Internet Scofflaw

The LA Times reports:

Celebratory bills — honoring historical figures, or a town’s anniversary, or a major local attraction — are a big part of House business. Incoming Republican leaders say they’re a waste of time.

Waste of time? Certainly. That’s why Congress should do many more of them. The time Congress spends on this sort of thing is time Congress isn’t doing any damage.

(Via Hot Air.)

A new study finds that, since World War 2, every dollar of additional tax revenue has come with $1.17 in additional spending. It’s a “sucker play” to try to balance the budget using tax hikes, even before you consider that tax hikes depress the economy.

(Via TaxProf.)

Mark Ames (I’ve never heard of him before, but apparently he makes a living accusing the Koch brothers of astroturfing various causes, like the Tea Party and opposition to invasive TSA searches, since no one could possibly oppose runaway spending, nationalized health care, or invasive pat-downs without getting a paycheck from the vast right-wing conspiracy) has this to say about me:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

Wow. Democrats call me unpatriotic all the time (most recently Paul Krugman), but this is the first time I remember being called an enemy of the state. By definition! I would be amused to see that definition.

(Via the Daily Caller.)

Paul Krugman says those who oppose the Fed’s new policy of printing money to buy long-term bonds “want the economy to stay weak”, just as China and Germany do.

It’s funny how the left always accuses the right of attacking their patriotism, when they are the ones who actually do it.

BONUS: Tom Maguire points out that Krugman was quite concerned about monetizing the debt when Republicans were in power. (And, back then, we weren’t even doing it.)

Michael Rubin notices an outright lie in Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel book. (This is old, actually, but I’m only now finding it.)

AP reports:

The cap that eventually stopped the oil from flowing was nearly pulled about a day after it was installed in mid-July because pressure readings looked so low that they indicated a leak elsewhere in the system. BP wanted the cap left in place and the well to stay shut, but government science advisers were firm and near unanimous in wanting the cap removed because of fear of a bigger, more catastrophic spill, the report said. . .

Before the cap was put in place, officials had established pressure levels that would tell them whether everything was OK, there was trouble and the cap had to be removed immediately, or whether it was a wait-and-see situation. The pressure readings were in the wait-and-see zone, but political appointees discussed it further and there was a push to remove the cap. Coast Guard Admiral Kevin Cook urged officials to give the cap more time, then Hsieh’s analysis swayed them.

To Paul Fischbeck, a professor of decision science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, this part of the report was scary.

“It became a political decision that they didn’t want to risk having this big blowout,” said Fischbeck, who wasn’t part of the commission. “You set up a logical reasonable process and in the heat of the moment all these factors creep in and it pulls you off what you had logically decided to do. And that is very dangerous when it happens.”

The disaster was averted by one scientist who took a cell-phone picture of the pressure readings and sent it to a colleague for advice.

(Previous post.)

Good grief:

Developers of the controversial Park51 Islamic community center and mosque located two blocks from ground zero earlier this month applied for roughly $5 million in federal grant money set aside for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

It’s becoming very hard to argue that the Cordoba House project is anything other than a deliberate provocation.

(Via the Corner.) (Previous post.)

Every single one of the 95 candidates who pledged to support network neutrality lost.

(Via the Corner.) (Previous post.)

The General Motors IPO is exempt from the anti-fraud laws that ordinarily apply to IPOs.

Control of the New York State Senate is not decided yet. Democrats can retain control (and thereby keep complete control of the state government) if they win the three outstanding seats. Unfortunately for them, Republicans are leading in two of the three races.

In one of the races, the Republican candidate (Mark Grisanti) leads the Democratic incumbent (Antoine Thompson) by 821 votes. Naturally it’s time for . . . a mysterious find of uncounted ballots!

Usually this means that someone “finds” a bag of uncounted ballots in a basement somewhere, but in the Empire State they think bigger. How does two uncounted voting machines sound?

GM gets a $45.4 billion tax break. For comparison, the original GM bailout was $50 billion.

