A footnote, this writer says. Or maybe a cautionary tale, at most.

Obama's fall is all the more spectacular because of the way he sold himself. I don't mean the messianic part, but that's a huge part of it.

I mean this: Candidates and parties sell themselves partly on ideology and party on simple competency. Ideology convinces some, but not a majority; to get to the majority, a pitch of competency grabs those who aren't sold on ideology but aren't dead-set against the candidate's ideology.

Liberals run harder on this message of competency than conservatives do, partly because the media sells this for them so ably, but also because they need to make up more votes this way. Maybe 40% of the country is conservative, and so a conservative candidate has to convince just 10% more to get his 50%; but only about 20-25% of the country is liberal, so a liberal candidate has to sell a lot more people on the idea that it's not his ideas, his ideology, that really matters, but just his general competency. His intelligence, mostly, and judgment.

The liberal media sells liberal candidates as brilliant and even-tempered and "sophisticated" and "nuanced" of thought; all of these are non-ideological attributes which appeal to most, whatever one's politics. And they need to do this, as only about 25% of the country can be persuaded to come along on the basic liberal message of higher taxes, more spending, more government power to dictate the affairs of men, and less freedom.

Meanwhile, Republican candidates get the opposite treatment from the media. I've noted before that every single Republican candidate is claimed by the media to be:

1. Stupid

2. Evil

3. Crazy

4. Out-of-touch

...and pretty much you can categorize every Republican office-seeker since Eisenhower (Out of touch) in this way. Nixon: Evil and Crazy; Reagan: Stupid and Crazy and possibly Evil; Bush I: Out of touch; Bush II: Stupid, Crazy, Out of Touch and Evil.

Just as the liberal media needs to pad a liberal candidate's vote-share by selling them on the non-ideological virtues of their candidates, so too do they need to deduct as many possible voters from a conservatives by selling them on the non-ideological negatives of those candidates.

So the public bought into Obama, to the tune of 53%, not on his ideology, mostly, but on just how super-duper smart he was. He would bring to the job not ideological positions, but general problem-solving tools. Without having to force the public to choose this ideology or that, he would just fix things, not because he believed in a specific theory of politics but because he was just that good.

Two years into his hopefully four year term, it's apparent to anyone who's not a fucking idiot that Obama doesn't have a fucking clue what the fuck he's doing. Far from being the Mr. Fix It, he's Mr. Fuck It Up Worse. All the calumnies thrown at Bush-- blundering incompetent idiot retard chimp -- apply fully to Obama. As they used to joke about Bush -- Obama is the idiot who broke the world.

It's amusing to me how simple America's problems were when Democrats were out of power, looking to take over. We would just fix the economy. Snap! Fixed. Just cancel Bush's tax cuts for the rich and it would all be right as rain. We could just bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and convince the Iranians and North Koreans it was in their interest to give up the bomb; all we needed was a smart guy to speak the right words to these countries that Bush was too stupid to know.

We could just get the oceans to stop rising, and just reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and just do this and just do that.

It was all so very easy for the 2006-2008 Democrats to explain how they'd work these wonders. All they needed, they told the public, was to get the idiot Republicans out of office. These problems were all easily solved; we just needed Smart People (TM) running things. Replace the Backwards Idiots (TM) with the Smart People (TM) and it would all be smooth sailing.

And it wasn't about ideology so much as competency.

Well we see now that none of these problems (and fake problems, like global warming) were simple to solve, and only a simpleton cold have claimed otherwise, but now Obama and his still-loyal media defenders are telling us, retroactively, how difficult all these things are to change and fix.

But I don't think the public is fooled. They were told that simply switching the supposedly dumb people out for the smart people would fix things. It didn't, and exposed the supposedly smart people as dumber than those they called dumb. Obama's luminescent incompetence is going to make it hard for Democrats to run on non-ideological competency as a platform for a generation.

Posted by: Ace at 01:47 PM | Comments (392)
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Obama and other liberals have been saying Gitmo is a major recruitment tool for Al Qaeda for years. They never quite getting around to proving that or demonstrating what exactly will be different if we closed Gitmo but that doesn't stop them from saying it ad nauseam.

