It has a lot of what you were saying earlier about how Tedisco shot himself in the foot by not figuring out what kind of candidate he was until the very last moment.

It sort of reminds me of McCain who tried about three various campaign strategies and always backed off the effective stuff when Dems complained about negative attacks.

But apparently no one minds if Dems are using negative campaign tactics or if they disenfranchise military voters.

There are just too many Republican candidates so afraid to do the wrong thing that they do nothing at all.

“Liberals scream about disenfranchised voters,” Fund tells Newsmax, “but they largely fall silent when it comes to the shameful fact that many of our military servicemen and women and their families can’t vote if they are overseas because of bureaucratic barriers.

There’s another positive lesson to come out of this and that is what happens when citizens shirk their duties. I tend to rant about this and will try not to here. Anyway, voters in earlier state constitutional conventions wrote in a requirement to the state constitution that the legislature must ask the voters every 20 years if they want to convene one. They did in the 70s, and the legislators took it over and made it a zoo, and the people could not or did not (I don’t know, I was too new to things at that time). The question again came up in 1997. The unions all came out against it, and there was a big push to say no because the legislators would just take it over again…as if a “no” vote wouldn’t just allow them to continue to run things and take over even more for another 20 years! But the citizenry voted “no.” I left as soon as I could, which turned out to be 2 years later. It’s not fun to live among Americans who seem to be broken and without a taste for liberty.

Not long after that vote, the First Lady of those days, a Chicago lady, with apparently the only exposure to NY being on Wall Street, just waltzed right into a US Senate seat here. She was first carpetbagger. Murphy from Missouri is only the latest. Had the citizens of New York State shown some backbone in 1997, I suspect neither coup by an out-of-stater would ever have happened. An in-depth analysis by experts would be very interesting, but it’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Anyway, it all boils down to the voters. “We” didn’t lose; the voters of New York State did, again. Of course, besides such heavy-handed stuff as legislative control and so forth being wrong, it is also bad economically. The state’s about broke to the point where it can’t tax its way back into the good old days. That needn’t have happened either, and again, the voters have only themselves to blame.

There is much other Americans can learn from the greatly underpublicized lessons coming from the Empire (state) these days.

Did we ever determine how many military ballots failed to be return by the unreasonable deadline Dems insisted on?

I’m wondering if we suffered this narrow loss because we were so afraid of offending people with a stronger campaign that we simply stood by and watched as the Dems threw everything including the kitchen sink into the race?

Well, it is kind of consistent with the race run anyway; he should have won it by a landslide.

Obama chortled and Steele talked meaningless generalities, per the article.

Sigh.

Keep in mind that the deadline for receiving overseas and military ballots is Monday and that they won’t be counted until Tuesday. As of 1:00 pm Friday, only 403 out of the 1918 that had been requested had been received.

I thought the the number of military ballots was 1,005. If there is a much higher number of military ballots that were not able to be returned by today then that could certainly throw the election to the Democrat.

I’ll keep that letter from veterans and POW’s handy until we know more.

Believe it or not we had one dim wit liberal on another thread claim that the military supported Obama by 6 to 1. No doubt he and others like him will claim that if we don’t count all the military votes in this race it only disadvantaged them. But that raises the question as to why Dems fought so hard to force an unreasonable deadline on the return of military absentee ballots.

“The only thing DOJ leaders essentially asked for (and got in a consent decree) was an extension of time for the receipt of overseas ballots, from April 7 to April 13. In other words, despite the fact that almost every expert in this area now recommends at least a 45-day transit time for absentee ballots for military voters, Justice asked only for 30.” WTF????

I did a Google News search and learned a bit more it from a Politico post at http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/0409/MiniMinnesota.html (note that it quotes the “Albany Times-Union” as a source, which tells me all I need to know about their own credibility; again, there is a mention of legal battles in terms of the hearing tomorrow in Poughkeepsie…more battlespace preparing?) They mention an open letter from US veterans about this disenfranchisement issued on Thursday, but the link doesn’t work. I found it at a Gathering of Eagles: http://gatheringofeagles.org/view701247r6071524660.html

I don’t know which is more stirring, the text of the letter or the names of those who signed it. I wonder if Curt might be interested in posting that in full? This really needs all the publicity it can get, as the media sure aren’t covering it, and it is an outrage.

I know it’s difficult to get hard facts in an election like this where we depend on multiple boards of elections for information but I would be very interested to learn just how many military ballots were mailed out and then received AFTER the Monday, April 13th cutoff.

Dems forced that early cutoff date knowing that it ran against all recommendations from postal officials:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjUwYWJmMTRjNDNlOWYyMTVhNTFiOGFjMWJhYTJkZWQ=

1,005 absentee ballots sent to military personnel serving overseas. I’d like to know just how many arrived back in time to be counted and how long it took all of them to be returned?

