Read it and weep, Democrats:

As he prepared to take a job in the White House at the end of last year, David Axelrod sold the political consulting firm that helped elect President Barack Obama for $2 million to a group of consultants who helped steer Obama’s campaign.

According to a disclosure form released Friday evening by the White House, the firm, AKP&D Message & Media, paid him $897,000 last year, when it had basically turned itself into an arm of the Obama campaign, which paid the company $2.5 million.

The disclosure indicates that Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe — the “P” in AKP&D and still an influential political consultant for Obama and the Democratic National Committee — was not among the buyers, though he’ll remain a senior adviser to the firm.

Instead, Axelrod reported the new owner is a “newly formed S corporation” owned by Obama campaign vets John Kupper, John Del Cecato and Larry Grisolano.

Kupper and Del Cecato — the “K” and “D,” respectively — handled research and for the campaign and also wrote many of its ads. Grisolano is a Los Angeles-based strategist who handled direct mail for Obama’s campaign.

This is a new day in Washington? This is something other than business as usual? This is open, honest government which only speaks for the people?

I’m telling ya, liberals, you’ve been taken for suckers – Obama might be a leftist, but those who elevated him to power did it for the money and the power, and now they are running the show behind the scenes while Obama reads the script off a teleprompter.

You’ve been had – wake up!

It is nice to see that Minnesotans are not about to allow the sleazebag politics of the Democratic party to hijack a Senate seat without a fight:

Minnesota voters testified Tuesday their ballots had been unfairly rejected as Republican Norm Coleman argued thousands of disqualified absentee ballots should be counted in the U.S. Senate race.

“Perhaps my signature is not as good as it once was,” Gerald Anderson, of St. Paul, told the three-judge panel hearing Coleman’s lawsuit. “It gets cloudy and crooked. I am 75 years old.”

But that shouldn’t have disqualified his vote, he said: “I want it back. I’m entitled to my vote.”

A statewide recount gave Democrat Al Franken a 225-vote edge. The personal stories that Anderson and five other voters told are just one front on Coleman’s effort to have more votes counted.

And so much for “count every vote” – that only applies when Democrats are behind. Once the Democrat gets in the lead, then all the votes are counted, no matter what.

Has there been a more disgusting spectacle out of the 2008 campaign? Here is Al Franken, the man who routinely accuses Republicans of being lying bastards, attempting to steal a Senate seat he couldn’t win on the square…how do liberals sleep at night?

Barack Obama was not one to hold back on doom & gloom characterizations of the economy, so why is it that only now he’s saying all the hope and change he promised will have to be scaled back?

[Comrade] Barack Obama said reviving the U.S. economy will require scaling back on his campaign promises and personal sacrifice from all Americans.

“I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,” Obama said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program broadcast this morning. “Everybody’s going to have to give.”

Obama also said in the interview recorded yesterday that he wants stricter guidelines and greater transparency in spending the remaining $350 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. 

It is amazing how different campaign promises are from reality… especially for Barack Hussein Obama. His “hope and change” is looking a lot more like “nope and more of the same.”  It seems like we’re hearing a lot of preemptive excuses being given to explain why Obama is ultimately going to be a huge failure.

We’ve just seen how Democrats in power have turned a legitimate Republican victory for Norm Coleman into a stolen election for Al Franken… so this ought to be a warning to the Republican Party that they have to do a lot more to fight the Democrats attempts to steal elections across the country.

The highly publicized vote recount in the Minnesota Senate race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman is shining a light on Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the state’s chief election officer.

Ritchie is chairman of the Minnesota Canvassing Board, which on Monday certified that Franken received 225 more votes than Coleman did.

Ritchie gave partial credit for his 2006 election to a liberal 527 group, the Secretary of State Project, which says its goal is to “ensure fair, clean elections” by replacing conservative secretaries of state with liberal Democrats.

 “I want to thank the Secretary of State Project and its thousands of grassroots donors for helping to push my campaign over the top,” Ritchie said in a posting on the project’s Web site. “Your wonderful support–both directly to my campaign and through generous expenditures by the strategic fund–helped me get our election reform message to Minnesota voters.”

