Special election for the 37th is set. Is the 17th next?

Governor Kaine has officially set January 12 as the day for the special election to fill the rest of Ken Cuccinelli’s term as State Senator for the 37th District (Washington Post).  While the Republicans have to choose among three contenders, the Democrats appear to be congealing behind Delegate Dave Marsden – never mind that Marsden doesn’t live in the District and the Ben Tribett can’t stand him (admittedly, the latter probably means a lot less to Dems these days).

The dynamic in the 37th got me thinking about the initial kerfuffle over Edd Houck, as in whether or not he would jump ship to the McDonnell Administration.  I was skeptical then, and remain so now, but longtime Democrat Paul Goldman still sees it as a possibility; in fact, he thinks it would probably happen before the special election (when Houck can maximize his leverage).

I would disagree with that.  If anything, it would be after the election that Houck would have more leverage with McDonnell.

Goldman (along with all of us who were politically active in the late 1990s) harkens back to the Gilmore Administration, and how it picked off Senator Charles Waddell and Delegate David Brickley.  Trouble is, both men were Democrats of a center-right bent with whom Republicans were quite comfortable.  Houck, by contrast, has drifted leftward with his party over the years, making this a much tougher fit unless the Administration had good reason to do it.

Said reason won’t be apparent until it becomes clear if the Republicans can hold Cuccinelli’s seat.  If they don’t, this is all academic.  Even if they do, it’s no guarantee McDonnell’s people can get past Houck’s lefty record and Dick Saslaw moving heaven, earth, and whatever other dimensions he can grab to keep Edd where he is.

Still, if the Republicans can win the special election in the 37th, all (or at least some) eyes would return to the 17th.

Global Warming Alarmism’s Worst Day

The top scientists behind the global-warming hysteria have been exposed by an anonymous hacker as data-fudgers and would-be-muzzlers of dissent.

In what can only be called a mind-blowing development, an unnamed whistleblower hacked the Hadley Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, and released a slew of emails and other documents written by some of the climate-change glitterati, including UEA Professor Phil Jones, who has admitted that the documents are the real deal (Essex County, NJ, Examiner – cousin of the DC Examiner).

Among the things exposed by the hacker is “Mike’s Nature Trick” – essentially garfting different data sets together in order to “hide the decline” that would have blown a gaping hole in the global-warming theory (Climate Audit, it will take a while for the link, but it’s worth it!).

There are also emails about trying to get skeptical colleagues fired (Air Vent), changing the rules of reviewing papers to suppress different points of view (Air Vent again), and even cheering the death of a skeptic (What’s Up with That).

There are literally hundreds of documents, and I myself waited to comment on this until I saw that the Essex Examiner picked it up.  Now that Professor Jones himself has admitted that the docs are real, this could turn out to be global warming alarmism’s Worst Day Ever.

How badly damaged is the Democratic brand?

This bad: New York Attorney General and potential gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, who has skilfully avoided all of the silliness in Albany this year, quietly built a decent record as Attorney General (at least from afar), and may very well be the most admired politician in the Empire State, still lost a double-digit lead to Rudy Giuliani in less than two months (Rasmussen).

The Dems have plenty of time to recover, of course, but New York was supposed to be one of the states immune to the Dem drop-off.  If the president is even dragging Andrew Cuomo down, anything is possible next year.

Obama Administration prepares the ground for a massive tax increase

James Pethokoukis has the details:

Did I just see a trail balloon launched? Over at a Wall Street Journal conference, Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers had this to say about deficit reduction:

But the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers admitted that health reform and a growing economy isn’t enough to bring down the deficit. She did mention one other place that revenue could come from: letting the Bush tax cuts expire.

Me: Since Obama already wants to get rid of the income and capital gains tax cuts for wealthier Americans that expire at the end of 2010, clearly what Romer is referring to is the rest of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. Letting all the 2001 cuts — rate reductions, child tax credit marriage penalty relief — expire would raise tax revenues by $2.5 trillion through 2019. (These CBO numbers assume no negative economic feedback impact from higher taxes.) And letting the 2003 tax cuts on capital gains and dividends expire would be tantamount to a $350 billion tax increase through 2019.

