The National Democrats have to get their act together - Now!

The time for improving the health care reform bill is over. The Democrats have to pass what they have spent all of last year squabbling over as the Republicans have sat on the side trying to destroy the bill (and President Obama) totally. Steve Benen describes the political imperatives now facing the national Democratic Party.

"President Obama is still the most popular political figure in Washington, and enjoys more support than either political party and either congressional delegation.

For Republicans, this creates a strong incentive to block any and all progress -- the more they can destroy American politics, the more the president appears ineffective. Undermining Obama's presidency improves their chances of winning additional power.

For Democrats, this should create the opposite incentive -- the more successful Obama is, the better off they'll be. The more they argue amongst themselves, or delay (or deliberately kill) key parts of the party's agenda, the more they drag Obama's support down.

Dems' success is inextricably tied to Obama's standing. As Ezra noted last week, this should point Democratic lawmakers in the right direction on health care, though the message isn't getting through.

If health-care reform dies, the media will try and explain the Democrats' failure. That means they'll spend a lot of time talking about what Obama has done wrong. If Democrats had simply refused to freak out and moved quickly to pass the Senate bill, there would be endless stories on what Obama did right, and how the Democrats finally passed this longtime priority.

Even putting aside all the moral arguments for passing this bill -- all the lives and homes it will save -- a crassly political calculation should have left Democrats rushing towards passage."

Right now it doesn't look like the federal government works any more. At the same time, the problems facing America - including the health care insurance crisis - are building up and in the great Neo-Hoover non-action and incompetence tradition of the Republican Bush administration are not being addressed.

The trouble is, the Democrats are an undisciplined and selfish lot who would rather squabble and run to give interviews to the media (to demonstrate how important each of the leakers is) than actually get any legislation accomplished. They are in their little Washington D.C. bubble where their status is determined by how many times they appear on the TV talk shows rather than what legislation they join the herd to vote for and pass.

Out here in the hinterlands the politicians really don't matter, but the legislation does. It's too late now to make any changes in the bill that is the only possible one to pass both houses - the Senate bill. So it's time.

Pass.The.Damned.Bill!

Health care, the Republican Party and the non-functional Senate

We are seeing groundbreaking Legislation finally drag through the Senate. Because of the nature of the Senate, it's far from an ideal bill, but considering how dysfunctional the Senate is, this is the best we'll get.

Lindsay Graham complained to NPR about how Nebraska was getting the federal government to cover the state portion of Medicaid while South Carolina was not. Somehow that seems unfair to Sen. Graham, but he could have worked his own deal by agreeing to vote for the bill and replace Sen. Nelson. Really, all Graham and the Republicans want to do is complain. The irrational aspects of the Senate bill are the responsibility of the Republicans.

That's because the Republicans have created the dysfunctional Senate using its small state bias (which magnifies the numbers of Republicans elected), its arcane rules, and the tradition of the filibuster.

The Republicans lost control of the Senate because they can't govern. Now they are making the Senate itself unworkable because they believe that short-sighted voters and the conservative media will blame the Democrats for the results of the Republican scorched earth policies and refusal to deal with the deep problems America currently faced. The Republican effort to Filibuster the defense appropriations bill in hopes they can delay passage of health care is unacceptable and irresponsible.

Consider what the Republicans have done to the Senate. They are demanding a 60 vote super majority in order to pass any significant legislation, and they are refusing to even present legislative actions to work with. The Republican Senators have abdicated their duty to the American nation in favor of somehow damaging the Democrats. The result it that the Senate now can only function by unanimous vote of all 60 Democrats. That's the reason for all the political deals to pass health care. With the requirement of a unanimous vote each Democratic Senator can block all Senate legislation unless he or she is effectively bought off.

The Republicans could stop this overnight. They just need a few Republican Senators to vote for the health care bill and replace the Democratic Senators who are holding up the Democratic Party. But the Republicans refuse to do anything for the American nation because they want to political advantage.

If the Democrats do not hang this action around the necks of the Republicans running for election in 2010 then they deserve to be voted out of office. Only the American people do not deserve the return of the Republican Party to Senate power.

In the meantime we get maybe half the health care bill that we could have if the Republicans had the interests of the American public in mind instead of the hope for return to power.

MA governor appoints Paul Kirk as interim Senator; GOP throws tantrum in media

The Massachusetts legislature passed a bill authorizing the governor to appoint an interim Senator to fill the seat which became vacant when Sen. Ted Kennedy died. The election to fill the seat permanently will still occur in the Spring of 2010. The GOP immediately brought suit saying that since the legislature did not declare that the interim appointment was an emergency appointment with a two-thirds vote, then the MA governor was required to wait 90 days to make the appointment.