Doing the job the MFM is supposed to but won't do, Thomas Joscelyn looked at Al Aqeda propaganda statements over the years and found that Gitmo rarely makes the propaganda cut.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has reviewed translations of 34 messages and interviews delivered by top al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan (“Al Qaeda Central”), including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, since January 2009. The translations were published online by the NEFA Foundation. Guantanamo is mentioned in only 3 of the 34 messages. The other 31 messages contain no reference to Guantanamo. And even in the three messages in which al Qaeda mentions the detention facility it is not a prominent theme.

Instead, al QaedaÂ’s leaders repeatedly focus on a narrative that has dominated their propaganda for the better part of two decades. According to bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other al Qaeda chieftains, there is a Zionist-Crusader conspiracy against Muslims. Relying on this deeply paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, al Qaeda routinely calls upon Muslims to take up arms against Jews and Christians, as well as any Muslims rulers who refuse to fight this imaginary coalition.

This theme forms the backbone of al Qaeda’s messaging – not Guantanamo.

Other topics al Qaeda scum like to talk about....the evils of capitalism and global warming. Hmmmm, where else have I heard that from? Never mind.

As Joscelyn points out, Obama and others often talk about jihadi websites as well and no doubt Gitmo gets some play on those but you'd think the "the number one recruitment tool" would get more than a few passing mentions from the top leaders (who are likely to draw the most attention). Maybe they are on the DVD extras of these speeches.

Obama and most liberals simply will not admit that the number one motivating factor in recruiting new terrorists is a religious appeal to Muslims against infidels. To admit that would ruin the happy multi-culti talk they love so much. It would also force liberals to confront the fact that the real bad guys here are the terrorists and not those fighting the terrorists. That would be inconvenient to say the least.

I think it's great the Joscelyn has done this but let's not forget one very basic fact: Gitmo's Camp X-Ray, the first facility used to hold War on Terror detainees there, opened in January of 2002. Prior to that date al Qaeda managed to recruit enough volunteers to pull off, or assist with, a few terrorists attacks you may have heard of (pdf):

-Attacks on US troops in Yemen and Somalia in the early 90's
-The bombings of two US Embassies in Africa in 98
-The attack on the USS Cole in 2000
-The 9/11 attacks in 2001

A series of other attacks were either planned and failed or were disrupted by security officials.

al Qaeda was also training terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who carried out his "Bojinka Plot" in 1995 after training in Afghanistan with al Qaeda but before officially joining the group)

So let's not pretend that recruitment was a problem before Gitmo. There are simply a lot of Islamists out there willing to kill and die for their religion and where we keep the ones we capture isn't going to change that fact.

It's almost as if the Gitmo talking point is more about recruiting liberal voters than Islamic terrorists.

Posted by: DrewM at 12:32 PM | Comments (115)
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One of the leading lights of conservative jurisprudence, Randy Barnett, has been at the forefront of efforts to see ObamaCare stopped in the courts. He writes in the Wall Street Journal today that stopping ObamaCare is not only about halting Congress' creeping seizure of power under the Commerce Clause; Barnett says that it's also about preventing the federal government from compelling the states to do things that the federal government isn't constitutionally authorized to do alone.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States." The problem with the Cornhusker Kickback was that the citizens of 49 states would have had to pay for Nebraska's Medicaid exemption—without getting anything in return. The special exemption exceeded Congress's constitutional authority because it did not serve the "general welfare"—meaning, the welfare of the people of each and every state.

This defect is true of the new health law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Although the constitutional objections to its individual insurance mandate—the requirement that any person who isn't provided insurance by his employer buy it on his own—have gotten all the public attention, the law also has a "general welfare" problem. It will pile unspecified new costs on states by requiring them to extend their Medicaid coverage to more people. In Florida, 20 states have challenged these state mandates as exceeding Congress's spending power. Their challenge is based on South Dakota v. Dole (1987).

In Dole, the Supreme Court upheld the congressional mandate that every state raise its drinking age to 21, or lose 5% of its highway funding. But the Court also acknowledged that "in some circumstances, the financial inducement offered by Congress might be so coercive as to pass the point at which 'pressure turns into compulsion'" (quoting a 1937 opinion by Justice Benjamin Cardozo). The Court upheld the drinking age mandate because a state would only "lose a relatively small percentage of certain federal highway funds."

