man in politics may well be David Axelrod. His record is impeccable: a 2004 Senate victory, terrific pre-campaign positioning inside and outside the Senate, the Iowa victory, February’s 11-state primary run, debate prep, campaign commercials and more. But along with what’s been called a “flawless” campaign strategy, Axelrod’s true genius was allowing other all-stars to do what they did best. From well-known names like Tom Daschle and David Plouffe to behind-the-scenes smarty-pants like Valerie Jarrett (key adviser) and Robert Gibbs (communications director)–Obama’s team was loaded down with talent. Like Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson did with Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman in the 90s, Axelrod allowed multiple stars to shine at once. No easy feat. Just ask the McCain aides currently leaking Palin dirt to the press. The Meltdown Gas prices didn’t do it. McCain’s age didn’t do it. Iraq, the budget deficit, Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric didn’t come close. It was the economic meltdown–and the contrasting reactions of McCain (suspend my campaign) and Obama (a President must multi-task)–that ultimately broke open this election. As the economy melted at warp-speed through early October, Obama secured a steady lead in the polls–a lead he never lost. Second Team The Game-Changer Any honest observer will agree (without smirking) to the following: that without the 44-year-old chief executive of the nation’s largest state, the McCain campaign would have been DOA after the RNC. Yes, Governor Palin was a poorly vetted and flawed choice. But she changed the game entirely. In the first 48 hours after Palin’s convention debut, the Obama campaign might have delegitimized her on the basis of her Alaska corruption controversies and pregnant daughter. They didn’t. And so for the next 30 days, Sarah the Barracuda gave the McCain campaign new life, new energy and new vitality. Call her what you will: the winking woman from Wasilla helped keep America interested in the most significant presidential race in history. The Rainmaker If money is the mother’s milk of American politics, the Obama campaign built the biggest dairy machine in American history. Like her candidate, Penny Pritzker (Obama’s National Finance Chair) is by no means a Washington insider. The 49-year-old scion of the Hyatt Hotel fortune got behind Illinois’ favorite son long before it was the “in” thing to do. Pritzker’s millions not only helped Obama out-organize Clinton in February but funded important counter-ads during the “cling-to-their-guns” and Jeremiah Wright fiascos of the spring. During the final push, Pritzer’s money machine allowed Obama to run 2-3 times more commercials than McCain in key battleground states including the “new blue” states (see Honorable Mentions below). The Benedictor Next to Oprah’s, Caroline Kennedy’s rare and poignant endorsement was the second most important of the campaign. Kennedy’s January 27th piece in the New York Times (”A President Like My Father”) draped the full weight, glory and elegance of Camelot around Obama’s shoulders–positioning him as this generation’s JFK. While Obama went on to lose the Massachusetts primary to Senator Clinton a few days later, Kennedy’s endorsement (along with her uncle Teddy’s) elevated the Illinois Senator to a different level in the minds of millions, giving him a gravitas and a sparkle he never lost. The Joker What’s tougher than a pit bull in lipstick? Turns out, a comedienne pretending to be a pit bull in lipstick. Sarah Palin survived the bad press and botched interviews, but Tina Fey’s dead-on impressions ultimately killed the candidate’s approval numbers. From early September to Election Day, Saturday Night Live’s leading lady did side-splitting impressions of Alaska’s Governor. By Halloween Palin’s unfavorable ratings were up almost 20%, and 59% of registered voters felt she wasn’t qualified to be President. Sure, the Couric and Gibson interviews diminished the public’s view of Palin. But Fey was the real impact player here. No comic has had such an effect on presidential politics since Chevy Chase reshaped public opinion of incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1975-76 with his hilarious impersonations of a bumbling chief executive. The Webmaster Chris Hughes was in high school less than ten years ago. Maybe that’s why he ran such a kickass digital operation. The openly gay North Carolina native co-founded Facebook with his Harvard roommates–then walked away from millions in stock options to lead Obama’s digital team. The result? The most transcendent victory in global democratic history. The role of the Internet in Obama’s success is now the stuff of legend. The little-website-that-could raised money ($700M+), organized volunteers (1M+), turned out voters (65M+), countered false rumors, and inspired billions at home and abroad. All under the guidance of a 24-year-old digital chief bringing his unique understanding of the web’s viral nature to the world of presidential politics. ^5! The Tone-Setter Rachel Maddow, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity all burnished their stars during this election season. But quiet as it’s kept, Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, had as big an impact on this election as any talking head. From his Clinton critiques during the primary to his “thrill going up my leg” comment about the race speech, his contempt for McCain’s election tactics to his blunt pronouncements on the debates and the conventions–Matthews truly shaped political insider coverage of the campaign. To be sure, Hardball draws far fewer viewers than Maddow or Olbermann (just under 1M vs. their 2M). But Matthews was must-see-TV for political insiders, bloggers and media types, meaning his hard-hitting comments reverberated far throughout the campaign. The Arbiter This spring, when a trailing but gaining Hillary Clinton challenged the nomination rules by looking for a new way to determine the Democratic Party’s nominee, Nancy Pelosi firmly pronounced that the party’s nomination principles should remain “the same.” Noting that the super delegates should not overturn the will of the elected delegates, the Speaker of the House frustrated Clintonites and helped assure Obama’s path to the nomination. The Challenger It’s counterintuitive, I know. But Senator Clinton’s refusal to go quietly into that good night may have helped Obama usher in his new day. How? (1) Because the primary continued two months longer than needed, the race reached key battleground states in the spring, prompting 1M more voters to register in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. (2) The increased media coverage that came with the extended primary–local newspaper profiles, TV stories, appearances on The View and other shows–allowed more Americans to “get comfortable” with Obama. (3) Clinton tested Obama on his toughest general election challenge: could he secure enough typically Democratic working class white voters? By identifying that elephant in the room early, the country and the media had more time to address it than had it been raised in Willie Horton-like fashion near the end of a general election. So before we drub Senator Clinton for overstaying her welcome, let’s remember that she may have (indirectly) helped usher Obama into her old digs. Honorable Mentions 1. Florida Governor Charlie Crist Who helped McCain wrap up the nomination with a critical primary endorsement 2. MoveOn.org The influential liberal political organization that rallied to Obama during the primaries and kept the liberal base motivated through Election Day 3. Wil.i.am Whose online video, “Yes We Can,” energized young Obama voters at a critical point 4. Nate Silver The outstanding quantitative analysis who shaped the media discussion of the race 5. African-American Voters Who provided almost 1 of 5 of Obama’s general election votes 6. Indiana & The “New Blues” NC, NM, NV, CO, OH, IN