 The SoS Project says it spent a total of $500,000 in seven swing states in 2006 trying to get Democrats elected as secretaries of state. They achieved victories in all but two of those states–Michigan and Colorado–but helped fund Democratic wins in Ohio, Nevada, Minnesota, Iowa and New Mexico.

This blatant attempt to steal elections must be stopped.

In Tennessee, at least:

On Election Night, voters spoke loudly with the echoes reverberating still today. In Tennessee, John McCain carried the state with 57% of the vote, Senator Lamar Alexander was re-elected with 65%, and fourteen new Republican legislators were elected yielding a Republican Majority in the General Assembly for the first time since 1868.

Voters elected legislators that carried the same values and principles that are held by average citizen in these districts. Those values and principles are pretty simple.

* Taxes and spending: The government should live within its means and oppose higher tax bills to fund a bloated budget; the voters know government needs to cut spending.
* Gun Rights: Voters want commonsense carry laws making it easier for them to protect themselves and their families.
* Local economies: Families in their community know that improvements are needed by investing in transportation and education infrastructure to support existing jobs and recruit new businesses. They are tired of the powerbrokers in Nashville increasing entitlement programs instead.

Candidates, who displayed the courage to challenge Democrat incumbents and in open seats were solid, qualified individuals. They were not just “known” in their communities. They are people that truly represent the values of their communities.

We believe this is what our founders intended with citizen legislators. The hard work and time commitment that is necessary to run campaigns are a good test of how hard each legislator will work for his or her district. The people of these districts will be well represented by their new representative’s principled leadership.

But it should be noted that Alexander out performed McCain by 8 percentage points – and had McCain jazzed up GOPers as much as he should have, we might have had a different result nationally.

The Tennessee GOP showed how its done – in an anti-GOP year with arguably the most unpopular GOPer ever in the White House, the Tennessee GOP clobbered the Tennessee Democrats. We have to get back to our roots, and back to the people – the left talks a great game about being for the people, but what they are really for is themselves…and for too long now, too many GOPers have aped this attitude, and now we’ve paid the price for it, and very deservedly.

It will be a long, hard road back to national power and it may even take a decade or two to complete (though I do think we have bright prospects for 2010), but it is a road we must travel for the sake of the nation. Liberalism, that dead dog of the past, will have its day – and it’ll be our job to ensure that it is the very last day liberalism ever has.

The recount in Minnesota has been a bizarre roller coaster, with Team Franken finding new ways to steal the election. Coleman has had a slim, but regular… yet Franken’s finagling. including mystery ballots being discovered in bizarre places.

Recent reports have Fraudulent Franken up… but it is far from over.

But major issues remain in the race, including some 5,000 withdrawn challenges that won’t be allocated to the candidates until next week. Coleman’s attorney, Tony Trimble, said those could throw the lead back to the Republican.

“We’ll let them enjoy the weekend,” Trimble said. When votes from those challenges are restored, he said, “You’ll see our ship come in.”

There’s reason for him to be optimistic. Franken withdrew more challenges before this week, leaving a larger pool of potential votes for Coleman in the next stage. There are 400 to 500 more ballots where Coleman could find votes compared with the batch available to Franken.

Al Franken is trying to steal this election… Help Coleman fend off Franken’s Fraud by donating here.

It’s about time.

Political newcomer Anh “Joseph” Cao, a Republican, has beaten nine-term incumbent William Jefferson, a Democrat, in the 2nd Congressional District, according to the Associated Press.

With 79 percent of the district’s 492 precincts reporting, Cao, a Venetian Isles attorney who has enjoyed strong backing from local and national GOP organizations, is leading 53 percent to 43 percent over Jefferson. Green Party candidate Malik Rahim has 3 percent, while Libertarian Gregory Kahn is trailing with less than 1 percent.

The district, which was drawn to give African Americans an electoral advantage, covers most of New Orleans, most of Jefferson Parish’s West Bank and parts of south Kenner. About two-thirds of the district’s voters are registered as Democrats.

It is a good day when a corrupt Democrat finally gets defeated… one down… a lot more to go.
Next up… trial and conviction.

I think a celebratory glass of Cabernet Sauvignon is in order.

UPDATE: How sweet it is.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Also noted is that the Democrats seem to have lost the other runoff House election in Louisiana. The reason does appear to be lower-than-necessary black turnout – one wonders that now there’s a black man to be in the White House will black turnout drop off heavily for all the special and off-year elections? For the 2010 mid-terms? The test will be in next year’s Virginia governors race.

