According to this article, Sen. McCain wants to compete in California. He thinks it's more of a purple state than a blue state. While I can understand that sentiment, I don't see how he's going to win the state unless Sen. Obama (or Clinton) has a complete collapse and loses almost everywhere.

For argument's sake, let's give President Bush in 2004 a few more points than he or any other Republican would have normally received from the state. In this and other large, normally blue states, like New York and New Jersey, Sen. Kerry still won those states by comfortable margins. In a year that's supposed to be bad for Republicans, I don't see how McCain can improve upon those already-inflated margins, even if he is able to pass himself off as a moderate.

Besides, he'd have to spend quite a bit of money in California. While he's throwing money into the state in an attempt that will probably only earn him another point or two, Sen. Obama will be flush with cash and outspending him in traditional swing states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Ohio, plus some new swing states, like Virginia.

I perform daily searches for information on Rudy Giuliani. I think his candidacy is a joke and he's making a fool of himself to any person who has been paying attention. I know many believe he'd be a formidable general election candidate, and in some ways, that may be true. Yet in many others, I think he'd be a great person to run against, because he gives us so much ammunition.

As I'm at the gym on the treadmill, to get myself pumped up, I usually imagine myself being involved with a campaign for whatever Democrat is the nominee. I often think of what sort of ads I'd run against the Republican nominee. For Giuliani, his biggest strength is his perceived national security expertise. We know this is a sham, but it's still potent, so that's what we would have to attack.

Okay, I know I have a habit of not posting a diary entry for months. I know there are several around here who have accused me of being a Republican operative designed to create divisions in the ranks on this site. I also know that the title is somewhat polemic, but that is designed to get people to look at  the diary. Now that we have that out of the way, let me go on.

As I was eating my breakfast today, flipping through Newsday, my local paper, I noticed a column by James Pinkerton, who is a conservative. The title, "A look back at the GOP 2008 victory," is what caught my eye. In this piece, among other hypothetical situations, he describes how Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) said that a new course was needed, and that soon Bush started to pull the troops out, which eventually saved the party from electoral defeat.

Like all of you, I am nervous and excited wondering about the results that will come tonight. I like to believe in reason and logic, yet I am also very superstitious. Thus, I believe that good luck can come in surges, so that when you're lucky in one regard, you're lucky in another. Now, what do I hear as I come out of the shower today? My friend in my Muslim history class calls and tells me that she just checked her e-mail and that the second midterm meant for today is going to be given as a take-home. And that's how I know we are going to win.

Before I start studying for my history class, I decided to check up on entertainment news and election news. I went to realclearpolitics.com to check polling information, and doing a quick scan of the headlines, I came across a Dick Morris column in the New York Post. I normally find him to be a repulsive idiot, but akin to the same way I can't turn away from a horrible accident, I pay attention to him now and then.  Today is no different, as he once again makes an appalling suggestion.

He suggests that if President Bush had focused on North Korea,  not Iraq, things might have turned out differently for the Republicans. Well, perhaps. Yet he's prettly explicitly advocating the use of fear to win an election. It's almost as disgusting as the times I've seen him advocate an actual attack on Iran to make the country rally around the administration.

Not that people here need a lot of reminding, but this is just another example of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone.

I just read an article on realclearpolitics.com that said he would do well enough in the heavily black counties where Democrats traditionally get a huge amount of votes to pull it out, or at the very least, said that there was a good chance he would do so. The site is of course right-wing in nature, but still, I've worried about this race for a while now. Perhaps I am missing something because I've been so overloaded with other stuff that I haven't followed it closely enough, but I am still worried.

What do you guys think?

(P.S. If this inspires some "THE LOONIES ARE SCARED OF STEELE IN MD!!!!!!!!!!!!" posts on the nuttier right-wing sites, I apologize in advance.)