Nancy Pelosi mocks Speaker-elect John Boehner for tearing up on election night.

Ramesh Ponnuru says we needn’t worry that 2011 will be a replay of 1995, with the president winning the public-relations battle against a Republican Congress.

Charles Rangel walks out of his ethics trial. Then, after the committee convicts him, he complains that the proceeding wasn’t fair: he wasn’t even in the room!

If Obamacare were working as promised, would 111 firms be getting waivers?

Of course, a lot of those waivers turn out to be payoffs for big Democratic supporters, including the SEIU.

(Previous post.)

It is said that Imperial Rome exported armies and imported grain. Plundering the provinces for the benefit of the capital is a time-honored practice for empires. With that in mind, consider this news: Seven of the ten richest counties in America (including the top three) are in the Washington, DC area.

It’s not our foreign policy that is imperialistic; it’s our domestic policy.

(Via Instapundit.)

It’s easy to mock the new Newsweek story that asks “Is the Presidency Too Big a Job?” As Glenn Reynolds puts it:

Nope. Just for the inexperienced guy with no management experience that we elected.

Or this:

The 9/11 terror attacks, in some ways, made being president easier. Struggles over education and agriculture that had mired George W. Bush’s first year in office were replaced with just one big expectation: to keep America safe.

This is Dilbert-esque! President Bush managed to do it, so it must have been easy. Oh yeah? If it’s so easy, why isn’t President Obama doing it?

But as much as Kathleen Maloney’s article tries to acquit Obama of incompetence and write off Bush’s accomplishments as trivial, her article centers around one serious point. She recognizes that our government is too big; “bloated” as she puts it. (Actually, she puts it “too bloated”. I guess a little bit of bloat is just right.)

She’s right. Indeed, the unmanageability of powerful central government is a theme that Friedrich Hayek (whoever he is) recognized over half a century ago.

But how does that acquit Obama? Even if we stipulate that the government is too big to be manageable by anyone, shouldn’t he then be trying to shrink it? Instead, he’s hell-bent on bloating it further.

POSTSCRIPT: Underscoring Maloney’s inability to see Obama’s incompetence as a unique problem, she generalizes from one data point:

Moreover, the number of speeches presidents now give—Obama delivered 57 in October alone, (including some fundraisers), written by a staff of seven speechwriters—can dilute the power of each one.

No, not “presidents”, just Obama. It has frequently been observed that Obama gives an astonishing number of speeches. I wonder if Obama might find the government more manageable if he weren’t spending his time giving two speeches a day.

More premium hikes resulting from health care nationalization.

This was The Economist’s take on the midterm elections:

What are these people on? President Obama said that, if Republicans won, there would be hand-to-hand combat on Capitol Hill. He said “[Republicans] can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” He spoke of the need for Democrats (Latinos in particular) to “punish their enemies“. Where are they seeing this bipartisan hand of cooperation?

Evidently, the Economist is still taken with this guy. They are still seeing what they want in him, rather than what is. Most of America has figured him out by now, but across the pond it seems they are still under his spell. (It’s very strange, after all of Obama’s inexcusable slights to the British, but often love isn’t rational.)

We’re told that Obamacare has solved the crisis over pre-existing conditions. Let’s take a look:

Mr. Obama declared at the time that “uninsured Americans who’ve been locked out of the insurance market because of a pre-existing condition will now be able to enroll in a new national insurance pool where they’ll finally be able to purchase quality, affordable health care—some for the very first time in their lives.”

So far that statement accurately describes a single person in North Dakota. Literally, one person has signed up out of 647,000 state residents. Four people have enrolled in West Virginia. Things are better in Minnesota, where Mr. Obama has rescued 15 out of 5.2 million, and also in Indiana—63 people there. HHS did best among the 24.7 million Texans. Thanks to ObamaCare, 393 of them are now insured.

