Think Progress » Lieberman: ‘This Was Not a Major Realignment Election’: “Lieberman: ‘This Was Not a Major Realignment Election’

On Tuesday, Democrats picked up six seats in the Senate and at least 29 seats in the House, taking control of both chambers for the first time in 12 years. Not a single Democratic incumbent lost. Today on Meet the Press, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said this was “not a major realignment election” and “both major political parties…[are] in a kind of probation.” Watch it:

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/12/lieberman-no-realignment/

“

CT-SEN: Lieberman Won’t Say Whether Dems Should Win House | TPMCafe: “Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a lifelong Democrat and student of politics, blanked when asked if America would be better off with his party regaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

A Democratic victory would immeasurably boost the influence of two Connecticut friends, U.S. Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro and John B. Larson, and provide a counterbalance to the Republican Senate and White House.

‘Uh, I haven’t thought about that enough to give an answer,’ Lieberman said, as though Democrats’ strong prospects for recapturing the House hadn’t been the fall’s top political story.

He was similarly elusive about the race for governor. Is he voting for John DeStefano Jr., a Democrat and mayor of the city where Lieberman has lived since the 1960s?

‘I’m, uh, I’m having,’ he stammered, then laughed and said his decision would remain private….

‘Running as an independent, as you well know, was not my first choice,’ Lieberman said Friday in an interview. ‘I honestly now look at it as a kind of, oh, I don’t know, a blessing.’…

‘I am fighting to change the way things are done in Washington. There is too much partisanship and not enough problem-solving,’ Lieberman said. ‘There’s too much political game-playing and not “

Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: Taking the neocon pulse: “Mark Steyn’s columns are always useful for checking the collective neocon pulse. This week, Steyn can’t figure out why it is that decorated Marine Jack Murtha’s conversion from pro-war-hawk to anti-war crusader got so much attention, while everyone ignored the earth-shattering Op-Ed written by Joe Lieberman, in which Lieberman announced that he used to be for the war . . . . and still is:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, came out with a big statement on Iraq last week. Did you hear about it? Probably not. Everyone was still raving about his Democrat colleague, Rep. Jack Murtha, whose carefully nuanced position on Iraq is: We’re all doomed unless we pull out by next Tuesday! (I quote from memory.) . . .

And, while the media were eager to promote Murtha as the most incisively insightful military expert on the planet, this guy Lieberman’s evidently some nobody no one need pay any attention to.

Here’s why. His big piece on Iraq was headlined ‘Our Troops Must Stay.’

On the list of unattractive neocon attributes, the need to perpetually cry about the chronic unfairness to which they are subjected (‘the media is ignoring us!!’) is near the top (right behind their desire to have the U.S. wage eternal war in futile and self-destructive pursuit of conquest of the entire Middle East).

Whatever else one thinks of Jack Murtha’s announcement, it was news. Murtha voted for the war, supported it, has long been one of the closest Congressional allies of the Pentagon, and has been a leading defense hawk on Capitol Hill for many years. The fact that someone like him changed his mind and confessed what he believes is his error about the war is not only news in and of itself, but also”

Crooks and Liars: By: John Amato @ 12:30 PM – PST
Steve:
This has ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ written all over it. From yesterday’s presidential radio address:
One freedom that defines our way of life is the freedom to choose our leaders at the ballot box. We saw that freedom earlier this week, when millions of Americans went to the polls to cast their votes for a new Congress. Whatever your opinion of the outcome, all Americans can take pride in the example our democracy sets for the world by holding elections even in a time of war.’ (emphasis added)…read on
If he had his way—he’d cancel our elections while tapping our phones— then throw us all in prison for as long as he wants…”

Answers.com – Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and much more: “Spotlight: If your relatives originally arrived in the US from Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, chances are good that they came through Ellis Island, the country’s main immigration port. Located in NY Harbor, the immigration station opened in 1892. More than 12 million immigrants had been processed there by the time the doors were officially closed on November 12, 1954. The island now houses the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and is a part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. “

Two–Four: “‘Off With Their Heads’
Watch for a Dick Morris column tomorrow in which he lays substantial blame for the Republicans’ disaster at the feet of House leadership, with emphasis on Hastert and Frist. I think he might get fairly close to some fact and truth.

Dennis Hastert is a goddamned idiot. Beyond the sort of pig-eyed machinations finely contrived for wedging himself into place in the House, he couldn’t think his way between Goldwater and LBJ in a straight line, and I don’t believe that he would care even if he could.

Yesterday, a great deal of Body Mass Index went under the wheels of people who know what they’re doing in ways that these imbeciles just can’t imagine.”

Two–Four: ‘And while I thought he should be replaced, I found the manner and the moment of his purge utterly disgusting. What was the rush? It was one of the worst moments of W’s presidency. It was a double surrender by the president, throwing a severed head to the Democrats and to the terrorists.’
(Michael Ledeen on the sack of Rumsfeld)”

The Plank: “It would be great if TNR could do an article on whether the 50 state strategy worked. Since we just got a landslide victory and were in play nationwide it seems strange to have knives out for Dean. Am I missing something here? It seems like we managed both a big win and party building, which is the best of both worlds. “

Crooks and Liars: “Atrios:
…………… at least that’s what I keep hearing. So, I bring you the conservative agenda
Read on…
As SusanG at dKos says: We’re All Conservatives Now .
On a related note, PBS’s NOW offered an examination of the role liberal bloggers played in Tester’s candidacy. Read it here. “

“En Vogue Tour Journal – Rehearsal 1”: “August 31, 1992
Los Angeles
Rehearsal 1

We do our most important work like elves.

During the day, we work with wrenches, screwdrivers, and meters. We tweak the design, change bulbs, re-assign dimmers…hardware stuff. We’re in the company of band gear guys, the set carpenter, runners, and various other production types. This project has more than a dozen people onstage during the show; players, dancers, and the Funky Divas from Oakland who are En Vogue. During the day, the entire entourage makes this old (1914) silent film stage a very busy place.

K.C. and Greg, the backline gearheads, occupy a dressing room jammed with electronics racks, keyboards, computers, cables, connectors, soldering gear, and guitars. They shuttle gear and floppy disks back and forth to the stage. They do things that we don’t know anything about, except when we hear an occasional blast of sound from the monitors announcing a new keyboard patch or DAT run.

David and Scott (known to us as the ‘Buttata-Heads’) work the sound rig. We don’t know what they do, the almost traditional, invisible walls between sound and lights people being what they are. However, they work quite hard with tapes, patches, mixes, microphones, and who knows what other sorts of hum”