I'm a huge fan and advocate of early voting, but even I didn't think the numbers would be this high. Wow.

United States Elections Project:

In the presidential election of 2008, approximately 39.7 million or 30% of all votes were cast prior to Election Day, November 4, 2008. This is a significant increase from 20% in 2004 and part of the upward trend experienced since 1992, when 7% of all votes were cast early. These numbers are likely to increase in subsequent presidential elections as more states adopt early voting and more voters become comfortable with the practice. A summary of these early voting laws can be found at Paul Gronke's excellent Early Voting Center. I discuss the bright future of early voting - among other trends - in this article available at the on-line political science journal, The Forum.

What a beautiful trend line. I hope these numbers keep rising and rising until Congress recognizes that the current system is pretty broken and very antiquated. I'm a fan of declaring Election Day a national holiday and giving everybody the day off to exercise their constitutional right and duty without having to worry about work and whatnot. I'm also a fan of vote-by-mail (see how well it works in Oregon) and expanded Motor Voter efforts. What electoral changes would you like to see?

h/t Markos, who quips, "no more 'election day.'"

The discord among Republicans is leading to a clear sense of panic in their ranks. Witness the unprecedented meeting -- sans party apparatus -- being called by the members of the Republican National Committee this week to take a look at the potential leaders now lining up to direct the party's future.

Of course, given that one of the leading applicants recently created a stir by sending out a Christmas disc with "Barack the Magic Negro" on it, it might be that they want to take a harder look at who's going to be leading them.

Ironically, one of the names we keep hearing from RNC types about potential candidates to head them up is Ken Blackwell, the black wingnut from Ohio. If they name him to lead a decidedly very white party, one would hope they'd at least have enough self-awareness to retire the "Magic Negro" charge regarding Obama.

But given what we all keep hearing from conservatives themselves after the election -- that their problem was that they weren't far enough to the right -- it seems like all this may be more pretext for driving the party into further irrelevance.

Indeed, as Eric Ward observes, some of the more wingnutty of the GOP factions -- including the NRA, the Eagle Forum, and the anti-abortion crowd -- are all hoping to seize the reins in the midst of the GOP's power vacuum.

Interesting times, interesting times.

America's Voice has put together a compendium of the worst campaign ads of 2008 that were focused on immigration.

You can choose from three:

Obama's Plan: Driver's Licenses for Illegals

The National Republican Trust PAC spent launched this ad attacking Barack Obama for supporting driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants and linked this policy to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in an ad that fact-checking sites called "terror-pandering."

Elizabeth Dole - Days B

Dole's provocative ad blamed immigrants for lost wages and runaway spending: "… here they came. Costing us a billion dollars each year. Billions in lost wages."

[SEN-LA] NRSC: Fence

The NRSC attacked incumbent Senator Mary Landrieu (LA) for being on the "wrong side of the fence" on immigration, and lambasted her for this vote and others that were no more "extreme" than Senator McCain's.

The Border is Broken

"I'll get tough on illegals," says congressional contender Jay Love, in an ad that invoked both high-tech surveillance images and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

David Woods for Congress

Alabama congressional contender David Woods put out this ad depicting what are presumably undocumented immigrants swimming across the border. The ad states that he opposes "amnesty for illegal aliens."

You can see them all and vote here.

These ads were most notable for helping drive Obama's victory (and that of Democrats generally) by alienating Latino voters. As AV notes:

Despite spending significantly on immigration ads, most candidates airing them lost. Of the 218 ads aired by Republicans or Democrats in races that have been decided, only 69, or 32%, favored a winning candidate.3 GOP candidates, party committees, and outside group allies sponsored 78% of the immigration-related ads in races that have been decided. Only 17% of these ads were placed by winning GOP candidates and their allies.

Now, will the right-wing nativists get out of the way and let progressives solve this problem? Not likely. But it's time for us to do it anyway.