ObamaCare won't alter Medicaid in a relatively small way. It's an "all in or all out" proposition—not a threat of losing just 5% of some transportation funds, but a threat of losing 100% of the single largest federal outlay to the states.

The Medicaid mandate/General Welfare Clause argument was not made in some of the other challenges to ObamaCare, which mostly focused on the individual mandate under Commerce Clause and tax arguments. As we saw with the Virginia lawsuit, the judge held that the individual mandate is severable from the rest of ObamaCare, and thus upheld the rest of the healthcare law. I'm sure the severability finding will be upheld on appeal.

But the General Welfare Clause argument applies to much more than just the individual mandate. ObamaCare without the Medicaid mandates is essentially an empty shell. In fact, if the Medicaid mandate portion of ObamaCare were overturned, Congress would immediately have to pass new laws relating to Medicaid, since Obamacare supplanted them.

From a litigators' perspective, this argument of Barnett's is strategically attractive because the Dole restriction, discussed in the WSJ piece, is relatively unfleshed by the courts. This case is absolutely headed for the Supreme Court and justices hesitate to overturn precedent. Dole's very vagueness gives them (ahem, Kennedy) room to maneuver because ObamaCare says 100% of Medicare dollars will be withheld from states that opt out. The justices won't have to decide a sticky question about just how much is too much coercion; it's relatively easy to say that 100% is too much.

Barnett writes over at Volokh Conspiracy that this op-ed explains a point not emphasized in oral argument a few weeks ago in the 20-state case: that if under ObamaCare a state opts out of Medicaid, the federal taxes of its citizens are transfered to other states on a massive, dare I say coercive, level. Be sure to click over for the whole thing.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:26 PM | Comments (39)
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Must be.

Based on global warming theory — and according to official weather forecasts made earlier in the year — this winter should be warm and dry. It's anything but. Ice and snow cover vast parts of both Europe and North America, in one of the coldest Decembers in history.

A cautionary tale? You bet. Prognosticators who wrote the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, global warming report in 2007 predicted an inevitable, century-long rise in global temperatures of two degrees or more. Only higher temperatures were foreseen. Moderate or even lower temperatures, as we're experiencing now, weren't even listed as a possibility.

Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.

Karl Popper, the late, great philosopher of science, noted that for something to be called scientific, it must be, as he put it, "falsifiable." That is, for something to be scientifically true, you must be able to test it to see if it's false. That's what scientific experimentation and observation do. That's the essence of the scientific method.

Unfortunately, the prophets of climate doom violate this idea. No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It's global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.

Posted by: Ace at 12:14 PM | Comments (43)
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I put the question mark there because he seems to have an interesting set of examples for what he means.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said this weekend he has no regrets about expressing his desire for a "truce" on social issues during the next presidency.

Daniels, a noted fiscal hawk, reiterated that social issues are of secondary concern to the country, behind the economy and national security. He first made his comments in June in a profile in the conservative Weekly Standard.

"No," Daniels told the Indianapolis Star in an interview when asked if he has changed his mind. "I say that with enormous respect for the people who want to see gay marriage legalized or who have a strong view on some other such question and want to see 'Don't ask, don't tell' go away."

Note the two examples. Who he has respect for. Based on his examples, when he says "truce," he seems to mean that liberals are the ones who should be primarily restrained by virtue of this truce. That is, he seems to be saying liberals should accept the status quo on social issues in this truce.

I don't know if that's his way of making this sound better to social conservatives or his real idea of what a "truce" is. I'd note that this sort of thinking is common. Tell me if you've ever been in this argument: You contend for a conservative position on some issue, like gay marriage. Your liberal opponent offers this argument: Why do you care so much? Why don't you just let it go? Why don't you just drop the issue entirely?

The way that your opponent has framed this issue is that you care intensely, too much really, about the issue, and should just drop it as an issue.

But this is disingenuous, because it's clear that your opponent cares intensely about the issue -- he's not "just letting it go -- and is not in fact pressing for both you and he to drop the issue. He's pressing just for you to drop interest in the issue, and cede the battlefield... to him.