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Carlos Watson: The All-Star Election Team, 2008

The election’s aftermath election continues, with lots of gossipy stuff about Governor Palin’s wardrobe and how Rush Limbaugh hates John McCain and the Republican party. The media are ecstatic that they no longer need to spend much ink on the substance of governing but can instead review the horse race over and over with clean consciences (except in Georgia, where there’s still a Senate runoff). However, in the midst of this trivia, an occasional nugget offers insight into how our next President views the political arena he has just mastered so thoroughly. Here’s a wonderful bit from Newsweek’s “Secrets of the 2008 Campaign” quoting Obama on efforts by the debate moderators to keep things at a sixth-grade level: “I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ Instead of being appropriately [ the tape is garbled ]. So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal .’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

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Carl Pope: Lightbulbs Aren’t Enough

Over the past week, the symbolic and substantive enormity of Obama’s election has been slowly settling in to the nation’s collective consciousness. Commentators, including myself, have reached for the history books to lay down words about “what it means.” (I settled on the triump of good over evil.) The most obvious is marking a new chapter in America’s checkered racial history. Some have observed that Tuesday was the final shot in the war that began on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter. (That would be the civil war in case those details don’t ring a bell.) My friend Marc Cooper, in his LA Weekly column , quoted a friend saying “the hands that picked the cotton were the hands that are picking the next President,” which sounded a little heavy, uh, handed — until I saw this : The Civil War might be over, but the War Between the States lives on. The good news is that the lingering resentments of that time might have finally lost their political power. Enough of the rest of the country has moved on, as is noted in this New York Times article , that the South is becoming politically irrelevant. And with it the GOP, which has staked its fortunes on exploiting the region’s resentments. When half your congressional delegation is from the South, and the Southern Strategy is no longer working, you need a new idea. Let’s see if Newt Gingrich or Bobby Jindal or — gulp! — Sarah Palain can come up with one.

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Joshuah Bearman: Maybe the Civil War isn’t Over