Matt Taibbi reflects on the failed McCain candidacy in perhaps the best and most-entertaining article of the entire political season. Here's a taste.

Rolling Stone:

John McCain and Sarah Palin, after all, represented two completely different approaches to Republican conservatism. McCain comes from the school of politicking that goes after as many votes as possible by waving a flag and saying as little as possible, which is to say he was basically a third-way Democrat with a Goldwater fetish. His basic plan heading into the general election seemed strikingly similar to that of the dipshit vice president character from the uninspiring but weirdly prescient Chris Rock movie Head of State, who ran on a platform of "I've been vice president for the last eight years, I'm a war hero and I'm Sharon Stone's cousin."

McCain's shtick wasn't exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.

Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama's presidency. She's a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove's wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.

Seriously...read the whole thing. It's well worth your time.

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Well, there goes Democrats' chances of getting 60 seats:

ATLANTA - Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss won re-election Tuesday in a runoff, dashing Democrats' hopes of capturing enough seats in the U.S. Senate to thwart Republican filibusters.

Chambliss' election to a second term gives the GOP a firewall against Democrats eager to flex their newfound political muscle in Washington. The monthlong runoff battle against Democrat Jim Martin captured the national limelight, drawing political luminaries from both parties to the state and flooding the airwaves with fresh attack ads.

Minnesota — where a recount is under way — now remains the only unresolved Senate contest in the country. With 92 percent of the recount completed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s tally had Republican Norm Coleman leading Democrat Al Franken by 340 votes, with nearly 6,000 ballots challenged.

The worst aspect of this is that Sarah Palin gets to claim some credit for the win. Sigh.

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Sarah Palin's out in Georgia today, ostensibly campaigning for the execrable Saxby Chambliss with her usual brand of right-wing populism that plays especially well in places like Gwinnett and Forsyth counties.

I say ostensibly, because who she's really campaigning for is Sarah Palin in 2012. These campaign stops are all about Palin positioning herself to become the leading figurehead of the Republican Party. Lotsa luck with that, of course. (You betcha!) [Wink]

But in the meantime, the fine folks back in Alaska are wondering what became of their governor. The Alaska Democratic Party's chairman, Patti Higgins, held a press conference a little earlier today raising that question. From their press release:

Palin has been back in Alaska at work for only a few days since running for vice president.

"Alaskans need our Governor here earning her salary and working on key problems facing Alaska families," said Alaska Democratic Party Chair Patti Higgins.

Alaska is facing significant challenges, Higgins said, including:

• Oil prices have dropped dramatically to about $45/bbl from the peak of $144/bbl in July, which threatens the state budget.
• Alaskans are paying some of the highest prices for gas in the nation, averaging $2.87 per gallon, while the national average is $1.91.
• The state's oil production continues to decline, due to falling prices and mature fields.
• The global credit crunch and falling natural gas prices threaten the Alaska gas line.
• The State is failing to meet its constitutional obligation to take care of public education as shown by the high drop out rates and the low graduation rates.
• Many Medicare patients cannot find doctors.
• There is continued flight from rural villages.
• Alaska faces the prospect of reduced federal dollars from Washington, D.C.

"Alaska's challenges are significant, and there is much that needs to be done right now. Our Governor should remember that her primary job is to work on behalf of the citizens of Alaska, not engage in partisan politics in other states," Higgins said. "Governing is more than creating photo ops. We'd like a commitment that the Governor is working, not just scheduling media appearances."

In a way, though, there's a certain symmetry about Palin gallivanting off to campaign for Chambliss. It makes clear she really doesn't give a rat's hindquarters about her actual constituents.

And as Senate Guru explains, neither does Saxby Chambliss. Two peas in a pod.

They really don't come much scummier than Freedom's Watch, the wretched excuses for human beings who smeared Democratic candidates this past campaign with lying robo-calls. The DCCC's anti-FW site has the goods on their deep GOP ties.