I've been in this Why Do You Care argument a hundred times. The natural rejoinder is Why Do You Care So Much, Then? But they obfuscate on that -- they claim they don't care (in their way of arguing using this particular tactic, claiming indifference to the issue puts you in a superior position and thus "winning") but they just think x and just think y and that's why we should have Position Z.

The argument sets up what is purported to be a neutral position, a natural default, which is not necessarily current policy, and claims that an opponent who seeks to deviate from that position is somehow not playing fair because he's become too obsessive about his position. Which, of course, deviates from the neutral, natural default.

That framing issue is critical. People tend to support whatever the "neutral, natural default" is defined as being. That's how the MFM works its biased magic-- it always sets up the consensus center-liberal position as the neutral, natural default and all deviations away from that as "ideological," "controversial," and, in a pinch, "extremist."

What I'm suggesting is that Mitch Daniels might be using this Why Do You Care? argument from the conservative side, against liberals. If he's doing that -- well, as I said, the argument is a little disingenuous, but it can be effective, framed that way, in which the neutral, leave-it-be position just happens to be your preferred policy outcome. If he elaborates further and makes it clear that this is what he's doing -- that when he says "truce on social issues" he means liberals should stop agitating to rearrange the deck-chairs while the ship is sinking -- it's possible that conservatives could embrace him.

He'd have to make that plainer, though. I know few conservatives will support him, despite his very good fiscal record, if he sounds like he wants social cons to just drop everything they care about.

Posted by: Ace at 09:46 AM | Comments (174)
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At Hot Air's Green Room, Mitch Berg has an introduction to Pawlenty, for the many who have dismissed him as some sort of RINO. Quoting the Pioneer Press:

“This is a state that was on a spending binge for a long time with a liberal-leaning political culture that goes back decades or generations, and to try to change the direction of the state was a big undertaking. But I think we did that,” Pawlenty said during an extended interview Tuesday with a group of Capitol reporters.

Making that change was not easy, the Republican governor said. He had to call a predominantly Democratic Legislature into special sessions, issue a record number of vetoes in one year and use a government shutdown to force the changes.

“This will be known as the time Minnesota finally came to terms with its excesses and got itself on a more sustainable and responsible path,” he said.

That legacy, he asserted, is more significant than any new program or building he might have created.

And then Mitch Berg:

Poli-sci prof Steven Schier from Carlton College provides the key caveat that the U of M’s Jacobs didn’t, pointing out that Pawlenty “never had a fully cooperative Legislature”. That’s putting it lightly. When the DFL took complete control of the Legislature in 2006, DFL Senator Cy Thao famously remarked “When you people [Republicans] win, you get to keep your money; when we win, we take your money!”. Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller said in 2008 “it’s silly to think that people can spend their money better than government can”.

It says a lot that prominent liberal politicians are permitted to say that in Minnesota. Even hardcore liberals like Nancy Pelosi shy away from saying "it's silly to think that people can spend their money better than the government can." She thinks that, certainly, but she avoids saying it, because that would hurt her caucus. And yet here's a Senate Majority Leader who says it.

So that's the battlefield he's on. That's the political culture he's confronting.

So when Salisbury quotes JacobsÂ…:

A governor must build coalitions to get things done, Jacobs said, but Pawlenty had a hard time finding “honorable compromise” with DFL legislators.

…one can forgive him for not adding “because the DFL had no interest in compromise, and were largely not honorable”.

But I will.

My real point is that Pawlenty’s legacy goes waaaay beyond simple, material things like programs and departments and government real estate. Tim Pawlenty did something that’s needed doing since long before I came to Minnesota. Because for all of my hard-core paleocon friends’ grousing about “impact fees” and “travelling with Will Steger”, it’s a simple fact that Pawlenty’s political leadership helped drive the Minnesota GOP to the right; it helped the GOP provide a real policy alternative to the DFL for the first time in recent memory.

Many may deem him to have governed not conservatively enough, but I always read that like this: If a guy governed as conservative as possible in a state's liberal culture, or even more conservatively than most believed possible, does that mean his Comfort Setting for his own personal politics is where he actually governed or further to the right of what he was permitted to do?

