The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.
Chinese proverb
Quiz of the Day
How do I feel about the GOP winning control of the House last night? Guess and then click here to see if you're right...
Spelling Mistakes
Well, I didn't realize I kept misspelling Christine O'Donnell's surname. I went back today and corrected about 18 posts... I guess it was a spoonerism involving the Virginia governor's surname. Maybe someone created a college drinking game on how often I would misspell it... I once said that Christine was a kissable, attractive woman, but I didn't have a shot. Misspelling her name probably left me with a negative shot...
My Address to the Voters in the States of New York and California
You got your knee-jerk progressive Democratic governors and US senators; now listen to me, because I'm speaking for the voters from the other 48 states. You have tax-and-spent your way to an unsustainable level to the point that business and high-worth individuals are fleeing your states in droves, serving your public union cronies with compensation/pension packages that dwarf those whom are forced to pay for it. ENOUGH! As far as I'm concerned, the state and local governments of your state should NOT receive one more drop from the federal teat; it's time for you to face your day of reckoning, and the rest of the nation should not enable your addiction to overtaxing, overspending, and overpromising what you can deliver. Not a person in any state, local, or federal government should receive a public pension higher than social security itself, as far as I'm concerned; you should defer pensions until retirement, except in the case of job-related disabilities impeding gainful employment, and government employees should be ineligible for pensions. Now what I'm saying is common sense.
Second, it's time to abolish tenure for public sector employees--across the board. Why are we giving guarantees to government workers that private-sector employees don't have? It's morally indefensible that public sector employees are "more equal than" private sector employees. Especially since higher taxes are a deterrent to the business growth you need to support the government...
You need to establish pro-growth policies (including business and personal income tax cuts) and enact policies to slash public compensation and pensions across the board; if state courts balk, amend the state constitutions or file for bankruptcy and force the courts to shed its union obligations. I'm seriously tired of gutless politicians failing to man up and confront the problems head on.
Just an aside: even when I've been between assignments, I've routinely rejected opportunities from California and New York; it's gotten to the point I'm routinely trashing related emails without reading them. I'm not interested in aiding and abetting unaffordable, un-American, dysfunctional local and state governments. It doesn't even matter what the businesses would pay for my services; it's a matter of principle. Am I making myself clear?
Bill O'Reilly Loses Credibility as an Analyst--Again
On tonight's O'Reilly Factor, Populist-in-Chief O'Reilly pooh-poohed ABC morning anchor George Stephanopoulos' CORRECT observation that after the defeats of Tea Party Express-backed Ken Buck, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, and Joe Miller that mainstream Republican candidates would have easily defeated (or did defeat, in the case of Miller). Let's be very clear: all 3 of these seats were winnable by the challengers. (I'm not including the last race because it was effectively an open runoff with 2 lead GOP candidates.)
Bill O'Reilly, showing his usual due diligence, totally ignored dozens of relevant polls which CONSISTENTLY showed the primary mainstream competitors to all the vulnerable winners beating them. That ALONE discredits his analysis on substantive grounds (although George failed to respond). He brushes that aside, pointing out the counterexamples of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. To quote the great McEnroe: "You CANNOT be serious!" First of all, take Rand Paul. Rand Paul was a much weaker candidate than his primary competitor against Conway, and he primarily benefited by a very bad ad from Conway that backfired on Conway and probably cost him the seat. I personally thought Rand Paul had all but thrown the race with incompetent blunders, like quibbling with the theoretical underpinnings of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and refusing to shake Conway's hand at the end of a debate; just look at the implications of bad manners, like when Gore contemptuously signed at Bush during the debates and was physically aggressive at points; the same sort of thing probably cost Lazio in Hillary Clinton's first race for the Senate from New York.