Supposedly they're about to go out of business. But evidently -- like the dying sting of a scorpion -- they're taking one last stab.

Now they're running truly vicious ads attacking Jim Martin, the Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia currently facing a runoff election:

Yesterday, the struggling Freedom’s Watch released an attack ad against Georgia’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jim Martin, saying that he “failed to look out for Georgia’s families.” “First he actually helped block stiffer penalties for drunk drivers,” warns the voice in the ad, which echoes previous GOP ads. “And then, Martin voted against tougher sentences for domestic abuse.”

As it happens, Martin built much of his political reputation as an effective advocate for protecting children from criminals -- no doubt a product of having his then-8-year-old daughter kidnapped. So he made an ad responding to the Freedom's Watch ad by pointing this out. As you can see, it's incredibly effective.

Of course, this is all too reminiscent of the way Chambliss won in 2002 -- with Republican operatives assailing the patriotism of Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran who left limbs on the battlefield.

It may have worked in 2002. In 2008, though, the national mood is different. Recall what happened to Elizabeth Dole when she tried pulling similarly nasty tactics near the end of her campaign against Kay Hagan in North Carolina -- she was spanked by an even wider margin than polls had indicated.

Most people are tired of this nonsense -- they want serious people who will go to work to solve the nation's problems. Hopefully, the voters of Georgia will be thinking likewise.

We knew even before the election that the right was going to be trying to delegitimize Barack Obama's and the Democrats' electoral victory, since it would be their only hope of hanging on to their own few rapidly vanishing strands of legitimacy, not to mention relevance.

Well the whole "ACORN used fraud to win" meme that was originally favored in this role didn't pan out so well, given the size and breadth of the victory.

So now they're going for the tried and true: The Librul Media Made Us Do It. That, after all, was the underlying meme in that phony Zogby poll intended to make Obama supporters look stoopid. It's looking like a desperate grasp at the strawman.

Mark Halperin, the onetime ABC News honcho now writing for Time, was out there yesterday doing his best to help. He told a crowd that the media bias in Obama's favor this election was overwhelming:

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Yeah, all that media silence about Jeremiah Wright, while they couldn't seem to stop talking about Pastor Hagee -- that was so biased! ... What's that? That's not what happened? I guess Halperin has me confused.

Now, it's probably true that the media coverage tended to make Obama look like a principled, thoughtful leader, and McCain look like a gimmick-driven hack willing to say or do anything to get elected. But then, that might be because McCain's campaign itself -- from taking on an unqualified dimwit like Sarah Palin as a running mate to dragging out Joe the Plumber at every stop -- made him look that way. As Colbert says, reality does tend to have a liberal bias.

But I have to say, Halperin's line that this was "the most disgusting failure in our business since the Iraq war" is a real piece of chutzpah.

Because when there was a chance for the media to do something about properly informing the public about the Iraq war, Halperin -- who had the reins of one of the three major network's news operations at the time -- did nothing. The media's coverage of the war, particularly during the critical runup period, was in fact a historic case of misfeasance that has had disastrous consequences for the nation. And Mark Halperin was a major player in that failure.

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Via Blue Texan.

Apparently the Republican Senator from Georgia doesn't like it when asked normal questions by a reporter about refusing to honor a subpoena in the lawsuit against a sugar company that sought his help to insulate them from culpability in the wake of an explosion at one of its plants that killed 14 people.

As he makes the cameraman say hello to Mr. Hand, he mutters:

"You can take it away now."

So evidently, not only is Chambliss above the law, he's above any kind of accountability to the public. Sounds like a classic Republican to me.

Go Jim Martin!

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Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council was out repeating the nonsensical yet much-repeated "America is a center-right country" meme for CNN's Lou Dobbs program Wednesday, and he added something of a new twist:

I think there is a strategy that's going to be going forward for the conservative movement. I think many in the conservative movement, if you will, believe that the Republican Party took over the conservative movement and kind of ran it off the road. And, uh, conservatives are ready to take back control of the conservative movement, and if the Republican Party wants to be a governing party, as it has been in the past, then it's going to have to return to those conservative principles.

