Lawrence O'Donnell: A Permanent Majority?

[Hissyspit]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-odonnell/a-permanent-majority_b_34114.html

A Permanent Majority?

I haven't had the time to type a word for HuffPo since the election because I've been too busy gloating on TV. Having predicted every Senate election correctly as well as the outcome in the House and the governors' races, I have been taking every opportunity on MSNBC and the McLaughlin Group to say a few self-congratulatory words and sit back and watch my Republican counterparts' befuddlement.

In my latest round of this, Joe Scarborough asked why I knew who was going to win the elections and Karl Rove, the genius, Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain," didn't know. By the way, how smart do you have to be to be Bush's brain? I didn't want to give up my secret for election predicting. I like being one of the few pundits to accurately predict all the Senate races. Fellow geniuses Eleanor Clift and Mark Shields got it right too, but they're not the gloating type and they never appear on MSNBC, so I was hoping to create a sort of Rove-level genius aura for myself, at least among MSNBC talking heads. You know, maybe "Olbermann's Brain," something like that. But I couldn't come up with a Rove-like rap about metrics because I had never actually used the word in a sentence, so, to avoid the horror of dead air, I went to my fallback position--the truth.

I admitted that the secret of my election pundit genius was public polls. Any study--okay, 'study' is too strong a word--an occasional glance at the publicly available polls during the two weeks before the election told you exactly who was going to win. When a challenger like Claire McCaskill was running a tie at 47 or 48 against incumbent Jim Talent, that poll is telling you that the challenger is going to beat the incumbent. It helped that I happen to know that Talent never polled above 50 against McCaskill and it helped that I had seen McCaskill campaign and knew she was a great campaigner. That's what provoked me to predict she was going to win months ago. But the rest of the predictions I made were based on nothing but public polls.

The MSM loves the image of Rove as genius almost as much as Rove does, but, showing no embarrassment for their years of dutiful transcribing of Rove's notion that he was building a permanent Republican majority, they are now moving on to the first-woman-Speaker story in which the word genius has yet to appear. Which brings me to my next big prediction in answer to the question of how long will the Democrats hold the House?

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[David Dunham]

1. The appointment of Hastings would really hurt us Dems. He is a crook.

[grasswire]

3. :::shrug::: Hastings was aquitted in court on that charge

From wikipedia

In 1989, Hastings was impeached by the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives for bribery and perjury. The Democratic-controlled Senate convicted Judge Hastings of accepting a $150,000 bribe in 1981 in exchange for a lenient sentence and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He became only the sixth Judge in the history of United States to be removed from office by the United States Senate. (The Senate had the option to forbid Hastings from ever seeking federal office again, but did not do so.)

Hastings filed suit in federal court claiming that his impeachment trial was invalid because he was tried by a Senate committee, not in front of the full Senate, and that he had been acquitted in a criminal trial. Judge Stanley Sporkin ruled in favor of Hastings, remanding the case back to the Senate, but stayed his ruling pending the outcome of an appeal to the Supreme Court in a similar case regarding Judge Walter Nixon, who had also been impeached and removed.

Sporkin found some "crucial distinctions"<2> between Nixon's case and Hastings', specifically, that Nixon had been convicted criminally, and that Hastings was not found guilty by two-thirds of the committee who actually "tried" his impeachment in the Senate. He further added that Hastings had a right to trial by the full Senate.

The Supreme Court, however, ruled that the federal courts have no jurisdiction over Senate impeachment matters, and Sporkin's ruling was vacated, and Hastings' conviction and removal were upheld.

[hogwyld]

2. I hope that we have a truly permanent majority

Especially after all of our state legislatures redistrict to limit the pukes to 40 house seats at most, and a filibuster, and veto proof majority, hopefully, we have seen the very last gasp of the GOP.