The counting’s all but over, and it is now possible to call the Alaskan Senate race. Multiple-felon Stevens is OUT; Begich is in.

The Senate now holds 56 actual Democrats plus Joe Lieberman (who is not an actual Democrat; he lost his primary but ran in the general anyway as an “independent Democrat” in 2006) and Bernie Sanders (an actual Independent, from Vermont). The race in Minnesota (Coleman v. Franken) is still in recount hell, but could break for Franken easily.

Saxby Chambliss in Georgia didn’t win a majority of the votes (he got 49.8%), so he’ll have to sit for a runoff — a runoff in which the entire Democratic party will be pushing for his opponent, Jim Martin (46.8; the Libertarian candidate got 3.4%).

Chambliss won his seat in 2002 by painting decorated veteran and triple-amputee Max Cleland as somehow unpatriotic in a series of smear ads on local media. He’s a douchebag of the first water, and deserves to be kicked to the curb more than anyone I can think of. Godspeed, Jim Martin.

I know you can all do math, but one possible endgame here is that the Dems seat 60 in their caucus come January.

The Dems will let Turncoat Joe keep his chairmanships despite his active anti-Dem campaigning AND his utter failure to use said chairmanship for anything useful during Bush’s presidency.

So, Senate Dems will be allowing Lieberman to keep his plum spot despite the fact that he has been deeply awful in that role, and despite the fact that he endorsed efforts by the GOP to imply that Obama is in league with terrorists, suggested that Obama endangered our troops, and said Obama hasn’t always put the country first.

Worse, Reid is echoing an argument he knows is false: That this is only about retribution. Reid and his fellow Senators have made the political decision to leave Lieberman in a job that he was a disaster at, rather than make the good governmental decision to remove him for the good of the country.

That it was apparently Obama’s decision makes me only slightly less annoyed.

Over the weekend, Mrs Heathen and I were wondering how a modern president engages the electronic world; as if on cue, the Times obliges us. Records-retention and security rules make it difficult for an actual POTUS to carry a Blackberry, apparently; there’s more discussion at the BoingBoing post on the subject.

Frank Rich has much to say on the likely future of the “party of Lincoln.” Hint: the internal Faithful are wildly wrong — and we’re probably worse off for it.

ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it’s two thumbs up!

[…]

The Republicans are in serious denial. A few heretics excepted, they hope to blame all their woes on their unpopular president, the inept McCain campaign and their party’s latent greed for budget-busting earmarks.

The trouble is far more fundamental than that. The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America. The proof is in the vanilla pudding. When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election.

On Nov. 4, that’s roughly the sole constituency that remained loyal to the party — minus its wealthiest slice, a previously solid G.O.P. stronghold that turned blue this year (in a whopping swing of 34 percentage points). The Republicans lost every region of the country by double digits except the South, which they won by less than double digits (9 points). They took the South only because McCain, who ran roughly even with Obama among whites in every other region, won Southern whites by 38 percentage points.

Those occasional counties that tilted more Republican in 2008 tended to be not only the least diverse, but also the most rural, least educated and slowest-growing in population. McCain-Palin did score a landslide among white evangelical Christians, though even in that demographic Obama shaved the G.O.P. margin by seven percentage points from 2004.

[…]

In defeat, the party’s thinking remains unchanged. Its leaders once again believe they can bamboozle the public into thinking they’re the “party of Lincoln” by pushing forward a few minority front men or women. The reason why they are promoting Palin and the recently elected Indian-American governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as the party’s “future” is not just that they are hard-line social conservatives; they are also the only prominent Republican officeholders under 50 who are not white men.

And here’s the completely-full-of-truth money shot:

The good news for Democrats is a post-election Gallup poll finding that while only 45 percent of Americans want to see Palin have a national political future (and 52 percent of Americans do not), 76 percent of Republicans say bring her on. The bad news for Democrats is that these are the exact circumstances that can make Obama cocky and Democrats sloppy. The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.

For the Republican Party to avoid brain-death, they pretty much have to tell the religious right to pound sand and adopt actual small-government positions — which means shutting up about gay marriage, immigration, pro-intelligent-design crap, and all the other issues so important to the know-nothing fringe. You see that happening? Me either.

TBogg nails it, on folks on the right complaining about boycotts targeting individuals and businesses who contributed to Prop 8 passage efforts:

The kind of person who contributes money to deny their fellow citizens their civil rights are not someday magically going to be part of the solution: they’re the problem. These are not people to be reasoned with; they’re ignorant, they’re haters and they’re bigots and the only thing people like that understand is power.

