Allen concedes.

Ed Bradley, dead at 65.

J.D. Hayworth won't get rid of that shit-eating grin.  And he won't concede Arizona's Fifth Congressional District to Harry Mitchell, who still leads Hayworth by five percentage points. 

Before the Valley of the Sun's beautiful people elected Hayworth to Congress, he was an obtuse sportscaster on the Phoenix CBS (nox Fox) affiliate.  I remember he came to my school once to talk about the Great Rubber Duck Race - an annual non-event in Phoenix in which thousands of rubber ducks are dropped into the canal system of the Salt River, presumably to celebrate the miracle of bringing water to the desert for all those golf courses.   I remember that Hayworth was very, very fat.  And he had the personality of a lamppost.  Of course these attributes made him a natural for Congress.

And now, having lost his bid for re-election, he's like the rest of us.  What will he do, with no bully pulpit to espouse his anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican diatribes?  How will he launder dirty Abramoff money into the pockets of his wife?  Will Hannity and the other wingnuts really want a loser on their shows now?

He doesn't even have the class to bow out.  Step aside, fat man.  Your time has come.

AP calls it for Webb.

Isn't this the time for Chris Matthews, Tim Russert or some other talking head to get up and say something to the effect that if George Allen was a real patriot and son of Virginia he would drop all hints of a recount challenge and graciously concede defeat?

The majors call it for the boy with the buzz cut.  We're in.  Lieberman isn't going to SecDef, so we are set in the Senate.

This presser is amazing.  Retreat on all political fronts.  Hopefully it also means we can advance in the military sphere. 

Bye Bye Rummy.  The resignation this fast says good odds that Lieberman will accept the position of SecDef, denying Democrats the Senate as Jodi Rell, CT's Republican governor would get to appoint a replacement.

Red State reader posts front page diary about the Webb-Allen race stating "Let's Not Re-Do Florida."  I agree boys, but I think that its not up to you.  Good luck on that.  I'd expect Karl thinks differently.  Remember, he's entitled to his own math. 

Don't worry folks--Webb's got this one.

Remember 2005?  The Virginia Attorney General's race went down to the wire, with the Republican R.F. McDonnell getting approximately 280 more votes than the Democrat R.C. Deeds.  A statewide recount of 1.9 million ballots gave McDonnell 30 more votes.  Right now, Webb leads by 7050 votes.  Allen ain't going to pull it out.  Plus we are going to get a nice month of hearing about all of the dirty tricks that Allen pulled at the last minute, thanks to the recount hoopla.

As I said on October 14th, our day came.

While browsing TPM this morning I noticed this post of a comment by Grover Norquist in the LA Times advocating that the White House do all it can not to seek compromise on the issues of the day with the Democrats as if governing is about some Leninist drive to exploit inherent contradictions or something.  When will these people grow up?  Not everything in politics is ideology.  Not everything in politics is a zero-sum game!    Running the country is not some playground where you just pick up your toys and go home if you're not happy with your playmates. 

I think this election has shown the GOP that pursuing a "50+1" political strategy and purposely cutting Democrats out of the national debate while politically successful in the short run has given us a disasterous set of policies that do everything but address the needs of the nation and are often contrary to the wishes of the public. 

My big hope after the last six years of "slash and burn" is that we get back to the consensus that a functioning democracy requires debate and compromise.  Does that mean that I might not always like what they come up with in DC?  Sure, but in general I believe that the best ideas and practices will emerge from the essential interaction of different viewpoints and in the end the democratic process should be about finding what works best for the entire country, not just Grover Norquist.

Charles Pierce on Bob Corker:

"....a guy so nondescript he has no shadow."

I've been saying something similar for a number of months now.  Looks like we've got another uninspiring East TN Republican set to collect a paycheck and warm a seat in the Senate chamber and little else.  So it goes....

At the last minute.  Damn.  My ticker can't take this shit.

Looks like a big night for the good guys.  Virginia is quite tight.

Don't believe them.  Good or bad, we just gotta wait.

omg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Like Britney just filed for D-I-V-O-R-I-C-E!!  is anything else happening today?

Massive turnout reported in VA as well.  Sounds sort of wave-like to me. 

Local papers reporting massive turnout in CT.  That's very interesting.

Next week on Fox, Steve Harrigan and the three men in black bring you the second part of our series on terrorist interrogation: What does pulling out a terrorist suspect's fingernails look like and how effective an interrogation technique is it? 

Christ. 

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman,
and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks,
Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
Revelation 6:15-17

Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, all bail utterly on the war:

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."

Their day has come.

Sorry its been a busy day, but Christ allmighty! who are these morons who thought it best to post nuclear bomb plans to a government website because they didn't trust the intelligence community to provide them with more inflammatory evidence on WMD's in Iraq?  Jesus Christ, evidently undermining nuclear non-proliferation treaties and agreements were not enough so they decided to post bomb schematics on the web!

Normally I'd say Congress should look into it but wouldn't you know it was chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees with the backing of the President who pushed this plan into being; something about using the "magic" of the blogosphere to prove the proverbial moot point.  What kinda expert analysis of nuclear engineering schematics in Arabic are they expecting from the likes of Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Reynold or John Hindraker?  Seriously? 

