I tried not to get too excited last night when Olbermann and Maddow were touting Mark Begich’s three vote lead in the Alaska senate race. Having gone from a 3200 vote deficit to a virtual tie was pretty impressive, but they had only counted about half of the early and absentee votes at that point. It was possible that the remainder could swing back in favor of Stevens.

This afternoon, it is being reported that Begich is now up by about 800 votes with about two thirds of those votes counted. I imagine this will go to a recount, but it’s damn nice to see a possibility of unseating that vile, old bastard.

Unfortunately, the possibility of pickups by Begich, Franken, and Martin makes Joe Liar-man a lot more important I’ll really hate it if he manages to hold onto the chairmanship of the homeland security committee.

If you’re getting ready to stock up on Holiday cards, the Union Shop has a variety of Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, and other holiday cards. All cards are printed by union workers. They all seem to be packets of 12 cards with envelopes for $10.

I have developed an ongoing fascination with Chuck Hagel over the last couple of years. He’s a principled guy. When I say that, I mean in it in almost precisely the opposite of how most ideologues and partisans mean the word when they use it. I bought his book, America: Our Next Chapter this summer, but had a hard time reading it. I eventually did read most of it, but skipped a few chapters. It was terribly pedestrian. Hagel, however smart he may be, is no intellectual. Even with a co-author who no doubt did the heavy lifting of putting Hagel’s thoughts to paper, it often comes off like a high school student’s “write your own biography” assignment. You need not be an intellectual to be smart and to be shrewd. Tonight, I read an interesting portrait of Hagel that came out in the New Yorker just before the election. It’s worth checking out.

China announced today that it’s going to unleash a $650 billion (yeah, billion with a “b”) economic stimulus plan over the next two years. They’re doing just the reverse of what we’ve done over the last twenty five years. They may be kicking the second foot of our empire into its grave in the process. Now that they’ve built the greatest industrial machine on earth, they plan to create their own mass consumer class. Once they’ve completed that, we become a much, much smaller part of their market. Propping our consumption up by buying our debt won’t have to be a priority for them anymore. We’ll need to undergo some major and painful restructuring to survive it. You can read about it at the Journal

We may get official word later today that there will be a December 2nd run-off election for the Georgia senate seat currently held by Republican Saxby Chambliss. Libertarian Party candidate Allen Buckley appears to have denied Chambliss the 50%+1 vote majority that is needed to carry the seat.

If you make the common assumption that most of the libertarian vote will go to Chambliss, then this is still an uphill battle for Jim Martin, but it is winnable. As the only federal election going on between now and the end of the year, Martin may well have a fund raising advantage in this thing.

MSNBC is reporting that the discussions between Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman included Reid telling Lieberman that he was welcome to continue caucusing with the Democrats, but that he would not be allowed to continue on as chairmen of the Homeland Security committee. Lieberman’s response was that this was unacceptable to him. He’s now being wooed by Mitch McConnell and the GOP.

That was among the things that were being speculated about the meeting yesterday, but MSNBC has apparently appropriately sourced the info today. I say they should kick him to the curb. Lieberman got a quid pro quo for his support when his vote made them a 51-49 majority. There’s no reason why we should keep on paying him now, especially after what he did in the Presidential election. If we manage to fuck things up badly enough that we somehow lose enough seats two years from now for it to matter, then we don’t deserve to lead the senate anyway.

It will be interesting to watch whether the legal argument being put forth by the San Francisco City Attorney against Prop 8 holds sway with the court. I haven’t been in California long enough to know the history of the court or much about the individual justices, so I’m not going to take any guesses on whether the argument will win out with them. It’s a simple argument. It’s one that I think logically applies to this case. It’s about the difference between an amendment to the constitution and a revision of the constitution. A revision changes the underlying principles of the constitution. An amendment doesn’t. Based on nothing other than the logic of the case that allowed gay marriage, the court would seem inclined to buy that Prop 8 changed the underlying principles by denying previously held rights.

What I can say with a lot of certainty right now is that we don’t want this thing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. We’ll lose. Maybe in a court that’s been shaped by a two term Obama presidency we would be better off. If you look at the court and modern life spans, though, Obama is likely to be replacing liberal justices. That’s good in that it keeps the court from turning further to the right. It keeps Roe alive. It doesn’t do much to help us reverse the trends of recent years, though. Our best chance for replacing a conservative is Anthony Kennedy. He’s the swing vote of the conservatives and has a pretty good record on gay rights. He (as a single example among many) wrote the opinion in Lawrence v. Texas that overturned the sodomy law in Texas.

A two term Obama presidency has an outside chance of replacing Scalia. Scalia and Kennedy are the same age, but Scalia seems like the type to hold on until he dies or just before. In interviews, it is clear that he absolutely lives for that court.

Clarence Thomas is twelve years younger than these two.

Alito is two years younger than Thomas. Chief Justice Roberts is only fifty three!

Any of y’all know any thirty year old pinko judges we can get on the nomination list?

I was digging through the state maps at the google maps elections page earlier. If their map was correct, Obama didn’t manage to take a single county in Oklahoma. If all of their maps are correct, Oklahoma was the only state where every county went for the same candidate. If we ever see a Democrat take 49 states, the holdout will be Oklahoma.

I’m so damn disappointed in the voters of this state. It looks like Prop 8 has passed. We voted to put discrimination right into the state constitution. It really puts a damper on the Obama win and the rest of it for me. I’m just hoping that, as the mailed in ballots and provisional ballots get counted, Prop 8 ends up with less than 51% of the vote. If that’s the case then we can take a shot at repealing it in near future.

The more I’ve thought about it over the last few days, the more I feel like Gavin Newsom deserves a big kick to the nuts for that “whether you like it or not” quote that the Prop 8 folks ran in most of their ads. You just don’t gloat like that on any issue where a simple majority can tell you you’re wrong.

I was on the phone with my dad just waiting for the clock to hit 8:00pacific so they could make it official.

I’m still almost afraid to type this, but…they can’t steal this one from us now.