Daily Kos: State of the Nation: “Notice anything about the media’s post-election coverage?
The Republican battle cry echoed by the press prior to the election was that Democrats have no plan. That Democrats are short on ideas. That Democrats were basically passive mutes. That Democratic candidates were basically blank-eyed dolts that dutifully kept their mouths shut as the GOP imploded.
In reporting on GOP talking points that ‘Democrats will raise your taxes,’ the press did not temper their parroting of these talking points with fact check (hey voters, remember, the President has the last word on taxes via his veto power). In reporting on outrageous ads, they failed to mention the lies contained therein, choosing instead to salivate on the shallow and gush over graphics.
The Democrats’ 100-hour-plan was barely a blip on the radar screen. Hours of so-called ‘analysis’ was focused on what those subpoena-hungry liberals would do to ’embarrass’ the president. Republican talking point after Republican talking point was fed into the noise machine and irresponsible members of the Xerox media spat the distortions out without analysis. They did not balance lies with truth as a responsible press should have done; rather, they chose to air the Republican hysteria without rebuttal.
Only now, after most races have been called and it’s clear that the Democrats will take power, only now do they report on that which they had suppressed throughout the campaign. Now we get articles detailing the Democrat’s tax plan. Now we get articles on the minimum wage and the effect of a Democratic house on industry. Now we get articles about how Democrats stand for a balanced budget. Now the talking heads report breathlessly on the 100 hour agenda, on how Democrats will affect the middle class, and how Democrats will try to fix healthcare.
Now the press chooses to re”

Crooks and Liars: “Lieberman Wins
By: Jamie Holly @ 7:31 PM – PST

Christy from Firedoglake was just on CNN giving her analysis of Lieberman’s win tonight.
Video – WMV Video – QT
Christy was right on when she said Ned Lamont changed the conversation on the campaign trails to the failures in Iraq and the lack of accountability by the administration.”

Daily Kos: Deep inside Santorum’s noggin’: “Deep inside Santorum’s noggin’
There’s something that has been really bugging me about the Santorum scandal: In the now-famous interview, Santorum says:
In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.
Tell me, what kind of person walks around talking about ‘man on dog’ sex? I can confidently say that the thought never enters my mind unbidden. Yet Santorum, in the course of a conversation with a reporter, casually mentions bestiality. The AP reporter was naturally taken aback:
I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.
I would be freaked out if anyone started talking to me about ‘man on dog’ sex. It’s not normal. For a Senator to bring the topic up to a reporter is, well, beyond belief.
So Republicans — this is your number three guy in the Senate. Aren’t you even the least bit embarrassed? And if the ‘man on dog’ thing doesn’t get you, then what about this?
He and his wife, Karen, have seven children – including, as Santorum puts it, ‘the one in Heaven.’ Their fourth baby, Gabriel Michael, died in 1996, two hours after an emergency delivery in Karen Santorum’s 20th week of pregnancy. The couple took Gabriel’s body home to let their three other young children see and hold the baby before burying him, according to Karen Santorum’s book of the ordeal, ‘Letters to Gabriel.’
Having suffered the ordeal of a miscarriage last year, I can’t begin to imagine the horrors of losing a baby hours after birth. But passing around the baby’s corpse to his other children?
I’ll”

reality-based educator: Webb Now Leads By More Than 11,000 Votes In VA: “Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Webb Now Leads By More Than 11,000 Votes In VA
Still more absentee votes to be counted and some provisional ballots to be counted tomorrow.

Tomorrow, lawyers from both sides will canvass all the precincts to see if they were any glitches or problems.

We’re waiting on Montana. The race is tightening. Dem Tester has a 7,000+ vote lead with 72% of the precincts counted.

Wow – what a night. It looks like it will come down to VA and MT.”

Shreddin’ With Dick ” Spotted on 10/19, by an eagle-eyed Wonkette reader: The Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services truck making its way up to the Cheney compound at the Naval Observatory.
Fun fact: Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services has been contracted by the Secret Service for our Executive Branch’s record-not-keeping needs.
The present contractor providing Pickup & Destruction of Sensitive Waste Material services is Mid Atlantic Shredding Services and the current rate is $0.095 cents per lbs.
You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!”