State Court Judge Tom Connolly disagreed and threw out the GOP lawsuit as being without basis. This was Judge Connolly's argument:

Lawmakers passed a law this week giving Patrick the power to appoint an interim replacement for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy until a special election can be held Jan. 19. Laws usually take 90 days to go into effect, but Patrick signed an emergency letter which made it effective immediately.

In a court filing, Assistant Attorney General Peter Sacks countered that the Supreme Judicial Court in a 1975 ruling had made it clear that a governor does not need legislative approval to invoke an emergency. He also said that the judiciary does not have the constitutional authority to directly block a governor's executive appointment.

On Thursday, Secretary of State William F. Galvin, a Democrat, said the emergency letter is "very clearly available to the governor under the Constitution. I don't know how you suggest this is something novel. It's not."

Former Republican governor Mitt Romney used the emergency provision 14 times, Galvin added, including to increase the boating speed limit in Charlton and to change the office of town moderator in Milton.
[...]
"the Party [The GOP] does not cite any case law in support of its argument."

So the precedent is that the Governor has the power to declare the law an emergency on his own and previous governors have frequently used that power. There is no case law that establishes that the governor does NOT have the power to make the immediate appointment. If there were then the GOP would have cited it in their lawsuit.

It looks to me as though the GOP was bringing a frivolous lawsuit hoping to get it heard by a lawless conservative judge who does what he wants instead of what the law requires. Now that Judge Connolly has done what the law and precedent required, the GOP is going to complain loudly in the media for a while. They were just playing for more time to kill health care reform.

The F-22; an unaffordable useless jobs project for politicians

At last new production of the F-22 fighter has been ended by Congress. There are currently 187 F-22's in service at a total cost of $67 billion. This is for an aircraft that requires 34 hours of maintenance on the ground for every single hour in the air. More important, this is an aircraft that has never seen a single hour of combat time, even though America has been in constant war since 2003. The F-22 is a useless and overpriced political boondoggle.

The F-22 is an aircraft that is designed to fight no known enemy of America either now or in the foreseeable future. There is no justification for spending more money on such as expensive waste. In addition to its extremely high cost per plane, there is no possibility that any other nation will buy F-22's and lower America's average cost because the law specifically forbids selling the aircraft to foreign nations. It is too hard to predict who America's enemies will be in a decade, and we don't want to sell them our latest technology today. Besides, they don't need the F-22 either - unless America decides to attack them.

Think about what the cost to every American family and American non-defense-related business of the constant war that America's mostly Republican and entirely conservative leaders costing this country are forcing America to fight. Here's what President Eisenhower said in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

That's not to say that America should not be fighting against the al Qaeda, Taliban, or the narco-traffickers in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Afghanistan. We should. But the expensive gold-plated flying machine called the F-22 has no value in those conflicts, and the cost of the things means that there are fewer resources available to fight those real enemies.

Killing the budget item for purchasing more F-22's is one of the rare good moves to come out of the Senate Recently.That $1.75 billion that congress tried to spend for seven more unwanted F-22 jet fighters can now be applied to bring down the total cost of a decent health care system for this nation. That is just under one one-hundredth of the estimated annual cost of Obama's health care plan, for those "fiscal" (meaning bought by the health insurance industry) Blue Dog Democrats. I'm sure that if the corporate lobbyists could be kept away from the corporate whores who populate Congress (and especially the rich man's 100 member protection club called the Senate) another 50 or so such budget cuts would be easy to find.

The six "centrist" Senate Democrats are fools

There are six so-called "centrist" Democrats in the Senate gearing up to kill the health care reform. Mark Kleiman points to the exact same situation in 1993 when the "centrist" Democrats did kill the Clinton effort at health care reform.

In 1993, Democratic "centrists" on Capitol Hill helped defeat Hillarycare, believing that their power was unshakable and would be increased by teaching the new President a lesson about who was boss. The Gingrich Revolution was condign punishment for them, though what the rest of us did to deserve it I don't know.

For Gingrich and his allies, the health care debate wasn't really about health care: it was about destroying the power of a Democratic President.

It's not surprising that the Republicans have remembered that lesson, but it's disappointing that the "centrist" Democrats have forgotten it. This bill is make or break for the Democratic Party, and Harry Reid ought to enforce party discipline on the cloture vote. No on cloture should mean no subcommittee chair, no pork, and no money from the DSCC.