One of my goals the next few weeks is to make sure that Howard Dean gets his due props and, by extension, all of us who fought to make Dean’s vision a reality. Dean envisioned the Democratic Party building a new base in solidly Republican strongholds, and should Barack Obama win the presidency and Democrats expand their margins in Congress on Tuesday, as most polls predict, Dean will walk away from this election as one of the unsung heroes. “Quiet” is not a word most people would have used for Dean four years ago, when he bowed out of the 2004 presidential race with a now-infamous scream. But Dean, the former Vermont governor, took control of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2005 amid cries that he would embarrass the party — and from there, built the party’s political machine Even Dean’s one-time opponents give him credit. “I think it’s partial vindication,” said Harold Ickes, a longtime ally of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) who opposed Dean for the DNC chairmanship. “There are special circumstances in each state. In Alaska, who would have predicted the conviction of Sen. [Ted] Stevens [R]?” “Partial vindication”? I’ll take it. Of course, Democrats were helped by Stevens’ conviction, but his Democratic opponent Mark Begich was competitive long before the indictments. In fact, Begich was up 47-41 in a poll _last December_. In fact, Stevens has led in very few polls this year . And even in the presidential race, until Palin was added to the ticket, Obama was making it a single digit race in a state Bush won by 25 points in 2004. But like I said, I’ll take it Ickes’ tepid admission. Remember, Ickes is this guy : “We have to remember McCain is not a standard, off-the-shelf Republican,” Ickes said, echoing the argument he says he’s making to superdelegates, and pointing up Clinton’s inarguable strength with Roman Catholics, Hispanics and elderly voters in key November battleground states such as Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. “He will have a lot of appeal for Hispanics. He’ll trounce [Obama].” Ickes was integral in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to dismiss Obama victories in places like North Carolina and Georgia by saying they didn’t matter because Democrats couldn’t win them. So his hostility wasn’t directed just at Dean, but at any Democrat who suggested we were more than a coastal and Great Lakes party. Heresy! If 2008 has taught us anything, it’s that Democrats can compete near everywhere, and no state, county, or precinct need be ignored. And while that was our message, it was Howard who took it to DC headfirst against fierce establishment opposition. The status quo “battleground state” mentality may have been a loser for Democrats, but the DC political elite still had nice, comfortable lives, and anything that might threaten their status was suspect. For Ickes to even tepidly admit that Dean was right is serious progress.

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Ickes admits Dean was right

Your one stop pundit shop. Eugene Robinson laughs at the Republican-created myth that we are a center-right nation, and says: I could make the argument that all is not lost for the Republican Party — that last Tuesday’s across-the-board defeat wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. But it would be a pretty dumb argument, and I doubt many readers would take it seriously. The truth is that the Grand Old Party is on a Bridge to Nowhere and may have great difficulty changing course. Richard Cohen thinks that naming Al Gore as Secretary of State would signal the dramatic changes coming to Washington. David Brooks talks of the upcoming battle between the traditionalists versus the reformists of the Republican Party. The good news for us? Brooks says that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are the “most prominent voices in the Traditionalist camp.” Paul Ryan (R-WI) says that it’s time to take a fire hose to the Republican Party to stop the “emboldened” (like terrorists?) Democratic majority. Henry Olsen wants the GOP to ask themselves, WWRD, joining the long list of desperate Republicans who don’t seem to realize that Reagan has been out of office for 20 years. William McGurn calls on John McCain to defend Sarah Palin from the hits she is taking in the media, because after all, McCain was the candidate who sucked. Michael Barone  tries to convince himself that last week’s election wasn’t a rout and a repudiation of the Republican Party. Joseph E. Fahey tells about his friend who died 40 years after his service in Vietnam from exposure to Agent Orange: It is long past time for these veterans to be treated fairly. If they are to be denied the right to seek recompense in the courts, then the other two branches of government owe it to them to fashion another remedy, such as a compensation fund. If our representatives in Congress and in the White House are not willing to take that action, then perhaps they ought to skip the meaningless platitude — the one about thanks and a grateful nation — that is uttered when the widow is presented the flag that draped her husband’s coffin. Norah Vincent didn’t vote and is now regretting it.

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Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up

Where’s John McCain’s honor when we need it? We’ll find out tonight, when the Arizona Republican appears on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. In the week since the election, Mr. McCain’s campaign team has leaked some nasty stuff about Sarah Palin. These leaks are personal, and they speak more to the character of Mr. McCain and the leakers than they do to Mrs. Palin. So it will be telling if Mr. McCain stands up for his partner and says how offended he has been by what some of his staffers have done to her.

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WSJ Questions McCain’s Honor, Condemns Attacks On Palin As "Language Of Losers"

