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November 8, 2006

The morning after on the Web

Surfing around after four hours sleep...

Conservative law blogger Ann Althouse on the CNN blog party: What happened last night?

Waking up this morning in my quiet hotel room, I realize how insanely hard it was to try to watch the election returns at that blogger party at Tryst. The notion that we were in some way bringing you the news is utterly absurd. We were struggling to watch it -- hear it -- on TV, something you could do not only more directly -- that's always the case -- but also more easily. To be on camera, under the lights, in the middle of a whirl of activity, expected to perform on cue the way you ordinarily perform naturally in the privacy of your home... oh no! The obvious analogy is to a porno movie!

Wonkette adds, in one of his (!) few sentences of OMG BLOG SLUMBER PARTY quotable on a news site, "Plus, the special super-fast CNN wireless network doesn’t work, unlike the normal wifi network here at Tryst, which we’ve never had problems with."

Blogger Shelley Powers of St. Louis stayed home and wrote (Viva La Vote),

I hope they had fun, got a lot to eat and drink, but I beg to differ with CNN: that's not weblogging. Same as the election today: that's not democracy. We can't go in once every two years and ignore what happens in our government the rest of the time. We also can't continue to be polarized over issues. Every time we are, we lose a little more of a our freedom, a little more of our rights. Corporate fodder. That's what voters are today, corporate fodder.

I think that we all, most of us, have more in common with each other than the people we elect. I voted for Claire McCaskill, but she, like all politicians, like her competitor Talent, sees the world a different way than people like you and me. I respect her, what she stands for and voted for her, but I liked that priest today wearing the hand knitted vest; gently taking a little old lady's hand in his and asking her how she was doing, as if her answer was all that mattered. I doubt he and I agreed on many issues today–in fact, chances are if he follows his church's recommendations, we disagree strongly on most issues–but he seemed like a nice man, and very real. He didn't look like an Agent of Oppression, Destroyer of Science, or Pusherman for God.

Netroots Victories. At liberal site MyDD, Chris Bowers discusses the 2006 version of Net politics.

Post Mortem Why Republicans got shellacked in the midterms by Fred Barnes at the conservative Weekly Standard:

THIS ONE IS PRETTY EASY TO EXPLAIN. Republicans lost the House and probably the Senate because of Iraq, corruption, and a record of taking up big issues and then doing nothing on them. Of these, the war was by far the biggest factor. Unpopular wars trump good economies and everything else. President Truman learned this in 1952, as did President Johnson in 1968. Now, it was President Bush's turn, and since his name wasn't on the ballot, his party took the hit.

The defeat for Republicans was short of devastating--but only a little short. The House seats the party lost in New York and Connecticut and Pennsylvania will be hard to win back. Just as Republicans have locked in their gains in the South over the past two decades, Democrats should be able to solidify their hold on seats in the Northeast, as the nation continues to split sharply along North-South lines.

What should worry Republicans most, however, is erosion of its strength in the West and in two states in particular: Colorado and Arizona. Fours years ago, Colorado was solidly Republican. Since then, Democrats have won a Senate seat, two House seats, the governorship, and both houses of the state legislature. At the state level, that's realignment....

What the...? No. by Christy Hardin Smith of Firedoglake.

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Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:24 AM | Permalink