I don't think those Democratic Senators will wake up to the facts they are facing until it is too late. I sure hope that somehow Harry Reid and Barack Obama can get the seriousness of their situation over to them.

Al Franken presents his first Senatorial funny

Al Franken as the most junior Senator in the Senate got to ask Sonia Sotomayor the last question of the questioning phase of the hearings. The question was fun for everyone.



Since the conclusion of he hearings is going to be the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the only question that has been unanswered in the otherwise boring proceedings was how the Republicans would express their bile and then somehow orchestrate a switch to vote for Sotomayor's confirmation, the moment of lightness was exactly what the proceedings have needed.

Trust Al Franken to know that and provide what was needed.

J. P. Green discusses the fiction that Democrats must have 60 votes to pass universal health care with a public option

J. P. Green writes at The Democratic Strategist. In a recent excellent post he explodes the fiction that the Democrats must cater to the Republicans wielding the filibuster. A sample of his post, here is what it would take to apply a little discipline to the wayward Democratic Senators:

Despite all the hand-wringing to the contrary, political commentator Bill Press makes a well-stated argument that 60 Senate votes are more than enough for Democrats to get a progressive legislative agenda enacted. Writing in his syndicated column today, Press says:

For six months, we’ve heard nothing but complaining from Democrats: Our hands are tied, they insisted. We can’t deliver a public plan option for health care, or pass the Employee Free Choice Act, or repeal the Pentagon’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, or do anything else we promised to do if re-elected — because we don’t have 60 votes. We have to compromise with Republicans, instead.

That excuse was phony, of course. Senate rules require only 51 votes to pass legislation, not 60. Democrats should never have allowed Republicans to pretend otherwise.

Press believes the filibuster obstacle is overstated, particularly if the Dems can find the gonads to invoke a little party discipline:

As for those wayward senators like Nelson or Landrieu, there’s only one thing Democrats are lacking: discipline. This may be a whole new concept for Democrats, who are not used to marching in lockstep. But if Barack Obama and Harry Reid are willing to play hardball by withholding committee assignments, White House invitations, campaign contributions, and endorsements, they’ll be surprised how soon Democrats will get in line.

It's hard to argue with what Greene and Press wrote. But I have. I argued that the Democrats were playing nice this year before the epic health care battle that is now in the run up phase and which should peak this month for purposes of husbanding the strength until it was really needed. It's an inside-the-Senate thing.

For various reasons if this is true then the political reporters won't report it because it involves trying to infer the motivations of the Senate players, and inferring motives is not reporting. It is mind-reading. No actual player will go on record to provide something to report.

We'll soon see if I was right, sometime in the next few weeks. After that, J.P. Green will be completely correct. July is going to be interesting for political junkies.

The Republican Party of "No!"

The Republicans try to make noises like they are working for the American public and to advance their ideology, but they are now just the party of "No!" They demand that government, facing the greatest economic crisis in 70 years, do absolutely nothing.

Want proof? Here is how Brian Beutler describes the Republican Senate behavior after Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) let slip the Republican strategy:

In a 99-seat Senate, 40 votes isn't nearly enough to "get anything done." Not at all. It is rather the bare minimum necessary to make sure nothing gets done. And it explains why so many Republican senators will routinely vote against cloture on major Democratic agenda items. It's called a filibuster--and it isn't typically thought of as way to "get stuff done."

You'll seldom hear Republicans admit that this is their legislative strategy--even though it manifestly is their legislative strategy--but sometimes obvious and uncomfortable truths are hard to deny, and slip out accidentally. And it's an important truth.

This strategy is crucial to understanding the GOP's gambit in the Minnesota Senate race. When that issue is decided, the Senate will have 100 members, and if Franken is declared the winner (as is widely expected) the Republicans' 40 votes will no longer be enough on their own to mount a filibuster.

As destructive as the conservative Republicans have been in the last thirty years, they have been mostly removed from real power, but they still hang on to enough nationally to be very destructive. They are clearly trying to do as much destruction to America as they can before they are completely forced out.

Devastating criticism of Senate Minority Leader McConnell,

Who do you think said this about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from the state of Kentucky?

“Good God, he wants to run everybody,” ...

“Do you realize that under our dynamic leadership of our leader, we have gone from 55 and probably to 40 (Senate seats) in two election cycles, and if the tea leaves that I read are correct, we will wind up with about 36 after this election cycle.

