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Ted Stevens Loses Senate Re-Election Bid
JakartaDean writes "Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, famed Internet regulator, has lost his Senate seat. The AP is reporting that 'Stevens was declared the loser in Alaska on Tuesday night after a two-week-long process of counting nearly 90,000 absentee and early votes from across Alaska. With this victory, Democrat Mark Begich (the mayor of Anchorage) has defeated one of the giants in the US Senate by a 3,724-vote margin, a stunning end to a 40-year Senate career marred by Stevens' conviction on corruption charges a week before the election.' It's probably too early to tell what this means for Internet regulation, but at least there's a > 0 chance that the next committee chair will understand something about the Net."
And now we will be paying him to sit around and do nothing for the rest of his life.
Thanks to his convictions, he will not have a pension, and may spend time in prison.
This is just really sad. Ted Stevens played a greater role in the development of Alaska as a state than any other person. Most people outside Alaska are unaware that he was literally named Alaskan of the Century. Think about that for a moment.
This is not to defend him. I disagreed with a lot of what he did. (Well, to be more accurate, I disagree with him and all the Robert Byrds, etc who stuffed their states full of pork at the expense of the nation. But at least Stevens had the excuse that Alaska really got a hugely raw deal in its statehood compact, and the lack of fulfillment thereof by the federal government.)
Stevens eventually became exhibit A in the argument for term limits. Well OK, Exhibit C after Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd.) When you are in office that long, you just naturally begin to believe that that office is YOURS, it belongs to YOU. And it's not fair that after your decades of able public service, your buddies on K Street are all filthy rich while you make a tenth of what they do. After all the billions you've brought to your state, who could possibly begrudge you $10,000 here or there? Heck, you DESERVE it!
I just want to point out that at one time, there was more to Stevens' career than this, including distinguished service in the Army Air Corps in WWII.
- Alaska Jack
Alaska doesn't replace Senators by governor appointment. They would have had a special election. Palin likely would have won.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Thanks to his convictions," he will not have a pension," Actually according to the cnn he will. He was grandfathered in. As in recently they made a new law that any new senators who are convicted of felony But since Stevens has been around since before that law. He still gets your money.
Gerrymandering is impossible in Senate elections as long as state borders remain fixed.
This is neither surprising nor unusual.
For a number of reasons provisional and absentee ballots have historically tended to favor democrats. These include the tendency for the poor & the elderly to vote democratic, as well as democratic voter outreach programs that focus on absentee ballots to lock in the vote early.
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Wait, never mind, Stevens has been kicking around longer than Alaska has been a state, precisely for that skill...
Actually, Stevens became a Senator in 1968, whereas Alaska became a state in 1958. He's been a prick for much longer than Alaska's been a state, though.
Kwitcherbitchin.
Nevada's got you beat six ways till Sunday. Utah and Oregon are not too far behind, and Idaho and Arizona are roughly 50 percent federally controlled on the basis of land area: Map plus top/bottom ten lists.
What's more to the point is the fact the federal ownership does not necessarily exclude economic exploitation. A significant portion of federal lands in AK are wide open to oil and gas production, coal and hardrock mining (the latter in the form of legalized looting thanks the the 1872 Mining Act), timber (hello Tongass NF) and dozens of other industries.
You've got a plethora of natural resources and lots of grubby opportunists who'd love an anarchic free-for-all to get while the gettin's good and say the fuck with the long-term consequences. Not too different from the placer miners in 1850s California, the sodbusters in the 1880s/1920s Great Plains, the real estate scammers and S&L kingpins of the 1980s, and myriad other shining examples of unfettered American enterprise. Thanks, but I'd rather see a steady hand on the controls even if some of y'all think it's a dead one.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
Oh christ not this shit again.
Who signed the CRA into law? A Democrat.
Where did most of the Democrats go in 1964 AFTER the vote on the CRA? The Republican side.
What wing of what party ended segregation as per Newt Gingrich? Liberal Democrats.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You seem to have forgotten a very important part of the article you are quoting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#By_party_and_region
The vote was more along the lines of North/South (as defined in the article) than Democrat/Republican. Almost all of the Southern legislators voted against the act. It only appears that Democrats were more opposed to the measure (in terms of percentages) than Republicans because, to that point in time, Democrats had always had a stronger showing in Southern elections than Republicans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Democratic_Party#Civil_War.2C_Reconstruction.2C_and_the_Gilded_Age:_1854-1896
That the South votes more heavily Republican is a recent phenomenon, dating to the Civil Rights act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Democratic_Party#The_Johnson_Years:_1963.E2.80.931968
The only of those races in which a recount was completed is the WA governor's race. The progressive tightening of this race and the Franken/Coleman race in which a recount was triggered (but has not been done yet) was the completion of the first count. Election night returns -- even that include 100% of precincts -- do not usually include 100% of the vote from each of those precincts. Various ballots (provisional ballots, absentee ballots that arrive on the day of the election, possibly early/absentee ballots in general depending on local procedures) require additional verification that prevents them from being counted until after the in-person ballots cast on election day. For a number of reasons, its not uncommon for these ballots to be more favorable to Democrats in general, and those trends may have been reinforced in this election where there were lots of new Democratic voters and a big effort by the Obama campaign to get people to vote early, so the initial election night count (which isn't a full count of all ballots cast in the election) of many races was less favorable to Democrats than the full count.