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links for 2010-11-03
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A Statement From Kevin Spillane – Senior Consultant, Steve Cooley for Attorney General
“With the counties completing their semi-official returns, Steve Cooley trails Kamala Harris by 14,838 votes – two-tenths of a percentage point. There are over 1 million provisional and absentee ballots yet to be counted.”
“The race for Attorney General will not be decided for at least another couple of weeks, and potentially could go until the official Certification of Vote deadline on December 3.
“We will continue to monitor the situation. The only thing we are certain of is that the final outcome will be close. We are grateful for all the good wishes of our supporters and will keep you updated.”
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Alot of ballots to be counted. -
Republicans may have won the U.S. House of Representatives in Tuesday's midterm election, but things, as usual, are different in the Golden State, where Democrats claimed victory in nearly all of California's statewide races.
We're still waiting for the outcome of the attorney general race, where San Francisco Democrat Kamala Harris currently has a razor-thin lead over Los Angeles Republican Steve Cooley. But voters went decidedly Democratic on the rest of the ticket.
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They call it a shellacking…. -
Republican Kristi Noem, who's already being touted as a rising star in her party after capturing South Dakota's at-large House seat Tuesday, still hasn't decided whether to back Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) for House Speaker.
On a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Noem said it would be premature to announce her backing for Boehner or any other Republican for Speaker just yet.
"I'm not even sure who's running yet," said Noem, who ousted Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) in a tight race Tuesday.
The Republican, who has evoked comparisons to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, indicated that she would wait until she's had the chance to converse with some of her new GOP colleagues in Washington before she decides whom to back for the Speakership.
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Rookie mistake? Or just being cautious?Probably the latter….
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Rudy Giuliani and Barbara Walters bantering on The View today.
WALTERS: She now says she will run if nobody else will. Do you think she would make a good President?
RUDY: Well, first of all, she's not going to have that situation — that nobody else will [run]. I ain't never heard of that!
Nobody will run for President of the United States?
There are now people registering as Republican in order to line up to run.
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Rudy is also the quipper:Later, they ask Rudy what it would take for him to run.
His answer: "If nobody else runs."
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San Francisco has become the first major U.S. city to pass a law that cracks down on the popular practice of giving away free toys with unhealthy restaurant meals for children.
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed the law on Tuesday on a veto-proof 8-to-3 vote. It takes effect on December 1.
The law, like an ordinance passed earlier this year in nearby Santa Clara County, would require that restaurant kids' meals meet certain nutritional standards before they could be sold with toys.
Opponents of the law include the National Restaurant Association and McDonald's Corp, which used its now wildly popular Happy Meal to pioneer the use of free toys to market directly to children.
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Good grief – next they will legislate what we eat.Big government = lack of liberty
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Video: Keith Olbermann Equates The Tea Party with a Universal Solvent
Keith Olbermann REALLY is a MORON.
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CA-Sen: Senator Barbara Boxer Wins Re-Election Over Carly Fiorina
California Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina talks to volunteers and supporters at California GOP election night headquarters in Irvine, California last night
It wasn’t a pretty loss for Carly Fiorina where polls had the race much closer than the 9-10 point Boxer victory.After monitoring results overnight, Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina conceded defeat Wednesday morning after her hard-fought race with Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, stating that she was proud of every moment of her campaign.
Speaking to reporters and a small group of supporters with her husband at her headquarters in Irvine, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive said the experience had been a privilege and that she had been touched by every person she met across California. She said she ran because she was concerned that attaining the American dream had become too hard for too many people and that she was still worried about out-of-control spending in Washington.
“We had an exceptional campaign,” Fiorina said. “In the end we could not overcome the registration that Democrats have, and in particular in L.A. County.”
Demographics played a role (look at the California map) but so did the relentless negative advertising by Barbara Boxer who portrayed Carly Fiorina as a greedy corporate executive who laid employees off by shipping their jobs offshore and enriched herself at the same time. The late in the campaign ads which featured outsourced Hewlett-Packard employees was devastating to Fiorina – particularly in populous Los Angeles County where the ads played ubiquitously in the last two weeks of the campaign.
