California Conservative

This Strib article reads like a press release for another ‘moderate’ Republican group. Its thinking is as predictable as it is flawed. Here’s just one of its ad hominem attacks that’s as rooted in reality as Grimm’s Fairy Tales:

“Look for the Club for Growth to oppose Simmons…Castle and (Florida Gov. Charlie) Crist in favor of ideologues who can’t win,” the REP said. “Such political narcissism may make the purists feel good about themselves, but it is not a sound basis for building an electoral coalition that can win again in what is still a center-right country.”

First, it’s important to note that the GOP’s running of spineless moderates have contributed to blowouts the last 2 election cycles. It’s laughable to take their advice seriously, especially with that historical perspective. Second, it’s absurd to think that Charlie Crist is the GOP’s savior, especially considering Marco Rubio is a charismatic, eloquent true conservative whereas Crist might be to the left of Linc Chaffee. (more…)

What you are about to read is an exclusive. When Americans with integrity read this, they will be outraged.

What you are about to read is how one of the attorneys working for the Franken campaign tried to eliminate a legally cast absentee ballot because it was a vote for Sen. Coleman. What you are about to read is a firsthand report from the man who witnessed this play out right in front of him. Sit down and read Chris Tiedeman’s account of an eventful episode in the recount process. Just be prepared to get very, very angry.

I was a volunteer attorney for the Coleman campaign during the recount phase of the post election attempt to figure out exactly who won the US Senate Race in 2008. I helped recruit local MN attorneys in counties around the state, I helped examine ballots accepted on Election Day during the recount, and for the sake of this story, I assisted in reviewing some of the rejected absentee ballots at the end of the recount process.

For much of New Year’s Eve and the day before, I spent my time in Anoka and then Dakota County. In Anoka County, because there was a group of potentially wrongfully rejected absentees that the Franken Campaign did not want reviewed, the process broke down entirely and no ballots were examined from either Anoka or Isanti counties at that time.

I spent the rest of the next two days in Hastings working with Carver, Scott, Goodhue and finally Dakota County. The purpose was to look at rejected absentee ballots that the counties felt were either wrongfully rejected by the counties themselves, or at least were worthy of scrutiny by the campaigns to determine whether the ballots were wrongfully rejected.

Dakota County had nearly 200 ballots for the two campaigns to review together (compared to 4 brought by Carver). Dakota County officials pulled the ballots together into categories; meaning that within each category, presumably each of the ballots should be treated the same by the two campaigns. In other words, if one ballot in a category was deemed wrongly rejected by the two campaigns, it was likely that the remainder in the same category were also wrongly rejected.

Towards the end of the second day, the county officials and the two campaigns were examining a category that the county officials said were wrongly rejected because of a legitimate error by a county elections official. If my memory serves me, there were approximately 15 or so ballots in that category. They were ballots where the voter was registered to vote, and the county official mailed an envelope with the ballot that should have been sent to a non-registered voter. Apparently there are two distinctly identifiable envelopes mailed to voters depending on whether they are already registered or need to register when casting their ballot. (more…)

This morning, I participated in a blogger conference call with Sen. Norm Coleman and attorney Ben Ginsburg. Sen. Coleman opened with a statement that yesterday’s ruling to allow 4,800 absentee ballots to be counted “was a great day for Minnesotans.”

The first question was asked by Janet Beihoffer of SCSUScholars. Janet asked if the absentee ballots that were ruled on yesterday were from Republican-leaning parts of the state.

Sen. Coleman’s initial response was that he didn’t know how the people voted. His next response was that the fifth pile absentee ballots that have already been counted were from precincts that leaned heavily Democratic. Mr. Ginsburg put the total of fifth pile ballots at 950+.

Both gentlemen stressed the fact that Franken’s lead was artificial. By that they meant that the lead Franken currently has will likely shrink when ballots from more Republican-friendly parts of the state are counted.

