Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Jonah Goldberg breaks down the Senate races to see if Republicans can take control. See his post for the charts.
Okay, I decided it was time for me to put on my rank punditry hat and start looking at the horserace stuff in the Senate. So here’s a pretty vanilla tally of things, that at least helps me commit this stuff to memory.
Lots of people say that without Delaware, taking back the senate is now impossible. Looking at this rundown in First Read, I’m not so sure…Geraghty or Ponnuru can check my math. But it looks to me that the GOP would need to hold all of the existing seats (FL, AK, OH, KY, MO, NH) – which looks likely – and then pick up 10 of the remaining 13 contested Dem seats (ND, AR, IN, PA, CO, WI, IL, CA, NV, WV, WA, CT and DE). The first five of those looks likely according to this chart by Mark Blumenthal…
…The next three are doable if everything breaks the GOP way (I think Wisconsin is going to the GOP, by the way). That makes a pick-up of 8. Then the GOP would need to take 2 seats out of the five [Me: this originally said "four"]remaining races in West Virginia, Washington, Connecticut and Delaware.
Update: Getting better all the time. Several readers remind me that Charlie Cook put Connecticut in the toss-up column yesterday.
That would be a huge parlay. It’s doable in a wave election. But it would need to be a really big wave.
Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Jonah Goldberg’s tally.
I don’t think nominal control of the Senate is all that important (which is why my concerns about the O’Donnell nomination have not included that it endangers that “control”). In the House, 218 votes really is a magic number. Having a tiny majority brings headaches but going from 217 to 218 is a much bigger increment of power than going from 216 to 217. I don’t think that going from 50 to 51 in the Senate is quite as crucial. The key numbers in the Senate are 40 and 60–and even that gets fuzzy if party discipline does.
I’d fiddle with FirstRead’s rankings on the likelihood of Republican pickups. I’d say Colorado is more likely than Illinois, and Wisconsin more likely than Nevada.
Tunku Varadarajan covers the bases in a guide to the Tea Party movement.
What would we do without the Tea Party? For well over a year, this rollicking muster of citizens—mocked and feared in equal measure by the Democrats and, indeed, by many Republicans—have offered more than just whizz-bang political entertainment. Starting out as a loose-knit posse of loudly disaffected conservatives, the movement has become better organized and improbably daring; in fact, it is now a full-blown political uprising. As we gird our national loins for the mid-term elections in November, here is a brisk primer on the movement.
A is for anger, the jet-fuel of a movement that Nancy Pelosi, in a rare moment of wit, pooh-poohed as Astroturf (i.e., not grassroots). Tell that to Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate nominee seeking to unseat Pelosi’s confrere, Harry Reid. She is the archetypal Tea Party insurgent: she checks all the ideological boxes, but would you have her home to dinner with the kids?
B is for Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, the two gaudiest Tea Partiers in the American media, and for Scott Brown, the Massachusetts senator whose astonishing election to Ted Kennedy’s seat in February was the earliest indication that the Tea Party amounted to more than just a rabble of birthers (although it does, to be sure, have in its ranks more than a few who believe that the president’s birth-certificate is an immaculate deception). …
Hugh Hewitt suggests campaigns that could use our contributions.
With just about 40 days to go to the election –less, actually, as voting starts very soon by absentee in many places– it becomes crucial to target time and money to key races. This is my suggested list of candidates to support. You can donate up to $2,400 per candidate in federal races and more in most state races, but many people like to contribute to multiple campaigns, so I am listing them with the assumption that some folks want to donate $25, $50, $100 or more to many different campaigns.
Please note that I am not listing some great campaigns. John Thune, for example, is coasting in South Dakota, and though he may be the best conservative candidate in the country this cycle, he doesn’t need your money right now. That goes for Governor John Hoeven in North Dakota as well, running for U.S. Senate there and leading by about 100 points.
By contrast, John Kasich and Pat Toomey are both on the list and at the top no less, even though both have pretty good poll leads right now in their races for governor in Ohio and senator in Pennsylvania respectively. I strongly recommend them because they are building get-out-the-vote organizations that will help many down-ticket races for Congress. Please note as well that I only list one race per state so I am suggesting those races over their fine colleagues on the ticket –Rob Portman for senate in Ohio and Tom Corbett for governor in Pennsylvania– because Kasich and Toomey have tougher races at this point than Portman and Corbett. When there is both a competitive race for senate and governor in a state, I suggest sending money to the race which is closest in that state.
Finally, I do have some races like Carly Fiorina and Sharron Angle rated higher on the list because of the message a defeat of Boxer or Reid would bring and because of the expected surge of resources the left will throw against them in the next six weeks. …
Robert Samuelson disagrees with the right and the left, and then discusses the anti-business climate.