Despite an enormous amount of help from Comrade Obama, Georgia Democrat Jim Martin was handily defeated by Senator Saxby Chambliss.

And despite attempts by Al Franken to steal his election, it looks like Norm Coleman will be returning to the Senate as well.

The runoff between Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin – Real Clear Politics aggregate of recent polls has Chambliss up by 4.7 points. All in all, it looks like the GOP will pull out a win here, though we must work hard – this could end up being the 41st GOP Senator.

As a side note, after our crushing defeat in 1992, it was Georgia’s Senate race which signaled the turn of the tide – coming hard on our defeat, it ushered in a period of victory which culminated in the 1994 mid-terms. History doesn’t actually repeat itself, but lets get a victory in Georgia and hope its an omen of our resurgence.

To help out Senator Chambliss who, with Franken still trying to steal Minnesota, may be all there is between liberty and 60 Democratic Senators:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will come to Georgia next week to campaign for incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss on the eve of the runoff election.

Palin, who drew large crowds while running for vice president with Republican presidential candidate U.S. Sen. John McCain, will appear at Chambliss rallies in Augusta, Savannah, Perry and Atlanta on Monday, the day before the Dec. 2 senate runoff between Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin.

A Chambliss victory following hard upon a Palin visit will make Governor Palin a top draw as we head towards 2010, and thus give her a massive leg up for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Scary.

More from Zogby:

 Just 2% of voters who supported Barack Obama on Election Day obtained perfect or near-perfect scores on a post election test which gauged their knowledge of statements and scandals associated with the presidential tickets during the campaign, a new Zogby International telephone poll shows.

Zogby Statement on Ziegler poll.

Only 54% of Obama voters were able to answer at least half or more of the questions correctly.

The 12-question, multiple-choice survey found questions regarding statements linked to Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his vice-presidential running-mate Sarah Palin were far more likely to be answered correctly by Obama voters than questions about statements associated with Obama and Vice-President–Elect Joe Biden. The telephone survey of 512 Obama voters nationwide was conducted Nov. 13-15, 2008, and carries a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percentage points. The survey was commissioned by John Ziegler, author of The Death of Free Speech, producer of the recently released film “Blocking the Path to 9/11″ and producer of the upcoming documentary film, Media Malpractice..

And of course there is a lot more at HowObamaGotElected.com.

Interesting:

In her seminal book, The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel writes about the real political divide — not left versus right, but what she calls stasists versus dynamists. The former fear change and want to use government power to minimize it, if not eliminate it. The latter accept that improvements in the human condition require change by definition, and understand that the best way to ensure it is to allow individuals the freedom to make choices, with consequences, both good and ill, to be borne by them.

By these definitions, both presidential candidates in this election were largely stasists.

Can’t say that I agree with that, but is in a fascinating concept – fascinating, to me, in the indicator of how widespread sheer misunderstanding is in our modern world. We’ve been far too long on this road, and its time we got off it.

As a campaign theme, “change” worked great for Obama. In reality, of course, Obama proposes very little of the change he ostensibly campaigned on, but we are in for some radical changes that were little mentioned during the election (we will get, for instance, a lot more abortion funding out of Obama even though that wasn’t mentioned on the campaign trail, but we won’t get a major shift in Iraq policy, even though Obama was on and on about it). Please observe one thing about the late, unlamented Presidential campaign – neither candidate talked about doing what is right. Curiously enough, I happened to hear Ralph Nader just before election day and in his own kooky but sincere way, he was talking about doing what was right, as he saw it. His tiny vote total can be taken as an indicator of what always trying to do the right thing can do to you, at times.

Change is a word which masks what is really going on – an attempt to avoid the hard and fast, “this is right or this is wrong” of it all. And don’t get me wrong here; John McCain is as guilty on this score as Obama. The jury is out on President Bush, and may not come in for a century. Former President Clinton is the archetype of the leader who will change daily in order to avoid doing what is right and thus risky. Taking one thing with another, we’ve had only a few President’s who were determined to do what was right all or most of the time. Reagan was one; so was Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and, of course, George Washington.