So if leadership means anything, it means you don’t lose … approximately 19 seats in three election cycles with good leadership.”

This came from Senate McConnell's fellow Kentucky Senator and fellow Republican Jim Bunning.

You know the Republican Party is in a crisis when Republicans are sniping at their fellow Republicans to the media this way. That's especially true when the comment is as accurate as this one was.

One other leader of the current Republican Party should also take responsibility. That is Rush Limbaugh, the one clear and unequivocal leader the Republicans generally now acknowledge and to whom all the Republican Congressional leaders defer.

The Republicans are to pay a big price for refusing to support Obama's stimulus program.

Obama came into office with the expressed intent to work with the Republicans to get important legislation passed. The first real test of Republican cooperation in return to Obama's outreach was the stimulus package. So Obama and the Democrats crafted a bill that included much that was intended to get Republican Senators to vote for it.

As Steve Benen points out, Obama has not forgotten being stiffed by the Republicans after he and the Democratic Congressional leadership watered the stimulus bill down badly so that Republican Senators could vote for it and explain their vote to their constituencies at home. Instead of working with Obama, they then followed Limbaugh and provided zero Senate Republican votes for the stimulus bill.

They are going to pay for that. That's what the reconciliation plan is all about. The Republicans can still work with Obama and get some of what they want in Health care, and pass a universal healthcare bill within the next six months. If they don't cooperate, then the Democrats go the reconciliation route and pass an all-Democrat plan.

My bet is that the Republicans are so crazed that they will follow Rush Limbaugh instead of work for the good of the American people and work with Obama.

There is a reason why the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chair Senator John Cornyn has said he did not think that the Republicans were going to keep a 40 Senator minority in 2010. Their radical conservative base won't let them compromise conservative principles even if that is politically suicidal. The marginal Senators who are up for reelection have a choice, much as does Senator Arlen Spector. They can run to win the general election but lose the primary and never get there, or they can cater to their conservative base, get the nomination, and be defeated by the Democrats supported by the Independent voters.

In my example, Senator Spector's other choice is to turn Democrat and see if he can win the nomination there. If he could win that, he can probably win reelection in the general election, but the Republicans still lose the Senate seat.

Harry Reid is out of touch with reality

Harry Reid doesn't think Ted Stevens deserves to go to jail.

"My personal feeling, you guys, I don't know what good that [would do]... He was a real war hero too, you know. He's been punished enough."

That's because Reid and Stevens belong(ed) to the Senate, making them two of the most powerful men in America.

In America the rich and powerful do not generally go to prison. But for those in the lower classes:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

And who passes the laws that imprison so many Americans for so many crimes not similarly punished anywhere else in the world? The powerful men in America, that's who. The same ones who don't themselves go to prison very often even when convicted of crimes others would spend long prison terms for.

Consider, for comparison, Martha Stewart.

(...)the homemaking diva was sentenced to five months in prison and two years' probation Friday for lying to investigators about her sale of ImClone Systems stock in late 2001.

Federal Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum also ordered Stewart to serve five months of home confinement after her release and fined the lifestyle expert $30,000.

The sentence was the minimum the judge could impose under federal sentencing guidelines. The fine, while relatively small given Stewart's wealth, was the maximum allowed under federal rules.

Hours later, Peter Bacanovic, Stewart's former broker at Merrill Lynch, also was sentenced to five months in prison and two years' probation; he was fined $4,000.

Martha Stewart was rich enough so that her prison sentence made the news, (most cases don't) but since she was not a powerful Senator, she couldn't avoid the minimum sentence mandated by law. That law was passed by the House, the Senate, and signed by the President.

Oh, and Martha is not a veteran, either. Maybe she could have avoided prison time had she been a "war hero." If, of course, she had a Senator to speak up for her.

I used to defend Harry Reid as a man doing the bet he could in a difficult situation, but this statement and his refusal to act against his fellow Senator Joe Lieberman after Joe worked so hard, lied so much and attacked the Democratic Party in order to elect John McCain as President shows me who Harry Reid has become.

Reid is simply not going to push to investigate the corruption and idiocies out of Wall Street which have led to the current and worsening Recession because the wealthy Wall Street bankers are his friends. He'll sweep the failure of Hank Paulson's handling of TARP as he has handed out free money to his only Wall Street friends. Paulson is rich and powerful. And Reid represents the Democratic Party Senate culture.

Now I realize that the power of the Senate has gone to Reid's head and he has gone "Washington native." He is now reduced to representing his fellow Senators instead of the American people. It's time for Harry Reid to go.