As an analogy: Many conservatives call Obama a socialist. (I agree.) But liberals point out that most of what he's done is not actually socialist per se (socialist light or socialist-tending, but not actually socialist).

That may be true, and yet I still say he's a socialist. Why? Because I know what his impulses are. I know where he'd take the country if he were allowed to, what he'd do if he didn't face so much push-back and hostile public opinion and panicking Democratic legislators and Republican delay and obstructionism.

I always laugh at liberals who make the claim that Obama isn't a socialist based on, say, the tax cut deal. Okay, people making that argument: If the Congress were dominated by liberals, and they'd won even more seats in 2010, do you imagine he'd be angling for the same deal? Or do you think he'd be looking to increase taxes not only above Bush levels but possibly above Clinton levels, too?

In other words: Can you imagine Obama putting his political capital on the line, defying Congress, and vetoing a bill that he considered too leftwing?

I can't. I don't think many can, either. I think his governing philosophy is as left as the road will allow.

At any rate, analogizing that to conservative-leaning governors in blue states: Doesn't this sort of thinking work in reverse, to their advantage, too? If we say Obama's a socialist based on what he would do if permitted, can't right-leaning governors, thwarted by tax-and-spend legislatures, be said to be strongly conservative, based on what they almost certainly would do if permitted?

I don't really think Pawlenty is going anywhere, but I think it's a bit of a shame that he's not even seriously considered at all. Like Duncan Hunter, he's one of those guys you really think should be seriously considered even though in your heart you know they won't be.

Posted by: Ace at 09:19 AM | Comments (92)
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Commenters to the Barbour piece below note that we shouldn't let the media chose our candidates for us. It is in that spirit that I bring you the other big news story today about a probable GOP 2012 candidate: this Wall Street Journal puff-piece on Indiana Rep. Mike Pence.

Mr. Pence usually draws under 5% in voter surveys testing the emerging 2012 field. But the excitement he's stirred among a swath of conservatives—he won a straw poll at the prominent Values Voter Summit in September—points both to the fluidity of the 2012 lineup and the dearth of names rousing interest among the religious right, a dependable GOP voting bloc.

Mr. Bauer believes that if Mr. Pence ran, he would quickly build support among socially conservative voters. "The nomination battle would be very wide open without Mike," Mr. Bauer says, who is one of several activists urging Mr. Pence to join the nomination fight.

A former radio personality, the 51-year-old Mr. Pence became a darling among fiscal conservatives for opposing two of President George W. Bush's signature initiatives, the 2001 No Child Left Behind education act and the 2003 Medicare Part D drug benefit. He saw both as violating his party's small-government principles.

Mr. Pence favors reducing the size of the federal government, and even the power of the presidency. He wants to amend the Constitution both to ban abortions and to allow marriage only between men and women. He says increased security along the Mexican border must precede any immigration overhaul.

Not to be missed: the endorsement in the third paragraph from Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, who recently suggested that DADT repeal would lead to a new draft since no soldier wants to be molested in his sleep. Not kidding.

Pence has said he would make a decision on running for president next month, but he's also got a good shot at the Indiana governor's mansion. The current governor, Mitch Daniels, is term-limited (and planning his own run for the White House).

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:57 AM | Comments (71)
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For the second week in a row, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is getting negative press and I can only assume these are the opening shots in the 2012 GOP presidential primary. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was Politico last week that kicked Barbour's racial comments onto the front page. If so, they've sure got a hard-on for one of his competitors because they're at it again:

Barbour has traveled extensively on the jet, brushing off suggestions from Mississippi Democrats that he give it up in favor of a more modest propeller plane for his travel. The trips, according to a POLITICO review of the CessnaÂ’s flight manifest since 2007, have mixed state business with both pleasure and national politics.

Some of Barbour’s travel may well have been worth it to Mississippi, a state that is heavily dependent on federal funds. But much of the time, he has used the plane to go to fundraisers for himself and other Republican candidates and committees, to football games and to at least one boxing match — travel that has a less obvious connection to what Barbour, a former top lobbyist in Washington, has cast as his lobbying on behalf of his state.

