Ted Stevens Loses Senate Re-Election Bid 337
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."
News for Nerds... Why? (Score:0, Informative)
Is this Nerd News because Senator Stevens was once in charge of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation?
Someone might want to tell poor kdawson that Senator Stevens hasn't been in charge of that committee for nearly two years.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:1, Informative)
Wait, never mind, Stevens has been kicking around longer than Alaska has been a state, precisely for that skill...
Re:Who's The Fool (Score:5, Informative)
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.
An Alaskan's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:If Stevens had won (Score:4, Informative)
Alaska doesn't replace Senators by governor appointment. They would have had a special election. Palin likely would have won.
Re:Who's The Fool (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who's The Fool (Score:3, Informative)
Also, he's 84. "Rest of his life" isn't going to be all that long in any case.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:5, Informative)
Gerrymandering is impossible in Senate elections as long as state borders remain fixed.
Re:Funny how recounts work (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:he did it on my dime (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wordpress.com].
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.
Re:Are you sure about that? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Poor Sarah (Score:3, Informative)
She'll just have to comfort herself with her book deal [today.com].
"Look at the elegance of the hand-tooled leather binding," said the Conservative Book Club, "the archival quality acid-free paper! Every copy will also come with a set of 100% all-American-made red, white and blue crayons to color it in."
Despite Palin's failure to secure the groups that McCain strategists hoped she might deliver - women, independent voters, suburbanites, those with ten fingers - her supporters insisted that she should not be blamed for McCain's shortcomings or Bush's failures. "It were all the fault o' them Muslin terr'ists," said political commentator Joe the Plumber.
Current projections show Palin taking 95% of 25% of the electorate. "I was against the bank bailout from the first," said Palin. "Lookit the rekerd. It was this governor, not that one! You betcha!"
*shudder*
Re:Are you sure about that? (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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 [wikipedia.org]
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Are you sure about that? (Score:3, Informative)
On signing the CRA, Johnson is said to have remarked, "There goes the south for a generation." As the parent said, most of the dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond defected to the Republican side after this. The notable exception was Byrd, who repented his racism, but the majority of his electorate apparently did not. Up until 2008, if you looked at the electoral map, the south voted republican. The reason for this is that republicans became adept at playing on fears of southern whites, pioneered by Nixon in his "the southern strategy [wikipedia.org]" (I'm not making this shit up, it's right there in the first sentence of the wiki). I say up until 2008, because this year majorities in Virginia and North Carolina voted democratic.
Re:Are you sure about that? (Score:3, Informative)
You stopped quoting when if gets interesting.
By party and region
Note : "Southern", as used in this section, refers to members of Congress from the eleven states that made up the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. "Northern" refers to members from the other 39 states, regardless of the geographic location of those states.
The original House version:
* Southern Democrats: 7-87 (7%-93%)
* Southern Republicans: 0-10 (0%-100%)
* Northern Democrats: 145-9 (94%-6%)
* Northern Republicans: 138-24 (85%-15%)
The Senate version:
* Southern Democrats: 1-20 (5%-95%) (only Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted in favor)
* Southern Republicans: 0-1 (0%-100%) (this was Senator John Tower of Texas)
* Northern Democrats: 45-1 (98%-2%) (only Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia opposed the measure)
* Northern Republicans: 27-5 (84%-16%) (Senators Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Edwin L. Mechem of New Mexico, Milward L. Simpson of Wyoming, and Norris H. Cotton of New Hampshire opposed the measure)
Re:I'm amazed (Score:2, Informative)
Palin would be quite a disappointment to the Alaskan people after Stevens. There is no way such a mental lightweight could ever deliver the pork like Stevens did.
Hey: Republican pork delivery! I like that.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Funny how recounts work (Score:4, Informative)
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.