Wednesday, June 07, 2006

two heroes: Bush and Sibel

* miguel wrote in about someone he knows - "her two heroes are Bush and Sibel. "
does that make your head explode?

* larisa will be on krxa at 7.30pm wed again. hopefully we can learn what she's up to. there's been so much happening on iran since she last wrote about it.

* there's been an interesting back and forth about RFK2's stolen election piece. here's salon's Farhad Manjoo responding - and tristero trying to sort out the discussion here. and ron's take here

* chris bowers:
"In 2004, Busby lost the CA-50 by 22.0%. Today, it looks like she will lose by around 4.5%. And that was with the NRCC spending $4.5M on the race. If Republicans want to spin losing 18 points after spending $4.5M of committee money as a good thing, go for it. After all, spin is basically why they spent so much money on this race. By blowing their wad in a solidly Republican district, they wanted to change the media narrative on the election in their favor. It will probably work, given how subservient and generally inaccurate the media tends to be when it comes to Republicans and elections. In reality, for a Republican candidate to pull 49.5% of the vote in a district with 44.5% Republican registration is shocking. Given those numbers, Bilbray probably managed all of 20% of the vote among independents.

No matter what the media says, no Democrat should be mistaken about this result. First, this is a huge, seismic shift in our favor that bodes extremely well for November. If we receive an 18% shift nationwide, we will win the House easily. If Republican candidates are pulling only 20% of the independent vote, the Indycrat realignment is still on.

At the same time, this is not as good as we could have done. The situation for Republicans is so bad right now, that even our huge leads in the generic ballot hide what Paul Rosenberg pointed out: we should be doing better. Just because we are winning does not mean we are using winning strategies. Our ten-point advantage in the generic ballot should be fifteen. The eighteen point shift we saw in CA-50 should have been twenty-five. Bilbray will win with under 50% of the vote, and there was low turnout relative to past California primaries. Clearly, there was an opportunity for us to do more.

We had some real victories tonight, and we still have time to rectify our mistakes. Fortunately, come November, even Busby will have another chance. I just hope that as a party we realize that there are clearly better strategic paths for us to take than the ones we are currently following. Tonight, as David Sirota writes, Jon Tester showed us just such a path."
we gave it a good shot.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could that person he knows be referring to Bush, the band, for staying with their name instead of changing it? That might be understandable.

Anonymous said...

Yes, we were disappointed last night in Encinitas at Busby's party when the numbers didn't shift more. I had a feeling that would be the typical pattern as it was for Donna Frye earlier, etc. where the initial absentee ballots wouldn't shift much from those percentages the whole night. Frye and Busby gained a few percentage points, but not 8%. It almost seemed like it was "programmed"... Diebold? Hmmm... Wonder if the central tabulator was on the internet and far away from Jim March this time around too!

Unfortunately also these scum also got Ron Roberts elected supervisor instead of Democrat Richard Barrera after sending out "masquerade" voter cards that endorsed all of the different Dem candidates except putting out Ron Roberts instead of Barrera (Roberts, BTW, was one that earlier ran against Mayor Dick Murphy for mayor where Donna Frye should have won the write-in campaign in that election before activist judges invalidated many of her votes contrary to the "intent of the voter" standards that were applied in other elections). Board of Supervisors had been all Republicans for a decade, as well as the Voter Registrar, etc. That is why things to do with Diebold around here have to be regarded with suspicion.

The spin meisters won again. After they did the "hit" on her last weekend for supposedly wanting to help illegals vote. I talked to the guy who did the rebukeduke.com site last night and contestthevote.com (which helped spur Barbara Boxer to do what wasn't done in 2000 and contest the 2004 results). I think he and I both got to thinking that we need to start fighting dirty to win against these Rethug bastards around here.

We talked about perhaps having a "patrol" to do things like what I mentioned here earlier as a recipe for Bilbray's defeat. Follow around Wilkes to see who we can get pictures of him with and hopefully catch him with Bilbray or some other entity around here where we can hang them!

I was saying that the idea someone had to write-in "Paper ballots only" to contest "uncontested" races, if done enough could also perhaps be made to force hand recounts in some instances in some places where recounts are required with a certain percentage of write-ins. That way, we'd make sure to have eyeballs see all of the paper scanned ballots to see if chicanery was being used to white out a Dem's vote and the Rethug blotted out, like what was done in Ohio in precincts that were "avoided" in the "random" selections of precincts for recounts, would get noticed. I noticed on the voter totals page they listed candidates like Bonnie Dumanis at 100% when I voted against her with that write-in... (same for Dan McAllister here) Did they not count my vote or other write-in votes? They DIDN'T have 100%, maybe 99.9%

lukery said...

thnx calipendence. sorry that we didnt have a better result. fingers x'd for november.

Lol re Bush, the band