Year: 2010

NY-25: Maffei Concedes, Buerkle Wins

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Got the good news via the Lonely Conservative, who got it from Robert Harding’s Tweet.

With last night’s concession in TX-27, Buerkle’s win puts the incoming GOP House majority at 242 seats.

A 4 p.m. press conference is scheduled.

UPDATE: Auburn (N.Y.) Citizen:

Maffei issued a statement this afternoon thanking the residents of the 25th for the opportunity to serve.
“I served every day honored to live in a community where a shy kid of modest means from a proud Syracuse family and a graduate of the Syracuse public schools could grow up to earn the trust of his community to represent you in Congress,” Maffei said in the statement. “And I learned from you every day, listening to your stories and working tirelessly on your behalf.”

I had a brief telephone interview today with Mrs. Buerkle. I’ll be writing this up for tomorrow’s American Spectator.

UPDATE II: Steven Moore of the Wall Street Journal calls Buerkle’s victory “one of the biggest election surprises of the year”:

“Almost no one saw this one coming,” said GOP pollster John McLaughlin. “Ann Marie was definitely below the radar screen of most political experts.”
One person who never saw it coming was Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who had championed Mr. Maffei as the kind of new liberal Democrat America needs and the Northeast wants. “Absent a Republican wave of historic proportions, his seat now seems out of the GOP’s reach,” wrote Mr. Dionne back in September.

Here’s your “historic proportions,” E.J.

Attagirl, Ann Marie!

UPDATE III: Publius at BigGovernment.com on the significance of NY-25: “John McCain received only 43% of the vote in this district in 2008. George W. Bush received only 48% in 2004. Hope and Change!” The Syracuse Post-Standard analyzed the arguments for and against Maffei seeking a recount.

Linked by Ruby Slippers. Thanks!

UPDATE IV: More reporting by The Hill, Roll Call and CNN, which notes:

Buerkle’s win . . . makes New York the state with the most GOP House pickups– six districts changed sides in the 2010 midterms. Republicans picked up five seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania respectively.

Someone in the comments had asked for details on the historic nature of this election:

  • In the 1946 mid-term election — a postwar backlash against Truman and 14 years of Democrat “New Deal” majorities –Republicans gained 55 House seats and held a majority of 246 seats.
  • In 1948, with Truman campaigning against the “do-nothing Congress,” the GOP lost 75 seats.
  • In 1952, with the popular wartime commander Eisenhower at the top of the Republican ticket, the GOP regained a slender House majority, 221-213.
  • In 1954, Democrats recaptured a House majority that they held for the next 40 years.
  • In 1994, Republicans gained 54 seats for a 230-204 majority.

So in 2010, Republicans gained more House seats (63) than in any election since 1938 (when they gained 81), and they now control more seats (242) than at any time since 1949.

UPDATE V: Remember that (a) Buerkle was endorsed by Sarah Palin, and (b) Buerkle is pro-life and was a former spokeswoman for Operation Rescue.

In 2008, Maffei was elected after the NRCC appeared to write off NY-25. This year, Buerkle — the kind of “right-wing extremist” that the GOP Establishment dreads — put the seat back in Republican hands, despite being out-spent 5-to-1. Maybe there’s a lesson there, huh?

UPDATE VI: Over in NY-1, Left Coast Rebel reports that Randy Altschuler has apparently come up 235 votes short in his challenge to Democrat Rep. Tim Bishop.

UPDATE VII: The Wall Street Journal notes that Maffei’s concession may allow some folks to settle their bets in the office pool. Remember that the title of my Election Day column was “Too Close to Call.”

WaPo Makes an Excellent Decision: Jennifer Rubin Hired as Blogger

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This is very encouraging news indeed, and I think all leading conservatives will share the view expressed by Ed Driscoll: “The WaPo Finally Gets One Right.”

My favorite piece by Jennifer Rubin was a column she wrote for Pajamas Media in February 2009. You will recall that, at that time, many Republicans were still talking about the need to cooperate and compromise with the new president. Rush Limbaugh had become a lightning rod because of the Four Famous Words: “I hope he fails.” (I had expressed my own view of the Democratic agenda in three less-famous words: “It won’t work.”) Yet in February 2009, the question of whether the GOP should oppose or support the Obama agenda was still very much debated. It was Rubin who distilled the correct insight into a strategic maxim: “The opposition party must oppose.”

And now that the opposition party has triumphed — winning 241 House seats — by obeying that maxim, Rubin will now be positioned to provide excellent coverage of the battles ahead.

UPDATE: A friend called my attention to this Politico column by Jennifer Rubin, which I definitely do not endorse.