Crooks and Liars: By: Jamie Holly @ 8:18 AM – PST
Keith Olbermann and Jonathan Alter discussed the attempts to suppress voters in Virginia last night. Today it has turned into a much bigger story:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the possibility of voter intimidation in the U.S. Senate race between Sen. George Allen, a Republican, and Democratic challenger James Webb, officials told NBC News.
State officials alerted the Justice Department on Tuesday to several complaints of suspicious phone calls to voters who attempted to misdirect or confuse them about election day, Jean Jensen, Secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections, told NBC’s David Shuster….read on
Between corrupt Republicans, the robo-call scandal and now this, investigators are going to be busy for a very long time.”

Poll Workers Struggle With Vote Machines: “Poll Workers Struggle With Vote Machines
– By ANICK JESDANUN, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, November 7, 2006

(11-07) 11:52 PST , (AP) —
Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts Tuesday, delaying voters in several states and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.
In Virginia, state election officials called in the FBI after several voters complained about getting phone messages that sent them to the wrong precincts.
Many of the voting machine problems surfaced as the polls were opening.
In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they couldn’t get to start properly.
‘We got five machines — one of them’s got to work,’ said Willette Scullank, a trouble shooter from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, elections board.
In Indiana’s Marion County, electronic optical-scan machines that read paper ballots initially weren’t working right in more than 100 precincts. Poll workers had trouble using a computer port to connect those machines to new touchscreen models, which handicapped voters use, County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler said.
Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., and Lebanon County, Pa., extended polling hours because of early machine troubles blamed on bad programming.
In Colorado, Democratic Party officials said they would ask a state judge to keep Denver polling places open an extra two hours Tuesday because of long lines. Power failures in the area had knocked out laptops used to verify voter registration, forcing workers to call the central office for information.
Jonah Goldman of the La”

Might today’s elections be the last that matter in America? This is, I know, a gloomy and apocalyptic idea. But we live in gloomy and apocalyptic times, and I believe that if the Republicans do well enough this year they will destroy all faith in democracy on the left. No one will believe that the election was not stolen with the aid of crooked computers. Hell, I won’t believe in a pro-Bush result, knowing how easy it is to break into one of the Diebold voting machines. There are already stories spreading across the net that signal this has been spotted, from such commentators as ‘the thoughtful Baptist’, the journalist Fred Clark.
Even the Miami Herald has reported ‘a story’ about voting machines that mysteriously registered a press on the Democratic candidate as a vote for a Republican one. Similar stories have come from Texas.
So all the materials for a first-rate conspiracy theory are there. The means, the motive and the opportunity are all in place; and no one who has watched the Bush government over the last six years could believe that they have any scruples whatever about – God save the mark – fairness or the rule of law. They know nothing more about democracy than they know about competence. This is obvious to everyone now, even to the neocon supporters of the invasion of Iraq, who have filled the papers, in the run up to the expected Republican defeat, with ‘rat-like chitterings’ of ‘It wasn’t me!’
Well, it was them and it was Bush, too. The one overwhelming justification of democracy is to punish such mistakes. It cannot ensure that the right people are elected.

Crooks and Liars: By: David @ 8:12 PM – PST

Bill Clinton provides the star power at tonight’s campaign rally for Webb. He delivers the famous Clinton stump speech and seems to enjoy to ripping Republican campaign tactics.
Video – WMP Video – QT “

Crooks and Liars: By: Steve @ 7:05 PM – PST
Alas, the story late last week about the Bush administration accidentally publishing nuclear secrets in Arabic on the Internet did not cause quite the stir that I had hoped for. Perhaps if John Kerry had told a joke about it, and left out a word, the story could have received wall-to-wall coverage on TV.
That said, there has been some interesting follow-up. For example, one of the people who convinced the Bush gang to publish the materials is now publicly criticizing the administration for its poor judgment.
House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra criticized the Bush administration on Sunday for its handling of a trove of once-secret documents from Saddam Hussein’s covert nuclear program disclosed on a federal Web site.
Hoekstra, R-Mich., complained the U.S. intelligence community hadn’t properly declassified the documents.
‘Well, you know, we have a process in place. It looks like they screwed up,’ he said on CNN’s ‘Late Edition.’
That’s great, but Hoekstra does realize that this whole scheme was his idea, right?”