House Dems did Better than Obama

Yglesias points out a strange deflation of praise for how well House Dems did.

All told, 56 percent of Americans voted for a House Democrat whereas only 52 percent voted for a Republican in 1994. That’s a larger majority than Obama got and, indeed, would have been considered a pretty crushing landslide on the presidential label.

Before I read this, I definitely thought house Dems did well, picking up seats for second straight cycle which is rare, but not as bone crushingly well as I would have hoped given the overall political contex.

What is even weirder about house races going well is that public approval ratings for congress are very low.

Brought tears to my eyes...

At the end of this long WaPo article on an 89 year old, Black member of the White House staff, and his wife who also worked there, came this absolute gut wrencher.

They talked about praying to help Barack Obama get to the White House. They'd go vote together. She'd lean on her cane with one hand, and on him with the other, while walking down to the precinct. And she'd get supper going afterward. They'd gone over their Election Day plans more than once.

"Imagine," she said.

"That's right," he said.

On Monday Helene had a doctor's appointment. Gene woke and nudged her once, then again. He shuffled around to her side of the bed. He nudged Helene again. He was all alone.

"I woke up and my wife didn't," he said later.

Some friends and family members rushed over. He wanted to make coffee. They had to shoo the butler out of the kitchen.

The lady whom he married 65 years ago will be buried today.

The butler cast his vote for Obama on Tuesday. He so missed telling his Helene about the black man bound for the Oval Office.

Carney Interview

Here is Chris' interview with a blogger. It is more in depth than much that I have seen. I don't know what he is saying about the FISA bill and retroactive immunity...

I'd like as much face time for our little blog!

Jordi

An excerpt:

There is a provision of the Military Commissions Act that says the government can declare a United States citizen an enemy combatant and hold them without habeas corpus.

When you suspend the constitution you have to be little bit nervous about that. I swore a couple of times to protect and defend the constitution both as a military officer and as a member of Congress. You can hold people in this country by charging them under the 5th amendment and charge them with a crime and they get due process. American citizens should not be deprived due process.

So do you favor repealing that provision of the act?


As long as there is a legal way to cover them if they are an American citizen they get full rights as an American citizen.

Is that a yes?

That’s a yes. When we ignore our own rules we hurt ourselves as a nation. We hurt our ethic, we hurt what we stand for in the eyes of our people and the eyes of the world.

Amercian Fascism raises its head

Who knows if she is out of line or represents a new strain of media saavy American Fascism, but
CONGRESSWOMAN Michelle Bachman, yes, an elected official, calls for investigations into "un-American" activities of her fellow elected officials.

She constantly conflates liberal, leftist, and un-American in a noxious cocktail of McCarthyism, Nixonian innuendo, and demagoguery.

Video


Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Pat Buchanan respond.

ACORN and NY Times

NY times editorial page tackles ACORN false scandal. They are mostly on target. I couldn't resist posting a comment.

Here it is:

1% of 1.3 million registrations is 1,300.

Think of ACORN as a business, like hiring people at an airport to solicit credit card registrations.

And add the fact that all registration forms MUST be turned in. Otherwise, you can have canvassers collect registration forms, and then throw out all the Republican ones. Wouldn't that be bad? So, turning in all of them seems like a good idea.

And then those forms are checked by election officials to make sure they are correct. ACORN flags those forms it thinks are flawed. So, those 1,300 flawed (we do not know intent of person who filled them out, so I won't say fraudulent) are then weeded out. By two rounds of quality control: first by ACORN, and second, by the good-intentioned and hard-working election officials.

Isn't that, you know, the system WORKING?

And, how many service companies that process paperwork in our society have a 1% error rate?