I think most people -- Republicans like Kathleen Parker included -- see it the other way around: the Republican Party was taken over by the conservative movement. One upon a time, the GOP actually was home to genuine moderates like Lowell Weicker and John Chafee; but ever since Ronald Reagan's ascension in the late 1970s, it gradually become a wholly owned subsidiary of the conservative movement.

Certainly, nearly every step taken by George W. Bush during his tenure had the movement's ardent support -- until, that is, it became self-evident to everyone but the 20-percenter kool-aid drinkers that his presidency was an unmitigated disaster for the nation. Now they want to blame that disaster on everyone but the misbegotten philosophy that caused it.

As Digby put it some time ago:

George W. Bush will not achieve a place in the Republican pantheon. Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal.)

Now, part of what makes movement conservatives the lovable wingnuts they are is that they are nothing if not spectacularly un-self-aware. They're like people who wear their underwear on their heads and then are puzzled when everyone points and laughs.

So Tony Perkins goes on, while repeating the right's favorite meme, and even admits that Republican governance has been a fiasco:

Look, America is a center-right nation. Barack Obama and the policies he reflects are not reflective of the nation. I think he offered, you know, what he called change, and Americans were ready for change. You know, Republicans have not governed well, and America was looking for a new path, and Barack Obama offered that. Now, his success is going to depend on whether or not he can govern as a moderate, as he campaigned, or whether he is going to be a liberal, as his record would indicate.

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[Image courtesy Tom Tomorrow.]

Nate Silver interviewed John Ziegler, the wingnut who commissioned that falsehood-based poll purporting to demonstrate that Obama voters were stooopid.

Silver's questions, as you can see, are perfectly normal and reasonable, but Ziegler completely loses it. By the end, he's doing a Cheney.

It starts to go downhill when Silver, who know a wee bit about polling, asks a perfectly reasonable question:

NS: Why would you commission a survey question with no correct response?
JZ: The purpose of the question, you pinhead, was we wanted to determine the Tina Fey Effect.

In short order, Ziegler starts attacking Silver over the phone:

NS: Where the interviews conducted by telephone or online?
JZ: How can you ask a question like that and pretend that you have any clue what you're writing about! That's unbelievable that someone could write what you did! That is unbelievable that you wouldn't know that it's a telephone or an online poll and that you went on my summaries of the questions before the questions were even released!

NS: We’ve heard reports from our readers that very similar questions had been asked in an online format. There was no online component at all?
JZ: That is correct, which you would have known if you had looked at the information. Before you called this a push poll -- you don't seem to know the definition of a push poll. How do you have this website?

NS: What did Zogby charge you -- what did you pay for this survey?
JZ: I'm not going to tell you that, I'm not a fucking idiot.

By the end, Ziegler is simply hostile -- not to mention thoroughly convinced that his bullshit don't stink:

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Mark Begich finally takes down Ted Stevens, the rampaging Hulk from Alaska.

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican lawmaker convicted on felony corruption charges in October, appears to have lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Mark Begich, according to a release from Begich's campaign and unofficial results from state officials.
Democrat Mark Begich (left) has claimed victory over Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

The statement and results Tuesday come two weeks after the election, after absentee ballots were counted.

With 100 percent of Alaska's precincts reporting, Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, had roughly 47.7 percent of the vote, compared with about 46.6 percent for Stevens, according to unofficial results posted on the Alaska Secretary of State's Web site.

He appears to have bested Stevens by 3,724 votes, according to the posted results.

So much for Sarah Palin's hopes of sliding over to the Senate.

And the Democratic tally in the Senate now reaches 58, with two more races still in the balance.

Rarrrrghhh!!!

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is plumping the efforts of an outfit called HowObamaGotElected, which in turn is now being bandied eagerly throughout the wingnutosphere.