Ed Morrissey of HotAir directed the next question towards Mr. Ginsburg. Ed asked if yesterday’s ruling brought any Equal Protection issues into play. This was a clear reference to Bush v. Gore. Mr. Ginsburg said that the ruling followed Minnesota law. Mr. Ginsburg then said that, in Bush v. Gore, the Florida Supreme Court ignored relevant Florida law and essentially wrote their own new law. (more…)

Harry Reid will attempt to seat Al Franken as the junior senator from Minnesota. His logic, if it can be called that, is disturbing:

“We’re going to try to seat Al Franken,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters on Wednesday, a few hours before he posed with Franken for photos just off the Senate floor. “There’s not a question in anyone’s mind, an assertion by anyone, that there’s been any fraud or wrongdoing in this election.”

Sen. Reid is trying to overlook the fact that Sen. Coleman has said that there’s been wrongdoing “in this election.” It’s apparent that Sen. Reid didn’t read King’s post on all the different ‘oddities’ that have occured during the process.

Rest assured of this: If Reid is successful in seating Franken before the election contest is finished, that will fire up the Republican base across the country. That will be the GOP’s rallying cry in 2010. It’s one thing to lose an election. It’s another for the Senate Majority Leader to say that he’ll ignore the will of Minnesota’s voters.

John Cornyn, who’s chairing the NRSC, says not so fast: (more…)

Most political junkies here in Minnesota initially had positive reactions to the physical recount in the Coleman-Franken race. Later, they started thinking of it as the battle over who could question the validity of their opponent’s votes. Still later, they saw the inconsistencies in the Canvassing Board’s rulings. Now we’re heading for the election contest phase. Michael Stokes Paulsen has written an op-ed in this morning’s WSJ in which he says that the recount isn’t constitutional. Here’s his explanation why it isn’t constitutional:

This is Florida 2000 all over again, but with colder weather. Like that fiasco, Minnesota’s muck of a process violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the controlling Supreme Court decision is none other than Bush v. Gore.

Remember Florida? Local officials conducting recounts could not decide what counted as a legal vote. Hanging chads? Dimpled chads? Should “undervotes” count (where a machine failed to read an incompletely-punched card)? What about “overvotes” (where voters punched more than one hole)? Different counties used different standards; different precincts within counties were inconsistent.

The Florida Supreme Court intervened and made things worse, ordering a statewide recount of some types of rejected ballots but not others. It specified no standards for what should count as a valid vote, leaving the judgment to each county. And it ordered partial recounts already conducted in some counties (but not others) included in the final tabulation. The result was chaos. (more…)

The day Harry Reid said that they wouldn’t seat Rolad Burris to replace President-Elect Obama in the Senate, I predicted that the political fallout would be so high that they couldn’t carry it out very long without paying a steep political price for it. Charles Babington says it best in this AP article:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Democrats who thought they could push away Roland Burris misjudged the racial fallout, underestimated public reaction and wound up on shaky legal ground.

The blunders began when the Democrats, including President-elect Barack Obama, insisted they would not seat Burris as the Senate’s only black member because the appointment came from a governor accused of trying to sell Obama’ former seat. On Wednesday, they all but admitted being outflanked by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, praising Burris and suggesting he soon will be a senator.

This outcome was predictable from the instant that Bobby Rush stood up at Gov. Blagojevich’s press conference where Gov. Blagojevich announced Burris as Obama’s replacement. In fact, I said at the time that it was a brilliant political move on Blagojevich’s part. (more…)

After the election, I wrote a number of articles about the need for a radical transformation of GOP politics. Many of these articles highlighted the work of the people at RebuildtheParty.com. This morning, I read a post by Redstate’s Leon Wolf that puts things in their proper perspective. Here’s what Leon said that most caught my attention:

In the wake of Barack Obama’s astounding fundraising success in 2007-2008, which was largely fueled by an unprecedented web operation that collected millions of active donors and volunteers, many Republican strategists have begun to realize that the current state of web operations on the right is simply not acceptable if the GOP is going to be competitive in elections going forward. New websites are springing up left and right in an attempt to solve this problem, and established web sites and online activists have dedicated countless hours, posts, and emails in the last several weeks to navelgazing over this issue. I tend to think that much of this misses the point entirely.

