[luke warm]

akhare, on Nov 8 2006, 11:47 AM, said:

hrothgar, on Nov 8 2006, 08:31 AM, said:

This isn't the victory that I dreamed of.  Lieberman winning re-election really soured the night for me.  More significant, I'm have mixed feelings whether a pro-life, anti-gay rights "Democrat" is really all that much of an improvement over a moderate Republican.

I concur -- Lieberman was a dampner for me as was Ford's loss. I agree w/ you on principle regarding social issues but I think that the Dems took a practical stance. For instance, it would have been almost impossible to unseat Santorum (good riddance) without assuming a conservative stance on those issues.

Now, as long as they don't enact any legislation based on those obnoxious personal views, I couldn't care less what they say they believe...

i found liberman to be a statesman of the old school, and would have gladly voted for him if he'd won the dem nomination in '04... as for the rest of richard's quote, i'd have to know what he means by "anti-gay rights"... as for the pro-life part, isn't the democrat tent large enough to hold those who don't march in lockstep? or is it just that pro life dems are accepted into the party, but not in an elected position?

[hrothgar]

luke warm, on Nov 8 2006, 09:57 PM, said:

I found liberman to be a statesman of the old school, and would have gladly voted for him if he'd won the dem nomination in '04... as for the rest of richard's quote, i'd have to know what he means by "anti-gay rights"...

I consider Harold Ford's position on equal rights for homosexuals reprehensible. Here's a direct quote from Ford:

"I do not support the decision today reached by the New Jersey Supreme Court regarding gay marriage. I oppose gay marriage, and have voted twice in Congress to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. This November there's a referendum on the Tennessee ballot to ban same-sex marriage - I am voting for it."

Note that Ford is attacking the New Jersey court decision. The New Jersey supreme court did not rule that the state must allow gay marriage, rather the core of its ruling was that homosexuals must be granted the same set of rights as anyone else.

Hard to read this as anything other than opposing gay rights... Of course, Ford's position is positively enlightened compared to some of the anti-gay ballot initiatives that passed yesterday.

[hrothgar]

hrothgar, on Nov 8 2006, 04:31 PM, said:

keylime, on Nov 8 2006, 05:49 AM, said:

Mike, where's that blue wave they were hyping up in the media?

All I see is a very calm ripple instead. 

What would look like a wave to you?

The Democratic Party has taken control of the House. The have picked up a minimum of four seats in the Senate. The last two seats are too close to call, however, there is a very real chance that the Republicans are going to lose in both Virginia and Montana. (As of 2:00 AM, Allen was down by 8,000 seats in Virginia. Tester is ahead by 2,000 votes in Montana)

Looks like the Democratic Party has taken the Senate as well...

A "calm ripple" indeed...

[keylime]

Blue wave no; blue tsunami, potentially yes.

[mike777]

1) I agree I hated using those new voting machines last night. I heard many comments from older people who did not like them and missed the receipts.
2) Some of the above posted comments that seem to say you want to win just for the power? You want Casey to run as prolife but then vote the opposite?
3) I see Rummy is out today?

[hrothgar]

mike777, on Nov 9 2006, 12:45 AM, said:

>2) Some of the above posted comments that seem to say you want to win just for the >power? You want Casey to run as prolife but then vote the opposite?

I'm very happy that "Man on Dog" lost his Senate race. However, I regret that the Democrats weren't able to win with a pro-choice candidate. For what its worth, Casey has stated that he is personally anti-choice. However, no one seems to know exactly what this means in terms of voting.

>3) I see Rummy is out today?

Yeap. And Bush is on the record as saying that he lies when he's talking to the press.

[akhare]

mike777, on Nov 8 2006, 04:45 PM, said:

2) Some of the above posted comments that seem to say you want to win just for the power? You want Casey to run as prolife but then vote the opposite?

Actually, it slightly more subtle than that. Casey / Ford can vote which ever way they want, but it's probably a safe bet that adominable issues like the constitutional amendment won't be on the agenda in the first place as long as the Dems are in power.

As I see it, if keeping the wolves at bay involves dressing some of your own in wolves' clothing, so be it, as long as you don't eat your own.

[mike777]

looks like Webb is up by 7,000 votes. This may be a long fight

[keylime]

Rummy's gone...and a fine American tossed under the bus.