On Panetta as CIA Director

TPM is all over the designation by the Obama transition team of Leon Panetta as CIA Director. It is surprising. He is NOT an intelligence professional. However, he is well known as a guy who gets things done, having been Bill Clinton's White House Chief of Staff after being a successful California congressman.

The choice came out of left field to almost everyone. Interestingly, the incoming Senate Intel Committee Chairwoman, Diane Feinstein, and the outgoing SSCI Chairman, Jay Rockefeller, both stated that they had not been informed of Panetta's selection. Feinstein has hinted that she might oppose Panetta for the CIA job. This failure to contact the current and prior chairs of the Senate Intel Committee has led to speculation that the Obama transition team made a uncharacteristic protocol error.

However, the Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, a less senior member of the committee, states that he WAS informed of the selection in advance. This strongly suggests that not informing Feinstein and Rockerfeller in advance was not a simple oversight. If not, then what could have motivated the transition team to skip a simple phone call?

Don't you just love inside politics?

A retired Intelligence professional took the time to write Josh Marshall an email that gave his opinion of what is going on. Josh published it here. His opinion is that Feinstein did not want the CIA Director to be someone who had his own wide network of independent power base of political supporters as Panetta clearly does. She would have a great deal of control over an intel professional who had risen to become CIA Director, but a lot less control over someone with broad outside support like Panetta. This would explain both the failure to call her and her sour comments on his designation as Obama's choice.

The emailer goes on to state that the big issue for the incoming CIA Director was going to be whether the CIA was focused on providing immediate tactical intelligence to the troops on the ground, or if it was going to be refocused to provide strategic intelligence to the President as the agency was originally designed to do. In the last decade and a half many agencies in the Intelligence Community have greatly expanded their ability to provide tactical intelligence, but the funds at CIA have been prioritized to support that effort, leaving strategic Intel for the President lacking.

There is also the issue that with General Jones as National Security Advisor and Blair as Director of National Intelligence, the entire Intelligence Community is being focused on the Military. He calls it "the [continuing] militarization of intelligence." Panetta will bring a civilian orientation in at the top.

I find the emailer's comments rather persuasive. The ex-White House Chief of Staff was certainly in a position to know what Intelligence the President needed and at the same time what he was getting. If that's the direction the CIA is to be reoriented towards, Panetta is an inspired choice. It doesn't appear that the CIA has yet fully broken the blinders of being totally focused on the USSR, and now America's problems are found in many other parts of the world.

The CIA has suffered a lot of blame for what the Bush administration has done, and its reputation is definitely down at this time. (While I don't think the CIA was blameless, an awful lot was the Bush administration blaming the CIA for Bush's failure to manage the government well.) Panetta's appointment, with his broad political base, should also help the agency to recover a lot of its reputation.

Still, the Panetta hearings in the Senate are going to be interesting.

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Addendum 11:04 am -- Just a thought.

Rockefeller is leaving the SSCI. Why is he upset about the proposed appointment of Panetta to the CIA? He's not losing any power.

My first reaction is that Rockefeller got the nickname of "Jello Jay" for so frequently caving to the right wing on important issues. What if Panetta surfaces evidence that Rockefeller was in the Administration's pocket and was directly responsible for encouraging, permitting or approving war crimes? With an intel professional with no outside-the-agency base of power as Director, Diane Feinstein could rather easily cover up such problems for Rockefeller. As the Senate Democrat's treatment of Joe Lieberman shows, the Senate Democrats do that a lot. She'll have a lot less such control over Panetta.

Or Panetta may just want to cut or redirect some of Rockefeller's pet programs, and again will be less subject to control.

With Panetta in that office it might just come out why Rockefeller so rarely supported Democratic positions when he was Chairman or Ranking Member. That has always been a puzzle.

Democrats reach majority of 58 seats in the Senate

Yesterday the Alaska recount gave the Senate seat to Democrat Mark Begich. The event is a not very pleasant birthday present to 85 year-old incumbent convicted felon Ted Stevens. From the New York Times:

With an estimated 2,500 votes still outstanding and other election certification steps still to take place, Mark Begich, the Democratic mayor of Anchorage, had taken a lead of 3,724 votes out of more than 315,000 cast, and he declared victory. [Snip]

Mr. Stevens did not immediately concede the race. He could request a recount, but he would have to pay for it if the current vote margins hold.

Mr. Begich’s victory will end the career of Mr. Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator ever and a pivotal figure in the history of his state after it initially appeared that he would triumph despite his criminal conviction just days before the election.

