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Saturday, January 3, 2009
The vote counting almost done in Minnesota
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It looks like U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn. They’re in the process of counting the last thousand or so absentees right now, and Franken has added more than 130 votes to his 49-vote margin. Incumbent Norm Coleman will still try to fight this out in court, but the vote total is in Franken’s favor and there doesn’t seem to be any real grounds for overturning that result.
So the Senate will be 59 D, 41 R.
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Illinois politics - the gift that keeps on giving
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ta-nehisi Coates at The Atlantic links to a couple of folks making damn fine points about the highly bogus U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush and Roland Burris. They’re the duo — assisted by Gov. Rod Blagojevich — playing the race card in their attempt to get Burris the Illinois Senate seat.
Says one:
“Blagojevich has virtually no capital to spare and Rush won’t win any points even if he did manage to cram Burris into Obama’s seat. And his explicit appeal: ‘There are no African Americans in the Senate’ is possibly the most politically tone-deaf moment since, well, last week or so. That argument might’ve carried (limited) weight on November 3rd. At this point the logical rejoinder is ‘And there are no white people in the Oval Office.’”
The second blogger points out that in 2004, Rush chaired the campaign of Blair Hull, a white millionaire who spent $30 million running against two black candidates for the very Senate seat now at stake. One of those candidates was Joyce Washington, the second was some guy named Barack Obama. Hull lost that primary race, which raises a question:
“Rush went so far as to compare Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who in 1963 stood in the doorway of a University of Alabama school building to block two black students from entering. Reid and Senate Democrats pledged to refuse any appointee sent by Blagojevich, even Burris, who would be the chamber’s only black member…. If sending a black senator to Washington is so important now, why didn’t Rush support a black candidate four years ago?
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