In the case of Marco Rubio, first of all, there was a case where Charlie Crist handled things much differently than Lisa Murkowski. He was an outlier among Republicans on the stimulus bill, and he should have cut his losses early a year ago by saying that he believed in a certain amount of stimulus, but not in the size of spending, which would have been more consistent with his fiscal conservatism. Instead, he continued to defend an untenable point of view that even I as an early supporter couldn't defend. Second, he tried to triangulate between his supporters, independents, moderates, and Democrats, vetoed a teacher reform bill and then started flirting with Obama and hinting he would sit with the Democratic caucus. These were unbelievably boneheaded moves. Obama's standing with moderates and independents were already sinking with the health bill debacle. These independents and moderates unhappy with the Dems and the President and any Republican willing to back him but horrified at the idea of Crist in an alliance with Obama backed away. Also, Marco Rubio was far more articulate than the rest of the Tea Party Express-backed candidates put together; he expressed conventional conservative viewpoints and was a well-vetted veteran lawmaker like Sharron Angle but without her iconoclastic reputation. I think Crist overestimated how his popularity would carry him in an independent campaign. If I had been in Crist's place and saw that Rubio's lead was holding steady, I probably would have simply dropped out of the Senate race and refiled for governor, biding his time for the next Senate seat.
But another thing was Rubio faced a very weak Democratic challenger (Congressman Meek), whom was running upstream as a progressive in a purple state in a challenging environment. If Crist had run like Murkowski as an independent Republican and/or if there was a conservative or moderate Democrat running, Rubio probably would have lost.
"Snarky Sarah" Palin Comments on Mike Castle
I'm going to have to go back to 350-lb. bench presses (I inherited a barrel chest) to blow off some steam after hearing the consistently incompetent, unqualified Fox News contributor Sarah "I Quit" Palin, whom tweets because 140-word limits are more than enough for anything she has to contribute. I was watching FNC coverage last night when contributor Sarah Palin, asked to comment about progressive Chris Coons' drubbing of Christine O'Donnell, claimed that Coons would have beat Castle, too.
This item was originally going to be part of a miscellany notes list below, but then Palin repeated the same garbage on Hannity tonight, citing "polls". There is only one "poll" that I am aware of, and I discussed this in the Political Potpourri discussion of my September 30 post: Rasmussen had posted something to the effect that Castle would draw nothing more than 5% of the vote as a write-in candidate. That is utterly preposterous, given the fact that even with money and volunteers pouring in from out of state, O'Donnell barely beat Castle.
Urquhart, Castle's GOP successor to the at-large Congressional seat that Castle won, won a couple of thousand votes more than O'Donnell. Consider the fact that Lisa Murkowski had only won one Senate election (2004) for the seat and had her fair share of political enemies--and yet she could gain about 40% of the votes in a 3-way race. Now Alaska is a more conservative state than Delaware so you can't necessarily compare from that, but Castle's decades of statewide victories as governor and Congressman gave him an unbeatable recognition factor versus his more obscure, inexperienced challengers.
The INDISPUTABLE fact is that in EVERY poll before the primary, Castle beat Chris Coons by double-digits. In only ONE dated poll out of 9 before the primary did O'Donnell beat Coons--a Rasmussen poll and even that lead was within the margin of error.
I did a Google search, and the only reference of the "polls" Sarah Palin specified was the dubious poll which argued that Castle would get less than half the difference of his lowest lead over Coons in prior polls. Talk about the freaking emperor wearing no clothes. It was frankly absurd and likely reflected very bad methodology, and any reasonable statistician knows any poll has to be independently confirmed. Scott Rasmussen should be ashamed of himself; I'm sure, after Murkowski's success, he must be rethinking that poll he released. Was Scott intentionally trying to undermine a prospective Castle write-in campaign? All I can offer is my personal opinion. But what Sarah Palin knows about numbers and polls probably comes from all those newspapers and magazines she couldn't list in the Katie Couric interview.
However, look at what happened to Scozzafava in the NY-23 election last year; for a number of polls, she was the leading candidate--and then her campaign collapsed. Again, as in the case of Crist, her campaign mismanaged the insurgent candidacy. The point is, when O'Donnell's campaign collapsed under the media attacks, Castle would have immediately stood to gain--permanently. There is no doubt in my mind that what happened to the GOP candidate for governor in Colorado. The winner (Hickenlooper) pulled 51% and Tancredo (under a third party) got 37%. The Republican candidate (Maes) got 11%.