In Sarah Palin’s interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren this evening, she referred to bloggers as “kids in pajamas sitting in the basement of their parents’ homes” spewing out mean and inaccurate things about her. Well, I am no kid, I am definitely not wearing pajames and I am living in my own house, thank you! And I am seriously depressed about the prospect of this person having a political future. In the course of the interview with Greta Van Susteren, a softball thrown with great affection by Fox, Palin manages to rebut all the attacks on her without ever providing much, if any, facts to support her position. She never asked for the clothes or the stylists. They just appeared. Nor the clothes for her “eight” member family (eight? I thought she had 5 kids…). She never thought Africa was a country . She was just concerned about Darfur and they discussed “Africa there…the country and the continent”. She always knew what countries were in NAFTA. She never thought the crowds were there because of her, it was just because of what she stood or — just a mom trying to change things. Pardon me, but I am nearly nauseous by now. There is no acknowledgement by Ms. Palin that she might not have been ready for this job . That there were things she did not know and should have known. That the media intensity revealed her weaknesses — only that it was mean and unfair. She deftly avoided the quesiton about 2012, but in a very frightening way to those of us who do not believe God tells what doors to open, she explained that God would reveal to her if she should run. God would tell her if there was a door open with a tiny crack, and she would, “by god”, just push through it. She is also a feminist in the sense of ” Feminists for life “, which for those of us who believe in the power of women, is not exactly our definition. I actually think she believes women should earn as much as men. But she does not believe government should help women and their families with children, especially special needs children , with any particular programs. Individuals and their communities should do that. Well — Governor Palin? They do not. And when they do not, why are you in favor of punishing those families when they find they can’t make it. They can’t support the 24 hour needs of those children without some support. Are they supposed to go out on the street corner and put out a sign that says, “Please feed my special needs child?” Oh my. We are in for a set of charming interviews over the next few days. The only losers will be the Republican party of “meanies” who have attacked Palin. No one is going to challenge her. No one is going to ask her to be accountable for the leaks from the campaign about her diva personality, her tirades against her staff, her acceptance of all those clothes and makeup and hairdressing, her lack of knowledge of basic facts about American government or foreign affairs. She can ust deny it all, smile, wink and we are all ok with it. Are we?

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Linda Bergthold: Palin calls bloggers "kids in pajamas"

When a party gains Senate seats over the course of two consecutive elections, conventional wisdom holds that the bill is set to come due the third time around. But even as the media keeps its focus on 2008’s lingering Senate contests, there are some early indications that 2010 could be another strong year for Democrats. Republicans will once again be defending more seats ( 18-15 ) unless several Democrats retire unexpectedly from the body in the next 24 months. Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the Cook Report, says it’s shaping up to be another bad year for Republicans. “This does not look to be a good cycle for them,” she said. Duffy noted that by the time 2012 rolls around, Republicans may finally win some seats back, since the Democrats will be defending 24 seats, to their nine. “But still,” she added, “it’s a long, very, very sad road, if you’re the GOP.” A Democratic official, speaking on background, echoed Duffy’s analysis (though with a bit more glee). In Kentucky, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just faced a tight race, Republicans should get ready to do it all over again (and then some) with Sen. Jim Bunning, who won in 2004 by just over one percentage point. “He was sort of a sloth the last time, just barely getting over the line,” the Dem operative said. With any kind of national money targeting him in 2010, the operative predicted Bunning, if he were to run, would lose. The Cook Report’s analyst offered some agreement. “Democrats have a bench. But they’ve got to get the right candidate. The advantage last time was that it took Democrats so long to find a candidate. I don’t think that’s going to happen this time. I also don’t think that McConnell’s [victory] forebodes anything for this race.” In Kansas, the Democratic operative said current Gov. Kathleen Sebelius could conceivably run for the seat likely being vacated by Sen. Sam Brownback. “She’s already won two statewide elections in a very red state. She’d be the strongest candidate of either party.” Duffy agreed Sebelius would be a strong candidate, but added, “she’s probably gonna get a primary” should she run. “Republicans have a couple of House members, of course,” she noted, as well as a crowded field in the governor’s race that could thin out if one or two Republicans look for less-contested electoral ground. Meanwhile, Duffy is not even convinced that Brownback — who said he would only serve two terms — is truly resigning. “Until Brownback definitely says ‘I’m out,’ and she announces, I have the seat as lean Republican… People have been known to change their minds.” In Arizona, the Democratic operative said “not many people think John McCain is going to run for reelection. If he does, he wins. If he doesn’t, Gov. Janet Napolitano could make a very strong candidate.” As for Sen. David Vitter, the operative cheekily observed that “going to hookers is never a great platform” to run for reelection on. Duffy said “one of two things likely to happen there: with Vitter, either rational minds prevail, and the seat is open — or he gets a very serious and competitive primary challenge.” Elsewhere on the map, the Democratic operative said Mel Martinez in Florida, Kit Bond in Missouri, and George Voinovich in Ohio could all face tough races. “Specter isn’t getting any younger, and he always has a tough race,” the Democrat added. “I don’t know if Chris Matthews can beat him, but plenty of others can. It’s hard to see who’s vulnerable [on our side].” But Duffy has a couple of suggestions for Democrats to worry about. While she says Republicans have no bench with which to challenge Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, “Harry Reid’s gonna get a race in Nevada, almost no question. I actually think Barbara Boxer’s gonna get a race; she sure thinks she is. One of the names bandied about is Schwarzenegger, and there are other names out there. Meg Whitman is looking at it. And Carly Fiorina — what kind of fun would that be?” Additionally, if Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye were to retire, Duffy thinks the open seat race could be competitive. Meanwhile, there is the question of who Illinois Gov. Rod Blogojevich appoints to fill Barack Obama’s soon-to-be-open seat . “I’m sort of interested to see who gets that appointment,” Duffy said. “Valerie Jarrett’s probably not going to get much of a race. Jesse Jackson Jr. could get a primary from a downstate Dem. And Tammy Duckworth would get a primary.” Finally, though, the gossip du jour, according to Duffy, is that a certain Alaskan Republican could challenge incumbent Lisa Murkowski. “Take a stab in the dark,” Duffy said. “Somebody who’s already taken on one more Murkowski.” She is referring, of course, to Gov. Sarah Palin. In tracking down the rumor, Duffy said she heard that Palin was thinking about challenging Murkowski in 2004 — to the point where then-Sen. Rick Santorum paid a visit to convince then-Mayor Palin to take a pass. “Lisa’s not her father,” Duffy said. “She’s done a good job. And if Stevens loses and/or is expelled, there’s a pretty important seniority argument to be made. My boss likes to say to candidates who are thinking of doing risky things, ‘does anybody who loves you think this is a good idea? The answer in this case should be ‘no.’” Overall, despite all the unknown challengers and unknown fundraising numbers, Republicans are facing another tough year of Senate races. “Three cycles in a row, go figure. They’re just looking at an uphill climb.”