Their main theme, apparently, is that Obama voters were "ignorant" because they hadn't absorbed the wingnuts' favorite smears about Obama during the campaign. The site claims that it commissioned a "Zogby Poll" which came up with the following results:

512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points

97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates

Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions

57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)

81.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)

82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)

88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)

56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).

And yet.....

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes

Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter

And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!

Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.

Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we "gave" one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)

Now, the data about the voters' ability to correctly identify facts about Sarah Palin -- as well as their understandable confusion about what Palin actually said about Russia, considering that in fact she did say that one could see Russia from Alaska -- is essentially meaningless; a survey of McCain voters would almost certainly come up with similar statistics.

But as Nate Silver says, this is flat-out push-polling. Look at the questions in the first half of the data summary -- nearly every one of the supposed "facts" is either simply false or a grotesque distortion:

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There is a coordinated effort by Conservatives to play the "Obama is stealing elections" game since they've been resoundingly rejected by the American people. The RNC is actually sending out fundraising letters which are blatantly claiming that Obama and activists are actively stealing elections away from Republicans. Mike Duncan, soon to be exc-RNC head is called out on this lie by CNN's American Morning host John Roberts who thought Duncan was way out of line too.

Roberts...but this fundraising letter clearly said that they are trying to steal these election victories.

Duncan: Well, we have to be careful. There have been a lot of reported irregularities in this election going back to ACORN when....

Roberts: Is it accurate to say that they are trying to steal these elections or did that language go too far?

Duncan: John, haha, I've not got that in front of me right now, but I want to make sure that we are vigilant and allow anyone to irregularly out influence the outcome of this election and we have to have resources to do that.

Roberts: It just seems to me to steal these election victories is pretty charged language and you should have something to back that up.

Duncan: Do you want anyone to steal an election?

Roberts: I don't want anyone to steal an election. but if there's no evidence that anybody is than it's hard to reconcile with how you put that language in a fundraising letter.

So he's telling us that the one and only Mike Duncan, the head of the RNC doesn't know what his own fundraising letter contained in it after he signed it and sent it out. What a liar.

Orrin Hatch is also engaged in similar behavior.

From an Human Events email blast:

Help Defeat MoveOn.Org

So Evan Bayh is leading what appears to be a growing chorus of "let bygones be bygones" Democrats who want to let Joe Lieberman keep his seat as chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee:

“We can take away his chairmanship, that’s something we have the right to do,” Bayh said on MSNBC. “What you will have at that point is someone who may very well resign, or someone is embittered ... who might not be with us on some of these key votes.”

Bayh said that Lieberman must first issue a “sincere apology” for campaign attacks warning of the perils of an Obama presidency and a large Democratic majority in Congress. He said Democrats should allow him to keep his chairmanship on the condition that he would not use his subpoena power and influence as chairman to undermine Obama’s presidency. Otherwise, Democrats would take away his gavel at any point next Congress, Bayh warned.

Bayh said Democrats should tell Lieberman sternly, “Look, we’re giving you a chance here, but if you don’t do the right things as chairman, and we see any continuation of this kind of behavior ...the game is up at that point.”

Democrats need to look beyond the mere fact of Lieberman's egregious disloyalty in the past campaign, which of course is at least an understandable reason to remove him, if not the most compelling one in a post-election season aimed at bridging rifts.

A far more compelling reason is that Lieberman in fact parts ways with Democrats on many issues besides merely the Iraq war. Think Progress has a pretty thorough rundown on just how many ways Joe is not with us when it counts: on taxes, Social Security, torture, health care, energy ... the list is long and damning.

But the ultimate reason to remove Lieberman as chair of Homeland Security is that his record as chair of that committee has been abjectly conservative, partisan, and in the end a menace to Americans' civil rights: In other words, Lieberman is antithetical to the progressive mandate Democrats have just been handed.

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