I was at the Irvine, California Fiorina headquarters yesterday afternoon through the early morning hours. Here are some photos which I snapped:
Radio talk show host of Salem Communications Dennis Prager
California Board of Equalization member Michelle Steel being interviewed
So, one has to consider whether it was worth the Carly Fiorina effort to challenge Barbara Boxer in “deep blue” California, raise, plus spend, the millions of dollars in campaign cash and come out with a loss that is about what Matt Fong experienced in 1998.Somehow I think it was, since Boxer herself acknowledged that this race was “the toughest and roughest campaign of my life.” Plus, Boxer had to utilize the full resurces of her incumbency to fight back Fiorina, including multiple President Obama fundraising events. Boxer spent $ millions which could have been redistributed to other states for other Democrat campaigns. And, she spent like a drunken sailor on television ads the last month of the campaign.
But, with this said, California Democrats who have a massive registration advantage, pretty much swept the California election board and shellacked the GOP – from Jerry Brown’s election as Governor to Loretta Sanchez’s re-election to the House. Even GOP favorite California Attorney General candidate Steve Cooley is in a close race which will be decided by absentee ballots (counted over the next few weeks).
I doubt whether the national GOP will place as many resources into California to win a statewide race (such as Senator Diane Feinstein’s re-election in two years) anytime soon – or my lifetime.
California is the new “Solid Blue” Massachusetts, New York or Maryland.
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Day By Day November 3, 2010 – Aliens
Day By Day by Chris MuirThe Republican Party had an outstanding election night and as a referendum to the Obama Administration sent a strong, mandated political message.In my Wednesday Washington Examiner column, which had to be filed before the full returns were available, I tried to set the Republicans’ historic gains in the House of Representatives in historic perspective, keeping in mind that the exit polls suggested that Republicans would not get the full advantage of the tsunami of public opinion in their favor in Senate races. As I told an interviewer on Britain’s Sky News, if you had to choose which legislative house you would like to control in America, you would pick the House of Representatives (where the party leadership usually can determined legislative outcomes) to the Senate (which no party even with a 60-seat supermajority really controls), just as in the United Kingdom you would rather have a majority in the House of Commons than in the House of Lords.
As I write, the House results indicate that Republicans have gained a net 61 seats (64 gains minus 3 losses) and are leading in 6 races currently undecided and trailing closely in 6 other races currently undecided. So the Republican net gain will be something like 67 seats—more than any party has won in any single election since 1948 (my Examiner column actually looks at the big seat gains for the Republicans in 1946 and the Democrats in 1948).
The upshot is that Speaker-to-be John Boehner will have a workable House majority, larger than the Republicans had during the 12 years they controlled the House from 1994 to 2006, larger than Republicans have enjoyed since the 80th Congress elected in 1946 which enacted laws which resulted in enduring public policies in 1947 and 1948. The sweet spot in the House, I would argue, is around 250 seats, enough so that you can let a fair number of your member dissent on a particular vote but not so many that dozens of members feel free to ignore party discipline because the party’s majority is so large. A 67-seat Republican gain would mean a House with 246 Republicans and 189 Democrats—a smaller number of Democrats than in any House since the one elected in 1946. The popular vote for the House is not yet available. California takes five weeks to count all its votes, a vivid contrast with Brazil, which voted on Sunday, where all the votes were counted within five hours (what is wrong with this picture?). But the popular vote appears to be a near-reversal from the Democrats’ popular vote 2008 majority in the popular vote for the House which was 54%-43%; the Republicans’ majority is likely to be greater than in 1994 and the largest since 1946 (54%-44%) and perhaps since 1928 (57%-42%). We are, as I wrote in the first sentence of my Examiner column, in uncharted territory.
Of course, I am disappointed with California where the Republican Party continued to take a drubbing at the hands of the Democrats, especially the Carly Fiorina vs. Barbara Boxer U.S. Senate race. But, I will have more on this race later.
America will be stronger and the political direction different for the Congress and President alike.
The American people have spoken.
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