The flight logs obtained by POLITICO indicate that Mississippi has spent more than $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour's air travel. That total does not include security and other logistical costs associated with his trips. And through a quirk in Mississippi law, whenever the governor is out of state, Mississippi must pay the lieutenant governor a salary differential as acting governor.

Barbour has reimbursed the state for a handful of flights, but he has more often scheduled obscure official business to coincide with the business of politics, according to the manifest and logs, which were obtained from the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration under a Mississippi Public Records Act request by a Democrat who has worked in the state, who provided them to POLITICO.

Barbour's spokesman responds by suggesting that Mississippi is more in need of national attention and federal largess and that the jet is an "an effective marketing tool in a state that really needs it." The Politico article goes on to detail some questionable flights that seem to have been solely to raise money for Barbour's campaign chest and that weren't reimbursed to Mississippi.

Who does this help the most? I'm gonna go with Sarah Palin, who most notably told the 2008 GOP Convention that she put Alaska's gubernatorial jet up for sale on eBay. (She managed to sell it through an aircraft broker.) However, other 2012 hopefuls are also demonstrating fiscal responsibility by curbing expensive flights, including Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:03 AM | Comments (73)
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Apparently the theme of the day here is government overregulation (see this post below). I'm seeing a lot of chatter today about the coming demise of incandescent lightbulbs in California and it reminds me of a scene in Alien 3, as things tend to do, when the luckless prisoners realize they lack the basics of modern life. "Nothing much works here," whines a proto-corpse. Ripley snarks back: "Do we have the capacity to make fire? Most humans have enjoyed that privilege since the stone age."

Well, California is banning a staple of human civilization for 130 years: the incandescent lightbulb. Starting on January 1, it will be illegal to sell 100-watt incandescent lightbulbs in California. In the following years, 75-watt, 60-watt and 40-watt bulbs will also be banned. Instead, consumers will have to use expensive halogen bulbs or toxic compact flourescent lightbulbs.

The CFL movement is rooted in the idea that they last longer, uses 28 percent less energy and provide the same amount of light as Thomas Edison's incandescent invention.

But there are problems with CFLs that might make you want to buy, or choose, an incandescent light bulb. A six pack of incandescent bulbs runs about $5 where CFLs cost about $3 each. CFLs contain toxic mercury and require special disposal.

Popular Mechanics magazine found that CFLs commonly fail because they are installed in inappropriate lighting fixtures. They can also wear out prematurely because they are turned on and off frequently or experience excessive vibration or impact.

The results are predictable. First, there will be a short-term black market in lightbulbs, I kid you not. Individuals will bring lightbulbs with them when they return from other states. California will no doubt respond by banning their importation and the highway patrol can start checking returning vehicles for them like the fruits and vegetables checkpoint on the way back from Vegas.

Second, twenty years from now the enviroweenies that set us up for this in the first place will be pissing their pants and causing a great stink about all the mercury poisoning. Guaranteed. And, shockingly, it will turn out that converting to CFLs didn't actually save much energy anyway.

Don't be too smug about this taking place in California, though. A nation-wide phase-out of incandescent lightbulbs will begin in 2012, courtesy of a law signed by President Bush in 2007. California is just ahead of the curve.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:03 AM | Comments (184)
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To recap: the Alaska Supreme Court says that the Division of Elections properly counted ballots under state law. Following that decision, the federal district court where Joe Miller originally filed his lawsuit gave him until today to decide what to do.

Last night he announced that he will continue to pursue his lawsuit in the federal courts, presumably under an equal protection theory.

In a prepared statement e-mailed to the media about 10:20 p.m., Miller said he planned to go ahead with his federal lawsuit "for the sake of the integrity of the election."

Miller initially challenged the Nov. 2 election in federal court, but Beistline ruled he had to go to state court first. Miller lost in state Superior Court, and the Alaska Supreme Court unanimously declared last week that the Superior Court had ruled correctly.

Beistline had given Miller until this morning to file motions continuing his case. The state has until Wednesday to respond. Beistline indicated he would rule from the filings and not require oral arguments.

Miller has not, however, asked the federal judge to continue the injunction which has prevented Alaska from certifying the results of the election. Murky will be seated and she will keep her seniority.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:42 AM | Comments (170)
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