That totals a tax increase of nearly $3 trillion, easily the largest tax hike in the history of the United States; and one that would leave the 95-percent-won’t-see-a-tax-increase promise in ashes.

Believe it or not, it gets worse (JP again):

And none of this includes possible plans for a VAT that could raise $400 billion a year more . . .

A VAT (Value Added Tax) is one of the most sinister taxes in any government’s arsenal.  It is a tax so hidden (it affects every level of production) that almost no one knows how much they’re paying (think gasoline taxes, which are not imposed at the retail level and are likewise opaque to the taxpayer).  One of the reasons America has not succumbed to the social democracy disease of Europe is its avoidance of this tax.  It is practically a blank check to big government.

Be afraid; be very afraid.

The stimulus is so massive, it’s creating new districts!

I really, really wanted to believe this was an Onion move; then I actually feared some clever lefty had laid a trap for over-eager center-right bloggers.

It is neither.  The Stimulus tracking site really does tout – and proudly, money that goes to phantom Congressional Districts.

Bill McMorris (Watchdog.org) has the details on North Dakota.

On a whim, I took a look at Virginia.

Among other things . . .

• Over $2.26 million was spent in the “12th Congressional District,” which only exists in the fevered recesses of Tom Davis’ ambition.
• Another $2M- plus went to the “00 Congressional District” (creating or saving exactly 2.5 jobs in the process)
• More than $2M went to such venerable Virginia Districts as the 36th and 26th (neither seen since the 19th Century), plus the 79th (which can only mean Obama has created a new and more perfect dimension to spend the money)

In all seriousness, this is beyond embarrassing.  Either the Administration is bending over backwards to make sure Joe Biden is never wrong (“Someone is getting scammed already”) or they can’t take the time to remove non-existent districts from the website supposedly dedicated to track the stimulus funds.

This crew can’t even get a website right, and we’re supposed to entrust them with health care?

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

Dear Mr. President

What the f**k?!?!?!

Sincerely,

Andrew Cuomo

In defense of patronage

Late yesterday morning, Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner caught wind of a new Obama Administration regulation designed to “that is clearly designed to weed out any Bush administration political appointees who ‘careered-into’ the civil service.”  Tapscott also sees the regulation as one which “effectively establishes a partisan political factor in hiring for career civil service positions in the federal bureaucracy.”  Eric Erickson calls it a “purge” (RedState).  The Administration, as far as I’m aware, has yet to deny this or spin it down.

Like Eric and Mark, I see an Administration attempting to remove political opponents from the executive branch, and to keep them out.  Unlike them, I am not fazed by this.  In fact, I applaud it.

Over the last century and two scores, the most politically dangerous event in the United States has been the rise of the “civil service” bureaucracy. It has become the greatest impediment to attempts to reduce excess government.

It has, however, become more than that: at nearly every level of government, the permanent bureaucracy has acquired its own agenda (survival and expansion) and largely imposed it on elected officials – depriving them of the ability to carry out mandates sought from the voters, severely limiting the voters’ ability to hold said officials accountable, and generally making politics far less transparent and honorable.  Candidates can make promises knowing full well they won’t be able to fulfill them and with a ready-made villain to blame (said villain is usually more than willing to take the role).  Voters have grown more and more cynical as a result.

The only redeeming quality of the civil service is its supposed check against the corrupt nature of allowing the elected executive the full authority to appoint whomever (s)he wishes (largely derided as the “patronage” system).  That this president hails from the one place where “patronage” has acquired its dishonor (Chicago) is unfortunate, but those of us born and raised in new Jersey can attest that “civil service” is no panacea for corruption.

Indeed, the anti-corruption theme was the basis for the civil service’s creation in the 1870s – and it was based on the myth that post-Civil War governments were unusually corrupt (this could only be believed by a population that lost nearly all of its witnesses to the 1820s and 1830s due to old age and war – which is what the United States largely was in the post-Civil War era).  In fact, the “patronage” system was itself an attempt to clear out longtime government officials who had used the time to feather their nests (both Jefferson and Jackson were incensed at holdovers from the Administrations they defeated; Jefferson about bureaucrats thwarting his agenda, Jackson about Adamsites that were thoroughly corrupt).