States had the option of designing their own pre-existing condition insurance with federal dollars in lieu of the HHS plan, and 27 chose to do so. But they haven’t had much more success. Combined federal-state enrollment is merely 8,011 nationwide as of November 1, according to HHS.

Eight thousand people?! We nationalized our health care system for eight thousand people?!

For eight thousand people, we could have instituted high-risk pools and left it at that. But that wouldn’t have accomplished the left’s aspirations to put the government in charge of our health care.

I spotted this one while scanning the list of bills in Cato’s analysis of “sunlight before signing”: The XXXXXX Act of XXXX. Cnet News explains:

It was supposed to be some routine election-year largesse from Democrats: a $26 billion spending measure to aid two of the party’s core constituencies, labor unions, and government workers.

But a watchdog Web site on Sunday evening spotted an unusual feature of the legislation, which the Senate approved by a 61-to-39 vote last week.

It doesn’t actually have a name. Congress’ official Web site calls it the “______Act of____” . . . Elsewhere, it’s referred to as the “XXXXXX Act of XXXX.”

Some say that Congress doesn’t bother to read bills before voting on them. I can’t imagine where they would get such an idea.

Cato has an analysis of how well President Obama has fulfilled his “sunlight before signing” promise. After a pathetic performance during his first year in office (4.8% observance), his second year in office was a marked improvement (65% observance).

Of course, 65% only looks good by comparison to 4.8%. And in regards to major bills, it’s almost zero.

According to a new Gallup poll, fewer than half (43%) of American Muslims support the Cordoba House project (aka Ground Zero Mosque). A greater number (44%) think either that the project should be moved to another location, or that it should be turned into a different sort of project.

Michael Totten observes:

This tells us two things. Opposition to the project isn’t based on mere bigotry. And American Muslims are not a monolith.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

The Interior Department’s Inspector General confirms that the White House altered a report on drilling safety in a way that made it appear, erroneously, that White House’s drilling moratorium had been peer-reviewed:

The Interior Department’s inspector general says the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the idea of the administration’s six-month ban on new drilling.

The inspector general says the editing changes resulted “in the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed.” But it hadn’t been. The scientists were only asked to review new safety measures for offshore drilling.

The report stopped short of finding that the administration violated the law. It found that:

The Department has not definitively violated the [Information Quality Act]. For example, the recommendation for a moratorium is not contained in the safety report itself. Furthermore, the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations.

(Emphasis mine.) This is strange. Perhaps the executive summary did not explicitly indicate peer review of the recommendations, but the report found (pages 7-8) that the White House reordered the executive summary so that the reference to peer-review appeared immediately after the moratorium recommendation, where originally the two were well-separated.

Thus, after the executive summary recommended a moratorium, the very next paragraph began:

The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering. Those experts, who volunteered their time and expertise, are identified in Appendix 1. The Department also consulted with a wide range of experts from government, academia and industry.

Any reasonable person would conclude that the “recommendations” in question were the ones in the immediately preceding paragraph.

So how could the IG find that “the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations”? Apparently she puts a lot of weight in the difference between “peer-reviewing” the recommendations and “approving” them. That’s a pretty feeble distinction, if you ask me.

Perhaps Ms. Kendall had in mind what happened to the last inspector general to cross this White House.

(Previous post.)

POSTSCRIPT: Another interesting tidbit from the IG report: The administration has claimed privilege over all the documents relating to this incident. (Page 7.)

Nothing says “we did nothing wrong” like claiming executive privilege.

Jonathan Adler remarks on how the environmental movement is hurting its cause, at least if stopping global warming is really its cause:

If everything calls for the same big government solution, why does it matter what the problem is?  If progressives really believe climate change is an impending catastrophe — not just a problem worth addressing but a potential apocalypse — and seek to enlist conservatives to their cause, they should pursue consensus efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including efforts to stimulate technological innovation or proposals for revenue-neutral carbon taxes (see, e.g., here, here and here).  Yet Hendricks’colleagues at CAP excoriate any and all who deviate from the progressive climate orthodoxy or espouse anything short of dramatic government intervention throughout the economy.  Environmentalists will be more successful enlisting conservatives (and many moderates) to their cause once they become more focused on solutions, and less insistent on government control.

I’ve thought much the same thing myself. The politicians and activists who tell us global warming is a crisis don’t act like it’s a crisis. If they really saw a crisis, they would be willing to make compromises to achieve action. We don’t see anything of the kind.

They don’t offer concessions in other areas, like supporting a pro-growth agenda, in order to obtain limits on greenhouse gases. They don’t accept a revenue-neutral carbon tax in place of the hugely unpopular cap and trade scheme. They oppose geoengineering research. They won’t abandon their irrational opposition to nuclear power. In fact, they won’t even compromise their ocean views to build wind farms.

In short, the environmentalist politicians and activists seem interested in fighting global warming only to the extent that doing so furthers government control over people’s lives. When the crisis becomes severe enough that they act like it’s a crisis, I’ll sit up and take notice.

Joe Biden is holding a closed meeting on government transparency.

They claim they can’t finish the paperwork until a week into the lame-duck session. Shameless. But I guess that’s the Chicago Way.

Another brilliant idea from our federal government:

For years, the federal government bought the [dairy] industry’s excess cheese and butter, an outgrowth of a Depression-era commitment to use price supports and other tools to maintain the dairy industry as a vital national resource. This stockpile, packed away in cool caves in Missouri, grew to a value of more than $4 billion by 1983, when Washington switched gears.

In 2010 dollars, that’s $8.8 billion of cheese and butter tucked away in caves!

(Via Volokh.)

Ilya Somin summarizes the state-of-play of the challenges to health care nationalization.

(Via Instapundit.)

Less government, please:

A new IBD/TIPP poll on public attitudes suggests that Tuesday’s event was less an election than an intervention: Stop what you are doing; you’re hurting us all.

A majority of the public wants Washington to stop the spending that has exploded the budget deficit. In a listing of top priorities for Congress, cutting the deficit by cutting spending came in No. 1, cited by 53%. (Fully 73%, including a majority of Democrats, said this is a “high priority.”)

#2 was to revise or repeal Obamacare.

This is an outrage: Philadelphia police arrested a man, confiscated his guns, and deleted pictures from his cell phone for “being insolent” and refusing to obey their orders. They were ordering him to stop “loitering” at a bus stop.

Note to Philly cops: You work for us. You are not our masters.

(Via Instapundit.)

A must-read for all GOP congressmen.

President Obama in January, on why Democrats didn’t need to worry about a 1994-style electoral blowout (as quoted by retiring Rep. Marion Berry (D-AR)):

Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.

Given that Bill Clinton lost “only” 54 seats in 1994, I’ve got to agree with Obama.

The outgoing 111th Congress considered every single piece of legislation under a closed (or partially closed) rule, the first ever to do so. Amazing.

Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely, without pay, from MSNBC. Did NBC realize that this unhinged, vitriolic, ultra-leftist was making them look bad? Alas, no.

Olbermann was fired for violating NBC News’s policy forbidding its journalists from making political contributions. That policy is stupid and hypocritical. The reason for the policy is not to ensure fairness in the newsroom, which is clearly does not. If Olbermann hadn’t made those contributions, he would be every bit the same unhinged, vitriolic, ultra-leftist.

The reason for the policy is to give the network deniability. When a journalist gives to Democratic causes, it’s hard to deny that that journalist favors Democrats, but when the journalist’s position is shown only by the slant of his or her work, it becomes disputable. Many people will, with a perfectly straight face, deny the imbalance of the media.

So the policy is hypocritical. Moreover, applied to Keith Olbermann, it’s just stupid. No one could suggest with a straight face that Olbermann is fair. So what does it matter if he gives to Democratic causes?

It does point out that Olbermann is a complete hypocrite, since he attacked Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News, for making political contributions to Republicans. But this doesn’t exonerate MSNBC, because Olbermann wasn’t fired for being a hypocrite.

I’m happy to see Keith Olbermann out of work, but he should have been fired for the right reason. This isn’t it.

UPDATE: As Bill Kristol puts it:

NBC doesn’t have real news standards for MSNBC—otherwise the channel wouldn’t exist. It’s a little strange to get all high and mighty now.

This is sheer idiocy. If payday lenders didn’t provide a valuable service, people wouldn’t use them. And if they could operate more cheaply, competition would force them to do it. (Even non-profits such as Goodwill have to charge nearly 300% interest on these sorts of loans.)

In other news, San Francisco is still crazy. The city has banned Happy Meals in the name of “food justice”.

You can’t make this stuff up. And you wouldn’t want to.

(Via the Corner.)

Suburbanites, President Obama doesn’t care much for you:

Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

More recently, Obama made clear that he is more interested in containing suburbia than enhancing it. In Florida last February, the president declared, “the days of building sprawl” are “over.”

His “the suburbs bore me” line was from his law school days. Highlighting that might be a cheap shot, if there were any evidence he had changed his mind. But the quote from February shows that, if his disinterest in the suburbs has faded, it’s only because it has become hostility.

Question: why is so much of the left hostile to the suburbs? In all seriousness, I don’t understand it. It’s not environmentalism; the hostility predates the rise of environmental concern over commuting. Is it just that concentrated people are easier to control?

(Via Instapundit.)

The United States House of Representatives is not a representative body. In a representative body, the people would choose their representatives. That’s not how the House works today. In fact, it works almost the exact opposite: the representatives choose their people.

With today’s gerrymandering processes, politicians start with the desired outcome and draw districts to match. Being constrained by the census, they have to leave a few districts competitive, but in most cases the result is foreordained. It’s rather like a twisted form of proportional representation, except that a lot of people are deliberately put into districts that will never represent them, in order to obtain the desired overall outcome.

In the wake of Tuesday’s GOP wave, Republicans now control the districting process in a great many states. The Wall Street Journal predicts that Democrats, now bereft of its traditional gerrymandering advantage, will embrace reform. If so, Republicans should go along.

Yes, it’s tempting to stick it to the other side, now that the shoe is on the other foot, but we should show that we’re better than that. This isn’t a case of unilateral disarmament hurting our cause (as when term-limit advocates observe term limits on themselves and thereby disappear their own movement); there is good reason to suppose that districting reform could be permanent. (Although Nancy Pelosi did sponsor a ballot initiative to reverse California’s districting reform.)

As we (hopefully) move forward into a time of reform, I want to make a proposal. John Fund, writing positively of reform, remarks:

While there’s no way to take politics entirely out of redistricting, its influence can be limited.

Actually, I think it might be possible to take politics out entirely. Here is how I suggest redistricting should work:

1. The law should establish an objective metric for compactness. For example, the sum of the squares of the circumferences of the districts, plus a penalty every time a district boundary crosses a county line. Exactly what the metric is doesn’t matter all that much; what is important is that it admit objective calculation.
2. Anyone at all can propose a district map. All proposals in which every district contains the same number of people (within some specified tolerance) will be considered.
3. All the proposals are evaluated according to the metric, and the one with the best metric is implemented.

In this scheme, parties would be welcome to make proposals that enhance their own representation, but they would be unlikely to prevail. The winning proposal would probably come from a team of computer scientists with a supercomputer.

UPDATE: Gerrymandering 101.

Connecticut has a razor-close governor’s race undecided on election day? It must be time to starting finding bags of uncounted ballots.

Somehow, I feel like I’ve watched this show before.

I’m seeing this two years late, but it’s the perfect send-off for the Joe the Plumber incident:

(Via the DC Trawler.)

POSTSCRIPT: Ted Strickland, the Ohio governor who condoned the illegal fishing expedition through Joe Wurzelbacher’s confidential information, has been given the heave-ho by Ohio voters.

When your pitcher has hit the last six batters before finally being pulled, you’re glad to see him go, but it’s not exactly cause for celebration.

According to NBC (as related in the Atlantic; I couldn’t find the original article), 113 of 129 Tea Party candidates for the House of Representatives won.

Oops:

The Social Security Administration asked its inspector general to investigate how a $32.3 billion mistake skewed its statistics on 2009 wages in the U.S.

Two people were found to have filed multiple W-2 forms that made them into multibillionaires, an agency official said yesterday. Those reports threw statistical wage tables out of whack and, in figures released Oct. 15, made it appear that top U.S. earners had seen their pay quintuple in 2009 to an average of $519 million.

The agency yesterday released corrected tables that showed the average incomes of the top earners, in fact, declined 7.7 percent to $84 million each.

POSTSCRIPT: Daniel Foster notes that an NYT column based entirely on the erroneous figures has yet to be corrected.

UPDATE: The NYT has now corrected:

An earlier version of this column incorrectly described the situation of the small group of Americans earning $50 million or more annually. Their incomes declined by 7.7 percent between 2008 and 2009; they did not quintuple.

Still, no note is made of how the correction pulls the rug out from under the entire column.

The Fed is announcing $600 billion in quantitative easing, which is economist-speak for printing money.

A great night for Republicans, picking about 60 seats and the majority in the House, 6 seats in the Senate, about 9 governors, and several state legislatures. A great night for the Tea Party, with Senate wins in Florida, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (plus all-but-uncontested South Carolina and Utah) and scores of House wins. The execrable Alan Grayson went down to a well-deserved thrashing, RINO-turned-independent Charlie Crist was defeated handily, and the Obamacare vote-switchers were decimated.

Still, I can’t help being wistful about what might have been. Candidate selection and gaffes allowed Democrats to keep some seats that Republicans should have been able to take in this year’s climate. And, although it wasn’t a surprise by election day, California’s bloody-mindedness is just astonishing, to send back to Sacramento the man who three decades ago set in motion the fiscal mess that plagues that state today.

On the other hand, my home state of Pennsylvania executed a very welcome about-face. We turned the governor’s seat, the Senate seat, 5 House seats, and the state House to Republicans. The GOP already controls the Pennsylvania Senate.

The high notes of the evening for me were Pat Toomey’s (R-PA-elect) gracious acceptance speech and Marco Rubio’s (R-FL-elect) inspiring acceptance speech.

The most important speech of the night was from Speaker-to-be John Boehner (R-OH). He made clear that he gets it: America did not embrace the Republicans and the big-government policies of their last stint in power; America repudiated the Democrats and gave the GOP a second chance. Hopefully, the scores of Tea Party representatives in his caucus will help him remember that.

UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru finds a silver lining in a small cloud on a bright day:

Republican victories last night were amazing judged by any standard other than that of the inflated expectations some conservatives had in the days leading up to the election. But the upside of the high-profile disappointments Republicans have just experienced is that they will nip any triumphalism in the bud. If Republicans had swept all before them, they would have entered the 2012 cycle overconfident.

UPDATE: Another such silver lining: David Kopel points out that, given a Democratic Senate, keeping Reid as majority leader is good for gun rights. The alternative would have been majority leader Schumer, who is strongly against gun rights.

UPDATE: The Pentagon says this isn’t true. They won’t say how much it will cost, though.

The president’s trip to India is going to cost $200 million per day.

There’s no question that the president needs to travel, and he certainly has fences to mend with India, but does it really have to cost that much? Andy McCarthy notes that in 2000, a multi-country Asia trip by Bill Clinton cost $50 million total.

One last poll before the election (hopefully) concludes tonight: A Gallup poll finds the greatest enthusiasm gap between parties on record. In the wave years of 1994 and 2006, the enthusiasm gap was 9 points. This year, the gap is 19.