Don’t get me wrong; our web operation is clearly and unacceptably behind the left’s, and these discussions need to be had or we risk perpetual minority status. However, I am sorry to say that our enfeebled efforts are not going to reach the needed levels just because our candidates master the use of Twitter. You see, an effective web operation only links people as they are; it does not change people into something they are not. And the bottom line is that, more than having been beaten by a superior operation, we were beaten by people who were more motivated and willing to get involved and donate than we were. Obama’s web operation was just a tool by which he took advantage of a pre-existing resource. (more…)

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been arrested. Here’s what they’re reporting:

A three-year federal corruption investigation of pay-to-play politics in Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s administration has expanded to include his impending selection of a new U.S. senator to succeed President-elect Barack Obama, the Tribune has learned.

Federal authorities got approval from a judge before the November general election to secretly record the governor, sources told the Tribune, and among their concerns was whether the selection process might be tainted. That possibility has become a focus in an intensifying investigation that has included recordings of the governor and the cooperation of one of his closest friends.

Rod Blagojevich is innocent until proven guilty but the FBI doesn’t get involved without a reason. Here’s an update: (more…)

Barack Obama campaigned on the claim that he’d be a post-partisan politician. With Senate Democrats talking about seating Al Franken against the will of the people of Minnesota, it’s time for President-Elect Obama to step forward and put an end to Sen. Reid’s hyperpartisan way and say that whoever wins the recount should be the next senator. (At this point, it’s looking virtually impossible for Franken to win.)

Finally, someone in the Beltway media started thinking that Franken’s Senate Option wasn’t such a viable option:

Speculation that the Senate might determine the contest between GOP Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken peaked after an attorney for Franken suggested in late November that the outcome could be decided by the Senate, and after Majority Leader Harry Reid for the first time publicly raised his concerns that some absentee ballots might not be included in the final count.

But that was before Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoff victory by Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a development that dramatically altered the Democratic risk-to-return ratio. While the Constitution allows the Senate to be the ultimate arbiter of who serves in the chamber, there is far less political incentive to intervene now that a filibuster-resistant majority is no longer at stake. (more…)

In an election year thoroughly dominated by Democrats, Joseph Cao defeated William ‘Cold Cash’ Jefferson. This follows on the heals of Saxby Chambliss’ resounding defeat of Paul Martin in the Georgia runoff.

Scandal-tarred Louisiana Democratic Rep. Bill Jefferson was defeated in his bid for a tenth term tonight by a little known Republican named Joseph Cao.

With 80 percent of precincts reporting, Cao led Jefferson 53 percent to 43 percent and the Associated Press had called the race for the Republican. The 2nd district heavily favors Democrats; Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) won 75 percent of the vote in it in 2004.

In 2007, Jefferson was indicted on 16 counts relating to allegations that he had accepted bribes from companies hoping to secure contracts in Africa. Jefferson insisted he had done nothing wrong.

The primary election in Louisiana, held on Nov. 4, gave Jefferson a 57 percent to 43 percent margin, a sign, many believed, that his ongoing legal problems would not impact his electoral success. Tonight’s results affirm that conventional wisdom regarding Jefferson was dead wrong.

I didn’t see this coming but it’s a great consolation prize after another disappointing election cycle for the GOP.

The results might indicate that things will rebound for the GOP in the 2010 midterms. This suggests that Barack Obama swept alot of Democrats into office with the large turnout. In 2010, people won’t be casting a history-making vote. They’ll be voting for their congressman. I suspect that that will dramatically change that year’s turnout model.

Technorati Tags: Joseph Cao, Saxby Chambliss, Runoff, William Jefferson, Election 2008, Barack Obama, Election 2010

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog