In the last week, I’ve really been bothered by something. Arlen Specter has said that his vote on EFCA is a sign that he’s not going to be an automatic 60th vote for the Democrats. He’s cited that has a sign of his independence, said it’s a bad bill, and used the GOP talking point/lie about how it takes away the right to have a secret ballot election.

Two sessions ago, Specter was a sponsor of EFCA. In the last session, he voted for cloture on the bill. It’s quite obvious that he only came out against EFCA because he hoped doing so would help him against Toomey in the GOP primary. I’ve seen various reporters and talking heads mention this disparity. I’ve never seen a single one of them challenge him directly on it when they’ve interviewed him. Maybe someone has, but in multiple interviews I’ve seen on CBS, MSNBC, and CNN, it hasn’t been brought up. I might be willing to let it go if Specter didn’t so consistently cite this one vote in interviews. The hypocrisy is galling, but the media complicity is more so.

Specter may well be an important vote on getting good health care reform through the senate this year. I’ll take it if it comes, but if Joe Sestak ends up challenging Specter in the primary I’ll donate money to Sestak’s campaign.

I probably shouldn’t allow myself to watch any national TV news in the morning. It makes me cranky. We usually watch a local channel. That channel has genuine, if sometimes odd personalities instead of the usual plastic news people. They’re so unlike typical large city local news that we’ve taken to calling the broadcast “the island of misfit news”. I woke up this morning, made my coffee, etc then turned on the TV. It was still on MSNBC after last night’s post speech coverage. I watched Monica Novatny play a clip where Obama pledges to cut the deficit in half during his first term. She and an analyst then proceed to do an SNL style “Really?!” segment where they rant about how he can’t possibly cut the debt in half.

The federal debt and the federal deficit are not the same thing. How does someone without a basic understanding of our decades long political debate make it as a news anchor?

On the topic of the speech itself, I don’t have much to say. It was an okay speech. The novelty of having a president who is well spoken and knows what he’s talking about hasn’t worn off yet, but I’m sure it will. The news of the night should be that Bobby Jindal all but killed any chance he had of being president in 2012 last night. His speech sounded like he was reading a children’s story to a room full of kindergartners. Beyond the incredibly poor delivery, though, it was the same generic speech that every Republican has given for twenty years. Please let them continue to be just that politically tone deaf for the next four years. We just might increase our majorities in 2010 and 2012 enough to undo some of the damage that’s been done to this country since 1981.

…is the best way that I’ve ever heard anyone say that right wing economics is full of shit.

The media and, seemingly, much of the country has been having a good laugh at the Bush-Cheney legacy tour. At a certain level, it is laughable. Few people who have lived as conscious adults or adolescents through the last eight years, let along the better ones before them, would think this has been a good time in America or that Bush has been a good leader. Don’t count on that sentiment to hold over time. It might. The last eight years might turn out for many Americans to be an even worse time than we think it was and Bush may be widely vilified.

My favorite column from Paul Krugman starts out like this: “Historical narratives matter.That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal;they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.”

The Bush-Cheney legacy tour may be a ham-fisted start to the project of rehabilitating their legacies, but it won’t be the end of that project. Once the GOP has done whatever self examination it’s going to do, it will find ways to claim successes over the last few years. It will spin some of the things that we find most objectionable as being among those successes. You can be damn sure that they’re not going to give up on their “regulation is bad” philosophy even if they have to tone down the rhetoric for a while.

I ask this favor of anyone reading this. For the rest of your life, if you hear any mention of anything positive that came out of the Bush presidency and/or Republican control of congress during much of it, you jump on that. Be clear that these are lies. Point out just how bad the Bush presidency was for the world and for most Americans. The GOP already has a set of lying talking points that are meant to distort the achievements of FDR and keep us from ever going down the path of creating an even halfway equitable society. We’ve seen those trudged out during the current economic crisis. These guys play the long game. We need to, too. If not, you may live long enough to someday find yourself flying into George W. Bush airport in New York or celebrating George W. Bush’s birthday as holiday.

Someone needs to send NBC’s Lee Cowen a copy of the constitution.

You may well have heard that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has supposedly decided to appoint former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to Barack Obama’s senate seat. I just watched Lee Cowen speculate that the U.S. Senate may just have to accept this because, after all, Blagojevich is the legally elected governor of Illinois and he has the sole power to decide this, in spite of Harry Reid’s objects.

Um, no.

Given the nature of this scandal, one might have thought that reporters covering the story would take two minutes to brush up on the appropriate section of the constitution. Since Mr. Cowen didn’t bother, I’ll provide this to any member of the media who wants to comment on this news story. It’s Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. constitution:

Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.

Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.

Neither House, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

Rachel Maddow takes apart the argument that Democrats should play nice with Joe Lieberman to get a sixty seat majority in the senate. Brilliant, but you really need to watch the whole six minutes.

Unfortunately the media plugin I’m using doesn’t seem to work with MSNBC’s embedded video code. Here’s a link instead.

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.

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.

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.