For the past few months, the Democrats have been openly pandering to their base, trying to gin up their base. It appears that their efforts have backfired, galvanizing the opposition more than their own side.

(Via Campaign Spot.)

At the eleventh hour, I just learned some troubling information about California’s proposition 19. It would not only make marijuana legal, which I support, but it would also make marijuana smokers a protected class. It would make it illegal for employers to discriminate against pot smokers — even for smoking on the job — unless they could prove that smoking pot impaired their job performance. Employers should not have to go through that kind of rigmarole to hire clean and sober workers.

As a libertarian, I have to urge a no on 19. Pity.

My final prediction for today’s election: In the House, Republicans will win a lot of new seats and take control of the chamber. (I don’t follow the House enough to guess a specific number, but with a 12-point advantage on the generic ballot, it’s not going to be close.) In the Senate, Republicans will keep all their seats, and win Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, for a net gain of eight. Dino Rossi (the Republican) will lead narrowly in Washington on election night, but Washington’s Democratic fraud machine will ultimately carry Murray to victory.

UPDATE: Pretty close. The biggest surprises were Colorado (which I expected to win), Pennsylvania (which was closer than I expected), and Illinois (which I expected to be closer). In the House, we did indeed win big. Although I didn’t have the guts to say it, I was expected 60-65 pick-ups, and it appears as though that estimate was maybe a hair low.

Wait a second, this doesn’t fit the narrative:

Democratic candidates and their allies spent $142 million on television advertising across all House races in the general election, compared with $119 million by Republican candidates and their backers. In the Senate, Republican candidates and their allies outspent Democrats, $159 million to $120 million.

The Democratic advantage on television spending in House races was something of a revelation, given all the attention that has been garnered this year by the staggering expenditures by Republican-oriented independent groups after a Supreme Court ruling in January that lifted restrictions on corporate political spending.

But it appears that the Republican-leaning groups were able to make a significant impact in many House races by leveling the playing field for underfinanced Republican challengers, who in previous elections might have had little chance against Democratic incumbents.

In other words, the narrative was BS.

(Via Hot Air.)

President Obama says that “the other side” (presumably Republicans) isn’t interested in fighting AIDS:

We’re funding global AIDS. And the other side is not. So I don’t know why you think this is a useful strategy to take. I think it would make a lot more sense for you guys to go to the folks who aren’t interested in funding global AIDS and chant at that rally, because we’re trying to focus on figuring out how to finance the things that you want financed, all right?

This is a bizarre attack, since President Bush launched a huge, well-regarded campaign against AIDS in Africa. A peer-reviewed academic study found that the campaign saved over a million lives.

Is Obama simply ignorant of Bush’s achievements fighting AIDS? No, he’s not:

President-elect Barack Obama doesn’t often offer praise for President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, but on Monday he offered the outgoing head of state accolades for battling AIDS in Africa.

“I salute President Bush for his leadership in crafting a plan for AIDS relief in Africa and backing it up with funding dedicated to saving lives and preventing the spread of the disease,” Obama said in taped remarks to the Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health.

I think what you’re seeing here is Obama’s basic reflex. When under attack (he was responding to hecklers), he blames Republicans and the truth isn’t a factor.

At Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity”, one featured performer was Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam, who is notorious for endorsing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

Robertson: You don’t think that this man deserves to die?
Y. Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Y. Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Y. Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.

[Some minutes later, Robertson on the subject of an protest where an effigy of the author is to be burned]

Robertson: Would you be part of that protest, Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Y. Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing

Shortly thereafter, Stevens/Islam told the New York Times that he stood by his comments. (Now he claims he was only joking.)

This is what Stewart considers sanity?

POSTSCRIPT: The rally to restore smugness.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll has the video.

UPDATE: Jon Stewart reportedly stands by the decision to include Stevens.

UPDATE: The site with the article on Stewart standing by Stevens is down, but you can see the article in the Google cache.