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Senate Dems Could Grow Majority In 2010

VETERANS DAY 2008 By Nicolaus Mills It is not easy finding a gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. I learned that earlier this year when I visited the grave of General George Marshall on the sixtieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan. The media had not thought the anniversary worth mentioning, and that day I was alone in seeking out the general. But despite knowing the exact locale of Marshall’s gravesite–Number 8198, Section 7—I needed more than an hour to find it. What took me so long was not just my poor map reading skills. It was that in looking for Marshall’s gravesite, I was forced to acknowledge, in a way I never did as a tourist, that Arlington is an out-of-doors church. It was not possible to move from one grave to another without first reading the inscriptions before me. Marshall had not made my task of finding him easy. A five star general and Army chief of staff throughout World War II, he outranked everyone buried near him. But his tombstone did not stand out by virtue of its size or the carvings on it. When it came to his accomplishments, there was simply a list of the positions he once held: Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, Secretary of State, President of the American Red Cross, Secretary of Defense. That was it. The modesty of the gravesite was consistent with the conditions that Marshall, who refused to accept military decorations from the United States during World War II, set down for his funeral. He forbade a funeral service at the National Cathedral and ruled out lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. He wanted no eulogy. He insisted that his internment be private, and he drew up a short list of honorary pallbearers that included his wartime and postwar orderlies but was casual about the famous—General Bedell Smith “if he is in town,” Marshall wrote in the instructions he left behind in 1956. I doubt that Marshall would have wanted a stranger like me near tears at his gravesite, and I did my best to comply with his wishes. But as I stood there, I also imagined how often Marshall, who spent his final years in Virginia, must have thought about Arlington and its acres of dead. In 1953 there was much comment about the paradox of a professional soldier like him receiving the Nobel Prize. “I am afraid this does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others,” Marshall had remarked in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones.” Marshall was confessing his own feelings about the price of being Army chief of staff and secretary of defense, but in the wake of this year’s Veterans Day, what is so painful about Marshall’s words is that they seem part of a bygone era in which, when it came to waging war, the country believed “we are all in this together” and refused to limit sacrifice to those on the battlefield. Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of “Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.”

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Nicolaus Mills: VETERANS DAY 2008

Democratic officials confirm that Barack Obama is sending aides to help with the runoff senatorial campaign in Georgia, putting his post-election coattails to an immediate test. Organizers who worked on behalf of the Illinois Democrat are heading to the Peach State to offer similar assistance to Jim Martin, the Democratic challenger who is facing a second-round contest against incumbent Saxby Chambliss after neither candidate received 50 percent of the initial vote. The investment by Obama, confirmed by an official working on behalf of the Senate campaign, apparently includes “ground team” members as well as “online specialists and bloggers,” and represents one of the earliest tests of the influence he can wield on the political landscape. A Daily Kos diarist first heard about the move from the Martin team. It remains unclear whether Obama himself will appear in the state. His campaign put limited paid resources into Georgia during the general election, mainly during the waning weeks of the campaign, though Obama’s registration efforts there were lauded for making the presidential contest in that state much closer than the historical norm. Martin’s race to replace Chambliss was even closer. The longtime Georgian Democrat finished with just under 47 percent of the vote to Chambliss’ 49.8 percent. Because neither candidate was able to win a majority of the vote, the two will square off again on December 2. While Martin will be assisted in the effort by the Obama campaign, Chambliss will be banking on GOP star-power to help propel him into office for a second term. Already it has been reported that Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin and John McCain will be either making campaign stops on the Georgian’s behalf or providing volunteers and aide.

