What are the Dems' REAL chances this Nov.?

As set rhetorically inquired, just what the hell are you spending your minutes (as precious as bodily fluids) reading? I'd ask you to provide evidence to support your claims regarding what "the dems" expect, but you'd probably link us to the intellectual giants at freerepublic.

Here's what Fred Barnes figures...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/817vxgub.asp

a better question than what will the dems do if they lose is... should I build an ark and fill it with two of every animal so I can repopulate the earth after the flood of piss and bile that is forthcoming if the repubs lose?

Let's give MM some conservatives to read...


Let's quit while we're behind
By Christopher Buckley HERE

And we thought Clinton had no self-control
By Joe Scarborough
HERE

Give divided government a chance
By William A. Niskanen
HERE

Restrain this White House
By Bruce Fein
HERE

Idéologie has taken over
By Jeffrey Hart
HERE

Mr. Blatham presents one of the most persuasive and brilliant analyses of the fact that the Republicans are doomed to lose both Houses in November. Certainly, the Democrats should hire Mr. Blatham as an analyst as soon as possible. His combination of links shows a truly impressive intellect at work.

Hi, Possum!

Whats freerepublic?

Now,as ehbeth posted yesterday...



Blaham,you liked that post when she posted it.

Here is part of an article by Stuart Taylor Jr...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200504u/nj_taylor_2005-04-26



Its a subscription,so I wont subscribe to get the whole article.

And from the Washington Times...

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20061005-114612-1909r.htm



And from here...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aHczjrHrbtxo

We get this...



So as you can see,there are many people saying that the dems will take the house and probably the Senate.

So,I ask again,how will the dems react if they dont take either one?

massagatto checks in....and is spot on for a change....

What's the A2K record for avatars/week, btw?

Yeah, why bother being even slightly careful with language. What you said was...

Then you find a link from the Washington Times, famous Dem mouthpiece which notes "an increased likelikhood of dems taking the senate" and another which says "could cost Republicans the senate" and another which says "conceivably the senate".


There's no "again" because what you said earlier was different. I'll remind you...


So, let's pretend you actually give a **** about being careful with your writing and thinking. Let's pretend you asked, "How might the party respond if congress stays in the control of Republicans?"

It won't break up (your 'comprehension' of either George Soros or Moveon is more deeply uneducated and fallacious than you are likely to even guess).

There will be pervasive disappointment and apathy, not merely about the Dem public relations activities and vote-getting operations, but about systemic issues (the popular vote, for example, will be overwhelmingly for dem candidates). There will be anger too, in some unknown measure and with unknown consequences.

The positive element will be a certain continuation of negative notions regarding Bush and the modern conservative movement (that trend we've seen over the last five years, culminating in the republicans bleak situation now) will continue. You'd better hope you do lose congress this time.

heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee . . .


it ain't even difficult no more, is it?

"Madison32"!!! Another incarnation! This dude's immortal!

You misspelled immoral.

My bad.

So,are you saying that you KNOW for a fact that the dems will get more votes?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 21, 2006
Carried Away by Talk of a 'Wave'
By Tom Bevan

Dire. Bleak. Grim. Those are just a few of the adjectives that have been used to describe the election prospects of Republicans just 18 days from now. So is it really that bad for the elephants this year? The answer is "yes" - and "no."

On one hand, some Republican strategists acknowledge that if the election were held today there is a good chance their party would lose control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats. The picture is only slightly less depressing for Republicans on the Senate side: right now the GOP is staring at a loss of four to six seats, which is the difference between just barely hanging onto the majority and just barely losing it.

On the other hand, talk of a huge Democratic "wave" election remains premature, if not a bit overblown. Some are suggesting this year is shaping up to be a Democratic blowout similar to the one Republicans enjoyed in 1994 when they picked up fifty-two seats and captured control of the House. So far, despite the fact that Republicans are actively defending a larger set of seats than they were a few weeks ago, the evidence available at the moment simply doesn't bear out talk of a forty or fifty-seat swing to the Democrats.

That being said, there are still two and half weeks left until Election Day, so things may indeed get worse for Republicans. Or they might get better. One thing to remember is that eighteen days is an eternity in politics. If you don't believe me, consider that just twenty-one days ago most Americans had never heard the name Mark Foley. And just nine days ago Kim Jong Il and North Korea grabbed the world's attention by testing a nuke. The point is that things can, and almost always do change quickly in politics - especially in today's 24/7 new media environment.