Strategy Lesson: State Parties Matter

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For the benefit of Alex Pareene — who strangely seems to believe that campaigns are of secondary importance to who wins elections — let me unravel a bit of strategy.

When I visited Massachusetts in early October, there was clearly a grassroots “enthusiasm gap” favoring Republicans. Da Tech Guy kept saying he had that Scott Brown feeling,” and even the Boston Globe noted how fired-up the local GOP was.

Yet when Election Night returns came in, the result was an across-the-board Democratic victory in Massachusetts. Deval Patrick was re-elected governor by a 7-point margin. The NRCC’s favorite House candidate in the state, Jeff Perry in MA-10, got just 42% of the vote, and no GOP House candidate got more than 43%.

The secret of the Democrats’ success wasn’t really a secret: The Massachusetts Democratic Party outspent the state GOP more than 2-to-1:

In the final days of the fall campaign, the Democratic State Committee overwhelmed its Republican counterpart with a massive amount of spending . . .
New reports filed with the state show that from Nov. 1 to Nov. 15, the state Democratic Party outspent the Massachusetts Republican Party, $475,641 to $21,147. In the prior month, the Democrats had outspent the GOP by more than 2 to 1, $2.4 million to $1.1 million, as both parties invested heavily in advertising to support their gubernatorial candidates. Since January 2009, the Democratic Party outspent Republicans by $5.9 million to $2.6 million. . . .
John Walsh, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, said the late spending was the final piece of a seven-month effort to identify Democratic voters and get them to the polls and avoid a repeat of the special US Senate election last January, when Republican Scott Brown was elected.
He said that the party’s strategy included reaching ethnic communities and about 300,000 so-called sporadic Democratic voters and that the state committee spent heavily on field organizers, about 40 campaign offices around the state, polling to track specific races, and assessing candidates for lesser office who would need additional help.

Read the whole thing, including the excuse-making by the state GOP chairwoman, who should be voted out at the next meeting. The overall money gap between the state parties — the $3.3 million disadvantage for Republicans — was not so great that it could not have been bridged, or at least narrowed, by fundraising efforts in a state as wealthy as Massachusetts.

And that should be a lesson to grassroots Republicans everywhere: Building up the state and local party apparatus is an excellent off-year project: “Stop asking what you can do, and start doing what you can.”

Flashback: Charlie Sheen Called Ex-Wife Denise Richards ‘F***ing N****r’

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One of the strangest things about porn star Capri Anderson’s account of Charlie Sheen’s hotel-room meltdown was her assertion that Sheen “started yelling racial slurs.”

Anderson (a/k/a Christina Walsh) is Irish-American, so what “slurs” was Sheen shouting? Mick?

Evidently, however, Sheen has a habit of shouting the n-word at women when he’s angry, as was the case when he left obscenity-filled voice-mails on the phone of his ex-wife Denise Richards:

In the first message, received on April 19, 2005 at 12.46pm, Charlie said: “You don’t answer the phone and you don’t have the f***ing courage or the wherewithal to like confront me or deal with me or just be f***ing honest.”
“I guess I’ve just got to stop being disappointed by that because that’s just who you are and what you do. And I guess once I accept that, I won’t be frustrated by your chicken s**t f***ing behavior. I’m just really f***ing mad and you owe me a phone call. If I did the same s**t to you, you’d be f***ing furious.”
In the second message, from 1pm the same day, Charlie said: “You continue to be deceitful and mischievous and sneaky, and you’re a f***ing liar. OK. You’re a f***ing liar. So, you know what it’s like, f**k you. OK, I hope you rot in f***ing hell. You’re a piece of s**t f***ing liar and I hope you f***ing rot in hell. So f**k you. I hope I never f***ing talk to you again you f***ing ****. F**k you. You’re a coward and a liar and a f***ing n****r alright, so f**k you.”

Here’s the uncensored audio of those calls:

So there is a certain element of credibility to the porn-star’s claim that Sheen “started yelling racial slurs” at her. Notice that Monday morning, after Capri Anderson’s Good Morning America interview, Denise Richards sent out these Tweets:


So she’s paying attention to Charlie’s latest embarrassment and — wisely, in my opinion — staying away from it. BTW, we still haven’t figured out what happened to Charlie’s $160,000 Patek Philippe 5970 watch . . .

PREVIOUSLY:

Sarah Palin’s New Show Less Popular Than ‘Spongebob Squarepants’?

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Yes, believe it or not Spongebob is the cable ratings king:

[F]or the week of Nov. 8 the top rated non-sports show was Dancing with the Stars with nearly 20 million viewers. Yet the top rated non-sports cable show was Nick@Nite’s Spongebob Squarepants with just a bit over six million viewers. Cable simply doesn’t come close to the viewers the big three networks get.