So when they stick their noses in other people’s affairs, they forfeit the right to be considered just another “ordinary person”. They’re involved and they would be foolish to expect that those other people in whose private affairs they have meddled wouldn’t return the favor. As they say: you pays your money and you takes your chances.

If you actively support taking away someone’s right to marry, then you absolutely do NOT get to claim some sort of moral high ground or express surprise when the community you’ve attacked decides they want to hit back.

The Mormons had the audacity to issue a statement with these paragraphs:

While those who disagree with our position on Proposition 8 have the right to make their feelings known, it is wrong to target the Church and its sacred places of worship for being part of the democratic process.

Once again, we call on those involved in the debate over same-sex marriage to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility towards each other. No one on either side of the question should be vilified, harassed or subject to erroneous information.

Really? That’s the angle you’re taking? “Hey, it’s just politics, and it’s inappropriate to retaliate?” No, I don’t think so. Turns out, politics works both ways, and you shouldn’t be surprised that there are consequences to enacting hateful legislation.

What’s really amazing to me is this story. Precis: Mormon musical theater director in California ends up having to resign — surprise! — because it turns out that he donated $1,000 to Prop 8. Dude, WTF? And his sister’s even a lesbian. From his statement, quoted in the linked article:

“I understand that my choice of supporting Proposition 8 has been the cause of many hurt feelings, maybe even betrayal,” Mr. Eckern said. “It was not my intent. I honestly had no idea that this would be the reaction.”

Either this man is an incredibly brazen liar, or he has no empathy whatsoever. Prop 8 was not some abstract piece of legislation; prior to its passage, gay couples could legally marry. After, they cannot. To suggest that he “honestly had no idea” that the people around him affected by it would be feel angry and betrayed by his material support of the measure is simply absurd.

Also, good luck finding theater work now, Mr Eckern. Your donation was a matter of public record already, but now you’ve been on record in the New York Times as a homophobic bigot.

Rolling Stone has much to say on the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today’s Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. “Many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo goo’ syndrome — good government,” said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. “They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Today, Weyrich’s vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission’s own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from “unreadability” to changes in a voter’s signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

[…]

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. “They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away,” says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. “We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn’t find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico.”

There’s a reason Iglesias couldn’t find any evidence of fraud: Individual voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration’s main point person on “ballot protection” has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. “The claim of widespread voter fraud,” Minnite says, “is itself a fraud.”

Go read the whole thing.

“It’s about the human heart.”

Some choice bits:

This isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics, and this isn’t really just about Prop-8. And I don’t have a personal investment in this: I’m not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.

And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics.

This is about the… human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not… understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don’t want to deny you yours. They don’t want to take anything away from you. They want what you want — a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

[…]

I keep hearing this term “re-defining” marriage.

If this country hadn’t re-defined marriage, black people still couldn’t marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal… in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn’t have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it’s worse than that. If this country had not “re-defined” marriage, some black people still couldn’t marry…black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not “Until Death, Do You Part,” but “Until Death or Distance, Do You Part.” Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are… gay.

[…]

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don’t you, as human beings, have to embrace… that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The full Democratic caucus will meet next week to vote on whether or not Joe gets to keep his chairmanship. My gut is that this won’t go Joe’s way, and that he’ll bolt the caucus in a huff. Door. Ass. Bang.

So, I was just wondering:

Our presidential electoral system is kind of weird, and some of its weirdness is based on the idea that it’s valuable to apportion some amount of Electoral College representation based simply on statehood, without regard to population. This means that even the tiniest “state” gets a minimum of 3 EC votes, even if it’s only got a single Representative in the House. It’s probably not absurd to handle Congress this way, given the separation of powers between the Senate and the House, but it’s far from clear that this is a good idea for Presidential elections.

Because low-population, largely rural states are overwhelmingly conservative, this tends to give a small electoral advantage to Republicans. I wondered, then, what if the Electoral College was concerned ONLY with population-based representation? We’d still have the all-or-nothing state-by-state EC system, but without the Senate-based distortion. How might this affect recent races?

In this world, the smallest number of EC electors is 1, not 3 (I’ve given DC 1, since it currently has 3, but has about half the population of another 3-EV state, Montana.) Instead of 538, candidates vie for 436 (435 House members + 1 for DC). The magic number is 219, not 270.