This is not to say that these men made no mistakes – each of them has a large number of rather stunning mistakes in the performance of their office. But the key to all of them was their burning desire to do what was right and the unflinching way they adhered to what was right, as best as they could determine it. And if you think we’re poor in having so few such leaders, please observe that in the entire rest of the world in the entirety of human history, the number of leaders who also tried to do what was right is, perhaps, even less than we’ve had in our 225-odd years. St Louis of France, for certain. Confucious, though he wasn’t in charge. Ashoka of India. Mandela. Christina Alexandra of Sweden, perhaps. Not much, to be sure.

To fault Obama and McCain for not doing what most people don’t do is unfair. On the other hand, to call for perish-the-hindmost change at all costs is insane. What we want is leaders who will try to discover the right thing to do, and then go on and try to do it, come what may. If doing the right thing calls for the complete overturning of a particular institution, then we must do it. If doing the right thing calls for rigid adherence to the existing rules of an institution, then we must do it. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and if you’re not actively seeking to do the right thing, then you run a high risk of doing the wrong thing, even if unintentionally.

That is the word.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, it would seem.

This is the part of politics most people shouldn’t have to see – Obama wants Hillary neutralized, at least for the first couple years, and by putting her in the Cabinet, he gets that. Hillary, meanwhile, has a lot of debts to pay off and the only want to get the money is via Bill’s “speaking fees”, and he will now have influence to peddle with this “foundation”. Actually, I’m going to hand it to Obama on this one – rather clever, if cynical, political ploy.

The larger worry I’m developing is that Obama appears unwilling to make a decision which risks Obama’s political prospects. In the advancement and defense of Obama, Obama is quick and decisive…on everything else he floats around like a feather blown on the wind. The various parts of the Obama Administration may fly very much out of control – someone has to make hard and fast decisions, and if Obama won’t, other’s will – to the detriment of national policy. Honestly, its better to have a series of wrong decisions made than a series of correct half-decisions.

Obama has a steep learning curve, and for the sake of the United States and the world I hope he realizes (a) how little he knows and (b) is determined to master his job.

John Hawkins makes a strong argument in favor of removing Senator Mitch McConnell from his Senate Minority Leader post, and that is part of a larger debate in the conservative movement about what moves we should make early on in our rebuilding process. My view? All Congressional GOP leaders should voluntarily step aside and allow new people to compete for their posts.

When you are the leaders of the losing team, propriety dictates a humble recognition that the failure, ultimately, rests in the leadership. Yeah, the cards were stacked against the GOP. Certainly, McCain didn’t run the ideal campaign. The MSM was in the tank for the Democratic party. On and on – there are plenty of mitigating circumstances. And they all amount to nothing – the GOP lost.

I didn’t hear a clarion call from the GOP as to just why we should elect GOPers to the House and Senate. I know we were low on money in a lot of respects, but I saw huge numbers of GOP ads attacking Congressional liberals…which is a fine thing to do, but you can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t just be against Congressional liberals (wise as that position is) you also have to be for something…and the GOP had a host of things to be for which a good, national campaign could have highlighted:

1. Oil and energy – the GOP made some good moves in this, but I never saw a comprehensive, national campaign to highlight just how bad the Democrats are on this issue and the common-sense solutions the GOP had in hand.

2. Taxation – no talk at all about how a variety of tax cuts could be used to stem the financial crisis and restore economic growth.

3. Corruption – Stevens should have been stripped of all his GOP privileges the moment he was convicted and every GOPer in America should have loudly called for his immediate resignation. Couple this with the Democrats continued coddling of people like William “Cold Cash” Jefferson and the GOP could have made fighting corruption an issue for the GOP.

4. Spending – Why didn’t we pledge ourselves to fiscal responsibility? A “we learned our lesson” campaign could have at least started returning GOP favorability in matters of spending.

Others can probably thing of many more things we could have used to go on offense – but all I perceive from the GOP in 2008, as in 2006, is a determination to limit losses…in other words, to not lose as badly as we could. Douglas MacArthur was asked what his formula was for defensive warfare – his one word answer, “defeat”. You can’t win unless you attack – and we didn’t lunge after Democratic vulnerabilities.