In the meantime, most (if not all) of government functions create divisions within the electorate about how said functions are delivered (welfare reform, education reform, privatization, etc.) or whether they should even be delivered at all.  Even at the local level (and I can attest to this personally), things as seemingly non-controversial as the Fire Department can become a divisive political issue (here in Spotsylvania, a storm is brewing over where the next Fire and Rescue station should go; it nearly became a partisan issue and it is almost certain to remain a regional one).

In the midst of all of this, permanent bureaucracies – which almost never have the same agenda as those elected to run them – continue to metastasize.  I have yet to see a defense of this that would even rise to the level of feeble, let alone robust.

Therefore, even though this Administration was not elected with my vote, I hope it succeeds in imposing its will on the federal bureaucracy.  At the very least, it will ensure (1) that an Administration that is elected with my vote will have the same power, and (2) that voters see the new reality and give their vote the sober importance that it would now deserve.

Recanvass in NY-23 cuts Hoffman deficit almost in half (with more possibly on the way)

The election that gave Democrats a psychological firewall last Tuesday got a lot closer – more than a week after it was supposedly over (Syracuse Post-Standard):

Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County.

As it turns out, neither was true.

But Hoffman’s concession — based on snafus in Oswego County and elsewhere that left his vote undercounted — set off a chain of events that echoed all the way to Washington, D.C., and helped secure passage of a historic health care reform bill.

Democratic Rep. Bill Owens was quickly sworn into office on Friday, a day before the rare weekend vote in the House of Representatives. His support sealed his party’s narrow victory on the health care legislation.

Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.

In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes — 12,748 to 11,000.

The new vote totals mean the race will be decided by absentee ballots, of which about 10,200 were distributed, said John Conklin, communications director for the state Board of Elections.

Now, before anyone takes this too far, it should be known that Owens did not provide the mathematical margin the Dems needed to pass the health care fiasco last weekend.  Without Owens, the Dems still win that vote 219-215, and Joseph Cao’s I-only-voted-with-the-Dems-when-I-saw-218 vote would still apply.

That said, there may have been more Democrats being skittish about the vote if NY-23 was perceived as up in the air.

So what happened?  Simply put, it was “chaos” in Oswego (their word, not mine), and some precincts in Jefferson County that mistakenly had Hoffman’s figure at zero.

Meanwhile, as Jim Geraghty was informed, Jefferson wasn’t the only county with zero-for-Hoffman snafus; here’s Madison County.  Based on the neighboring precincts, these foul-ups could have cost Hoffman at least 500 votes.  That would cut the margin to 2,500, with four times as many absentee ballots yet to be counted, and as many as eight other counties still out there with possible issues.

Sure, it’s an uphill battle for Hoffman, but it’s getting flatter by the day, if not the hour.  Moreover, if by some chance it is found that Hoffman actually won the election . . .

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

Say what?!?!?!?!

Just when I thought politics in Spotsylvania couldn’t get any weirder – or to be more precise, that it would finally calm down – the one man I never thought would ever give the Republican Party an opportunity just pried open the door (Washington Post):

McDonnell might try to tip the balance of power in the Senate by luring a Democrat in a vulnerable district into his administration.

One key senator Friday did not rule out the possibility of accepting such an offer. Sen. Edward Houck (D-Spotsylvania) , a longtime school administrator who was considered for secretary of education under both Kaine and Warner, said he would be willing to discuss an administration job.

“I would certainly be willing to talk to the governor-elect and his staff about whatever they want to talk about,” he said. “I’m not looking for that, I’m not seeking that, but I’m willing to talk to them about anything.”

In this environment, “I’m willing to talk” might as well be “Why haven’t you called me yet?”

Now, there isn’t any Spotsylvania Democrat who has defeated more Republicans than Edd Houck.  Some of his comments since his party retook the Senate in 2007 have been so baldly partisan that I’m guessing some of his own colleagues blushed.

Still, knowing the people around McDonnell, I’d be stunned if Edd’s phone isn’t ringing already.

Maybe, just maybe, Spotsylvania’s election season isn’t done yet.

T-plus one day

It’s a rather unusual aftermath. While I lost, nearly every other Republican in Virginia won.

Still, I very much enjoyed the last nine months, and I very much appreciate the help I received from everyone. I ran a campaign of which I could be proud.

In the meantime, at least we’ll move in a different direction from Richmond.