[hrothgar]

pclayton, on Nov 8 2006, 07:25 PM, said:

I guess this means we won't be running any more threads on voting machine malfunctions?

My understanding is that the electronic voting machines performed quite poorly. There we're all sorts of problems documented across the US. I sincerely hope that we spend the next couple years working to get some decent machinery in place. Equally significant, I think that we need much a much more uniform system to avoid voter suppression.

I've been following the discussions about electronic voting machines pretty carefully. Here's a brief discussion of the best sounding electronic voting system.

End users cast votes using an electronic voting machine. These machines generate a paper ballot.

End users are able to verify that the paper ballot accurately reflects their voting prefer. The paper ballot is feed into an electronic scanner that records the vote.

The advantage of this type of system is that is is much easier to verify what's going on. End users are able to double-check that the voting machine generated the right ballot.

The electronic scanner is a very simple machine. Its relatively easy to validate all of the code. Furthermore, individual voting machines can be tested by feeding them a 10,000 ballots and ensuring that they are recording votes properly.

The paper ballots can saved in case a manual recount is necessary.

[cherdano]

hrothgar, on Nov 8 2006, 03:31 PM, said:

keylime, on Nov 8 2006, 05:49 AM, said:

Mike, where's that blue wave they were hyping up in the media?

All I see is a very calm ripple instead. 

What would look like a wave to you?

The Democratic Party has taken control of the House. The have picked up a minimum of four seats in the Senate. The last two seats are too close to call, however, there is a very real chance that the Republicans are going to lose in both Virginia and Montana. (As of 2:00 AM, Allen was down by 8,000 seats in Virginia. Tester is ahead by 2,000 votes in Montana)

This isn't the victory that I dreamed of. Lieberman winning re-election really soured the night for me. More significant, I'm have mixed feelings whether a pro-life, anti-gay rights "Democrat" is really all that much of an improvement over a moderate Republican. From what I can tell, this election boiled down to over-sight on the White House rather than any real political realignment. However, I consider that over-sight absolutely essential. Also, capturing the Governorship in Ohio is going to be very significant for the 2008 election cycle.

Finally, I hope that the extremely poor showing by the electronic voting machines demonstrates that a we need to invest some significant resources in overhauling this part of our electoral system.

It is certainly a blue wave, but is it a victory? If it is a victory, a victory for what (as opposed to a victory for whom)?

In a political climate where
- McCain is considered a moderate,
- liberals have to hope Harold Ford wins a senate seat,
- "liberals" can be used as a pejorative term, but there is no similar term for conservatives, despite 6 years of the country being run by a bunch of ideologically guided Neocons whose perception of reality has been remarkably decoupled from reality several times,
- pretty much any leading Democrat is careful not to out himself as supporting gay rights too much,
- the GOP is still confident (probably correctly so) that adding an anti-gay marriage referendum to a ballot will increase the turnout in their favor,
- Democrats can't stand up against going to a misguided war in the first place, can only do hindsight-criticism of the way a war was handled,
- an outraging law circumventing the Geneva convention is called a "compromise", because "moderates" stood up against it, only because the president started with an even more radical position,
- etc.,
I sort of agree with keylime: this seems more like an exchange of red vs blue than a reversal of the process in the last decade or so of America becoming more conservative.

[mike777]

Defining or trying to define liberal or conservative can be fun.

For those from other countries please keep in mind how much the 30 year ongoing abortion debate here in the USA really moves people on both sides or maybe I should say the many many sides of this discussion.

For the the latest google the Kansas doctor who is under investigation. There are so many issues involved and passions such as privacy rights, medical rights, parental rights, women rights issues, rape issues, and many many more.


As for the War, what war are we talking about, how are we defining victory and do we want to win Geez do not forget many think there is no war out there..it is just about Bush trying to get himself rich and his oil buddies?

[cherdano]

mike777, on Nov 9 2006, 12:54 AM, said:

As for the War, what war are we talking about, how are we defining victory and do we want to win Geez do not forget many think there is no war out there..it is just about Bush trying to get himself rich and his oil buddies?

It seems everybody thinks there is a war. Group 1 thinks there is a war on terror. Group 2 thinks there is civil war in Iraq.

[hrothgar]

cherdano, on Nov 9 2006, 01:37 AM, said:

It is certainly a blue wave, but is it a victory? If it is a victory, a victory for what (as opposed to a victory for whom)?

