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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."
Senator Stevens re-election bid is down the tubes.
that it got this close. I figured this would be an absolute stomping after Senator Tubes became a convicted felon.
Alchemist: Be Thou For the People
You mean it's actually possible to be more of a socialist for Alaska than Ted Stevens?!
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
As a vicious, corrupt scam artist (and convicted felon) whose major contribution to American politics was to funnel millions of taxpayers dollars into one "Bridge to Nowhere" after another, Ted Stevens is the perfect representative of one of the most influential segments of the internet community: spammers.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
a) Fraudulent ballots are being added for the Democratic candidate in the midst of the recount.
b) For whatever reason, more valid democratic ballots went uncounted during the first counting.
Since recounts are heavily observed by both sides, I find option a to be unlikely. To be perfectly accurate however, the Alaska race was never recounted - they just finished counting all the ballots (absentee and so on take longer) for the first time. Despite this, given the closeness of race, I find it hard to believe that election monitors for either side would have been so incompetent as to allow the level of fraud that you suggest.
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).
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Thanks to his convictions, he will not have a pension, and may spend time in prison.
Unless still-president Bush pardons him.
They would have had a special election.
Am I the only one who read the "special" in "special election" with the same connotation as "special olympics"? :)
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?
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.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Gotta love American politics.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
What does this rant have to do with Ted Stevens? He lost because during his trial a large number of Alaskans thought he looked like a lying politician. The people who voted early (during the trial) overwhelmingly voted for Begich.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Vote_totals
See also 1968
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
He could not pardon ANYBODY on his staff. The reason is that if they are pardoned, then they CAN be forced to testify. That is why Libbey was not pardoned. He is still guilty. Just his sentence will not be carried out. That is also why Dems are waiting. All I can say, is that Obama NEEDS to allow all the investigations. Nixon, reagan, Clinton, and W have shown that ppl with out a moral characters will be corrupted. And it is possible that Poppa Bush was in the same vein, just not caught. Probably the ONLY honest pres was Carter.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.