Warner Todd Huston makes that point by way of pushing back at a Washington Post TV critic who used her column to take cheap shots at Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC.

Spongebob Squarepants could not be reached for comment, due to a speaking engagement in New Hampshire. Sources close to the Nickelodeon star denied that Spongebob is considering a campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Holy Crap! North Korean Opens Artillery Bombardment on South Korean Island

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This is kind of scary:

North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire on Tuesday after dozens of shells fired from the North struck a South Korean island near the countries’ disputed maritime border, South Korean military officials said. Two South Korean soldiers were killed, 15 were wounded and three civilians were injured, said Kiyheon Kwon, an official at the Defense Ministry.
The South Korean military went to “crisis status,” and fighter planes were put on alert but did not take off.
South Korean artillery units returned fire after the North’s shells struck South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island at 2:34 p.m., said Mr. Kwon, adding that the North also fired numerous rounds into the Yellow Sea. Television footage showed large plumes of black smoke spiraling from the island, and news reports said dozens of houses were on fire.
The official North Korean news agency said in a brief statement Tuesday night that the South had started the fight when it “recklessly fired into our sea area.”

Sydney Morning Herald:

NORTH KOREA has burnished the leadership credentials of its 26-year-old dictator-in-waiting with a deadly artillery attack on South Korean territory, causing its neighbour to return fire and scramble F-16 fighters. . . .
A North Korea expert at Beijing’s Central Party School, Zhang Liangui, told the Herald that Kim Jong-un was deliberately destabilising the environment in order to mobilise the military and consolidate his power.

Hat-tip: Gateway Pundit.

UPDATE: “Gird your loins!” says Michelle Malkin, quoting Jim Geraghty: “I can’t believe the president’s personal letter to Kim Jong Il didn’t work.”

UPDATE II: Via Memeorandum, more from Da Techguy’s Blog, Ruby Slippers, Richard Fernandez, Hot Air, Donald Douglas at American Power and AmSpecBlog

Debt Causes Collapse of Irish Government

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Something here I can’t quite put my finger on:

The Irish government faced imminent collapse on Monday, only a day after it signed off on a $100 billion bailout, setting the stage for a new election early next year and injecting the threat of political instability into a European financial crisis that already has markets on edge.
Confronted with high-level defections from his governing coalition, Prime Minister Brian Cowen said he would dissolve the government after passage of the country’s crucial 2011 budget early in December.
His announcement capped a grim day for Ireland, as protesters tried to storm the Parliament building in Dublin, and Moody’s Investors Service, the ratings agency, lowered the rating on Irish debt by several notches.

Hmmm. Deficit spending and a giant bailout leads to angry protests and “political instability” . . . Why does all this sound so familiar?

Alex Pareene: Expert on Hackdom

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Takes one to know one:

These are the most predictable, banal, intellectually dishonest and all-around hacky newspaper columnists, cable news shouting heads and political opinion-mongers working today. . . . We cut the list down to 30 people whose continued employment most baffles us, and then we ranked them in order of shamelessness.

When I think of a “hack,” I think of someone who habitually pushes second-hand partisan talking points or, alternately, an untalented writer who recycles cliches. Either way, it is the lack of originality that defines genuine hackery.

We’ll wait to see the full list before assessing how well Pareene has ranked these pundits. But right off the bat, I’m perplexed by this question: Exactly how the hell does Pareene — who has never done anything except sling snark from the sidelines — presume to apply the label “hack” to a political reporter like Matt Bai? And what the hell kind of criticism is this?

[Bai’s] sins are largely the sins of most professional campaign reporters. . . Because he covers campaigns, he privileges campaigns . . . as the single most important factor in deciding elections.

Excuse me? Is Pareene trying to say that campaigns are a secondary factor in deciding elections? Has Pareene ever done any reporting himself? Does he think that campaign reporters — i.e., the journalists most directly acquainted with the facts on the ground — should be disqualified from offering analyses of elections?

Bai has done some excellent work for the New York Times, including a very informative pushback against the Left’s absurd claim that Democrats lost because of moderate “Blue Dogs.” Having covered several Republican candidates (including Morgan Griffith and Ray McKinney) who were campaigning against incumbent Blue Dogs, I fully understand how valuable such centrists were to Democratic Party control of Congress. If Pareene doesn’t understand that, it’s his problem, not Matt Bai’s.

And why is Howard Kurtz No. 23 on the list? If Kurtz is not the best “inside media” reporter in the country, who is?