The other thing to remember is that for many people around the country who do not follow politics very closely, the election has only recently gotten underway. Both Republicans and Democrats will be blanketing the airwaves with ads and pouring every last dollar into mobilizing their supporters in the final two weeks.

The heart of the question is whether Republican voters are really as depressed and fractured as the media has portrayed them to be over the last few weeks. If they are, and they decide to sit on their hands this election, then November 7 could indeed turn to out to be a very bad night for the GOP.

But if Republican voters aren't that depressed or, perhaps more likely, if they are disgruntled at the moment for one reason or another but decide in the final days that the alternative to not voting (i.e. having Speaker Nancy Pelosi two heart beats away from the Presidency) is worse, then GOP losses this cycle might not be so severe.

Right now, you can find signs pointing both directions. Adding to the uncertainty is that voter sentiment is a tricky thing to measure and polls may or may not be accurately capturing the potential effectiveness of the Republican get-out-the-vote effort. Many of the most hotly contested House races are in Republican-leaning districts, so even a slight rise or dip in turnout may end up being decisive.

Historically, the sixth-year midterm of a two-term administration is always an uphill battle for the party in power, and it's certainly true Republicans carry some additional burdens into this cycle - not the least of which is an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

Given the current political environment, probably the best case scenario for Republicans this year is that they manage to limit losses to twelve to fourteen seats in the House and perhaps three or four seats in the Senate, clinging to bare majorities in both chambers. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and political guru Karl Rove have all suggested in recent days they are optimistic about the chances of doing exactly that.

Many dismissed their comments as unrealistically optimistic and blatant spin. Maybe so. But right now the chances of Republicans maintaining control of the House and Senate seem equally as good as (if not slightly better than) the predictions of some that Democrats will rack up gains of forty plus seats in the House. As I said, a lot can still change over the next eighteen days when Americans finally go out and conduct the only poll that matters.

Tom Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics. Email: tom@realclearpolitics.

That would be a silly knowledge claim, now wouldn't it? I can't KNOW for a fact that Bush will return to cocaine use, I can just estimate probabilities.

So, are you saying that you have the cojones to wager me, say one or five hundred good american dollars on the matter?

16 Nov 2003

Illinois
-------
State Sen. BARACK OBAMA, D-Chicago, who is running for U.S. Senate, didn't tell all when recently asked about any past use of illegal drugs.

I know that because I found out more information in a 1995 book by - guess who - Barack Obama.

"Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," is, according to liner notes, a "lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir" documenting how "the son of a black African father and white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American."

In his introduction, Obama says he was asked to write the book because of publicity he received as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and he took a year off after graduation to do so. He said last week he was 33 when he wrote it. He had gone to law school after being a community organizer in Chicago. His Kenyan father and his mother, a Kansas native, met when both were students in Hawaii.

Obama, 42, told me recently he had tried marijuana in high school and hasn't consumed any illegal drugs in 20 years. When I asked if there was anything beyond marijuana in his past, Obama said, "That'll suffice." But the book includes a passage in which Obama discusses how he dealt with questions from his mother when he was 17 and a senior in high school. The context of the book also makes clear that he was trying to deal with the problems his race presented.

"I had learned not to care," he wrote. "I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though. ..."

"Blow" is a street name for cocaine. "Smack" is slang for heroin.

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama wrote. "Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. ... You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection."

Obama last week apologized for not telling me earlier about his past as portrayed in the book. He said I had caught him off guard with the drug question and that, at the time, he had not wanted to overshadow his story of that day - his endorsement by the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

"My life is literally an open book," he said, referring to "Dreams of My Father."

"I was a confused kid and was making a bunch of negative choices based on stereotypes of what I thought a tough young man should be," he said of the period depicted in that section of the book. "Those choices were misguided, a serious mistake.

"Growing up to be a man involves taking responsibility," he said. "By the time I was 20, I was no longer engaged in any of this stuff.

"A lot of us make mistakes when we're kids. Part of my campaign, I think, is to be as clear and honest about who I am and how I've grown as a person over time."

Just for the record, I have been asking Senate candidates about their past drug use because I thought it fair to do so after another reporter popped the question to a GOP candidate at a news conference. Some have said they had used marijuana. Some have said they have never used illegal drugs.

Clearly, the small excerpt I have taken from Obama's 403-page book is just a tiny bit of his story.