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Obama Dispatching Aides To Georgia Senate Race

Last night electoral votes were counted, and with excitement rising–nervous excitement, because we feared the sudden crashing, crumbling, or poisoning of the various voting machines being used throughout the nation, a group of friends and I, all ObamaManiacs shifted between CNN, MSNBC, The Comedy Channel, and occasionally Fox (just to make sure they weren’t messing with the results), waiting, hoping, watching, praying (even the atheists among us) that it would all end as we had for so long now and so very ardently wished, that our constant donations: five dollars here, ten there–another hundred ok, two hundred, why not, what could be more important–that our volunteering, knocking on doors, phoning hundreds upon hundreds of people, our rallying, our marches and chanting, our emailing and our passionate urging of those who leaned toward maintaining the awful status quo would have made the difference. We perched in front of two TVs; we up and wandered back and forth, from room to room, waiting for the various states to be called; we ate nervously; chattered about the countries to which we planned to move if McCain and Palin won, the communes we would set up in Canada, or outside of Barcelona, in Italy perhaps, or Uruguay or Costa Rica or Brazil, or India, where you could find your old job (as Bill Maher suggested), then cleared our heads and cheered over Pennsylvania, groaned over Texas, reassured each other, let out the occasional scream of excitement and finally, finally, yelling, crying, applauding hugging each other, jumping up and down, calling children, brothers and sisters, old best friends on our cell phones, some of us weeping uncontrollably, we settled down and shut up long enough to listen to John McCain make his truly grand speech conceding to our President-elect and calling for unity and support for the new Commander-in-Chief. We were a group of twenty or so, most of us over the age of fifty. Our hostess was a woman of ninety. We were not young. Not African-American; there was but one black woman in the group. We were gathered in an apartment in Sarasota, Florida, in which area we all live. I had been a poll watcher on the morning shift, 6:30 to 10:00 a.m. at a precinct near my house, and I had returned to that same precinct to collect the numbers posted–as by law they must be–on the precinct door at 7 p.m., when the polls closed. McCain had won in my neighborhood, by some three-to-one margin, and my heart had provisionally sunk. So, ecstatic, I, we watched Florida turn blue, all of us amazed, and incidentally relieved that we no longer had to apologize to our friends up north, or to ourselves for that matter, for living here. As soon as McCain finished speaking, I had the sense that I had to go home, to hear Obama’s speech alone, and that if I left immediately and drove fast, I might make it in time. So I grabbed my things and without a word to anyone, fled, it was fifteen minutes before midnight, and I sped home with the radio on, missing only the very beginning. But NPR described Obama, Michelle, and the children so well, I could see them in my mind’s eye, through my tears, as I careened down the nearly empty Tamiami Trail. And as I drove, I had the oddest thought. I thought, Bush made this possible. Bush did this for us. This was his legacy. It was this for which he would be remembered. He had made conditions in this country and relations between this country and others so bad, so unspeakably bad that he had effectively destroyed his own party, made it impossible for a Republican, probably any Republican to carry on. He had paved the way for someone who truly offered change, change of every sort. And the coincidence of Bush: this disaster who had been our president, who had brought our country to the brink of its demise in every area and the appearance of Obama: this black man, this brilliant and industrious black man who is elegant, articulate, even-tempered, thoughtful, intellectual, unflappable, who seems to have values and plans for the health and prosperity and growth of our country, well, it was the perfect storm meets the climate of one’s dreams. It suddenly occurred to me that if it weren’t for Bush and Cheney, Neo-Cons and company, if it weren’t for the disastrous mess they had made of our wonderful country: if it weren’t for the lies they told us about everything until nothing whatsoever that Bush said was believable; if it weren’t for the unnecessary and unforgivable war that they had determined and convinced us to wage in Iraq, a country that had done us no harm, a war in which so many Americans and Iraqis had been needlessly killed and maimed; if it weren’t for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo ; the introduction of torture as a permissible modus operandi for the USA; the editing of our Constitution; unimaginable amounts of money both borrowed and spent, and the debt accrued, and the economic meltdown; and the cavalier and blatant disregard of the needs of our people, for whom they were supposed to be responsible; if it weren’t for the inattention to the infrastructure of the country, to the environment, to the future of the planet; if it weren’t for the unforgivable treatment of the poor in crisis, and the health care costs both plaguing and impoverishing our citizens, and the housing scams inundating us with foreclosures; and the job losses; the tax breaks for the wealthy while the poor got poorer and rich got obscenely richer; and the pathetic level to which education had sunk in this country, this wondrous election might not have been possible. I did not like the first president Bush, but I positively loathed W, and it would never have occurred to me that anything good could be attributed to him, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we can thank him for leading us to the launching pad on which we stand today and for his (albeit inadvertently) paving the way for both the deconstruction of the corrupt mess that our “democracy” had become when Katherine Harris and The Supreme Court made him president by fiat and for the upcoming reconstruction of a government of which we can once again be proud.

