Month: November 2006

No big surprises so far: Lieberman beats the Kos Kids, DeWine and Santorum lose, and the other key Senate races are too close to call. The ones I’m watching are the toss-ups: Rhode Island, Virginia. Missouri, and Montana. It looks like CNN Elections 2006 has the best coverage.

UPDATE: CNN calls RI for Dems, so they’re halfway there. Much celebration over that, I’d imagine. Virginia now looms large.

FINAL: It’s a wipeout, the Dems walk away with the whole pie. Now maybe we can get religion out of politics for good.

It looks to me like the Dems will pick up about 30 seats in the House, which means it changes hands. The Senate looks closer, and it will probably stay narrowly in Republican hands. The Senate doesn’t matter that much because you need 60 votes to do anything important, and neither party is close to that mark.

Nationally, the Dems will pick up several governorships, but California will buck the trend. Not only will Arnie be re-elected, but we’re going to get one or two more Republican statewide office holders, probably Tom McClintock and either an insurance commissioner, a treasurer or a controller. Democrat Debbie Bowen will win the Sec. of State’s race, and that’s a good thing because she’s a real geek.

If the Repubs are paying attention, they’ll learn from California to shut up about the gays, the Christians, the guns, and the unborn babies, and worry more about stuff like the environment, infrastructure, low taxes, and health care.

Even though the Dems are going to pick up the House, I doubt Nancy Pelosi will be elected speaker. She’s a dimwit, and they can do a lot better. Steny Hoyer came second in their last contest, and he’s a much better man than Frisco loony Pelosi.

UPDATE: The Dems did even better than I thought, taking the Senate as well as the House, and it looks like they intend to give Pelosi a shot at speaker after all. Hopefully, her cat-fight with Jane Harman will stop. Sadly, Tom McClintock won’t get to entertain us from the ceremonial position of Lt. Governor, but the Republican Steve Poizner won Insurance Commissioner over the corrupt Cruz Bustamante. The only Congressional seat to change columns here was Pombo’s, which he lost because of his radical opposition to the Endangered Species Act.

Geoff Nunberg, the leftwing political activist and linguist who wrote Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, is upset with me for connecting George Lakoff with his former professor, Noam Chomsky:

Many people assume that there’s some connection between Chomsky’s politics and his linguistics, and a lot of them go on to conclude that linguistics itself is constituitively a leftish discipline. So when Lakoff emerged as an influential political figure, it seemed natural to blur both his politics and his linguistics with Chomsky’s, particularly if for those who didn’t know jack about linguistics. Whatever your political views, it’s a depressing reminder of how widespread the ignorance about the field of linguistics is (not that we exactly needed another one). But then it’s probably asking too much to expect people who find it expedient to conflate Lakoff’s garden-variety liberalism with Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalism to take the trouble to learn the difference between Chomsky’s minimalism and Lakoff’s cognitive linguistics. Oh well, they have the sense they were born with.

Please. I called Lakoff a “protege” of Chomsky’s because one of the meanings of that word is “pupil”. I’m aware that Lakoff went on to develop his own school of linguistics and a set of political beliefs that differ from Chomsky’s at the margins. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Chomsky was the prototype of linguist-cum-lefty-activist, and Lakoff was a student who follows in the master’s footsteps along the broad program while differing in some of the details. Nunberg follows the same (by now) well-worn path, so (naturally) he sees distinctions that don’t matter to civilians. For the record, Lakoff’s linguistics are much less loony than Chomsky’s, but that never was the issue. I’m concerned about the use of the science of linguistics to mislead voters, and on that front Chomsky and Lakoff are strongly aligned.

UPDATE: A more accurate description of Lakoff is “Chomsky wannabe.” When you criticize linguists, be very careful about your terminology as they’ll pick you to death with meaningless distinctions.

This is wonderful:

The issues dominating this election season remain Iraq, terrorism and various scandals, but the Schiavo matter may prove to be a sleeper issue. It has cropped up in contests across the country—from the Florida governor’s race to close congressional campaigns in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and points west. Schiavo himself has helped stoke the debate by campaigning for candidates who backed his position on Terri’s case and lambasting those who opposed him. Using funds raised by TerriPAC, a political committee he founded last year, he has also given 15 candidates a total of $20,000. All of it is aimed at driving home his message: “Government should not interfere with personal matters,” says Schiavo, who still seethes at the memory of Congress’s and President Bush’s attempts to block removal of Terri’s feeding tube.

After mourning Terri’s death, Schiavo had planned to move on with his life (he has a second wife and two kids). But in the course of writing a book about the case, he reviewed news footage that he’d never seen from the height of the controversy. He became incensed all over again—and decided to do something about it, teaming up with Democratic consultant Derek Newton. Schiavo’s hardly an electrifying speaker, and he mangles names on the stump. But he has an ordinary-guy appeal and a wrenching tale. Formerly a Republican, he’s now a Democrat, though he has supported candidates from both parties. As Election Day nears, he’s trying to squeeze in one more round of campaign stops, in response to requests from candidates in Georgia, Iowa and Virginia. And after Nov. 7? “On to 2008,” he says. An activist has been born.

H/T John Cole.

Remember Ned Lamont, the puppet of lefty bloggers Markos and Jerome Armstrong who shook the world by beating Joe Lieberman for the Senate nomination in Connecticut this spring? Well, things aren’t going so well for Mr. Lamont:

The apparent end of the much-ballyhooed Lamont phenomenon is causing a great deal of soul-searching and recrimination in all corners of the Democratic Party. The bloggers that once championed Mr. Lamont as an awkward but earnest savior now alternately blame Washington’s strategists for hijacking their candidate and Democratic leaders for abandoning him. Beltway consultants fault the Lamont campaign for failing to move the candidate beyond his left-wing celebrity and define him for a greater electorate.

The election is a week away, and already Democratic Party insiders speak of Lamont in the past tense, and all Markos has to show for all his money-raising is a reduction in the number of Democrats in the Senate.

Oh, and did I mention that Lamont’s champions are leaders of the net neutrality cause? Well, they are.