"'Dreams from My Father' is one of the most powerful books of self-discovery I've ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity," author and journalist CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT is quoted on the book's dust cover. "It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel."

I'll reserve the right to say more about it, if I ever get it all read.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

vGOP Will Win in November
Philip V. Brennan
Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006




"Run for the hills, the dam has burst!" was the alarm shouted by the horde of panicked people racing to get out of town ahead of the floodwaters in the famous James Thurber story that ended with someone halting the exodus by asking, "What dam?"


At the moment, we're hearing a similar cry about the coming November 7 congressional elections. This time, according to the media, the barbarian Democratic hordes and a few nervous Nellies in the GOP, it is the Republican dam bursting, ready to wash any number of Republican members of Congress off Capitol Hill.


For the Democrats and their media flunkies it's written in the sands. The raging waters will carry off at the very least 15 Republicans and hand Mrs. Pelosi the House speakership. Some of the more sanguine Democrats even expect the tide to reach the Senate and drown the re-election hopes of six Republicans, thus handing the upper body to the Democrats.


Along with the late Mr. Thurber's character, I am inclined to ask, "What dam?"


Story Continues Below



Do you mean, for example, the tiny crack in the levee allegedly created by the Mark Foley scandal? If so, as they say in New Yawk, "Forgeddaboutit." The Foley scandal will have an effect in maybe two House races, and that effect may, even in those cases, prove minimal and not decisive.


We are being told by the ever-so-wise media savants that the conservative Republican base is so disturbed by l'affair Foley that they will express their discomfort with the GOP by staying home on Election Day, thereby depriving the Republicans of the electoral muscle they need to win the fight.


Now, there may be a small number of idiots who actually believe they will somehow best serve the conservative cause by putting into power, by their absence at the polls, an assemblage of loony leftists who will turn the Hill in the nation's largest nuthouse, raise their taxes, tie the hands of the president in the middle of a war where the West's very survival is at stake, and advance the cause of socialism that is so dear to their hearts.



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At the most, that cadre of discontented conservatives will attract a lot of noise, but because they are the tiniest of minorities and obviously slightly deranged, their protests will fall on deaf ears.


At the moment, however, it is an article of faith among the Democrats' media lackeys that these disgruntled Republicans are a near majority among conservatives and their allies in the so-called religious right, and they will sit on their hands on November 7. In other words, the Republican Party will not be able to get its vote out on Election Day.


Boy, are they in for a surprise!


Whirring away out of sight is the GOP's get-out-the-vote machinery and it's well oiled, its cogs spinning smoothly and ready to produce a record-breaking turnout on November 7. Mr. Rove and his companion Mr. Mehlman have been busy fine-tuning the machinery for over two years, testing it with spectacular results in little-noticed local elections across the nation, and they are ready to roll and drive their troops to the polls.


It is an article of faith among the media elite that the average American voter out there in fly-over country is a dolt, totally incapable of sifting out the political wheat from the political chaff. Only with the guidance of their intellectual and cultural superiors in the media can they possibly make sensible decisions and vote in the ... sniff ... "proper" manner.


The problem for all the pretty boys and leggy blondes at the networks, the elites at the New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the socialist media, is that outside of their sheltered enclaves on the East and West Coasts, nobody is listening to them anymore.


We don't have to - we now have Fox Cable, Rush Limbaugh, my gutsy pal Mike Reagan, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, David Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and about 600 talk radio hosts, Web sites such as the top-rated NewsMax.com, Lucianne.com and Matt Drudge, and a host of well-researched and well-reported blogs to deliver the truth rather than the phony pap the mainstream media have been feeding us for years.


Thanks to these feisty news sources, residents of the Red States have been able to penetrate the liberal iron curtain and get the facts the liberal mainstream media would, if they could, prevent them from learning. To them, an educated electorate sounds their death knell.


The bottom line is that no matter how hard they try, the media cannot get the American people to believe that their safety would be safer in the hands of the Democrats, that cutting and running in Iraq and exposing the entire Middle East to a certain and bloody catastrophe is a good thing, and that their money is best spent by Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and Harry Reid and not by themselves.

November 7 is going to be a battle royal, not easily won, but when the smoke clears, Nancy Pelosi will still be the feckless House minority leader, Harry Reid will remain the leader of the Senate minority, all will be well, and God will be safe in His heavens.


The dam is still standing, with nary a leak.