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Rachel Ben-Avi: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Just minutes ago on Fox News I saw Sarah Palin tell Greta van Susteren that the rumors that she wanted to ban books in the local library while she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska were false. Governor Palin said the charge was untrue because someone accused her of banning Harry Potter books and that would be impossible because “Harry Potter had not been written yet” when she was mayor. But Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002 and there were additions to the Harry Potter series in that period. So the conclusion to be drawn here is either 1). Palin is lying about her attempt at book burning in Wasilla and trying to cover it up; or 2). Palin is so clueless about secular popular culture she is unaware of the time period of the publication of the books in the mega-hit Harry Potter series. Of course, van Susteren — dutiful Fox News Republican ventriloquist dummy she is — just let Palin’s assertion go by unchallenged. I just thought it was really weird. I guess Palin just lies even when she doesn’t have to or is really culturally challenged up there in the tundra. Did anybody else see this?

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Joseph A. Palermo: I Just Saw Sarah Palin Snow a Willing Greta van Susteren

Our readers point us to various and sundry web graffiti. From 236.com , a list of the seven wonkiest things you’d never thought you’d say: 1. “That reminds me of something I read on Daily Kos…” Three months ago Daily Kos was a site that seemed to be designed for an alien race. You couldn’t understand which part was the real site and what was just some dude’s “Diary,” and you wondered whether you really had any right to be reading another guy’s diary anyway. These days, you still can’t quite figure the site out. You just know you belong there. 4. “Because Nate Silver said so!” He’s had complete control over our emotional lives since at least August.  Anytime you heard something or read something (Drudge) that made you anxious, you went to fivethirtyeight.com and were instantly reassured.  In the Autumn of 2008, Nate Silver was better than Xanax. From the Urban Dictionary (h/t shrike): Palin   An applicant lacking even basic job skills Someone supremely un-self-aware or lacking any relative sense of what he/she does or doesn’t know. HR sent me another Palin for the marketing manager job. Palin  v. to abandon one’s principles for short term gain Tom, a devout vegan, palined when he consumed a happy meal solely to obtain the collectible toy it contained. Palin  n. Pejorative term that refers to an incompetent, impractical, irrelevant or incapable person who has been appointed to a position of great importance. A person who holds authority disproportionate to his or her requisite ethics and qualifications. Derived from John McCain’s controversial 2008 Vice Presidential pick, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. John was recently made principal, but everybody thinks he’s a Palin who can’t do the job. My new boss is such a Palin - he took my deserved place because the CEO is his personal friend. From Roll Call (h/t Kula2316): Two-thirds of voters saw the “Saturday Night Live” election parodies during the campaign season and 10 percent said the program had an influence on their vote. Asked whether they would prefer Alaska Gov. Saran Palin (R) or actress Tina Fey — who portrayed Palin on the show, to hilarious effect — as vice president, 51 percent said Fey. From Borowitz Report : Palin Hoping to be Named Ambassador to Africa ‘A Darned Important Country,’ Says Guv Maybe it was all planted by the McCain campaign. All-time favorite poll analysis from John Oliver:

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Sign Of The Times

A former campaign adviser to John McCain named Martin Eisenstadt has outed himself as the proud source of the Sarah Palin “doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story. The New Republic and MSNBC have picked up the scoop. But it’s not at all clear that Eisenstadt exists. William K. Wolfrum of Shakespeare’s Sister, who was suckered by Eisenstadt during the campaign, did some digging and concluded , “There is no M. Thomas Eisenstadt. There is no Eisenstadt Group. There is no Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. M. Thomas Eisenstadt is a hoax.” Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones writes of being tricked by Eisenstadt on an another scandal: A few hours ago, we (okay, I) posted a blog about a man claiming to be a McCain adviser who made ridiculous comments on Iraqi television about building a casino in the Baghdad Green Zone. In addition to the inherent absurdity of it, there was a lot of arrogance, cultural insensitivity, and racism thrown in. Other blogs had posted on the guy, and when I checked him out before posting I found his blog and a foreign policy institute claiming his employ. Turns out the blog and institute, like the adviser, were an elaborate hoax. It didn’t help that the guy, in creating his fictional foreign policy expert, closely mimicked the name of a real foreign policy expert. Here’s why I got taken: I received an emailed press release reporting that the supposed McCain adviser had apologized for his comments about the casino. You’re welcome to disagree with me, but I had no reason to believe that someone would invent a persona, a blog, a foreign policy institution, a video with a fake Iraqi television station, a press release, and an organization or email entity to send out said press release. But frankly, there was enough info on the web that I should have sussed this thing out. This is a long way of saying I apologize and that I’m more than a little ashamed. I’ve taken the post down. Kudos to the inventor of this whole thing. My only consolation is that if I had as much time on my hands as he clearly does, I probably would have figured this out and saved myself a fair amount of embarrassment. Even if he did exist, Eisenstadt doesn’t appear to have been high up enough in the McCain campaign to be privy to Sarah Palin’s private utterances. According to his own bio , his role in the campaign was “offering advice and liaising with the Jewish community in particular.” To be clear, that doesn’t mean the Africa story is false — just that it probably didn’t come from this source.