It might have been that the ultimate course for 2008 was GOP defeat – perhaps the anti-GOP headwinds really were too strong to overcome by even the best candidate and the best campaign. So be it – but you go into any battle with the absolute conviction of total victory and fight like heck from start to finish. We didn’t do that – our leadership didn’t do that; and it is time for them to go.

The very long fuse of the Catholic Church has finally gone off over this criminal enterprise:

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has not yet been able to determine if grants made to ACORN were used for fraudulent voter registration, but has cut off all funding to the community organizing group, Bishop Robert Morin announced on Tuesday.

Shortly after addressing the full assembly of U.S. Catholic bishops, Bishop Morin spoke to reporters about what the bishops had learned concerning the use of grants from the CCHD to the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which is currently under investigation in 13 states for voter fraud.

CCHD originally announced in July 2008 that it was suspending funding to ACORN because of the embezzlement of 1 million dollars by the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. Today, however, the Bishop Morin went one step further and announced the cancelation of all funding to the group.

The Catholic Church will work with just about anyone if there’s a chance the poor will be helped – recognizing the truth that we all fall very far short of the perfection God desires for us, its not time to stand on ceremony when a sinner offers to help out. But there is a limit, and ACORN has at least reached it. Hopefully the good people in ACORN will start to realize that they’ve been taken for a ride by a group dedicated to fraud and a leftist political ideology which is at war with all morality.

So, The One announces that if you’re a lobbyists you can’t work on the transition – this is supposed to give us all a tingle up our legs as we believe that, finally!, government will be cleaned up…

But, meanwhile, we still haven’t got a valid explanation from Obama about just why the security precautions were taken of his internet donation link and just where did all that money really come from? We know some came from non-existent people and some from foreigners…anyone want to take bets on some of it coming from lobbyists via third-party cut-outs?

Obama, if you want us to believe you’re really going to change how DC does business, then call for a special prosecutor to look into all campaign fundraising in 2008. We’ll be fair – we’ll have the GOP looked at, too.

After all, Democrats, there is nothing to fear from a full airing of just who donated to whom, right?

From a radio interview:

Q — Why did your campaign lose?

A — I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a $10 trillion debt in a Republican administration, how have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration?

If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party had been representing. People desiring change I think went as far from the administration that is presently seated as they could. … It’s amazing that we did as well as we did.

It is a certainty that the run up of debt, the various Congressional GOP scandals and the long war with its errors (real and imagined) played a huge role in our defeat last week. McCain’s mishandling of Palin’s roll out post-convention also played a role, as did McCain’s decision to eschew attacks on Obama over his racist, anti-American pastor of 20 years standing. The final nail in the coffin was – in retrospect – McCain’s decision to get deeply involved in the bail out. All that accomplished was to remind people what they didn’t like about the GOP Congressional delegation, that McCain is part of the terribly unpopular Congress and that he’s in the same party as George Bush. Pretty much, take any of the varied factors which contributed to the defeat and turn it around, and McCain stood a good chance of winning.

On top of all of this, however, is the current institutional weakness of the GOP. The Democrats have a motivating desire – they want power; all of it, all the time, in order to enrich themselves and their cronies and remake the United States in their sophomoric image of what America should be like. They don’t care how they acquire power and will use everything short of rape and murder to obtain it. Ok, fine; they probably also wouldn’t use cannibalism. I think. Maybe…. Meanwhile, the GOP doesn’t know what it wants. Conflicts between social and fiscal conservatives, various fights over how libertarian we should be and then whether or not we should work with or fight tooth and nail against the Democratic party push and pull the party in various directions and make it nearly impossible to have a coherent message for the elections.

The first task of the GOP is to sit down quietly for a bit and think:

1. What do we want?

2. How do we want to do it?

Until we’ve got good answers to both questions, we’ll continue to flounder about and fail to create that generational majority we’ll need to really reform America and excise the left wing poison in our system. Answering those questions might not be necessary for electoral victory – Obama’s almost-certain-to-fail policies may well usher us, deserving or not, back into power – but they are necessary to make our efforts worthwhile and lasting. Governor Palin is at least understanding why we lost, and it will be up to her – and others – to figure out over the next four years what we need to win.

Interesting:

Despite widespread predictions of record turnout in this year’s presidential election, roughly the same portion of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 as in 2004.

Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004, according to a voting analysis by American University political scientist Curtis Gans, an authority on voter turnout.

He estimated that between 126.5 million and 128.5 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, versus 122.3 million four years ago. Gans said the gross number of ballots cast in 2008 was the highest ever, even though the percentage was not substantially different from 2004, because there were about 6.5 million more people registered to vote this time around…

…In 2004, turnout was 6 percentage points higher than in 2000. But Gans said he believed it did not spike more this year because fewer Republicans went to the polls. While it may be premature to draw conclusions, Gans said, it appeared that Republican voting declined 1.3 points, to 28.7 percent of the electorate, while Democratic turnout rose from 28.7 percent to 31.3 percent of the electorate.

The Democratic increase struck some analysts as modest, considering the party’s immense get-out-the-vote operation, strong anti-Bush sentiment and Obama’s popularity.

“It sort of calls into question some of the vaunted ground game discussion, the whole turnout machine,” said a Democratic strategist who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing Obama’s campaign. “The GOTV effort was redoubled in 2008 compared to 2004, but it did not seem to make that big of a difference.”

Not quite the sweeping victory for liberalism our leftwing friends are claiming. Now the stories about Obama’s paid “volunteers” (who seem to have went at least temporarily unpaid) massing in droves to back his candidacy take on the look of, well, nonsense. Here are some States which had a decrease:

Ohio: 5,379,765 in 2008, 5,722,443 in 2004, 6% decrease.
Indiana: 2,286,760 in 2008, 2,468,002 in 2004, 7% decrease.
Alaska: 223,258 in 2008, 312,598 in 2004, 29% decrease.

The Alaska number is especially amazing given the hotly contested Senate seat plus having the Alaska governor on the ballot. For all the hoopla and hype and election day stories of massive turnout, its clear that it wasn’t like that at all – so why were we getting stories saying such was happening when it wasn’t? Some States (Florida, eg) had a big increase in turnout, but there are not enough actual turnout increases in battleground States to support the election day meme of high turnout. We were also advised that turnout might be as high as 150 million, about 30 million more than actually showed up – where did the high estimate come from?

What shapes up initially is a lack of enthusiasm for John McCain on the part of rank and file GOPers which could not be made up by merely having Palin on the ticket (and for all the lefty attacks on her, the rank and file GOP holds a very high opinion on her) – as in 2006, not so much a resounding endorsement of liberalism but a rejection of the GOP as its been over the past few years. A better GOP should be able to get those voters back to the polls and put a swift end to the Era of The One.

UPDATE: Haven’t been able to secure the complete vote for Illinois, but it appears that turnout in The One’s State only increased about 1% over 2004. Strange, huh? It was up a bit more than 2% in Arizona…which is still a small increase, all things considered, but beats Barry’s.

In the finest tradition of Democrat politics:

100 votes suddenly discovered. Every one for Franken and Obama. Every one.

Hey, I’ve got 1000 votes for Coleman in my rumpus room. Sorry, I forgot to deliver them previously. Where shall I bring them?

The Minnesota GOP can probably use some money for lawyers.

Click on this link to donate to the Minnesota GOP – it might be too late to save the seat, but we must try to prevent the Democrats from stealing another election as they did in Washington State in 2004. Without our help, the Democrats will just keep manufacturing votes until they get the number they need to put Franken over the top.

If you click on the “every one” link above, you’ll see that what is happening is the impossible appearance and disappearance of ballots, always in favor of Franken. The MSM, naturally, doesn’t care – one more Donk Senator is always fine with the lapdog Dinosaur Media. The problem is that Minnesota has a very clean election reputation – when I noted the final tally, I figured the recount might have some small differences, but that Coleman was certainly re-elected because when you have efficient and clean elections, the variance between “count” and “recount” are very small. All of a sudden we’ve got all sorts of Chicago-style things going on.

Franken is a hard left fanatic and someone who has proven himself rather hate-filled in his statements as well as someone not entirely devoted to truth and justice. The Democrats under Obama’s Chicago leadership can be, if anything, even less trusted than before to be honest about the election tactics. It will be a terrible tragedy if the Democrats are able to corrupt Minnesota, and a plain and simple crime if the Democrats of Minnesota allow it to happen just to get one more Democratic Senator.

