Democracy for New Mexico

Sen. Domenici's Pajama Moment

An incident involving New Mexico's senior Senator Pete Domenici that was reported in the Washington subscription-only publication, Roll Call, was picked up yesterday by the national blog, The Raw Story. Today, the story was front-paged at Daily Kos, adding fuel to the rumors and speculation that Sen. Domenici's level of health and/or mental fitness may preclude him from running for another six-year term in 2008. Of course this could also just be a case of Domenici's adoption of the kind of outfit allegedly favored by home-based bloggers since day one.

From Raw Story:

According to some staffers, a Republican Senator has been wandering around the Senate office buildings in his pajamas, Roll Call reports.

"We had a number of reports Friday that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) was wandering the halls of Senate office buildings in his jammies," Mary Ann Akers writes. "Two staffers said they saw the Senator wearing 'tartan' or 'buffalo plaid' pajama bottoms and a 'loose-fitting shirt.' By the end of the day, one informant called to say she heard Domenici was walking around in his boxers."

From Roll Call

"What are people talking about 'walking the halls'? I work!'" the 74-year-old Domenici said, sounding a tad indignant that folks would assume his lightweight wool plaid pants were pajamas. "These pants have two pockets like any else."

He explained he wears the hunting pants around the house and if he leaves to go to the office, "I don't necessarily take them off."

They're comfy, and they're fun, he said. "People stop me to talk about them. They're Christmasy, they're black and white."

The names of several New Mexico politicos are being bandied about as possible candidates for Domenici's seat including NM-03 Congressman Tom Udall, AG Patricia Madrid, Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez, current Lt. Gov. Diane Denish and even Gov. Bill Richardson, should his executive branch ambitions fade. Mayor Chavez has said he wouldn't run for the Senate seat unless Sen. Domenici decides not to run for another term. Given that stories like the pajama incident are already making their way into the political dialogue, Chavez just may get the chance.

Snippets

• Juan Cole reports: The US military announced that Sunni Arab guerrillas have killed 9 GIs in Baghdad and al-Anbar over the weekend. AP says that 71 bodies were found in Baghdad and other cities on Sunday.
• Sen. Diane Feinstein, who will chair the powerful Senate Rules Committee come January, will introduce legislation to require paper trails and audits for all electronic voting.
• David Sirota names names as he analyzes Dem membership in The Money Party vs. The People Party.
• Terrific maps of how the midterm elections have changed Red vs. Blue America.
• Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future describes how Democrats Go Wrong on the economy by blindly continuing to follow Rubinomics.
• Digby reports we have to watch what we ask for with Bush, whose top security aide said that the prez is weighing a range of options in Iraq, including a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from violence-plagued cities and a troop buildup near the Iranian and Syrian borders.

Bye Bye Bolton

Early Xmas present: Lunatic fringe hero John Bolton has resigned as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Having given Bolton a temporary recess appointment, Bush would have had to get Bolton appointed the old fashioned way this time, with a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. No dice, even if Dems hadn't won back the Senate.

I've been thinking about proposing that Bolton grow a shaggy beard to go along with his shaggy gray mustache and floppy hair and get a job as a Macy's Santa Claus, but that would be cruel to the children. Maybe we should give him a pooper scooper and hire him to follow after Santa's reindeer to make himself useful. After all he was always good at bullsh*t, wasn't he? Just a sample:

There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. --John Bolton

Sunday Bird Blogging: Sunny the Acrobat

Sunny the sun conure loves to play with toys of all sorts but his special favorites are balls, especially plastic or straw varieties. Lately he has taken to rolling onto his back with his feet in the air while playing with his balls (no, not those kind). He likes to perform acrobatically on the top of his cage where he generally hangs out, and loves to be noticed while he does so. He's an avian ham.

In this recent video he also seems to develop a strange fixation on his tail feathers, grasping them with one foot while he performs other amusing moves on top of his cage. He hasn't shown any interest in doing this with his tail feathers before or since this performance, so savor it as a rare treat. We do.