Finally, let me point out the hypocrisy of Sean "Sore Loser" Hannity. In 2006, Jan Ting won the Republican primary for Carper's seat with 43% of the vote, and O'Donnell got 17%. Nevertheless, O'Donnell decided to run as a write-in and got a whole big 4% against Carper's 70%. Now, really, Hannity, why is it you think a third-place finisher in the primary--not even the second-place finisher in a manipulated election, whom had won in every single poll against the Democratic nominee--whom then ran in the general election as a write-in, getting 4% of the vote--should have been given any consideration? Or didn't you or your staff do any due diligence on O'Donnell's past elections? Oh, in 2008, running against a Joe Biden who was also running as Obama's VP, O'Donnell, who ran unopposed in the GOP primary, managed to win 35% of the vote. So let's see--O'Donnell lost to her competition in a primary and two general elections, in her best showing earning 35% of the vote. Castle, in his worst showing against Coons, got 47% (vs. 36%) of the vote.
Better Dead Than Red...
In explaining how yesterday, unlike the rest of the country, California voters could have possibly reelected clueless, ineffectual, incompetent professional politicians to statewide office in the middle of ongoing budget crises, consider this relevant news item: California state senator Jenny Oropeza, who died 2 weeks ago (RIP), defeated Republican John Stammreich yesterday. (See, Obama: sometimes that 'D' in the Government Motors car you're driving stands for 'Dead', just like your job engine.) Mr. Stammreich, don't you think you could have gotten the message out? Election board: didn't you think voters had a need to know?
This is yet another example of how "the law is an ass" (Charles Dickens). What is going to happen is that they are going to hold a special election after just holding one yesterday. I'm not a lawyer but it seems to be when athletes win a race and the winner is disqualified (e.g., banned drug/doping tests), they don't run the race again: they award to the nearest legitimate finisher. Now a dead person by definition is disqualified. So the winner should have been the qualified candidate whom won the most votes, in this case, Stammreich. As a former MIS professor, I cannot understand why, in an age where gas stations can change prices to accommodate traffic flow, customer discounts or capacity, election technology remains in the dark ages, unable to accommodate candidate changes in near real-time, even unable to use biometric technology to ward off voter fraud.
Duh! After Write-In Lisa Murkowski's Win in Alaska, Mike Castle Now Has Regrets...
You know, Mike Castle, I wrote several posts pleading for you to do the same. I mean, you're the best-known, most popular, trusted politician in the state. I know Scott Rasmussen was spreading garbage about your write-in chances, but please...especially after Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell misfired coming out of the block? Christine is a beautiful woman, but Delaware's Harold Stassen was never a viable candidate: you can put lipstick (political spin) on a pig (a political amateur), but it's still a pig.
Manchin Shoots an Unarmed Tree and Wins Election to the US Senate
As if cap-and-trade wasn't already dead... Maybe John Raese should have responded by shooting down clay pigeons in honor of Harry Reid's favorite legislative maneuver. We could have seen 2000-page bills drop down and thousands federal budget pages float down out of the sky, with John's voice saying "I'm going to shoot down any progressive bill or budget that comes my way..."
I would have been far more impressed if West Virginia Governor/Senator-elect Joe Manchin had chopped down the cherry tree (and admitted it...), saying that he was going to cut the budget, business taxes and burdensome rules and regulations and rule out wasteful earmarks as he drives away from the Robert Byrd office building, down Robert Byrd avenue, past the Robert Byrd memorial, across the Robert Byrd bridge, on the way to Robert Byrd airport.
Post-Election Notes
Political Humor
"President Obama sent out an e-mail encouraging his supporters to take at least three friends with them to vote. That's not how people vote — that's how women go to the bathroom." –Jimmy Fallon
[One friend was needed to get him to the polling place, the second was there to tell him how to vote and whom to vote for, and the third was to give feedback to the President.]
"'Twas the night before Election Day and all through the house, everyone was shouting crap at each other." –Craig Ferguson
[Twas the night before Election Day
and all through the House
Seats of Dem incumbents all were in play,
Nobody could save them, not even Hillary's spouse.]