UPDATE: Very strange thing – 223258 and 312598. The first number is the number of votes cast in Alaska in 2008, the latter number is those cast in 2004. How come in a hotly contested election year, with the 80% approval-rating Alaska governor and a hotly contested Senate race is there about 89,000 less votes in 2008 than 2004?

While I disagree with the concept of gay marriage, B. Daniel Blatt over at Pajamas Media explains what gay activists will have to do to have a chance of actually winning the political fight over it:

…proponents of Proposition 8 began their campaign by pointing out that judges and politicians were trying to force gay marriage on the citizens of California. In their first television ad, they pointed out that four judges on the California Supreme Court “ignored four million voters,” the approximate tally of citizens who, in 2000, voted in favor of Proposition 22, which defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Those four justices explicitly overturned that initiative in their May decision.

That same ad showed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom saying that gay marriage would happen “whether you like it or not.” The campaign thus made it appear that citizens were being left out of the process.

Other ads suggested that Proposition 8’s failure would lead to schools teaching gay marriage and prevent parents from allowing their children to opt out of such instruction. A “yes” vote would return sovereignty over such matters to the people.

Whenever state courts mandate recognition of gay marriage, it leads to a backlash at the ballot box. By November 2004, not even a year after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (the Bay State’s highest court) handed down the Goodridge decision finding it unconstitutional under the state constitution to limit marriage to different-sex couples, voters in thirteen states enacted constitutional provisions defining marriage by its traditional definition: the union of one man and one woman.

This year, after the California and Connecticut Supreme Courts handed down rulings similar to Goodridge, voters in Florida and Arizona joined those in California and amended their state constitutions.

Following the passage of Proposition 8, Jonathan Rauch, author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, wrote that gay marriage advocates need to rethink “the wisdom of mindlessly pushing lawsuits through the courts without adequately preparing the public.” Since state courts began mandating gay marriage, thirty states have amended their constitutions to define marriage so as to prohibit recognition of same-sex unions as marriage.

Our liberal friends, of course, rely upon judicial tyranny to impose their views – elect liberal executives who appoint liberal judges and then file lawsuits to impose new laws which would never pass muster with the people or which would involve long, expensive fights in the public square. The success of Roe in enshrining abortion in our laws has been the model – abortion on demand commands only a small minority of support, but it is the standard which the left holds to and they’ve got a Supreme Court ruling on their side about it. It is also handy to use judges as they can bypass the more local political bodies – State supreme courts to overturn city and county laws, federal supreme court to overturn State laws. This is a negation of America.

In point of fact, I’m not particularly concerned if the people of San Francisco wish to recognize as a “marriage” the union of two men or two women…or, for that matter, three men and three women, if that is what floats their boat. I don’t live in San Francisco and while I love my fellow Americans in that city and will fight to defend them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, its not for me to tell them how to live – just as it isn’t for them to tell me how to live. Within the framework of our sublime constitution, we’re supposed to have vast differences between the States and localities on how business is done. Think of the United States as a host of local and State political laboratories where various experiments in democratic governance are conducted, with the most successful experiments making it to the national level. This is what we really should be shooting for.

The problem with the left is that it seeks to impose itself everywhere – its not good enough if gays in San Francisco are married…Salt Lake City must do so, too. Its not good enough for abortion to be legal in Santa Monica, it must also be legal in Boise. Its not good enough to have a porno store down the street in New York City, there must also be one down the street in Billings. This is not the way it is supposed to be – as long as an American is free to hold his property, speak his mind and come and go as he pleases, he’s as free as any person needs to be…the rest of it is a matter of local desire. Some localities are ok with freewheeling immorality, some places aren’t…and each should respect the basic desires of the other.

If gay marriage is ever to come to the United States, it will have to come in a piecemeal fashion – States and localities, after extensive political argument, will have to decide for themselves what they wish to do. My bet is that most will opt for some sort of civil unions to allow gay couples – and other non-traditional family-like relationships – to pool their lives and resources free from outside interference (which, by the way, is a core American value)…but it has to be the people deciding. If the gay marriage advocates continue down the route of judicial tyranny, it will eventually provoke the ultimate backlash, an amendment to the federal constitution forbidding gay marriage.