Sunny's cage is in our back den, where I've been camped out during my convalescence, and he's given me many hours of entertainment in the process. I have to admit we had to move our 7 parakeets to another room as their near constant singing was the precisely wrong prescription for my headache-dominated malady. Even Sunny screeches at times, but thankfully he usually limits his loud vocalizing to times when I leave the room. Sun conures are known for their playfulness and tricks and Sunny definitely fits the mold. Enjoy.

Saturday Music Hall: Graceland

Given the midterm election and my illness and recovery cutting into the time I can devote to this blog, our Saturday Music Hall entries have been neglected for some time now. I'm pleased to report I'm feeling better each day, although the fatigue and pain still linger. I'm back at it, but still running on just a few cylinders.

During my recovery I've been hanging out on the daybed in our den in front of a TV tuned mostly to Turner Classic Movies. I mean it. I've been too spaced for reading novels and don't have the energy to do much else. Thankfully, I've found It a perfect channel for sickies, one that takes me back to well worn Hollywoodland images and celluloid dreams. No blaring ads. No yelling or extreme violence. No fast-cut camera angles. Instead I've been comforted by all those mostly black and white, often cornball images so familiar to my subconcious from childhood and beyond.

I've found it easy to fade and in out of sleep not caring how much I've missed in the storylines populated by Clark Gable, Betty Davis, Spencer Tracy, Kate Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Barbara Stanwyk, Gary Cooper, Joan Blondell, John Wayne, Eva Marie Saint, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra and many more. There are also the entertaining shorts from the 30s with awe-inspiring performances by costumed dogs, dead-end kids and wealthy debutantes in formal wear. You could say that old movies have been my graceland over the past several weeks. Which brings me, in a round-about way, to today's music video by Paul Simon.

Not only did I get a chance to see TCM's screening of The Graduate -- Dustin Hoffman's career-making movie with Anne Bancroft, accompanied by the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack that sold millions of records in 1967 -- I got to see Paul teamed with Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michael on the excellent Sundance conversation series, Iconoclasts. It made me remember how much I've loved Paul Simon's music over the years, his musical imagery traced into my subconcious as strongly as those flickering images from Hollywood in its heyday. He's been producing creative, intelligent, innovative music since the long-ago days when I was buying 45s for my mono record player. I hope you enjoy him doing a live version of Graceland backed by a contingent of fabulous South African musicians. I'm outta here and back to my tv lair. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are calling me back to Hollywoodland, to Graceland.

Generation Dem

More good news for Dems: voters under 30 supported Democrats by significant margins in the November election. According to an article examining 2006 election trends by Sidney Blumenthal, "the momentous 2006 elections signaled the emergence of a younger, bluer America that could reshape politics for years to come. Blumenthal describes a "younger generation that is overwhelmingly Democratic." Tidbits:

While voters under 30 were the most favorable age group in 2004 for Kerry, casting 54 percent of their votes for him, Democratic House candidates in 2006 received 60 percent of their votes, compared with 38 percent for Republicans.

Nationally, partisan identification breaks 38 percent Democratic to 35 percent Republican, but among those under age 30 the percentages are 43 to 31 in favor of Democrats. This pattern runs as strongly in the West as in the East, the Midwest and the Pacific states, a clear indication that the Western states are heading out of the Republican camp -- out of alliance with the deep South's Republican states and into coalition with the broad majority.

In Wyoming and Arizona, where Republicans won elections for the House and Senate, the Democrats would have won by 16 and 15 points, respectively, if the elections had been conducted only among under-30s. In Montana, where Democrat Jon Tester won by 1 percentage point, fewer than 3,000 votes, his margin among under-30s, who were 17 percent of the electorate, was 12 points.

Bush has been the formative political experience for the youngest generation of voters, those 18 to 30. Studies of voting preferences show that the experience imprinted on a generation in its 20s largely determines its future political complexion. This generation is the most Democratic generation ever -- more Democratic than the youngest voting generations of the New Deal and the 1960s.

