Miller Wins in Alaska

Joe Miller appears to be squeezing out a narrow victory in Alaska.

Republicans are fired up and ready to go, and that's producing some surprising election results, including the possible defeat of Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, who would be the third sitting U.S. Senator ousted by their own party this year.

The Alaska story, though, could shape up to be the most interesting. Miller leads Murkowski, a second-generation senator, by three percent. But the results are still trickling in - more than 15 percent of the ballots have not been counted, including the many absentee ballots from Alaskans who work, serve or attend school elsewhere. If Murkowski goes down it will be the biggest pelt yet for Sarah Palin's hunting party. She backed Miller (as did the Tea Party Express with a late $500,000 ad buy) and can claim lots of credit for his success. If Miller prevails, he should have a clear shot at the Senate against Democratic nominee, Sitka Mayor Scott McAdams. Miller is a conservative, West Point graduate, Yale-educated lawyer and former judge. While Alaskans overall may have some reservations about Palin after she abruptly left the governorship, this should be a very Republican year in a very Republican state.

98% of the precincts have come in and Miller continues to lead. The Tea Parties, of which Miller is a favorite, have flexed their muscles in the primaries.

That said their future goes through three states: Nevada, Florida and Colorado. The Tea Parties have shown incredible muscle in primaries. Furthermore, it's a movement that is here to stay. It has spawned the likes of Nikki Haley, Scott Brown and Rand Paul.

The key for this movement will be whether or not their candidates can win elections in a cross section of states that represent the country as a whole. That's where Florida, Colorado and and Nevada come in. No one is a bigger Tea Party favorite than Marco Rubio. There's no more purple state than Florida. So, a victory by Rubio in Florida legitimizes the Tea Parties.

It means that Tea Parties don't have to settle for any Republican candidate. Meanwhile, a loss means the tea parties took a solid Republican seat and gave it to another party.

There are similar dynamics in Nevada and Colorado. In both states, a tea party candidate came out of nowhere to defeat the establishment candidate. In both states, the seat was likely Republican. Will the tea party candidate hold on? If so, a real political force is born. If not, it could be the sort of force that does more harm than good electorally.

More Bleeding Heart Liberalism

The Las Vegas Journal Review has an excellent piece breaking down the Senatorial campaign between Harry Reid and Sharron Angle. It will likely come down to the public's perception of Harry Reid's clout.

Locked in a dead heat, both U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and Sharron Angle picked up support in the past two weeks, according to a poll for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and 8NewsNow that shows Nevada voters sharply divided on whether Reid's Senate seniority is too valuable to lose.

More than half of those surveyed, 51 percent, said the Senate majority leader's influence is not too valuable to give up, while 45 percent said Nevada can't afford to lose his clout, said the survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. Another 4 percent weren't sure.

It's one of the comments that was most interesting to me.

What really bothers me about Sharron Angle is she has no compassion. Nobody can get an abortion, even if their father rapes them. People looking for a job shouldn't be given unemployment checks because it's pandering to them. Kids shouldn't have the number of teachers they need because it's paying a teacher who might belong to a union. Old people should fend for themselves and not have Social Security. Also: those of us expressing our opinions don't have to be employed by Harry Reid to want to do it. She is SOOOO irritating all by herself. Glad to see she's behind in the last 5 or 6 polls.

Clearly, this individual thinks it's government's job to pay for all these compassionate endeavors. That's why we call such people bleeding heart liberals.

Harry Reid: "I Don't Know Why Any Hispanic Would Be a Republican"

That's one of the dumbest and most obscene comments you'll ever hear come out of a politicians mouth. Let's remember, many liberals and Democrats claim that the Tea Party movement is itself racist. The Republicans wasted no time in responding. Here's Marco Rubio, himself of Cuban descent.



Sharron Angle has proven to be a very weak candidate, but at this point, she just needs to keep her mouth shut as Reid is a total disaster.

Sharron Angle: the Extremist?

With her victory, Democrats are trying to paint Sharron Angle as an extremist. I'm trying to find her so called extremist positions. Let's look at all the craziness.

Sharron Angle is a former school teacher and legislator. She is known as a conservative renegade in Carson City. She wants to phase out Social Security for younger workers, dissolve the Education Department and repeal the 16th Amendment that established the federal income tax.

Wait, she wants to repeal all income taxes. Goodness, what a radical?! We definitely don't want any crazy idea like that in Congress. What makes a lawmaker think that people should keep 100% of what they earn. The Republic will surely crumble if we ever allowed that. Yet, Democrats are licking their chops to take her on this issue. They call it a tax cut for the rich. People are cautioning that she must moderate.

