http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081130.wottawa1130/BNStory/National/home

NDP+Liberal Coalition to boot Harper. Go visit your butt boy in Crawford, Steven.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/30/clinton-turned-down-power_n_147217.html

Daily Mail is a Brit paper, but if this is true, it kinda blows up a lot of the logic for her leaving the Senate. Usually the chair of this committee is the longest serving majority senator, as it had been Robert Byrd and Dan Inoyue was #2, I believe.

 There are a lot of things about Chabad that I don’t care for in the political arena. But, even in the relatively remote part of California where I live, when the recent fires struck, the Chabad folks were the first ones to help and they operate with low overhead compared to the Red Cross.

Chabad was not in India to spread Zionism or Judaism. Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were there to offer a way station for traveling Jews, who might be looking for some kosher food or a place to relax on shabbat. They weren’t there to save souls, convert people, or impinge on anyone else’s religious beliefs.

And they weren’t even Israelis–they were New Yorkers, and they were killed by fanatics in order to destablize the Subcontinent further, probably by trying to draw Israel into a muslim-annoying alliance with India.

Thanks, Bush for ignoring al Qaeda for 7 years.

With the original In re Marriages case only sporting a 4-3 majority, it is simply required that each of those 4 votes hold fast in order to support striking Proposition 8.

Justice Joyce Kennard voted against reviewing Proposition 8. There are more details in this L.A. Times article, but the upshot is she is an independent voter on the Court. Lost amongst the very strong voices on each side is the reality that right or wrong, with or without the threat of a recall, many judges are extremely reluctant to override the democratic process. 

Only Justice Moreno voted to immediately suspend the effect of Proposition 8. There is little to suggest that any of the 3 in he minority would be inclined to take the more radical step of overriding a popular vote, unless, somehow they are persuaded that the principle of stare decisis demands it. That seems unlikely.

Chief Justice George seemed to be making an appeal to history in his In re Marriages opinion. 

Kennard and Corrigan are not up for reelection until 2018. Werdegar, Moreno, and Baxter are up again in 2014. But I’m fairly sure George is up again in 2010, and so is Chin, a solid ‘no’ vote. 

My guess is that Prop 8 is sustained 6-1, Moreno dissenting. There will be a repeal proposition in 2010 and an effort to vote Chin out.

The greatest shame of the 2008 election was that the Democratic Convention and its unprecedented final night did not get a day or two to breathe in the analytical ether because it was stepped on by Bush Patsy McCain’s goopy Nilap soap opera. Before the Ditz Bomb hit, I wrote that Obama’s coalition and the pageantry and substance of the Convention’s final night constituted a 21st century update to the Jacksonian tradition.

Where Andrew Jackson represented a new class of people being given the franchise Barack Obama symbolizes new segments of voters being counted. The electorate that chose Obama was younger, blacker, and browner than the one that “elected” Generalissimo Bush twice. What this Expansion does not want, by and large, is the reactionary resentmentmongering over the upheavals of 1968 that the Conservatrons have been spewing for a generation. What it does want, by and large, is economic security, better health care, real action on global warming, and government competence. In other words, the broad ideas that progressives have expressed for years. There isn’t really too much that is new here. There are just more of us now.

You would never know this by viewing the insider bloviation-a-thons where the “center right nation” myth holds sway. Their’s is a world without the Expansion, where people really did just reject the cosmic screwing of the Bush years, but not the Conservatron memes that have become accepted wisdom for these antiques over the last 40 years. The audience for these talking heads does not include the Expansion, and they still cannot fathom its existence. Consider the concern trolling in the MSM over the flakiness of the youth vote throughout the election season and then consider Polemic’s experience in Nevada where one of the leader’s of the office was an eighteen year old kid. Who wound up having a bigger impact on election night, the talkers or the doer?

The New Jacksonianism will not be televised… at least not too often, but it will be downloaded, streamed, considered, chatted, and calling you on the phone and knocking on your door.

All of the mathematical data and dancing in the streets on November 4 were not deceiving you. Obama’s New Jacksonianism has made America a center-left country. Our crucial decade, the “2010s,” begins on January 20!

David Broder says HRC shouldn’t be SoS, so, to me that almost confirms the wisdom of Obama’s pick. Indeed, Broder has been wrong about just about everything important for 10 years, yet no one has the heart to send the old man to the glue factory.

Hillary Clinton was the 68th most senior senator in the current Congress. She is junior to people you’ve never heard of, like Jeff Bingaman, Barbara Mikulski, Herb Kohl, Daniel Akaka, and Tom Carper. She is junior to people whose political importance belonged to years, if not ages past, like Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, Dan Inoyue, John Kerry, and Tom Harkin. She does not chair one committee (and only chairs the Superfund Subcommittee… big whoop)—but Joe Liebermann does. She has no standing in the leadership.

No one is going to tell the Senate how to run itself. Personally, I think they could do with someone like Nancy Pelosi to make the trains run on time, but that’s just not how it is. 

HRC was at least an election or two away from any legitimate chance at a major chairmanship or a leadership role. So, while I agree that she could have been useful in that role, it almost certainly wouldn’t have come along during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Add that to the fact that Joe Biden is not running for president in 2016. He will be 74 and would probably lose a primary. So, HRC, who we *know* still wants to be President takes the #3 job in the Administration: Secretary of State. Not a traditional launching pad for the presidency, but then neither was first lady, and it almost worked.

Is here. Says Franken by 27.

Sorry. FWIW, I just don’t think you can formulate the reasons for the challenges at this point yet. I’ve seen some video suggesting that Coleman is challenging every McCain/Franken vote, but I don’t know if that’s statewide or not.

I don’t think you can say anything about what’s inside the challenged group, which is now more than 10 times the gap between the two.

Now, I *believe* that the Coleman team has from the beginning had the strategy to challenge enough votes to make sure Franken was down going to the board no matter what. I also *believe* that Franken’s team was only making bona fide challenges at first, but then he rapidly accelerated the count.

I still think the best predictor is an undervote analysis, which showed Franken picking up enough to win.