Shoot The Vote Counter

It looks like Norm Coleman's going down. Even though the Coleman campaign will continue to mount "legal challenges", it's pretty clear from tactics like whining about procedures that the whole effort is just an attempt to de-legitimize Al Franken's victory. We've seen this play before here in Washington State, where Chris Gregoire (D) won on the second recount and sustained that victory in court after Republican attempts to gin up "fraud". Apparently "recount procedures" are this years' "fraud".

It should be noted that these water-muddying tricks down't work. Al Franken is no idiot; if he wins by 49 votes, he knows he's going to need to reach out to Coleman or Barkley voters in some fashion in order to win reelection. Gregoire did just that with her "business climate" initatives. Rather than blindly cut taxes or deregulate, the now has a number of staff members whose job it is to help small businesses wade through regulatory barriers, especially during the business's startup period. She won the rematch with Rossi by more than 6%, proving "we wuz robbed" is not a winning campaign platform.

Mitch McConnell: Bully (but Only If Democrats Let Him Be One)

We're getting close to put up or shut time for Harry Reid. Mitch McConnell wants to stall the stimulus package for at least a week, which is all fine and dandy. The real question is whether or not McConnell will try to delay the bill using the Gingrich tactics from the Clinton health care plan

1. Find some tiny provision of the bill that is modestly objectionable.
2. Hold endless press conferences about how this particular provision, if passed, will show that Democrats want to take away your foot massager, destroy the American economy, and lead to the destruction of the institution of marriage.
3. Force Democrats to remove the provision, potentially having cascading effects elsewhere in the bill.
4. Return to step (1) and repeat.

Now, history does not repeat itself, it merely rhymes. There are three big reasons to think that Dems are in a stronger position than '93 and should treat McConnell's words as an empty threat,

• 57% of the country did not vote for Bill Clinton; while the evidence suggests that Clinton would have won a two-way race, many more voters had little or no attachment to Clinton as a President.
• While the headline unemployment figure is not terrible by historical standards, it's pretty clearly on a trajectory to get worse, which was not the case in
• McConnell just doesn't have plausible case to filibuster anything that's remotely popular.
  

In 1993, Democrats held 57 Senate seats, but that 57 included between seven and teen Southern Democrats who would today be significantly to the right of the Nelson/Bayh/Landrieu triumvirate of centrists. This bloc outnumbered the handful of Republican moderates (Chafee, Danforth, Durenberger, Kassebaum) that might be tempted to work with a Democratic President.

Today, however, even the most conservative Senate Democrats are unlikely to feel political pressure to show independence from the White House. Meanwhile, Arlen Specter and George Voinovich face reelection in 2010 in states that went for Obama by non-trivial margins, one of which (Pennsylvania) is now a fairly safe state for Democrats, while the other (Ohio) will be one of those hardest hit by the slowdown in the auto industry. Throw in Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and if the moderates decide that their electoral fate lies in playing nice with Barack Obama, these are just empty threats. Reid should just put money in the stimulus package for SUPERTRAINS and dare Specter to vote against the needs of his suburban Philadelphia constituents.

What Does Amy Klobuchar Have Against Buffy?

Ken Avidor and Pam Spaulding tip us off that Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) has requested a $500,000 earmark for "Minnesota Teen Challenge", an organization that distributes pamphlets urging teens to stay away from the Satanic influences of Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Korn. Getting kids to not listen to Korn is a fine thing to do, but it doesn't look like the organization is doing this out of enlightened cultural tastes. And even if they were, the meager hipster points you score by being anti-Korn are swamped by your losses from dissing on Buffy. And then when start dissing on gay people, well, I can't get behind that.

In any event, I'm willing to run on the assumption that Klobuchar herself isn't personally a fan of these retrograde cultural sentiments and will rescind the earmark when she figures out what these people are up to. If anybody lives in Minnesota or knows Klobuchar's people, please do your part to make this happen.

Your Republican National Committee Candidates, Ladies And Gentlemen

Two guys who think it's fun to be racist:

• Katon Dawson (was in a white-only country club for 11 years, until the media found out)
• Chip Saltsman (mailed everyone "Barack the Magic Negro")

Two black guys who lost statewide elections in 2006:

• Michael Steele (lost the Maryland Senate race)
• Ken Blackwell (lost the Ohio Governor race)

"two guys who just eliminated themselves from this race" for criticizing Chip Saltsman's decision to send out the "Barack the Magic Negro" CD, according to an RNC member:

• Mike Duncan
• Saul Anuzis

Bomb (Uninhabited Parts Of) Palestine (Instead Of Killing Hundreds)!

Ezra, who's written a bunch of sensible stuff on the Gaza bombings, says that people keep asking: "What would you have Israel do in response to non-lethal rocketry?" Hamas, after all, didn't kill a lot of Israelis with the rocket attacks that got the Israelis killing hundreds of people. All the casualty counts I've heard from Hamas rockets have been in the single digits, with most of that coming after Israel started bombing.

If I had to think of a proportional response, it'd probably be dropping a bunch of bombs on some relatively uninhabited part of Palestine where there aren't any people. This, of course, would be annoying and bad, just as the Hamas decision to shoot rockets at Israel that don't kill anyone is annoying and bad. But it wouldn't be as bad as killing hundreds of people.

Thinking you can destroy Hamas by bombing hundreds of people is like thinking you can destroy the Democratic Party by killing a bunch of Democrats. The political institution will live on, and attract popular sympathy because of its members' martyrdom.