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Chambliss looking strong in runoff results
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congratulations to Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who looks to be on his way to a second six-year term in the U.S. Senate. Democrat Jim Martin has made a good race of it, pushing Chambliss to a runoff in a state in which Republicans remain strong favorites statewide, but he had a lot of the obstacles in his path.
Six year from now, this kind of race might end differently. But apparently not this year.
Lauren McDonald, running as a Republican for Public Service Commission, also looks to be winning. If so, I think Georgians are really going to regret that one — with important decisions to be made on multi-billion-dollar nuclear plants, we’ll pay for it literally and figuratively. Replacing incumbent Angela Speirs, an honest, pro-consumer and yes, Republican public servant, with someone like McDonald is a serious step down in class.
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Things looking bad for Franken in Minn.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today’s Senate runoff between Jim Martin and Saxby Chambliss has drawn national attention in large part because of the possibility that a Martin victory would give Democrats 60 seats in the Senate, enough to close off filibusters.
However, Sen. Jim Martin would become that 60th vote only if Sen. Al Franken became the 59th. And that seems highly unlikely. Franken has fallen behind by more than 300 votes in the Minnesota Senate recount (although the Franken camp claims the real margin is less than 80), with less than 10 percent of the votes still to be recounted.
According to The Hill, Franken’s camp is even considering taking the fight to the floor of the Senate:
“Al Franken’s (D) campaign may ask the Democratic-led Senate to intervene on his behalf to allow some disqualified absentee ballots to be counted in his quest to unseat Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.).
Franken attorney Marc Elias made the case to reporters Monday that as many as 1,000 absentee ballots were improperly disqualified and that the Senate or the courts may need to step in to resolve the issue.
“No recount can be considered accurate or complete until all the ballots cast by lawful voters are counted,” Elias said of the recount that became necessary when only about 200 votes separated the two candidates on Nov. 4.
Minnesota’s Board of Canvassers ruled last Wednesday that it would not revisit the improperly disqualified ballots. The bipartisan board ruled unanimously that it did not have the authority to order that the ballots be reviewed and counted.
Elias said that of the 12,000 disqualified absentee ballots in the race, “as many as 1,000” ballots were improperly excluded, and should be counted. He added that the campaign would appeal to the Board of Canvassers, courts or the U.S. Senate to ensure those ballots are counted. Last week, Elias had indicated that the campaign would not directly appeal the board’s ruling.
The U.S. Constitution allows each congressional chamber to be the “Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.”
Taking it to the Senate would be a big mistake, and Senate Democrats ought to refuse to get involved if Franken dares to push things that far. Franken has the right and even the obligation to press Minnesota officials to count every legal ballot, but in the end the decision should be made in Minnesota, not by politicians in Washington.
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Bush regrets mistakes of others
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson (transcript here), President Bush was asked about his greatest regret:
BUSH: “I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
There’s a lot packed into that paragraph. First, note how neatly Bush absolves himself of any blame whatsoever. He regrets mistakes made by others, not any mistake that he himself might have made.
Second, he tries to extend the myth that the decision to invade Iraq was driven by concern that Iraq had WMD and that it might be given to terrorists. However, that was always just the excuse for invasion; it was never the reason.
In the words of the infamous Downing Street memo, written by a top British official after a visit to Washington in July 2002, long before most Americans were even aware a war was looming:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others saw Iraq as a piece of low-hanging, very ripe and oil-rich fruit, waiting to be plucked. They saw it as an Arab country that could be fairly quickly and profitably “Americanized” to serve as a permanent staging area for U.S. forces in the region and even as a pro-Israeli voice in the Arab world.
The claim that Iraq posed some danger to the United States — remember the dire talk of unmanned aerial vehicles supposedly capable of reaching our shores, the “mushroom cloud rising over an American city” — was manufactured to justify the picking of that fruit.
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Denying reality doesn’t change reality
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Through the early and middle parts of the political season, right up until the September collapse on Wall Street, the Republicans were still claiming that the economy was doing just fine, that all was well and that the rest of the country was just imagining a slowdown.
It was, as Phil Gramm put it, a mental recession. John McCain claimed the economy was fundamentally sound. Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss enlisted in the effort as well, claiming back in July that “We may not be in a recession. I don’t know what that term means.”
They were wrong, of course. Most Americans knew in their gut that something was wrong, and the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge that reality cost them a lot of credibility. Now, a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research has officially confirmed that the current recession actually began back in December 2007, just as a lot of folks suspected.
Of course, the Republicans are hardly alone in their belief that if we all just refused to acknowledge trouble, trouble would disappear. And at least they didn’t take it as far as authorities in Latvia.
RIGA, Latvia — Hammered by economic woe, this former Soviet republic recently took a novel step to contain the crisis. Its counterespionage agency busted an economist for being too downbeat.
“All I did was say what everyone knows,” says Dmitrijs Smirnovs, a 32-year-old university lecturer detained by Latvia’s Security Police. The force is responsible for hunting down spies, terrorists and other threats to this Baltic nation of 2.3 million people and 26 banks.
Now free after two days of questioning, Mr. Smirnovs hasn’t been charged. But he is still under investigation for bad-mouthing the stability of Latvia’s banks and the national currency, the lat. Investigators suspect him of spreading “untruthful information.” They’ve ordered him not to leave the country and seized his computer.
Finance is a highly touchy subject in Latvia, one that the state tries, with unusual zeal, to shield from loose tongues. It is a criminal offense here to spread “untrue data or information” about the country’s financial system. Undermining it is outlawed as subversion.
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Palin concludes Georgia sweep
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sarah Palin is reportedly drawing decent but not great crowds in her sweep through Georgia on behalf of Saxby Chambliss. The turnout is certainly a lot better than any other political figure this side of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could attract.
“The Saxby Chambliss signs are plentiful, but it’s clear even before you walk in that this is a Sarah Palin for President event, four years ahead of its time,” reports Jim Galloway from the Gwinnett Center.
The enthusiasm and turnout reflect Palin’s appeal to the party base and should be helpful to Chambliss in his re-election effort. But polls say that the same traits that endear Palin to the hard-core GOP are turnoffs to independents and moderates.
“Palin’s image, being the way it is for independents, puts her at a distinct disadvantage from a general election standpoint,” Tony Fabrizio, a veteran GOP strategist, told Politico. “But it wouldn’t be the first time the hard-core base ran off the cliff.”
I wonder: Does that candor put Fabrizio on Redstate’s “leper list?”
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