The defeat came on Mr. Stevens’s 85th birthday, at the end of a day in which he avoided expulsion from the ranks of Senate Republicans as his colleagues awaited the final results.

It seems likely that the Republican Senators saw the handwriting on the wall for the convicted felon Ted Stevens. This may be why they skipped the discussed vote in their caucus yesterday to expel Senator Stevens. It now becomes unnecessary, and the Republican Senators can avoid the bad publicity they would have had when they expelled him.

The win in Alaska by Begich also shuts off the potential opportunity for current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to reenter national politics by replacing Ted Stevens herself.

This is the second election in a row in which Democrats have made substantial gains in the Senate. While many of the elections have been close, those close elections haven't broken for the Republicans.

Minnesota is still a squeaker with incumbent Republican Coleman leading challenger Democratic Al Franken by roughly 205 votes out of 2.9 million votes cast. Since 205 vote difference out of 2.9 million cast is less than a half percent difference, the election goes to an automatic recount, so the Democrats are within a close shot of having a majority of 59 Senators in the Senate.

Clearly the Republican Party has taken another major hit in the Senate this year. Conservatism does not wear well over the long run.

Alaska Senate seat: Begish lead over Stevens grows to 1,022 votes in Friday vote count

Additional votes in Alaska were counted Friday, and the Anchorage Daily News reports that Begich's lead over incumbent felon Ted Stevens to 1022.

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is in grave danger of losing re-election after Mark Begich widened his lead to 1,022 votes Friday.

More than 90 percent of the votes are now counted, and Friday's count of absentee and questioned ballots could have been Stevens' best chance to make a comeback.

That's because it included all the ballots left from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, where Stevens has enjoyed his most unwavering support.

There are about 24,000 ballots left to be counted, coming from Anchorage, Southeast Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula. The state will tally them all Tuesday.

Dallas Massie, state Republican Party district chair from Wasilla, in the heart of the Mat-Su, said he thought Friday would be a day Stevens closed the gap. The senator, however, saw Begich's lead grow by more than 200 over the margin the challenger established on Wednesday, when post-Election Day counting of absentee, early and questioned ballots began.

This is very bad news for Ted Stevens.

We should get the final results late Tuesday, but right now the Alaska Senate seat held by Republican felon Ted Stevens appears to have shifted to teh Democratic Party.

Rachel Maddow presents the case against Joe Lieberman in the Democratic caucus

A number of Democratic Senators have recently said publicly that in the Democratic Senate caucus they think that Joe Lieberman should not be penalized for campaigning with the Republican candidate for President, John McCain and for harshly attacking Barack Obama. Rachel Maddow presents the case for why Lieberman should, at the very least, be removed as Chairman of the unique Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.




Maddow gets it exactly right. Lieberman has failed to use his committee to investigate the mishandling of Katrina as he promised during his reelection campaign. He prefers the policies and company of the Republicans who opposed Obama and who continue to oppose the Democratic party. In fact, Lieberman appears to prefer the Republican refusals to deal with the collapse of the American economy. It's also quite clear that if Lieberman remains in the Democratic caucus, he will not vote with the Democrats on high-profile issues.

Lieberman can be offered another committee. The one he is squatting on and not using is too valuable to waste on a man so unreliable and untrustworthy. Besides, inside the Democratic caucus or not, Joe Lieberman is not likely to be a reliable vote when he is really needed to break a filibuster by Republicans anyway.

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Addendum 5:14 pm

Senator Patrick Leahy has come out against Lieberman.

"Every Senator will have to vote the way he or she believes they should," Leahy said, in a reference to the upcoming vote on Lieberman's fate in the Dem caucus next week. "I'm one who does not feel that somebody should be rewarded with a major chairmanship after doing what he did."

"I felt some of the attacks that he was involved in against Senator Obama...went way beyond the pale," Leahy continued. "I thought they were not fair, I thought they were not legitimate, I thought they perpetuated some of these horrible myths that were being run about Senator Obama."

"I would feel that had I done something similar," Leahy concluded, "that I would not be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the next Congress."

Next, here's a statement from Bernie Sanders, Independent Senator who caucuses with the Democrats and will have a vote on whether Joe Lieberman keeps his committee chairmanship.

"To reward Senator Lieberman with a major committee chairmanship would be a slap in the face of millions of Americans who worked tirelessly for Barack Obama and who want to see real change in our country," Sanders in the statement sent our way by his office.