So then came the math. It turns out to be pretty easy to do this, since Wikipedia has all the data a mouse click away. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that this “New Math” can only affect races where (a) the winner has more states than the loser and (b) the difference in states won is greater than half the electoral college margin of victory. Only one race in the last 50 years would be affected by this, and it’s the same one where we sent the guy with fewer popular votes to Washington. Go figure.

• 2008: It’s not even close, but let’s look anyway. Obama won 365 electoral votes, and McCain 173 — a margin of 68% to 32% in the Electoral College. Obama won 29 states; McCain 22. If we reduce each candidate’s total by (states * 2), the adjusted score is 307 to 129, and the margin of victory changes to 70% to 30%. For 2008, then, the extra weight given to small states wasn’t that big of a factor.

• 2004: Bush won 286 EV, 53% of the EC, and 31 states; Kerry won 251, 47%, and 20. If we apply the same math here, we get Bush 224, Kerry 211, and no electoral change (though a narrower EC race at 51% to 49%). Bush took a 62 EV hit, and Kerry 40, but the real-world margin was too much for the state adjustment to flip the race. The state margin (11) is far less than half the EV margin (40, half of which is 20).

• 2000: Here’s the money shot. Bush won 271 (30 states, and a hair over 50% of the EC) to Gore’s 266 (21 and 49%) (yes, we’re missing an elector because of the rogue dude in Minnesota who voted for John Edwards). Eliminating the small states’ advantage drops Bush to 211, below Gore’s adjusted store of 224 and flipping this hypothetical race even with Bush carrying Florida. As predicted, the difference in states won (30 – 21 = 9) is more than 1/2 the Electoral Margin (271 – 266 = 5).

With that in hand, let’s delve further. Needing the race to be close to be worth analyzing pushes us pretty far back. Clinton won about 70% of the EC in both his elections; George Herbert Walker Bush won with 79%. Reagan famously waltzed off with 91% in ’80 and 98% in ’84. With EC margins like that, the Senatorial noise becomes immaterial.

• 1976: Carter, though, was somewhat closer with 55% of the EC in 1976, 297 to 240 for Gerry Ford. However, Carter won fewer states (24 to 27), so the race can’t flip (just to be clear: it means Ford would take a bigger EV adjustment than Carter).

• Nixon’s 1968 run was also close, with about 56%, but the peculiarities of the year save him: first, he won 32 states and bagged 301 EV — but most significantly the opposition vote was split by Humphrey (Dem, 191 EV, 14 states) and George Wallace (46 EV, 5 states). Ding Nixon his 64 votes and he’s still above the real-world totals of his opponents, so no change here, either.

• We have to go to 1960 for another “close” race: JFK won with 303, 22 states, and 56% of the EV compared to Nixon’s 219 and 26 states. (Harry Byrd won some votes that year, plus we’re far enough back the the total is actual 537, not 538, hence the funny totals.) Again, we can’t flip the race with the new math because (a) the margin’s too big and (b) JFK won with fewer states.

And all of a sudden we’re back in the 1950s. Actually, the forties; the 1948 race was relatively close, but not enough to get interesting. Truman won 303 electoral votes and 28 states; Dewey bagged only 189 and 16 (Strom Thurmond picked up 39 and 4), so no flip here, either.

To find another candidate for adjustment we have to jump back to 1916, with Woodrow Wilson vs. Charles Hughes. Wilson got 277 EV and 30 states; Hughes got 254 and 18. The key rule is, again, if the difference in states is more than 1/2 the EV margin; the state difference is 12, and the EV margin is 23, so we’d expect the adjustment to flip the election. Wilson’s 277 less (2 x 30) is 217; Hughes’ 254 less (2 x 18) is 218, and all of a sudden there’s a new President for the First World War.

It’s clear that the EC kept the popular vote winner from the White House in 2000. It’s interesting to see that a small change to the EV system would rectify that; however, it’s also obvious that the barrier to entry on such a change (depending as it does on supermajority (2/3) votes in both houses of Congress PLUS ratification by 75% of the states) will keep this exercise firmly in the realm of the theoretical.

Sure, the party I was at became an impromptu flag-waving parade after the race was called (we ended up at Rudz, natch), but something even cooler happened in the St Mark’s neighborhood of New York. The assembled crowd spontaneously broke into the National Anthem.

If that doesn’t at least give you goosebumps, you have no soul.