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."
I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:To Be, or not To Be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No Senator Palin then (Score:2, Insightful)
He'll be missed (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm NOT amazed. Congress collectively has an approval rating below ten percent leading up to the election and yet over 96 percent get re-elected. The American electorate definitely get what they deserve because they keep sending the same idiots back time and time again.
The real shame is that it takes a felony conviction to create enough momentum to throw the guy out. How that William Jefferson in Louisiana is still in office is beyond comprehension.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm NOT amazed. Congress collectively has an approval rating below ten percent leading up to the election and yet over 96 percent get re-elected. The American electorate definitely get what they deserve because they keep sending the same idiots back time and time again.
It's called gerrymandering and the congress, they doing it right.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. Contrary to the breathless summary:
what would have been "stunning" would have been if Stevens survived. In fact the pre-election polls suggested he was a goner, and the fact that he nearly won was very surprising.
What this really means is that (a) the Repugs won't have to vote to sack one of their own from the senate and (b) Palin won't get a run at this senate seat.
Re:An Alaskan's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
""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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:To Be, or not To Be... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I'm amazed (Score:4, Insightful)
"Aren't Governers > Senators?"
Strict constitutionalists would tell you so, or at least they tell me so. The nature, qty, and method of procuring the federal funding that flies around these days has made the D.C. delegations much more powerful than their state level counterparts.
Anyhow, I usually hear the Civil War cited as the tipping point between state/federal power with feds going unchallenged for supremacy since I have been alive to witness.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of comprehension strikes again! (Score:3, Insightful)
While this is certainly true, his failure of reelection has nothing whatsoever to do with any committee chairmanship, since the Democrats control the committee chairmanships in both House and Senate, and they weren't going to pick a Republican no matter what the result of the Alaska Senatorial race.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:2, Insightful)
I doubt Palin would have appointed herself. First off, that's probably against the law, or Governor Murkowski would have done it to himself a few years ago rather than appoint his daughter Lisa to the seat. Since then she has won reelection on her own merits.
More importantly, though, if you look into Ms. Palin's history a bit you'll find that her whole campaign for Governor was pretty much based on running against the extremely corrupt Republican machine in Alaska.
Appointing herself to the seat would cause her to lose all credibility on that issue with people like me, with whom it's a major selling point. :)
Re:I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Anti-White Racism in the Afro Community (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm amazed (Score:2, Insightful)
the term "executive experience" is only used because it was churned out on a massive scale by the Republican media machine. what exactly does it mean? does Mrs. Palin indeed have it or does it just make her sound better?
_AC
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Vote_totals [wikipedia.org]
See also 1968 [wikipedia.org]
Re:he did it on my dime (Score:3, Insightful)
Alaskans get $1.85 back for every $1.00 they pay to the Federal Gov't.
Yeah, so? That's why their called 'taxes', not 'fees for service', it's a redistribution of wealth, metered out by politicians for favors.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:3, Insightful)
Two words: Marion Barry.
Re:To Be, or not To Be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm amazed (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily - if you can't move the borders, sometimes you can move the people cf 'Dame' Shirley Porter's gerrymandering in Westminster [wikipedia.org].
Re:An Alaskan's perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
there was more to Stevens' career than this, including distinguished service in the Army Air Corps in WWII.
And that matters WHY?
We (and by that I mean both Slashdot as well as at least somewhat intelligent people in general) rightfully chastise those who vote for politicians based on things like who they'd rather have a beer with, and, quite correctly, declare that this shouldn't play a role and that candidates should be voted for based on whether you think they'll be able to do a good job - whether they've got the necessary qualifications, insights, knowledge, and so on.
How is saying "I'll vote for him because he served in a war 65 years ago and got a medal for it" different from "I'll vote for him because he's got a big ranch and drinks lots of beer and listens to country music"?
I know you didn't quite say you'd vote (or have voted) for him just because of that, but you do seem to think that it should play a role, even if it's just a small one.
Why?
Re:I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To Be, or not To Be... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Our nation is in debt. If you have moral character, you agree that you must service your debt until you can pay it off. This requires that revenues come from somewhere. I'll take an honest politician who tells me that I have to pay my share of the debt, to one who says, "Don't worry! There are no consequences to being deeply in debt, and nobody will have to sacrifice to pay off this debt." Yes, a big-taxing, big-spending Democrat is morally and effectively superior to a small-taxing, big-spending, big-debt Republican.
Re:Who's The Fool (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Who's The Fool (Score:3, Insightful)
Carter was also the worst of all of them. People bitch and moan right now about the economy, but I don't hear anything called the "misery index" on the nightly news like during Carter.
Re:I'm amazed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Anti-White Racism in the Afro Community (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree entirely. Hilary lost because she insisted on being in the spotlight for years leading up the the campaign; this is the main reason her supporters and haters were so divided. The problem with this was, all the usual campaign hand-waiving and distractions can't change the mind of voters who made up their minds years before.
She lost my vote early on when she revealed her true colors as a censorship machine. First she tried to to censor video games for violence at the federal level [wikipedia.org] (thankfully, it failed to garner support). Then she promised if elected that she would protect us from computer-generated porn and violence [wired.com].
Sure, this got her the over-protective mom vote, but the rest of the rational people in this country realized how stupid this all was. A person with this kind of "censor everything" agenda would only grab for more if you gave an inch. It was more than enough for me to vote against her.
Re:Too Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
C'mon, guys, how many more times after this are we really gonna be able to beat this dead meme? You could at least try...
Re:Anti-White Racism in the Afro Community (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree entirely. Hilary lost because she insisted on being in the spotlight for years leading up the the campaign; this is the main reason her supporters and haters were so divided.
No. The #1 reason she lost was her support of the Iraq war and refusal to apologize for it. If she had opposed the war from the beginning like Obama, she would have had the blowout victory on Super Tuesday that she was expecting.
But she still could have had this in the bag if she and her team weren't so damned arrogant. They completely ignored the caucus states, which was how Obama sealed the deal with his 11 state shutout in February. They went all in on a one-two punch with Iowa and New Hampshire and thought Super Tuesday would seal the deal.
She lost my vote early on when she revealed her true colors as a censorship machine.
Flag burning. Don't forget the flag burning. But she's not so much a censorship machine as a pandering machine.