Should we be worried about the Senate races in New Jersey and Connecticut? I'll admit, I am less engaged in actual races than I used to be, especially because school just started, because I have been working a lot, and because of many other things. I've noticed that we are competitive in a lot of races, especially in the Senate, but I don't know enough to feel strongly one way or the other. But looking at some numbers, like those on Slate and on realclearpolitics.com, I am starting to get worried about the races in New Jersey and Connecticut. I feel as if New Jersey should be a lock for us, even with a moderate Republican like Kean, and I thought Lieberman would be in a free fall right now.

So what do you guys think? Do you think we'll keep New Jersey and have Lamont instead of Lieberman in Connecticut in a few months? It'd really be something if we won places like Montana but lost New Jersey.

Mark Schmitt of The Decembrist weblog makes some very smart and important points about Medicare Part D, the prescription drug coverage. Simply put, he says that the Republicans knew what they were doing, and that, despite the possibility of a set-up designed to increase anti-government sentiment, we need to remind people that we could have produced a much more efficient bill that would have been larger in its scope but smaller in its cost. As Schmitt says:

"That's a very important point to get across to the seniors who are now so predictably outraged. Their GOP representatives will blame it on 'unintended consequences' and glitches in implementation, but that spin must not be allowed to stand. Every problem they are encountering was built in from the start in the structure that forces elderly and disabled people, their adult children or helpers, to make immensely complicated financial and medical choices, for a benefit that amounts to nothing more than a modest discount on wildly inflated prices. This is what they voted for, and they know it."

These days, it almost goes without saying that the vast majority of the stories we hear concerning the Bush administration will combine some combination of incompetence, ignorance, and malevolence. As it happens, I have something that could quickly rise to the top of the list as a prime example.

Looking over some of the blogs I visit, I found an article from The Washington Post. The article describes how the creation of the Department of Homeland Security happened. If you have trouble sleeping at night, I suggest not reading it, since it's bound to scare you into permanent insomnia.

I'm home on break from college, and since I only received two shifts at my job this week, since the rug shampooer upstairs doesn't seem to work, and since I decided to do most of my Christmas shopping tomorrow, I'm catching up on my politics. For one reason or another, many of my favorite blogs have not updated in the past few hours, so I went over to motherjones.com and stumbled on an article about Paul Hackett. Reading the article, I started to think about something that I've wondered about for a while now: where are the Democrats going to compete in 2008?

One reason why I think about this is that I'm a huge fan of "The West Wing" and watch it every chance I get, even if it's not quite up to level of greatness now that Aaron Sorkin once achieved. In the current race between Santos and Vinick, the Democrats are conceding some states, like California, and competing in others, like Texas. Another reason I think about this so much is that I once read Ruy Tuxeira's great book "The Emerging Democratic Majority," where he described how the Democrats would soon have an advantage as far as national elections go.

I know we aren't supposed to print things twice, but I really want to see what others think about this, and nobody has responded to me on the open thread. So I am reprinting it in a diary:

At work last week, I overheard two guys at the counter which I was covering (I work in a restaurant in the Hamptons, so I am blowing part of the identity that I wanted to be discrete about and will say that I am in college) talking. From what they were saying, it sounded like they were both conservatives/Republicans, but I am not sure.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon absolutely owns Goldberg. The National Review goon is now undoubtedly Taylor's bitch.

Scrotum Tighter...Tighter...

Dammit, I want the National Review to pay me to write insane horseshit.

The longtime complaint of conservatives about the "liberal academy" is that conservatives are forced out, seemingly, by roving bands of Stalinist postmodernists. Taking their hammers and sickles, they rove through campus libraries, burning stacks of Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss (they figure the heavy nicotine smell of Ayn Rand's books is more than enough to turn them off to any sensitive liberal mind) and having fraternity-style brandings of Susan Sontag's autographs on the buttocks of all new hires.

Over at New Donkey, this post talks about possible Senate races for Alan Keyes. I'm not sure if he still has a residence in Illinois, but he has one in Maryland. No matter, because as Kilgore notes from the Baltimore Sun article, Keyes is supposedly very engaged with the Terry Schiavo case in Florida.

Might he run in Florida? If he somehow got the nomination, my guess is that Nelson would take it easily (and I already expect him to win). Even if Keyes runs as a third party candidate, he'd still help Nelson by drawing away votes from whomever the Republican nominee would be.