"Appointing someone to a major post who led the opposition to everything we are fighting for is not 'change we can believe in,'" Sanders continued. "I very much hope that Senator Lieberman stays in the Democratic caucus and is successful in regaining the confidence of those whom he has disappointed. This is not a time, however, in which he should be rewarded with a major committee chairmanship."

I especially agree with Bernie when he says that rewarding Lieberman for fighting against Obama's election was clearly not the way to bring change to the country. It's definitely not what I voted for.

Alaska: Begich now leads Ted Stevens by "814" votes - recount continues

According to Sean Quinn at Fivethirtyeight

"The Alaska Board of Elections has finally updated (pdf). With 17,728 votes counted since the previous update, Democrat Mark Begich has the lead over Republican Ted Stevens, 132,196 to 131,382."

Since the remaining votes to be counted come from counties which lean towards Begich, it looks very probable that Democrat Mark Begich is going to be the new Senator from Alaska.

If Begich becomes Senator for Alaska, this forecloses the possibility that Sarah Palin might run for Ted Stevens's seat when he resigns because of his felony conviction. For Palin this news represents another door closing.

Since the recount in Minnesoata appears to be going for Democrat Al Franken, that means it is very likely that the Democrats together with Joe Lieberman are going to have 59 votes in the the Democratic caucus in the Senate in the 111th Congress. That means that the December 2 run-off between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democratic challenger Jim Martin is becoming a national race for a Senate with a filibuster-proof Democratic majority.

As I wrote earlier, the November 4th election is not yet over.

Alaska: Begich leads Ted Stevens by "3" votes - recount continues

This is great news. From the Ancorage Daily News

The elections division still has over 10,000 ballots left to count today and thousands more through next week, but the latest numbers show Mark Begich leading Sen. Ted Stevens 125,019 to 125,016.

The new numbers, reflecting nearly 43,000 absentee ballots counted today, are from all over the state. Election night, Ted Stevens led the Democratic Begich by about 3,000 votes.

[ h/t to TPM ]

The Senate is still in play

Well, well. MSNBC thinks that there is still a possibility that the Democrats can make it to 60 votes in the Senate. So does Josh Marshall at TPM. Here's how.

The Democrats now have 57 Senators if we include the turncoat Joe Lieberman. There are three Senate raced that have yet to be determined. Those are Alaska's Republican convicted felon Ted Stevens vs. Democrat Mark Begich, Minnesota's Republican (accused in court of being paid off under the table) Norm Coleman vs. Democrat Al Franken, and the race between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and the Democratic candidate former state Rep. Jim Martin.

Alaska

In Alaska Stevens currently leads Begich by 3,400 votes but there are 55,000 absentee and provisional votes not yet counted. That count is expected to take about a week. Alaska's vote turnout is also surprisingly low while the results are very different from what the polls predicted, leading to questions of possible severe vote irregularities. This election's not over. Alaska's only Congressman, Don Young, who is under investigation by the FBI for corruption, was also surprisingly reelected. The results of the Alaska election are not in yet. Nate Silver provides an argument for why the recounts might break for Begich.

Minnesota

The most interesting race remains the one in Minnesota between Coleman and Franken. At last count Coleman led by a scant 326 votes. Because it is so close there will be a recount. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune notes that there are at least 25,000 ballots in which voters voted for President but not Senate. These are called "undervotes."[*] These undervotes could be a result of "over votes"[**] in which the optical scanners thought that the voter marked more than one candidate for Senator. In that case the optical scanning machine reading the ballot will simply not count any vote in that race. But the recount will be manual, and the counters will be looking for a clear indication of who the voter intended to vote for. What is especially bad for Norm Coleman is that most of the ballots with votes for President and no Senate are in counties which are primarily Democratic. It is highly likely that Al Franken will come out of a recount as the winner.

Coleman knows the danger and has already gone to court to stop the recount. The court has thrown out his law suit.

Georgia

The incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss has won his reelection race, but because of the votes taken by Libertarian Allen Buckley Chamblis did not win the required 50% of the vote that would prevent a run-off election. The Atalanta Journal-Constitution has the details. The run-off will be Dec. 2. The common wisdom is that the run-off will not bring out the number of voters who voted in the Presidential election, and that Martin came as close to beating Chambliss because of African-American voters who voted a straight Democratic ticket to elect Barack Obama. The result is that the Chambliss voters will return in larger percentages to vote for Chambliss than the Democratic voters. The Democrats, in this view, were voting for Obama, not Martin.