The “Albany Times-Union” is not too obviously but clearly boosting Dems in an article at http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=789212&category=SARATOGA and reporting on how mean those Republicans are for challenging ballots; and apparently the TU is also helping to prepare the battlefield for space an upcoming legal battle (as in “Ken Dow, a former elections commissioner and Democratic committee chairman, said the Republicans are ‘acting in bad faith’ because state law is clear on the matter. In 1983 the Court of Appeals ruled in Ferguson v. McNab….”).

Meanwhile, “The Saratogian” today has an interesting article up on what would happen if there is an actual tie: What we have here is a “failure to elect”…. http://www.saratogian.com/articles/2009/04/11/news/doc49e00a129f744192217984.txt I think an actual tie is pretty unlikely, but it’s interesting. I’ll bet Paterson is wishing he’d gone with Princess Caroline after all.

Happy Easter, all!

http://www.elections.state.ny.us/

Tedisco now up by 24 votes. This is painful to watch!

Thanks for the additional information on absentee ballots. Very disturbed about the military ballots. Over 800 have still not been returned? Only 4 days left before the deadline. No wonder Dems fought so hard to force a deadline that was nearly impossible to meet.

Here is the state board of elections page where the update they mention should be posted at 10 a.m. Eastern: http://www.elections.state.ny.us/ (I haven’t checked out the detailed results yet, as there are some problems with Adobe Reader on this computer.)

While checking the news this morning, I found this article with some details of the absentee ballot counting, posted an hour ago: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000003095131

It’s reassuring that both campaigns are going to be getting such detailed information. Apparently it was Murphy’s campaign that announced the 20-vote lead in Delaware County, but we’ll see what the official count there is. Looks like Saratoga County is going to be a key one, too.

Get this, though! “The counties also have yet to receive all military and overseas ballots, which are not due until April 13. Of 1,045 such absentee ballots mailed out, only 201 have been mailed back, the state board of elections reported on Wednesday evening.” Jeesh!

Other information about the other absentee ballots (looks like I was wrong about the Independents, at least on this plane): “Of the absentee ballots returned, 3,188 belong to voters registered with the Republican or Conservative parties, which endorsed Tedisco, and 2,405 are from registered Democrats or Working Family Party voters, which backed Murphy. Independent voters also submitted 157 absentee ballots.”

This site has had a good roundup:

http://www.politickerny.com/tags/20th-congressional-race

From what you are saying it sounds like Tedisco’s rather aggravating tepidness about the stimulus bill may have been the right thing to appeal to Independents in his district. I hope so.

I just wonder how many of the military ballots will not be counted because the Dems refused to give enough time to get many of them returned from remote battlefields?

Here’s an update as we wait for the absentee votes to be counted, Tedisco had been as high as 97 votes ahead, after the race became tied at one point, but now he is only up by 17. Per the Albany Business Journal about 40 minutes ago, at http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2009/04/06/daily21.html :

“The most recent update came late Tuesday. Now, Tedisco has 77,034 votes; Murphy has 77,017.

“As of April 3, the two had been tied. On April 6, the state said Tedisco led by 97 votes.

“Absentee ballots are expected to decide the election. About 6,760 have been returned to date; close to half of those came from registered Republicans.

“Military and overseas absentee ballots are still scheduled to be counted on April 14.”

Close to half is not more than half, which will be needed. Registered Independents might swing this. Tedisco is ahead by a small margin in Rensselaer County, and it’s the Independents that have put him there; I know it even without having access to the breakdown, because I used to live over there and know that it has the highest number of Independents of all state counties (well, this was true in the 90s anyway). Many of us then were mobilized with the city of Troy, the county seat, tried to sneak a gun ban through; I’ll bet many still there haven’t forgotten how Jim Tedisco stood by them. And, too, maybe more people than I had already recognized Murphy for the carpetbagger he is.

Still, the margin for Tedisco over there isn’t as large as for other counties. However, a huge number of people have migrated into Troy from downstate, while I doubt the rest of the county, which is rural, has grown at all, if it hasn’t shrunk some; and that may be why it’s such a small lead currently.

The Wash Times commentary you link is right on:

Pollster John McLaughlin sees enormous potential for Republican candidates for Congress in 2010 – but his optimism is accompanied with a sobering warning. Republican candidates should not be linked to the party’s recently disastrous political past. And they had better have a reform vision for the future.

There has never been a time when Republicans more needed a Contract With America-type pact that would pledge an end to pork-barrel earmarks and oppose the spend-and-tax philosophy that has absorbed Mr. Obama’s Washington. All this will require vision – and planning – which ought not require rocket science to accomplish.

We tried the play it safe routine in 2006 and 2008 and look what happened. I’ll put my money on a more aggressive approach even if that risks us being tagged as “negative” campaigners. It’s worth noting that Dems did nothing but spew hate at President Bush for 8 years and somehow managed to win elections in 2006 and 2008.