Actually, if we want to continue the joke, we can ask where Keyes might be most valuable to us. Virginia? Mississippi? Texas? Pennsylavania, perhaps?

I doubt many people remember this about me, particularly since I haven't been around as much since the election and the start of 2005, but I've always disliked David Horowitz. I don't pay much attention to him outside of the times he manages to make news for something infamous, as he's more infuriating than someone like Ann Coulter, who appears to be too ridiculous for words to describe. No matter, I've read his Front Page Magazine a few times and know very well that he's on a crusade of some kind against the alleged liberal bias and unfairness in academia.

Over the past few days, I've read some reports that he and his followers are engaging in quite a bit of dishonesty. He's been going around the country, specifically in the West in Colorado and Washington, to trump up charges. Even when his "facts" are proven to be grossly distorted or downright false, he refuses to apologize and continues on with his ridiculous quest.

In his latest entry, the Bull Moose (Marshall Whittman) discusses the upcoming State of the Union speech. He rightly claims that the fiscal policies of the United States should be aligned with our national security needs.

Unfortunately, in the Bush administration, the opposite is true. As Whittman says, "[w]hile the President may talk about increasing the size of the military, his first objective is to increase the bank accounts of the ultra-wealthy."

While Whittman denounces the irresponsibility of Bush, he proposes an interesting idea:

 Democrats should not shy away from making the national security case against both the Bush tax cuts and social security privatization. The Moose has a suggestion - Democrats could propose a Liberty Fund that would pay for the expenses of the war, expand the military and promote democracy through "soft power" or public diplomacy. The money for the fund would come through the repeal of the phase out of the estate tax and eliminating corporate welfare. After all, what better way to provide a promising inheritance to the next generation than the spread of democracy?

It seems that the elections in Iraq turned out well. While the evidence that came out late last year indicated that the reasons for going to war were dubious, to say the least, the idea that we might have a functioning democracy in the Middle East in the near future is encouraging. As Marshall Whittman of the Bull Moose blog says here and here, we have a lot of reasons to be proud of those that defied the attacks and threats in order to vote and to hope for a positive outcome in regards to the election.

Of course, as the Moose says, the potential is there. Things could certainly go wrong. While I don't follow the outcome of events as closely as some here, I find it hard to read the reports of death of soldiers and the constant threats of insurgent attacks.

So much has been lost already, and no matter what happens, we cannot forget that. I may be a pessimistic person when it comes to just about everything, but I don't want to be that way about this situation.

Reading a comment at Atrios' site, I decided to read the article in The Washington Post about Gov. Phil Bresden of Tennessee cutting TennCare, a form of Medicaid for Tennessee. A Democrat, Bresden was a health care CEO before he became governor, so he has experience in the field.

It's an interesting article that discusses the problems we are facing with public health care programs. I'm not really sure what to say, because I don't live in Tennessee and haven't been following the issue. I will say that it's interesting to note this program was designed by a Republican, if we can believe the article.

Someone once told me that that Kerry's programs were similar to TennCare. I have no idea if that's true, but then, I saw nothing in the article, outside of mentioning "disease management" programs, which TennCare has not adopted, that indicates this person was right. Was she right?

Are we up to 48 senators that would vote against President Bush's plan to gut Social Security? According to Josh Micah Marshall, Republicans Olympia Snowe, Lincoln Chafee, and Arlen Specter are against the president's plan. If every Democratic senator plus Jeffords voted against the plan, we would be up to 48 senators. That's three away from having it shot down in the Senate.

Of course, there are supposedly some Democrats--members of the "faintharted faction"--that might support President Bush's plans. JMM claims they are Senators Carper, Lincoln, Bayh, Nelson of Nebraska, Landrieu, Lieberman, and maybe even Clinton. But how many of them are really set on private accounts in the way Bush is proposing them? Remember that former Clinton economic team members Gene Sperling has advocated private accounts--on top of the guaranteed Social Security benefit, not gutting the system like Bush. So perhaps that's what Landrieu means when she says she's not completely opposed to them.