In a political climate where
- McCain is considered a moderate,
- liberals have to hope Harold Ford wins a senate seat,
- "liberals" can be used as a pejorative term, but there is no similar term for conservatives, despite 6 years of the country being run by a bunch of ideologically guided Neocons whose perception of reality has been remarkably decoupled from reality several times,
- pretty much any leading Democrat is careful not to out himself as supporting gay rights too much,
- the GOP is still confident (probably correctly so) that adding an anti-gay marriage referendum to a ballot will increase the turnout in their favor,
- Democrats can't stand up against going to a misguided war in the first place, can only do hindsight-criticism of the way a war was handled,
- an outraging law circumventing the Geneva convention is called a "compromise", because "moderates" stood up against it, only because the president started with an even more radical position,
- etc.,
I sort of agree with keylime: this seems more like an exchange of red vs blue than a reversal of the process in the last decade or so of America becoming more conservative.

There's a lot of debate going on within the Democratic party about what this election actually means.

The DLC and Rahm Emanuel are claiming that the Democratic Party won because the Democrats ran relatively centrist / conservative candidates.

The left wing of the party is point to the fact that there doesn't seem to be a correlation between policy positionss and winning seats. Many of Emanuel's conservative superstars lost their elections. Many of the more liberal/progressive candidates who were winning scored quite unexpected victories. There's a very good debate going on at the New Republic. (Registration required) http://www.tnr.com/d...perlstein110806

In particular, there is some very interesting discussion regarding whether the GOP has over played Nixon's "Southern Strategy". The GOP has been destroyed in New England and was just butchered in the Midwest. Much of the far West is also gone. The base of the GOP - its most reactionary and conservative members - are still there, but they're no longer tempered by any moderates. Some folks are arguing that the GOP has just been reduced to a regional party...

Personally, I think that this election boiled down to a question of competance. I think that candidates that were able to articulate strong, principled, internally consistent positions did well regardless of whether they were liberals or conservatives, which gives me some faint hope.

[keylime]

Richard,

You hit the nail on the head - the GOP in the Northeast is a shell in the best of cases, and in the Midwest got hammered.

I'd be interested to see the red vs. blue nation map on the voting.

[Winstonm]

keylime, on Nov 8 2006, 05:10 PM, said:

Rummy's gone...and a fine American tossed under the bus.

The choice in this election was between honest crooks and low-down thieves and the only change in Washington will be in the direction of the spin. But at least for a night, we all get to feel like it actually mattered.

Rumsfeld had best stay away from Germany - I understand an independent group is bringing war crime charges against him there.

[mike777]

Germany has its hands full with all the very young women who are sold into marriage and slavery there from around the world. Germany so far chooses to only take on a very few high profile cases and ingores thousands and thousands of young women in bondage. Not that Germany is the only country this happens in.

[akhare]

keylime, on Nov 8 2006, 05:10 PM, said:

Rummy's gone...and a fine American tossed under the bus.

Yes indeed -- a fine American who not too long ago shook hands with the very tyrant whose execution is now being hailed:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15590729/site/...week/?nav=slate

But what about the Americans—the Republicans, in fact—who helped Saddam remain in power all those years and then, changing their minds when the monster proved beyond their control, launched the ill planned and shamefully executed war to eliminate him that continues to this day? The dictator killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, it is true. According to the most recent study by the British journal The Lancet hundreds of thousands more have died from combat, terror, crime and pestilence since the Bush administration brought him down.

It's hard to imagine a more striking example of two wrongs making for a worse—horribly worse—outcome. Is there a moral equivalency? Actually, there is. The Republicans asked to be judged for their intentions. They wanted … what was it they wanted to do? Find weapons of mass destruction? Stop terrorism? Assure oil supplies? Ah, yes. They said when they launched the war that petroleum played no part in their judgment. “Nonsense,” was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive retort.

[hrothgar]

pclayton, on Nov 8 2006, 07:25 PM, said:

I guess this means we won't be running any more threads on voting machine malfunctions?

Actually, things might be getting VERY interesting down in FLorida

http://www.tpmmuckra...ives/001972.php

[Gerben42]

7,000 votes is an enormous amount, if the correct number of votes for a party changes more than about 50 you should already seriously consider disallowing people who cannot count from counting. I mean it.

On a total number of votes of say 5,000,000 an "error" of 50 votes is UNACCEPTABLE. An error of 1,000 or more is fraud.