…Confidence is crucial to stimulating consumer spending and business investment, and Obama constantly subverts confidence. In the past year, he’s undone some of the good of his first months. He loves to pick fights with Wall Street bankers, oil companies, multinational firms, health insurers, and others. He thinks that he can separate policies that claim to promote recovery from those that appeal to his liberal base, even when the partisan policies raise business costs, stymie job creation, or augment uncertainty—and, thereby, undermine recovery. His health-care “reform” makes hiring more expensive to employers by mandating insurance coverage; the moratorium on deepwater drilling kills jobs. No matter.
Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on personal incomes exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles) is the latest example of his delusional approach. It satisfies the liberal itch to “get the rich.” Well, the rich and most other taxpayers will ultimately have to pay higher taxes to help close budget deficits. But not now. Raising taxes in a weak economy doesn’t make sense. Just consider: these affluent households represent almost a quarter of all consumer spending, says Zandi. Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, says his data suggest that uncertainty about the extension of the Bush tax cuts has already caused affluent buyers to cut their spending.
Some small businesses would also be affected, because many (sole proprietorships, partnerships, and subchapter S corporations) file their taxes on personal returns. Higher taxes would discourage hiring and expansion. …
Ed Morrissey discusses Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign for the Alaskan Senate seat. He names the only Senator to ever win a seat from a write-in campaign, and comments on the likelihood that Murkowski will be the second such win in US history.
…Lisa Murkowski has never been terribly popular with Alaskans, not since her father appointed her to the Senate seat she holds. She won in 2004, mainly due to the overwhelming support for George Bush in Alaska. She just lost her primary, which means more than half of the people who would normally be inclined to vote for the Republican didn’t want her in the general election anyway. Murkowski offered no compelling reason to vote for her in the primary, and the only compelling reason for the write-in bid seems to be that Lisa Murkowski likes living in Washington DC. …
The Financial Times paints a portrait of Raul Castro, as dramatic changes are initiated in Cuba.
There are two very different visions of the young Raúl Castro who fought alongside his older brother Fidel and Che Guevara against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista more than five decades ago. …
…the 79-year-old is now more likely to go down in history as the man who tried to save Cuban communism from itself – by turning to capitalism. This week the government announced it is to shed 500,000 workers, who will instead have to become self-employed or start co-operatives in just six months. As Raúl said: “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live without working.” The measures will eventually lead to 1m, or a fifth of the labour force, working in the private sector, and represents the biggest shake-up of the Cuban state since 1968, when all shops, from hamburger joints to street vendors, were nationalised. …
…It was only in July 2007, however, that he gave his first major public speech in which he echoed popular complaints of a decaying command economy where state wages, equivalent to $20 a month, cannot cover bare necessities. Since then he has repeatedly decried paternalism, called for more individual initiative and encouraged the public and official media to denounce bureaucratic bungling. When Fidel quipped the other day that the Cuban model no longer worked, he was merely uttering the common view fostered by his brother to prepare the way for change. Any hard-line dissenters in the elite – who might respect but do not revere Raúl as they do Fidel – fell in line. …
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, James Delingpole has the latest in globaloney warming
President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”
And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if “global climate disruption” is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of the US economy (“de-development” as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions).
Holdren is not the only person having problems with the “world not warming and everyone growing increasingly sceptical” issue. …
The Economist reviews a book of letters from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, known to his mother as Dan and to everyone else as Pat, served four presidents—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—as adviser, speechwriter and ambassador, in Delhi and at the United Nations. He represented New York for 24 years in the United States Senate. When he retired, one scholar said he brought to that job “luminous intellect, personal conviction, deep historical knowledge, the eye of an artist and the pen of an angel, and above all, an incorruptible devotion to the common good”. Someone else called him “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln, and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson”.
Now a New York Times journalist, Steven Weisman has edited a 671-page collection of Pat’s letters, diary entries, reports to his New York constituents (addressing them as “Dear New Yorker”) and what amount to state papers written for his four presidents. Almost every page is enlivened by a sharply minted phrase, an enchanting vignette, a joke or a shrewd inversion of the conventional wisdom. …
…He knew everyone. He wrote to cardinals, presidents, senators, to the Oxford historian Alan Bullock and to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, to William F. Buckley and to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. In a letter to Yoko Ono, he offers to teach Sean Lennon about Northern Ireland. A couple of weeks later he offers, at some length, to explain the history of ethnic conflict in the 20th century to Woody Allen. He sends limericks to Robert Conquest, a historian of the Soviet Union. He also has time to exchange charming letters with the preteen daughter of an old friend, who has asked him about the games he played as a child: “We used to play marbles for keeps. If you lost, you lost. It is the same way with politics, but not everybody knows this.” …