Hey, you mucked-up lawmaker: you might have been voted out of Congress, but you’re still gonna be in hot water with the Feds. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Dem Jim Webb to hold a press conference this afternoon to declare victory over George Allen in the Virginia Senate race. Location and time to be announced.
Allen is expected to say something today, too, after the recanvassing of the vote is finished, in “mid to late afternoon,” his adviser says.
Meanwhile, the attendants at Webb’s campaign are answering the phone with, “Good morning, office of Senator-elect Webb.”
Rep. Sue Kelly (R-NY) lawyers up.
Nowadays when you hear those words about a Republican, it usually means the indictments are soon to follow. But not here. She’s looking to challenge her defeat on Tuesday.
The recount battle in Florida’s 13th District (Katherine Harris’ old district) continues to heat up.
An analysis by a local paper on the voting irregularities there shows that the problems likely cost the Democrat the race.
Amazing how bad a campaign the Democrats ended up running, wasn’t it? No message, no new ideas? No taking any stands. Another hapless gambit from the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
Oh, wait, right, they crushed the GOP House majority and won control of the senate (by election rather than defection) for the first time in 12 years.
My point here isn’t to gloat on the Dems’ behalf. And political chatmeisters do routinely impute genius to campaign victories and vice versa. But over the last six+ years, as the capital has fallen under the spell of the Bush-Rove confidence cult, opinions about the Democrats have become particularly fouled by fatuous circular reasoning. And same with the Bush-Rove GOP.
Victory is its own defense. The Republicans won the 2004 election. But only just barely. Not through any particular genius. And, I suspect we’ll learn, much less through micro-targetting and data-mining mumbo-jumbo than we’d been led to believe.
The Rumsfeld defenestration justly dominated the news cycle yesterday. But beyond the numbers and policy changes a lot of things are going to need to be rethought in Washington now. A lot of people’s conceptual meal tickets just expired.
Let’s not forget about what was probably the most despicable episode on Election Day. Especially as Michael Steele makes a bid for RNC Chairman.
Some thoughts from Greg Sargent about what Tuesday’s results mean for the battles ahead over national security.
Here’s our rundown of the 10 House seats still undecided. As it stands now, the Dems would get two more seats, and the Republicans probably eight. But that all depends, of course, on how these recounts go.