However, if the run-off is seen as the race that makes the difference for the Democrats to get a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate, then the national Democratic party may pull out all the stops, to include having Barack Obama campaign for Jim martin. That would also cause the national Republicans, still licking their wounds from November 4, to drop into the run-off with both feet, if only for pride.

How likely that is will depend on the outcomes in Alaska and Minnesota. It is also going to be weighing heavily on Harry Reid's mind as he and the Democratic Senate Caucus determine what to do about Joe Lieberman.

In short, the November 4th election isn't over yet nationally. The fun continues.

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[*]An "undervote" is a case where the ballot has a vote for President but no vote for Senator. Since both appear at the top of the ballot it is considered unlikely that a high percentage of voters in one location will vote for President but skip Senator, so it is a strong indicator that there was an error recording the vote. Vote fraud is possible.

[**] An "overvote" is a term used with an optically scanned ballot when the scanner thinks it reads marks alongside more than one candidate in a particular race. When that happens the scanner does not record any vote in that race. Frequently it means the voter intended to vote for one candidate but accidentally placed a mark of some kind in a second block. The voter's intent is normally very clear visually in case of a recount.

Reid to Lieberman - you won't keep the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

Harry Reid has reportedly told Joe Lieberman that he will not be allowed to keep the Chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He can have another committee, but not that one.

Senator Lieberman has replied through aides that if he cannot keep that committee he will switch to join the Republican caucus. Unfortunately for Joe, Ryan Grim of Politico writes:

A Republican Senate aide said Friday morning that there was little McConnell could offer in terms of high-ranking committee slots, which is why Lieberman is resisting overtures from the Republican side.

Steve Benen wonders why Lieberman is so dead set that he has to keep the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, then offers a likely explanation.

This seems to be routinely overlooked, but take a moment to consider what the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs actually does: it's the committee principally responsible for oversight of the executive branch. It's an accountability committee, charged with investigating the conduct of the White House and the president's administration.

As chairman of this committee for the last two years, Lieberman decided not to pursue any accusations of wrongdoing against the Bush administration. Lieberman's House counterpart -- Rep. Henry Waxman's Oversight Committee -- was a vigilant watchdog, holding hearings, issuing subpoenas, and launching multiple investigations. Lieberman preferred to let his committee do no real work at all. It was arguably the most pathetic display of this Congress.

And yet, now Lieberman acts as if keeping this chairmanship is the single most important part of his public life. Why would he be so desperate to keep the gavel of a committee he hasn't used? I'll let you in on a secret: he wants to start using the power of this committee against Obama.

Lieberman didn't want to hold Bush accountable, but he seems exceedingly anxious to keep the committee that would go after Obama with a vengeance, effectively becoming a Waxman-like figure -- holding hearings, issuing subpoenas, and launching investigations against the Democratic president.

That would fit with his recent attacks on Obama and his support for McCain.

My advice to the Senate Democrats - It's good riddance to bad rubbish. No one can trust Joe Lieberman, and leaving him on a powerful committee is stupid.

Besides, Hillary Clinton doesn't have a committee Chairmanship. She might like that one.

It's a good Democratic night!

With Ohio going for Obama, if the remaining states who went for Kerry go for Obama he has the Presidency in a walk-away. Pennsylvania has also been projected for Obama, and the numbers look grim for McCain in Florida. Florida's voting problems are probably the reason why it has not already been called for Obama.

It's the Senate races that now become interesting. Sadly, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky appears to have won reelection, but he was not a likely loss.

The Democrats have gained five Senate seats.

• Mark Udall has won the senate race in Colorado.
• Tom Udall has won the senate race in New Mexico.
• Jeanne Shaheen has won the Senate race in New Hampshire against John Sununu.
• Hagan has won the North Carolina Senate Race over Elizabeth Dole.
• Mark Warner has just one the senate race in Virginia.

The one weak Democratic Senate Race is Mary L. Landrieu in Louisiana. She is reported to be ahead by 1%.

So as of right now the Senate has jumped from 50 - 50 to 55 Democratic and 45 Republican, with many weak Republican Senate seats still to be determined. There will also be a Democratic Vice President in case of Senate ties.

In five minutes California polls close and they kick Obama to 275 of the 270 required electoral votes for President.

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Addendum November 6, 2008 6:50 am CDT
The Oregonian has projected that Democrat Jeff Merkley has defeated Republican incumbent Senator Gordon Smith. (From TMP Election Central.)

That makes the gain six Democratic Senators.