Give It Up, Norm

For your pleasure, a message for Norm Coleman from the Minnesota DFL:

The Tide Is Turning Against Norm - Time To Goodbye?

The tide of conservative opinion is turning against Norm Coleman. Both the National Review and Powerline today tacitly admitted that the contest is lost for Normie. In two consecutive posts in Nation Review's The Corner column yesterday and today, Ramesh Ponnuru said that Coleman should give up:

If he keeps up the fight, he is likely to lose, unnecessarily deprive Minnesota of a second senator, end his political career seen as a sore loser, and hurt his party in a state that is eager for this fight to be over. His team has talked enough about further legal challenges that if he leaves now, he will get some points for grace. (Needless to say, that sentiment would not be universal.) But this is, I think, the last moment where he can exit with some dignity.

Meanwhile, today on the Powerline blog contributor Scott Johnson admitted today that Al Franken "didn't steal the election." In a column also reprinted in National Review Johnson wrote:

The logical implication is that we may never determine who actually received more legally cast ballots. Coleman formulates the issue in terms of equal protection and urges a lowest-common-denominator approach to the inclusion of rejected absentee ballots as a matter of constitutional law, but I am afraid he may have identified a wrong without a legal (as opposed to a political) remedy.

[...]...the Coleman campaign has put on a performance that conveys a strong impression of complacency and ineptitude; the Franken campaign outhustled and outsmarted it.

[...]And I don’t think it can exactly be said that he (Franken) won the election fair and square. Indeed, I can’t find a single good thing to say about him except that he didn’t steal the election.

Wow, the harsh light of reality has finally hit the troglodytes at the National Review and Powerline! Now all we need is for Gov. Pawlenty to realize that Coleman is a political tar baby, and stop equivocating about putting his signature on the election certificate. Coleman has ruined any chance of further elective office in Minnesota, and T-Paw needs to realize that the same thing can happen to him by association. If he's planning to run for president in 2012 or 2016 (and he is, you can bet), Pawlenty needs to think about that long and hard. Personally, I don't think the Gov is smart enough not to toe the GOP line, and will do everything he can to delay signing that certificate. Meanwhile, Minnesota goes without full representation in the Senate.

The GOP strategy is clear: delay that 59th seat by whatever means necessary! Any consideration for the rule of law, for the principles of representative democracy, for the good of the country--none of that stands a chance against the greed and lust for power that's driving the Rethugs. I think this debacle will help counter the usual loss of seats by the majority party in 2010. People will remember who thought of the country, and who thought only of themselves.

And John Cornyn, why don't you just STFU?

Condolences...

...to Keith Olbermann, who lost his mother today.

When Will Sarah Palin's 15 Minutes Be Over?

So I'm watching the dust settle after the latest Palin blowup, and I can't help but laugh. Levi says that Sarah "probably knew" they were having sex? And he's the fall guy in all of this?--

So, yeah. Levi Johnston was just some regular dumb kid from in a shitty town, and then he knocked up his girlfriend, and because his girlfriend's mom was running for vice president as a family values conservative, he had to pretend he wanted to marry this girl, and he was dressed up in a monkey suit and paraded before the nation as an exemplar of traditional heartland values like "terrible life-altering accidents stemming from lack of proper sex education (and also, you know, being a dumb teenager— it happens, but usually you can do something about it unless national politics are involved)."

And Sarah, as stupid and vindictive as ever, goes after this kid with a vengeance. But Levi is the bad guy here, not the one who put this teenaged couple into the national spotlight in the first place? Hey Gov. Stupid, who put their unwed pregnant teenage daughter out before the public in a vain and cynical attempt to win votes? Amazing--for the first time in my life, the conservatives celebrated an unwed teenage mother's pregnancy! And did anyone actually believe that this kids were going to get married? Did you not see the look of "get me outta here!" on Johnston's face all throughout the convention?

So after the breakup, the arrests, and the nationally-syndicated back&forth, we've got a kid with no father in the house, two teenage high school dropouts, and one insanely vindictive, hugely cynical, and immensely stupid governor, all airing their dirty laundry before the nation. This latest modern-day Hatfield-McCoy scuffle just makes me glad that most of the country had the good sense to vote for Obama & Biden last fall!

Iowa Does The Right Thing

AllllRIGHT!

The Iowa Supreme Court this morning upheld a Polk County judge’s 2007 ruling that marriage should not be limited to one man and one woman.

The ruling, viewed nationally and at home as a victory for the gay rights movement and a setback for social conservatives, means Iowa’s 5,800 gay couples can legally marry in Iowa beginning April 24.

[...]Today’s decision makes Iowa the first Midwestern state, and the third in the country, to allow same-sex marriages.

[...]Supreme Court Justice Mark Cady, who wrote the unanimous decision, at one point invoked the court’s first-ever decision, in 1839, which struck down slavery laws 17 years before the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of a slave owner to treat a person as property.

Iowa’s gay marriage ban “is unconstitutional, because the county has been unable to identify a constitutionally adequate justification for excluding plaintiffs from the institution of civil marriage,” Cady wrote in the 69-page opinion that seemed to dismiss the concept of civil unions as an option for gay couples.

“A new distinction based on sexual orientation would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our constitution,” Cady wrote.

The ruling, however, also addressed what it called the “religious undercurrent propelling the same-sex marriage debate,” and said judges must remain outside the fray.

[...]“Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve these types of religious debates and entrusts to courts the task of ensuring that government avoids them,” the opinion says.

The ruling explicitly does not affect “the freedom of a religious organization to define marriage it solemnizes as unions between a man and a woman,” the justices stressed.

We Don't Need Him

Indiana's Evan Bayh pisses me off. Here's a Democratic senator who thinks he's a "bipartisan statesman," some kind of Republican-lite asshole who can't decide where he stands. Why he thinks that "working" with Republicans who use him and his "bipartisanship" as a tool to oppose and obstruct the President is a good thing, is beyond me. When in this Congress have the Republicans responded in kind, and reached across the aisle to help Democrats? Never! Now, when I reach out to someone and they spit on my hand, I usually make that hand into a fist and apply it upside their head. But Bayh seems to think that he's accomplishing something--but for whom?

Now, it seems that there has been, at least in the recent past, a method to his madness. Ezra Klein charts Evan Bayh's inconsistent conservatism:

The two really interesting data points, however, are the 109th Congress, which stretched from 2005 to 2007, and the 110th Congress, which ended in January of this year. In the 109th Congress, Bayh's voting pattern suddenly develops an uncharacteristic liberalism. He becomes the 19th most conservative member, with a record more liberal than, among others, Joe Biden. As context, there were also the years when Bayh was preparing for the presidential run that he eventually aborted.

I've thought for a while that Bayh was posturing with his Blue Dog Democrats for a reason, but now I really don't understand what he's doing. Did he not notice that his state, Indiana, went for Obama last year? What's he after?

No matter--Bayh is an opportunistic weasel, and the voters of Indiana need to give Bayh the boot, and put in a truly progressive Democrat when he's up for reelection.

Glen Beck Needs Help

Glen Beck is seriously in need of an intervention. The man is publicly breaking down on cable tv! He was always a crazy wingnut, but since he moved from CNN to Faux, he's been crying, blabbering, and otherwise having a full-blown psychotic break on tv. His latest nutty cause is....well, I'll let Stephen Colbert explain it, better than I ever could:

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