Musical Interlude: Instrumentals/One-Hit Wonders
Mason Williams, "Classical Gas"
However, look at what happened to Scozzafava in the NY-23 election last year; for a number of polls, she was the leading candidate--and then her campaign collapsed. Again, as in the case of Crist, her campaign mismanaged the insurgent candidacy. The point is, when O'Donnell's campaign collapsed under the media attacks, Castle would have immediately stood to gain--permanently. There is no doubt in my mind that what happened to the GOP candidate for governor in Colorado. The winner (Hickenlooper) pulled 51% and Tancredo (under a third party) got 37%. The Republican candidate (Maes) got 11%.
Finally, let me point out the hypocrisy of Sean "Sore Loser" Hannity. In 2006, Jan Ting won the Republican primary for Carper's seat with 43% of the vote, and O'Donnell got 17%. Nevertheless, O'Donnell decided to run as a write-in and got a whole big 4% against Carper's 70%. Now, really, Hannity, why is it you think a third-place finisher in the primary--not even the second-place finisher in a manipulated election, whom had won in every single poll against the Democratic nominee--whom then ran in the general election as a write-in, getting 4% of the vote--should have been given any consideration? Or didn't you or your staff do any due diligence on O'Donnell's past elections? Oh, in 2008, running against a Joe Biden who was also running as Obama's VP, O'Donnell, who ran unopposed in the GOP primary, managed to win 35% of the vote. So let's see--O'Donnell lost to her competition in a primary and two general elections, in her best showing earning 35% of the vote. Castle, in his worst showing against Coons, got 47% (vs. 36%) of the vote.
Better Dead Than Red...
In explaining how yesterday, unlike the rest of the country, California voters could have possibly reelected clueless, ineffectual, incompetent professional politicians to statewide office in the middle of ongoing budget crises, consider this relevant news item: California state senator Jenny Oropeza, who died 2 weeks ago (RIP), defeated Republican John Stammreich yesterday. (See, Obama: sometimes that 'D' in the Government Motors car you're driving stands for 'Dead', just like your job engine.) Mr. Stammreich, don't you think you could have gotten the message out? Election board: didn't you think voters had a need to know?
This is yet another example of how "the law is an ass" (Charles Dickens). What is going to happen is that they are going to hold a special election after just holding one yesterday. I'm not a lawyer but it seems to be when athletes win a race and the winner is disqualified (e.g., banned drug/doping tests), they don't run the race again: they award to the nearest legitimate finisher. Now a dead person by definition is disqualified. So the winner should have been the qualified candidate whom won the most votes, in this case, Stammreich. As a former MIS professor, I cannot understand why, in an age where gas stations can change prices to accommodate traffic flow, customer discounts or capacity, election technology remains in the dark ages, unable to accommodate candidate changes in near real-time, even unable to use biometric technology to ward off voter fraud.
Duh! After Write-In Lisa Murkowski's Win in Alaska, Mike Castle Now Has Regrets...
You know, Mike Castle, I wrote several posts pleading for you to do the same. I mean, you're the best-known, most popular, trusted politician in the state. I know Scott Rasmussen was spreading garbage about your write-in chances, but please...especially after Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell misfired coming out of the block? Christine is a beautiful woman, but Delaware's Harold Stassen was never a viable candidate: you can put lipstick (political spin) on a pig (a political amateur), but it's still a pig.
Manchin Shoots an Unarmed Tree and Wins Election to the US Senate
As if cap-and-trade wasn't already dead... Maybe John Raese should have responded by shooting down clay pigeons in honor of Harry Reid's favorite legislative maneuver. We could have seen 2000-page bills drop down and thousands federal budget pages float down out of the sky, with John's voice saying "I'm going to shoot down any progressive bill or budget that comes my way..."
I would have been far more impressed if West Virginia Governor/Senator-elect Joe Manchin had chopped down the cherry tree (and admitted it...), saying that he was going to cut the budget, business taxes and burdensome rules and regulations and rule out wasteful earmarks as he drives away from the Robert Byrd office building, down Robert Byrd avenue, past the Robert Byrd memorial, across the Robert Byrd bridge, on the way to Robert Byrd airport.