Democrats say Angle’s extremist ideas include eliminating the Education Department and repealing the federal income tax. Manders told his listeners on Wednesday “this hardcore right thing is going to kill her.” He said “it may cost her an election if she doesn’t understand that.”

I would love to see the Democrats running against across the board tax cuts. It's a sign of how far we've come that massive tax cuts are now seen as extremist. Are Democrats really going to spend the campaign telling people that they don't pay enough in taxes and that eliminating income taxes entirely is radical.

It's in fact so radical that our country was founded with no income tax. In fact, it took an amendment to the Constitution only to allow it.

What Angle's so called extremism shows is that when we say we want bold ideas, that's only theoretical. As soon as anyone comes up with a bold idea, they are an extremist. Imagine the horror of someone suggesting eliminating an entire department. After all, our deficit is only $13 trillion. The tens of billions we'd save by eliminating the Department of Education, an idea echoed by Ronald Reagan, is completely unnecessary. After all, our country's finances are in perfect order.

Then, she wants to phase out Social Security. How crazy is that? After all, the unfunded liabilities in Social Security are only about a hundred trillion. That's easily solved right. What exactly would happen if we weren't able to meet our liabilities? Wouldn't that be the same as phasing it out? Angle is definitely a radical and an extremist.

Last Night's Primary

All right, everyone knows all the results from last night. Blanche Lincoln was the big winner in Arkansas as she held off Bill Halter by four points. Both and either are getting crushed by John Boozman however. Sharron Angle won the Republican primary in Nevada. Angle is for repealing the income tax, which some Democrats think is a liability. We'll see. The Republicans will have to former female CEO's representing them in California in Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman.

The most important thing, however, is that Danny Tarkanian lost. Now, no one will have to hear a talking head remind us that he's the son of the former UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. That was an interesting tid bit the first FIFTY TIMES. For the last few months, it's become annoying.

The Cubs once had Ryan Theriot and Mike Fontenot starting a short stop and 2nd base respectively. It just so happened that Fontenot and Theriot played together since grade school including being the double play combination on the national champion LSU Tiger team. That was also an interesting tidbit THE FIRST FIFTY TIMES. Now, I cringe every time they are in the same shot together. That's how I felt every time there was a feature on Danny Tarkanian. When will the analyst point out that he's the son of the former UNLV coach as though we've never heard that before?

TARP to Foreclosures?

President Obama will propose using $1.5 billion in TARP funds to help: Michigan, Nevada, Florida, Arizona, and California, the five hardest hit states by foreclosures.

While he’s in the state with the highest foreclosure rate in the nation Friday, President Obama plans to announce a proposal to take $1.5 billion in funds originally designed to assist ailing banks and instead use it to help the hardest hit states stem the housing crisis, according to senior administration officials.


The proposal to redistribute money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program will benefit the five states with the steepest declines in home prices: Nevada, California, Florida, Arizona and Michigan.

$1.5 billion would be a drop in the bucket. Also, it's unclear what this money would do that his failed $75 billion loan modification plan would do. Most importantly, TARP was not supposed to be used for this purpose.

Nevada's ACORN Prosecution is Critical and Here's Why

The Nevada Secretary of State was on television all weekend discussing his office's prosecution of ACORN. The Secretary of State, Ross Miller, is himself a Democrat. That's important, obviously, because ACORN's first reaction to most investigations is to say they are political. Given Miller's party affiliation that is harder to do. Much more important that that, Miller's office isn't going after some of the help. Instead, they are going after ACORN itself.

When ACORN took to Las Vegas and started playing "Blackjack" and "21," the activist group was making a far bigger gamble than it ever guessed, according to Nevada prosecutors.

There's nothing wrong with playing the tables in Vegas, but authorities say ACORN was using the names of those casino games as a cover to illegally pay workers to sign up voters as part of an illegal quota system.

A preliminary hearing Tuesday in the downtown Clark County courthouse has put ACORN on trial for the first time as a criminal defendant.

We know that ACORN is under investigation in more than a dozen states but in those investigations it is individual employees of ACORN under investigation. Until now, with each investigation, ACORN has claimed that it is individual and rotten, often low level, staffers that are the subject of the corruption. In Nevada, the Secretary of State doesn't see it that way. He sees ACORN's policies as the subject of the corruption. He believes that they engaged in ILLEGAL quota systems that lead to ACORN employees making bogus voter registration cards.

So, for the first time, ACORN itself will be charged with criminality. Now, it's not hard to follow the logic. If ACORN is convicted, it will be the first time that any jury has ruled that ACORN itself, and not merely some of its subordinates, is the criminal entity. Conservatives have long believed that ACORN is a criminal enterprise and the Nevada trial will be the first court case to test that theory. That's why it is critical.