As usual the professionals in the intelligence community were stepped on in a misguided effort to once again playdefense for an indefensible  political position which makes me ask the question: "Do you feel any safer?"  I know I don't.  Its clear these people don't have my or your safety in mind whatsoever, and the continued corruption of national security procedures for political gain is breathtaking in its stupidity.  This nation deserves so much better. 

(Updated 11/4/06 RM)

Haggard, 50, initially denied the allegations, telling 9News Wednesday night that "I've never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I'm steady with my wife. I'm faithful to my wife."

But KKTV in Colorado Springs reported that New Life Associate Senior Pastor Ross Parsley told a meeting of church elders Thursday night that Haggard had met with the church's overseers earlier in the day and "had admitted to some indiscretions."

Or how 'bout Drudge last night--he hypes a stunning new story on Iraq's A-bomb work pre-war.

Its the bomb all right--Republicans had demanded a slew of intelligence documents recovered from Saddam's archives to be put on a website to assist them in re-election.  Turns out they described the following:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Suckered.  There's your November Surprise.  Calling Osama . . .

I don't want to comment on the quality of the commentary on CNN these days, although I will say its lacking.  Case in point, this article as to whether the "fictional" character that Michael J Fox played for so many years, Alex P. Keaton, would support his stem cell research advocacy this election cycle.  While I too have had similar thoughts as to whether the people in Mayberry will vote for, oh, Democrat Heath Shuler, I was a little puzzled as to whether or not Alex would also have Parkinson's, because after all Alex is only a fictional character played by... oh, never mind?

I like this piece about how Bob Corker has lent his campaign another $2 million dollars because the $10 million dollars the Ford campaign has spent evidently threatens to overwhelm the $14 million his own campaign has spent. 

I'm not going to debate the merits of the Kerry "controversy", although to a generation of politically savvy men, like the Vice President, who were able to avoid being drafted through college deferments I'm sure it hit home. Who knows, maybe we'll get to hear another tirade from the queen of faux outrage to boot.  What I'm still shaking my head about is that the "botched joke" wasn't something off the cuff, but an actual prepared remark written by a staff member and he still botched it:

 “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”  

General Casey's next press conference:

"I'm not saying that things are going great and we've still got a lot of work to do but so long as that arrow stays out of the red, we'll be okay.  What was that...oh, crap!"

I'm not saying the 90 or so companies on this list should advertise on Air America and they have every right not to, but is there another radio network out there that is the target of such an extensive "blackout list"?  And if REI says that they never agreed to be on any sort of "blackout list" then who put them on there?

Ed Kilgore's take on George Allen and his desperate campaign is priceless.  My favorite paragraph is this:

 But I personally think the most damning thing about the Allen Story is that he has been exposed as the ultimate Golden State Child of Privilege who has spent much of his life trying to impersonate a dirt-farm, dirt-track Yahoo, mainly by aggressively embracing the underside of Yahoo culture, without the mitigating circumstances of actually growing up that way, or any indication that he shares the positive features of that culture (e.g., a healthy disrespect for economic elites). To put it another way, most true southern white crackers may well have contempt for those well-heeled cultural elitists who look down on them, but they'd also kill to give their kids the kind of advantages that George Allen had, and, if confronted directly with the full Allen Story, would probably consider his efforts to remake himself as a 'bacca-chewing, thuggish redneck the ultimate insult.

I've never quite understood the appeal of George Allen.  When I lived in DC there were nightly news stories of how Virginia was struggling to overcome many of the fiscal and political decisions he made, especially the huge cuts in transportation infrastructure funding that made plain his contempt for the northern VA suburbs around the District.  The odd thing about this election is how after thirty years of cultivating that crude tobacco-chewing, cowboy boot wearing, confederate flag waving "Southern" good ol'boy one step away from the White House, Mr Allen's artifice has suddenly cracked and we're left with a mean-tempered Southern California transplant ashamed of his actual heritage who after years of political success has only a mediocre Senate record to run on and a campaign perpetually shooting itself in the foot. 

Couldn't happen to a better man.

The Intelligence Community will be using its own version of Wikipedia.  Members of the intelligence community will be able to edit the database, just like people on Wikipedia can do.  I can just imagine what the talk page on Iraqi WMD will be like:

JWilson:   I added a section indicating that I didn't find any WMD in Niger.

BigTime:   You are objectively pro-terrorist.  I reverted the article to remove your mistakes.

DonaldH:   How can you say that you "didn't find any WMD?"  There are things we have found, and things that we haven't found.  But the fact that we haven't found them doesn't mean they do not exist.

JWilson:   I've reverted my No WMD in Niger edits.

Scoot:   I added a new section entitled "Joe Wilson's Wife."

DavidKay:   I added a section entitled No WMD in Iraq.

CharlesDuelfer:   I expanded DavidKay's No WMD in Iraq section to include No WMD programs in Iraq for a decade.

DonaldH:   The sections regarding no WMD in Iraq and no WMD in Niger are not neutral.  I'm disputing their neutrality and reverting them back to their original status.

I can't imagine what the section on Iran is like right now.

These clowns got us into this mess by selectively editing the facts with no regard for the truth.  The last thing we need is the ability of those with the desire to change the story without regard for the facts.