Post-Election Notes
- ABC Politics shows 7 of the 16 undecided House races resolved since my last post with the GOP winning 4 of those races: 239-187. That mathematically eliminates the Dems from reaching 200 seats for the first time in Obama's or my lifetime. I went through state result summaries and identified the remaining uncalled seats: currently in the GOP lead (3): CA-20, IL-8, WA-3; currently in the Dem lead (6): AZ-8, AZ-7, KY-6, CA-11, NY-1, NY-25.
- How did the 70% rule work? Recall I said the 70% rule (using the RCP counts) predicted a 53-47 Senate in favor of the Dems (including "independents" Saunders and Lieberman); the GOP reached at least that, since it is clear Murkowski has been reelected (further comments below); Murray holds a modest lead in the Washington seat. Poor Rossi: how likely is one person to possibly lose 2 photo-finish statewide races in less than a decade? In the House race, I predicted a 238-197 count. It looks like (on current counts) like it may end up 242-193, so clearly I underestimated the size of the GOP win and apologize to my readers for being that far off...
- More on interesting House races: unfortunately, as expected, Djou lost HI-1 in a reasonably close race, and Cao got blown out (by a bigger than expected margin) in LA-2, William "Money in the Freezer" Jefferson's old seat. (I can't resist: Jefferson took "cold, hard cash" a little too literally.) And Bart "Let's Make a (Health Care) Deal" Stupak's seat went to Republican Dr. Dan Benishek. (Let's hope Dr. Dan can cure the Democratic Party Health Care Law.) Bush VP Dan Quayle's son won AZ-3 last night. Kaptur (D) beat Iott, especially known for his SS troop reenactment father-son bonding experience.
- From the How Stupid Do You Think We Are? file: Fox News through this morning was reporting that they didn't know exactly who was/were the write-in candidates beating
Tea Party ExpressGOP candidate Joe Miller by several percentage points, pointing out that there were several dozen names ; this was a cynical attempt to sabotage Lisa Murkowski. The Murkowski campaign eventually appealed to the state Supreme Court to allow voters to have access to a list so they wouldn't misspell her name on the ballot. The Miller campaign fanatics, angry over the Murkowski refusal to capitulate to their sniping her renomination to the Senate, attempted to pack the list (so voters would have to find a needle in the haystack, a dirty campaign tactic by any objective measure). Let's think about this: no candidate in Alaskan history has won a statewide write-in campaign, and so, only after state Supreme Court agrees just before the election, you have a pent-up surge of over a hundred write-in candidates (some of them, obviously spouses, from the same address) filing. (In fact, a local radio talk show host with an ax to grind against Murkowski egged his listeners to do just that.) Murkowski was the only well-known write-in candidate, she was leading by a comparable margin in a recent poll against Joe Miller. Let's keep in mind the only reason she wanted the list was to help voters avoid misspelling her name--even though the election board made it clear it would tolerate modest misspellings of her name to count. So Fox News, in its pretense of "objectivity", claims it's not sure that the write-in's reflect Murkowski versus a number of unknown candidates. I seriously doubt these Miller supporters intending to sabotage Murkowski's listing request even voted for themselves... (I mentioned election technology earlier--fuzzy matching algorithms have been around for decades; I was doing householding application database work (consolidating names and addresses in various forms across computer files so you don't send out redundant mailings or whatever) in 1994. It would be trivial to provide voters with a search engine suggesting relevant candidate names.)
Political Humor
"President Obama sent out an e-mail encouraging his supporters to take at least three friends with them to vote. That's not how people vote — that's how women go to the bathroom." –Jimmy Fallon
[One friend was needed to get him to the polling place, the second was there to tell him how to vote and whom to vote for, and the third was to give feedback to the President.]
"'Twas the night before Election Day and all through the house, everyone was shouting crap at each other." –Craig Ferguson
[Twas the night before Election Day
and all through the House
Seats of Dem incumbents all were in play,
Nobody could save them, not even Hillary's spouse.]
Musical Interlude: Instrumentals/One-Hit Wonders
Mason Williams, "Classical Gas"
