A year after Barack Obama’s election stirred broad hopes for change among American voters, persistent high unemployment and the spectacle of continued gridlock in Washington threaten Democratic dominance of the political landscape.
Tuesday’s defeats in gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey not only ended a decade or more of Democratic gains in those states but also signaled possible trouble ahead in the midterm elections at the national level.
Twenty years ago, he would have at least thrown in a “stinging rebuke” or whatever the 1980s variant of the phrase was. Forty years ago, he would have written that Democrats had tears streaming down their faces.
Now all we get is some warmed over tripe about “possible trouble ahead”?
I really wish Steve Gilliard were here today, because only he could do full justice to both Bloomberg’s victory and Corzine’s failure. And while Mr. Gilliard was, IIRC, no fan of Mayor Bloomberg, he would certainly have had some useful if excoriating advice for those goo-goos who are now shocked, shocked that a rich person could be rewarded by New York City voters for a blatant attempt to buy his way into keeping office.
A letter about healthcare reform to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), apparently from former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, triggered a security scare that briefly shut down much of the Senate on Wednesday.
The typed letter, tucked inside a hand-written business envelope, appeared in Reid’s office without postage, in an outgoing mailbox bin. A Senate postal clerk noticed the envelope and alerted a Reid staffer, who in turn notified Capitol Police about 2 p.m.
A small swarm of officers responded, first shutting down the hallway outside Reid’s office and then taking the even rarer step of shutting down the wide Ohio Clock corridor that senators use for press conferences outside the Senate’s main entrance. Mindful of the ricin and anthrax attacks in 2001, teams of hazardous materials technicians were called and tested the envelope before opening it and discovering Koop’s letter.
“The staff in the Capitol in particular and on the Hill in general are very sensitive to mail that ends up in an office and hasn’t been cleared,” said Senate Sergeant at Arms Terry Gainer.
So, to review. When Pakistani citizens watch their friends and neighbors blown up by missile strikes, it is the position of this administration that they should not view it as terrorism. On the other hand, when we receive a letter without a stamp, we shut down a portion of the most powerful government in the world out of a general hysteria over terrorism.
I’m even going to go out on a limb and wager that more Af/Pak citizens have been killed by missiles than Americans have been by unstamped letters.
Also, this is excellent news for conservatives and really puts the health care reform agenda in a bad spot.
On the one hand, this is beyond stupid in the sense that a teabagger has no chance of winning in the land of herbal tea. On the other, Fiorina is a shitty candidate anyway:
A California Republican aiming to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) next year has gotten a boost from conservative Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).
DeMint announced last night his Senate Conservatives Fund was endorsing state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore over former Hewlett Packard chief Carly Fiorina. The group supports only “rock solid” conservatives, organizers told supporters on a conference call last night as election results came in.
DeVore “will work with me to shake things up,” DeMint said, and “vote the right way …stand up in our conference meetings and say, ‘Folks this is wrong let’s turn this thing around.’”
I hope DeVore busts out the industrial strength anti-immigrant hate. That always goes over well in California.
I have to admit that I’m disappointed by the media’s fairly measured response to last night’s elections. Sure, we’ve been told that two Democratic defeats in state elections prove Americans hate the Democrats in the federal government while two Democratic victories in federal elections don’t mean anything, but I’m surprised by how how little is turning up when I google obama+”stinging rebuke”. Or is that phrase no longer in circulation?
Newsweek magazine is teaming up with an oil-industry lobbying group to host an invitation-only event on climate-change and energy issues for lawmakers, just as the Senate gets set to take up legislation on the subject.
The panel discussion, entitled “Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?”, will feature Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, and, as moderator, Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, according to an email invitation sent by a Newsweek business staffer and obtained by TPMmuckraker.
“Newsweek is pleased to be co-hosting this panel discussion with API,” says the email, which adds that “notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate” have been invited. The event is scheduled to be held December 1 in a Senate meeting room.
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
Ever, in the history of the country, have state Governor’s races not even in a midterm election year, but one year into an administration, been portrayed as a referendum on the President. And this is ignoring the fact that the two Democrats running for national office both won, one of which in a seat that has been in Republican hands for a century and a half, giving national Democrats one more seat than they had yesterday.
Could Chuck Todd explain to me how many votes in Congress for health care reform Chris Christie and McDonnell have? Our media is just hopeless.
So, to review, the wingnuts took a seat that would have been a win for the Republicans, so much so that the seat had not gone to a Democrat since Reconstruction and the Democratic candidates had been getting about 35% of the vote the last few elections, ran the Republican out of the race, brought their own special kind of crazy to town, and the voters rejected them handily.
Even I didn’t expect Owens to win. I seriously hope they pursue this strategy nationwide.
In other news, a Goldman employee has finally lost a job, with Corzine out in NJ. I know nothing about the election there, nor the one in Virginia, but I do know that Terry McAuliffe is not Governor. That is a good thing.
The only really bad thing is the repeal of the gay marriage law in Maine. Other than that, I’d be hard pressed to draw any conclusions from yesterday other than that Sarah Palin is still a loser. I’m sure that won’t stop the right-wing hacks from claiming this has been a bad result for Obama, but let’s face it- everything is good news for Republicans.
The race has now been called for Democrat Bill Owens.
This is a huge win for conservatives.
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I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman winning would just be gravy. A Hoffman win is not in the cards, but we did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed GOP candidate.
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For all intents and purposes, NY-23 is a trial run for Florida. And in Florida, the conservative candidate is operating inside the GOP. If John Cornyn and the NRSC do not want to see Florida go the way of NY-23, they better stand down.
How much more of Erickson’s bullshit is the Republican party going to take? The guy is quoted in Politico every freaking day now. Okay, so are Lanny Davis and Doug Schoen, so maybe that’s a bad example. But you see what I mean, right?
There’s not much of a lesson to be learned from a bunch of low turn-out races in an odd year. But if you didn’t already know that running to the center in a state your party lost last time (I’m referring to McDonnell in VA) is smart and running to the far right in a swing district (NY-23) is dumb, this is more evidence.
There was a period under Bush where it became accepted wisdom that Bush had “won the center by moving to the right” (this is pretty close to a verbatim quote from Howard Fineman). I think that era is over.
Update. I am now putting all posts in the category “Good News For Conservatives”, btw.
Update update. Also consider this a late-night open thread.
I remember talking to voters in this district back in 1980, with Jack Germonde and R. W. Apple, at an old diner that only served coffee, donuts, and burgers. You could tell something was in the air. You could tell the Reagan revolution was coming. People were angry. Regular people, gritty people, blue-collar workers with plastic crucifixes on their dashboards.
U. ROCHESTER—In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.
Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.
The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and coauthor of the study.
It brings up a couple points:
Does the fact that this is happening so quickly make the theory of plate tectonics more believable to young earthers?
Thank God this wasn’t Kenya or they’d be looking for a birth certificate in there.
