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."

Comments

I'm amazed

[Swordopolis]

that it got this close. I figured this would be an absolute stomping after Senator Tubes became a convicted felon.

Re:I'm amazed

[andytrevino]

Yeah -- essentially what this result means is that those Alaskans who cast their vote for Stevens would rather vote for a shamelessly corrupt convicted felon than for a Democrat.

Most of the time, I'm with 'em. ;)

(though, to be fair, he would have probably resigned and been replaced with a better candidate by appointment or special election, had he won.)

Re:I'm amazed

[omeomi]

what would have been "stunning" would have been if Stevens survived.

Well, I don't know about "stunning"... Is there anything left that our elected leaders can do that would really "stun" the American public?

Re:I'm amazed

[deniable]

It's job creation for comedians. Obama's election is making their jobs harder. Palin on a national stage would bring back the good times.

Re:I'm amazed

[deathy_epl ccs]

Is there anything left that our elected leaders can do that would really "stun" the American public?

If one of them were to turn out to be decent and upstanding, that would utterly shock us.

Re:I'm amazed

[TheRaven64]

Obama made me realise quite how jaded I've become towards politics. He keeps doing and saying things I approve of, and I keep wondering what his ulterior motive is. The idea that he really believes what he's saying never occurred to me.

Re:I'm amazed

[Thing 1]

Funny you should mention that. Even though his replacement would be chosen by special election and appointed, the consensus in the punditocracy was that Palin would run for the seat and probably win.

That's actually my favorite part about this: her national political career is now stillborn, she'll have to wait for an actual election to be able to take a Senate seat.

Re:I'm amazed

[DavidTC]

Afuckingmen.

I've started calling them 'borrow and spend' Republicans.

Look, I'm a progressive guy, and things like some sort of national health care make sense to me. But I can see how reasonable people would disagree.

It's my job to get people in that would demonstrate that those people are incorrect, and it's other people's job to stop me, and we can behave rationally as we disagree.

Meanwhile, I think our 'larger than the entire rest of the world combined' military budget is perhaps slighty to large unless there's some alien menace we don't know about, and I'll disagree there.

But there is a place the Republican have not been behaving rationally: Taxes.

Incoming must match outgo, period. This isn't debatable, this isn't some reasonable disagreement, we must take in as much as we spend, on average. (Year to year we can fiddle with that, overtaxing in a boom and undertaxing in the recession, but whatever.)

And yet Republicans constantly pretend the amount of tax is government policy that they disagree on. That we're having some sort of fucking rational debate whether or not we should tax people enough to run the damn government!

They do this because they, if you can't see my signature, want to 'drown the government in the bath tub'. They are attempting to cripple the government so badly that it can't actually run social services.

You know what 'crippling the government' is, in my book? Treason

Re:An Alaskan's perspective

[HW_Hack]

""After all the billions you've brought to your state, who could possibly begrudge you $10,000 here or there? Heck, you DESERVE it!""

Corruption is like pregnancy ... nobody is just a little pregnant. Whats his name Duke Cunningham (who used to be a Top Gun pilot) also found guilty corruption etc.

A lot of "good" can be washed (down the tubes) by a little bad.

Re:To Be, or not To Be...

[gutter]

Rights wise, you trust Republicans more than Democrats?

You mean the republicans who fought against civil rights for blacks, gays, and immigrants, and are always looking for ways to suppress the vote? Or the the republicans behind the Terry Schiavo debacle? Or the republicans who decided pornography and medical marijuana were among the top priorities at the DOJ? Those republicans? Or the republicans who were basically 100% for the PATRIOT act, gutting FISA, and legalized torture?

Those are the people you think are looking out for your civil rights? I'm not saying the Democrats are perfect on civil rights, but dedication to civil rights seems to be much more of a liberal issue (witness right-wing attacks on the ACLU).

he did it on my dime

[YesIAmAScript]

Alaskans get $1.85 back for every $1.00 they pay to the Federal Gov't.

So Ted Stevens played a huge role in developing Alaska on my dime. I don't need to laud him for that.

What was wrong with the Alaskan statehood compact? From what I can tell, the Federal government purchased Alaska from Russian. Then turns some of the land over to the state of Alaska? And Alaska gets to charge severance tax on oil taken up there?

Doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.

Re:Who's The Fool

[pchan-]

Thanks to his convictions, he will not have a pension, and may spend time in prison.

Unless still-president Bush pardons him.

Re:An Alaskan's perspective

[Comatose51]

It's rare to have such nuanced views on Slashdot. As much as I wanted Stevens out of the Senate, your perspective on him is quite believable. The world isn't black and white or good vs. evil. People are often shades in between. It doesn't help our understanding of the world to type cast someone or see only one perspective/side of a person, a nation, or an issue.

It is indeed sad to see someone with such a long service to fall to such lows.

Re:To Be, or not To Be...

[saforrest]

You mean it's actually possible to be more of a socialist for Alaska than Ted Stevens?!

You do know that to be an actual socialist (as opposed to a cable-news caricature of one), you have to do more than just spend bucketloads of money on any random thing, right?

Re:To Be, or not To Be...

[hey!]

Reminds me of my dear departed bolshie Uncle Ivan. Ivan wasn't really a communist, although he was a socialist by inclination. The reason could never be a communist was that more than anything else, he was a cynic.

"Kid," Ivan used to say, "nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's socialism for me, capitalism for you."

Wherever he is, he's been reading the newspapers the last couple of months and laughing his ass off.

Re:Who's The Fool

[DrgnDancer]

Well, there's getting facts wrong and there's being horrifyingly ignorant about basic concepts. The woman could not articulate an opinion on the Bush Doctrine. It's been the cornerstone of US foreign policy for last 6 years (right or wrong) and she couldn't talk about it. Worse, it's a really conceptually simple idea (get them before they get us, essentially), articulated by the current president, who happens to be a member of her own party. That's like not being able to tie her own political shoes. To claim that being able to see Russia gives her foreign policy experience when she can't speak intelligently about the most basic concept of the currently foreign policy is not a mistake, it's like claiming a PhD (or at least a bachelors degree) in physics but being unclear on what gravity is. Biden may have gotten a few equations wrong, Palin didn't comprehend the foundational theory.

To be fair she got better as the campaign went on; but it still felt like she was mastering the presented material, not actually understanding the theoretical underpinnings that made it all work. I'm not saying she's stupid, I don't have enough information to base such a statement on; but she was clearly very unprepared for the role. The types of mistakes she made were just much more fundamental than the mistakes Biden made.