Would the country be as aware of the following if not for an extremist government in power in Washington?  Acorn and the “community organizer” groups have been revealed to be nothing more than corrupt partisan hacks exploiting the poor and the taxpayers.  The unions and their leaders exposed as power hungry ideologues with no interest in the long term well-being of their members.  The mainstream media’s willingness to lose all credibility with the vast majority of the public with its not so subtle cheerleading for their preferred politician has become obvious to all.  The Democratic Party, at one time the self-declared defender of the little guy, has openly declared war on small business and capitalism.  The Democratic members of Congress have been revealed to be indifferent to the voters, incapable of reading bills and fully in the pockets of liberal special interests groups.

This issue was debated in an earlier post. Read the rest of the AE piece here.

When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education.  Senator Obama said, “I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and half years before I went to law school.   That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.  Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

Hmmm . . . more here.

In that year of 2004, Arlen Specter’s term was up.

The Goal: keep that seat Republican.

The Plan: As an incumbent has a better chance of re-election than a challenger seeking an open seat, re-nominate Specter.

The Problem: Pro-life Pat Toomey, more interested in the lives of the unborn than in the continuance of Specter’s political career, was challenging Specter in the primary, and showed every sign of beating him.

The Solution: Santorum, and even pro-life President George W. Bush, would campaign for Specter’s re-nomination.

And just how well did that solution work out for the Republican Party?

Today, the Great State of Pennsylvania is represented in the United States Senate by two Democrats.

Let’s take a look at just where, as a former boss of mine used to say, did the wheels come off?

Specter, with Santorum’s and Bush’s support, was re-nominated, and re-elected. He was grateful for this support to them and to the Republican Party, yes? Maybe not so much.

Two years later, faced with his own re-election challenge, and with the sting of Toomey’s defeat still marring his pro-life credentials, Santorum was defeated by Robert Casey Jr., son of the late popular pro-life governor Bob Casey (who is most famous outside Pennsylvania for being denied permission to make a pro-life speech at a Democratic National Convention). Casey Junior, running as a pro-life candidate was able to draw enough of Santorum’s pro-life supporters away to defeat Santorum. After over two years, Pennsylvania pro-lifers are still awaiting Casey’s first pro-life vote. Specter did support Santorum’s re-election, but somehow Specter’s support was not persuasive to Pennsylvania’s pro-life communinity.

And now, with liberal Specter voting with the Democrats on virtually every issue, and faced with the task of running for re-election again in 2010, and faced again with a challenge from Toomey, Specter, told by his pollster that he cannot win a Republican primary (no doubt due to his abandonment of every distinctly Republican principle), has switched parties, and will seek re-election as a Democrat.

Was this not utterly predictable? Was it ever likely that Specter, as one of the Republican minority in the Senate, would stand up against the majority for GOP principles?

The Lesson: The Republican Party will win as a pro-life party, or not at all. The label isn’t enough, Republicans must actually believe in the platform.

(Cross-posted to Thoughts of a Regular Guy.)

But who is responsible for Illinois being represented by a lying weasel in the U.S. Senate?

Though Blagojevich appointed Burris, that was just the beginning of our descent into madness. Like I said, there are two others who deserve credit.

Obama could have demanded a special election to fill his own vacated Senate seat, the one that Blagojevich allegedly tried to sell to the highest bidder. Obama also pressured Senate leaders to seat Burris, in the hopes of ending the fiasco before his inauguration.

And, after Burris tried to fix the lie he told to Durkin in the impeachment hearing—that he had no contact about fundraising with Blagojevich people other than one aide named Lon Monk—Burris sent an affidavit to a Madigan flunky, state Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Madigan), dated Feb. 4.

Currie held that affidavit in her desk, conveniently, until after Burris voted last week for the near trillion-dollar Obama pork/stimulus package. Now Madigan is demanding an investigation of possible perjury and has sent the documents to a Springfield prosecutor.

Yet the deed has been done. Obama’s porkulus was passed. Obama got Burris’ vote, and Madigan has an excuse to attack Burris because he doesn’t want Burris leading the 2010 Illinois Democratic ticket when Madigan’s daughter runs for governor.

See how it works? They get what they want. And we get Tombstone Burris.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The election of a black man as president is supposed to be a wonderful thing. Doesn’t that depend on how it came about? If it shows the growth of human respect and a widening scheme of cooperation then it’s a good thing. If it shows that a social order that took particular histories and connections into account has been replaced by one based on TV, pop culture and celebrity on the one hand and formally certified expertise on the other, then it’s certainly a sign of Change but not necessarily one of improvement.

If the GOP decides to go in the Bobby Jindal direction (fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights), it will be committing political suicide. As much as anything else, this election was a referendum on the social conservative agenda, and the social conservatives did not win.

I really don’t understand the logic here. Was this election at all about social issues? From what I saw, social issues were very rarely discussed — the primary issues were the economic crisis and the Iraq War. McCain rarely brought up social issues unless prompted, and Obama, for his part, didn’t harp on them either. So how on earth was this a referendum on the social conservative agenda?

Furthermore, given that Proposition 8 passed in California, as did several other socially conservative initiatives and referendums, it is extremely difficult to see how connection can be drawn to widespread distaste for of the social conservative agenda. There is absolutely no logic to this line of argument — it’s the same old tripe we constantly hear from libertarian-leaning Republicans.

There are a few things we need to keep in mind before we completely give in to fatalism.  Last night was bad, but the reality is that the Republican Party is in essentially the same spot the Democrats were in a mere four years ago, and about the same as the GOP was in after the 1992 election.

Obama’s ultimate popular vote margin of victory will be more substantial than Bush’s over Kerry and about on par with Clinton’s over Bush, but it was not a blowout.  The Democrats will hold a slightly larger lead in the Senate than the GOP had four years ago, and it will be about the same as the Democratic majority after 1992.  Ditto for the House.  And though Obama was able to flip at least eight red states last night, only two really portend long-term trouble for the GOP: Colorado and Virginia.  Meanwhile, former swing states such as West Virginia and Tennessee can now reliably be put in the red column.  (Hmmm, West Virginia and Virginia seem to be returning to their post Civil War positions.)

That being said, there are a few very troubling electoral patterns.  John McCain lost eight of the nine most populous states.  Though Florida, Ohio, and even Pennsylvania are not forever lost, the Republican Party cannot go into every presidential election with no shot in California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Michigan.  You’re basically conceding half the Electoral College right there, and that is simply not sustainable.  Inroads must be made in some of these states or it will grow increasingly difficult for a Republican to win the White House.  And while I’m happy to go to war with the southeast at my back, we need to recapture the Midwest.

Again, we’ll get into the particulars of how to go about doing all that later on.  For now, maybe we should all forget about politics for a few days and enjoy some of the finer aspects of life – like the continued dominance of the New York football Giants.

(Cross-posted at Crankycon)

What galls me is that three strangers, decorated with partisan buttons and campaign hats, think that it is consistent with our democratic traditions to knock on my door and inquire as to how I voted on a secret ballot in another state.  Where do these people come from?