Blumenthal also analyzes demographic data generally and in other categories. His findings are strongly positive for Dems almost across the board. Excerpts:

Exit polls showed that the Democrats won the popular vote by 52 to 46 percent. Given that Bush won the popular vote by 3 points in 2004, this was a reversal of not 6 but 9 points. An analysis of the actual popular vote for the Senate, however, reveals an even greater Democratic margin of 55 to 42.4 percent. That number also coincidentally corresponds to the margin by which Democrats won women, the greatest margin since 1988. Yet Democrats won independents by an even bigger margin, 18 points, the greatest spread in House races in 25 years. The profile of independents on issue after issue now mostly resembles the profile of Democrats.

One of the largest shifts appeared among Hispanics, the group that Rove targeted most intensively for six years. In 2006, Hispanics went for the Democrats 69 to 30 percent, a 10-point increase in the spread from two years ago. Unpopular as Bush may be today, he has been the most accessible Republican to Hispanics ever, a Spanish speaker from a state with a large Hispanic population. Next time, in 2008, the Republicans do not have a potential candidate who can remotely approach Bush's appeal.

The dramatic turnover of both the House and the Senate should not obscure the profound transformations going on in the states, where 10 state legislative chambers switched to the Democrats, and, as political analyst Charlie Cook points out in the National Journal, "the Democratic advantage over Republicans in state legislatures went from 15 seats (3,650 versus 3,635) to 662 seats (3,985 versus 3,323), with gains in every region.

There's certainly much to celebrate in the 2006 election results. Just think how much more we can improve our chances for victory in 2008 and beyond IF Dems across the nation take the reins and dedicate themselves to representing ordinary people and the core Democratic values of fairness, opportunity for all, common sense and the common good. More and more Americans -- particularly younger voters -- have caught on to the lies and manipulations employed by rightwing Repubs to try and fool all of the people all of the time. Clearly, the Dem Party needs to accellerate outreach to younger voters and take full advantage of the trend building for a Generation Dem. Let's hope DNC Chair Howard Dean's 50-state strategy places a strong emphasis on reaching out to young voters.

Petition: Put Paper Ballots on National Dem Agenda

From Democracy for America: On Election Night, DFA-endorsed candidate Barbara McIlvaine Smith was down by 19 votes in her race for the Pennsylvania state house.  She refused to concede, saying, "It is not about winning or losing... It's about making sure our democracy is intact."

Earlier this week the count of absentee and military paper ballots concluded, and Barbara won by 23 votes -- switching the Pennsylvania House from Republican to Democratic for the first time in 12 years.

This powerful victory happened because every paper ballot was counted.  But across America votes are increasingly being cast electronically with no paper record.  Had the election in Pennsylvania been conducted electronically there is no saying how the race might have been decided.

You helped elect a new Democratic House and Senate in Washington, D.C.  It's time to put our majority into action.  Ask Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put paper ballots on the agenda in the new Congress's first 100 hours:

https://www.democracyforamerica.com/paperballots

The danger of paperless elections is clear. Look at Sarasota County, Florida.  They use paperless touch screen voting machines. In the hotly contested Congressional race there, Election Night ended with Republican Vern Buchanan ahead of Democrat Christine Jennings by less than one-quarter of one percent. This triggered an automatic recount.

On November 20, state election officials certified Buchanan as the winner by 369 votes, despite the fact that there were 18,000 "under-votes" in the county.  An under-vote is when a machine reports a vote cast for another office, but not for the Congressional seat.  The percentage of under-votes in Democratic leaning Sarasota County was far higher than in surrounding counties.  And many voters reported that their votes were not recorded on their electronic ballot. Some said the machine skipped the race while others couldn't find the race listed at all. 

Currently this contest is being litigated in the courts.  But the results of this election will be forever in doubt because there are no paper ballots to review. This is unacceptable.  Congress has the power to mandate that all elections take place using paper ballots.  Ask the new Democratic majority to make it a priority.

The Democrats are committed to an impressive agenda in the first 100 hours of the Congress.  They will raise the minimum wage, require Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, implement the 9/11 Commission security recommendations, cut the interests rates on student loans, and broaden the types of stem cell research allowed with federal funds.  But Democrats can't stop there.

Let's restore America's faith in Democracy too.  Let's make sure that in the first 100 hours the Democratic majority makes paper ballots mandatory:

https://www.democracyforamerica.com/paperballots

Thank you for doing your part,
Jim Dean, Chair
Democracy for America