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Martin Eisenstadt, Non-Existent McCain Adviser, Spills On Palin Dirt

Dems did pretty well in North Dakota last Tuesday. The day after the election, Obama was +8 job approval with Rasmussen. Nearly a week later, Obama is up +17 . Republican Sen. Mel Martinez, on MTP, notes that his party’s xenophobic tendencies could doom it into the future . The fact of the matter is that Hispanics are going to be a more and more vibrant part of the electorate, and the Republican Party had better figure out how to talk to them. We had a very dramatic shift between what President Bush was able to do with Hispanic voters, where he won 44 percent of them, and what happened to Senator McCain. Senator McCain did not deserve what he got. He was one of those that valiantly fought, fought for immigration reform, but there were voices within our party, frankly, which if they continue with that kind of rhetoric, anti-Hispanic rhetoric, that so much of it was heard, we’re going to be relegated to minority status. Obama team is working on plan to close down Guantanamo Bay prison . From an email press release — MSNBC has given Keith Olbermann a new four-year contract. Congrats to Keith! Palin gets her own dictionary definitions . An applicant lacking even basic job skills Someone supremely un-self-aware or lacking any relative sense of what he/she does or doesn’t know. HR sent me another Palin for the marketing manager job . More props for Nate Silver . And yes, he was always a numbers freak: He “was a numbers fanatic,” said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University. “When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting,” Brian Silver said. “When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three…’ ” By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head. By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance (it doesn’t). By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and created his own. Damn right we’re looking at Texas for 2012 . Damn right. Treat DC as one big crime scene . Minnesota remains the good government/good citizen state , with 77.9% of eligible voters showing up at the polls. My home state CT seems like a bunch of slackers at  67.1 (make us a battleground and see what happens), but then there’s W VA at 50.3 to make me feel better.  - DemFromCT Secret Service code names are often thought to be revealing of a president’s character, so if you’re expecting big changes, you might be pleased that the code name for President-elect Obama is Renegade . The rest of the new first family gets matching “R” names: Michelle Obama is “Renaissance,” Malia is “Radiance” and little Sasha is “Rosebud.”  How does Obama’s name compare with his predecessors’? Bill Clinton was “Eagle.” George H.W. Bush was “Timberwolf.” Ronald Reagan was “Rawhide.” Jimmy Carter was “Deacon.” As for George W. Bush, his code name is “Tumbler.” Whether that’s from his problem with Segways, mountain bikes, or pretzels, only the Secret Service knows for sure. - Devilstower Burnt Orange Report’s David Mauro is the only progressive blogger in line for a $10,000 blogging scholarship. Go vote for him .

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Midday open thread

Well… what can I say?

John McCain’s pick in Sarah Palin undoubtedly impalined him during this campaign season.

From user: Jane

The Wassilla Project website has provided a very interesting and honest insight into Palin’s violation of federal information using her personal email account.  Any sane individual who has worked in state or federal level is briefed on ethical procedures and behavior at the beginning of their career, and once every year after.  Surely Palin knew her actions were unethical, so why did she proceed to communicate concerning state business using her personal account?  For those of you who feel no one is above the law visit the Wassilla Project site.  There you will see a video and hear from residents of Palin’s hometown speaking up as all Americans do when things don’t seem right.   One of them is Anne Kilkenny.  If you recall, months ago a personal but honest and through provoking email by Anne Kilkenny, a local resident of Wassilla, was disseminated on the internet by the recipient.  At first read anyone could tell Anne’s insight was no exaggeration.  Anyone who has a knack for false and truth knew she was the real thing; a valid connection as to what makes Sarah tick.  We must keep this story alive to prevent other politicians from thinking they are excluded from the rules and regulations all employees must follow.  Please visit the Wassilla Project website at:

Sarah Palin: The email scandal

One thing for certain, there are a lot of smart and honorable people up in Alaska who deserved a qualified Governor.  Hopefully next time they’ll vote for someone who has their best interest at heart instead of attempting to blind their eyes and minds with oil tax rebates.

From user: ih8palin

BY GEORGE CARLIN- ANTI ABORTION= ANTI WOMAN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrXvDXVhqfU&feature=related