German newspaper Der Spiegel leans left, even for a European newspaper. So imagine the disappointment:

US President Barack Obama suffered a painful defeat in Massachusetts on Tuesday. With mid-term elections looming, it means that Obama will have to fundamentally re-think his political course. German commentators say it is the end of hope.

Stunning the shockwaves that little a Massachusetts election can generate.

Technorati Tags: Scott Brown, Martha Coakley, 2010 Massachusetts Senate Special Election

The NY Times has a great new map up that shows the county-by-county comparison of the 2010 Senate special election with the 2008 presidential election.

Source: NY Times

Every single county in Massachusetts voted more Republican than they did just two years ago.

Now that’s a message.

Ted “Blonde in the Pond” Kennedy came from a little town called Hyannis, which is in Barnstable County. According to the NY Times interactive election map, Barnstable’s results are as follows:

The Democrats managed to get slaughtered in Kennedy’s backyard. Now that should tell you something. And it certainly should tell the Democrats something. Think they’ll listen?

OK, I was wrong. Brown won decisively enough that challenging the results of this race won’t have a chance in court. Even Democrats won’t try that one.

Source: NY Times

As much as everyone wants to deny it, the Massachusetts Senate special election was a referendum on the Democrat agenda in general, and ObamaCare in particular. So much so, that Democrats nervous about retaining their jobs are getting ready to jump ship:

Democratic leaders and the White House insisted ahead of the vote that they aren’t preparing to desert health care. They admit they’ll have to come up with a new strategy to win passage but said they didn’t want to allow one Senate race to take them off course on the president’s top legislative item for the year.

But several House members said Tuesday night that they had no interest in pursuing the most likely scenario for moving ahead with a bill — approving the already-passed Senate version of health reform in the House — and some said President Barack Obama should step back and start over.

HT to Hot Air, who muses:

Exit question: What do Blue Dogs stand to gain by still voting yes? A promise from Obama that he’ll campaign for them? How did that work out in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts?

Indeed, it seems that ObamaCare may be DOA in 2010. Should Democrats retain the House in November, they can take another run at it in 2011. That way there’s a whole ‘nother year before the next election. In the meantime, there’s a whole lot of other issues in the Democrat agenda, and there are a few Republicans that would be willing to cut from the herd on one item or another. Politico has an opinion on which issues these will be.

The polls won’t close for an hour and a half, but Martha Coakley is already preparing for the coming court battle.

The thing is, the news release is dated the day before the election. The date has been corrected on her site. Was this an honest mistake on the part of an overworked press agent in the Coakley campaign? Or should the date of the election, January 19, be so ingrained in every Coakley associate that such an error is unthinkable?

See,I told ya so. Hunker down, folks, this is gonna get nasty.

Technorati Tags: Martha Coakley, Scott Brown, Massachusetts Senate Race, Massachusetts Special Election, Stealing Elections, Reform the Voting Process, Voter Fraud, Diebold and Other Flawed Systems

Martha Coakley has been heavily criticized for running a poor campaign from the start and now she may lose what should have been one of the safest seats for Democrats in the nation. I don’t put a lot of stock in polls, but they have historically tilted slightly in favor of liberals. So the trend in Massachusetts in fair-to-middlin’ surprising:

The latest polling in the race shows Republican Scott Brown with leads in the single digits, but some pollsters are predicting the swings in momentum suggest he’ll win Tuesday by double digits. That would be a stunning result for Democrats.

A survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling released late Sunday had Brown ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley 51-46, while a Suffolk University poll from late last week had Brown ahead 50-46.

Research 2000, which conducted polls for liberal websites both last week and over the weekend, showed the race a tie, but with Brown gaining eight points in a matter of days.

However, Obama has been campaigning heavily for Coakley in recent days so I think the margin will be pretty narrow.

In addition, I think Coakley will end up winning due to last minute voting machine shenanigans. The voting machines to be used in more than 90% of the state’s precincts are easily hacked, and have been in the past (HT to TCOT Report):

The electronic voting systems used in Massachusetts are notoriously plagued with problems and vulnerabilities, and are in violation of federal voting system standards. . . .

Making matters worse, the company who sells, services and programs the Diebold optical-scan paper ballot systems to be used next week, LHS Associates, has a disturbing criminal background, and has admitted to tampering illegally with voting systems during past elections.

Look for this one to end up in the courts, no matter who “wins”. The question is whether it will get resolved in time to affect the ObamaCare abomination.

Technorati Tags: Martha Coakley, Scott Brown, Massachusetts Senate Race, Massachusetts Special Election, Stealing Elections, Reform the Voting Process, Diebold and Other Flawed Systems

Might I suggest one of these items from the Reagan Foundation?

Ray Charles, who battled childhood poverty, blindness and heroin addiction to help pioneer soul music and become one of America’s most enduring musicians, has died at the age of 73, a spokesman said.

Charles died at 11:35am (local time) at his Beverly Hills home from liver disease complications.

Family members and his manager were present, said Jerry Digney, his long time publicist.

He was born Ray Charles Robinson on Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, the first child of Aretha and Baily Robinson. His father was a mechanic and a handyman; his mother worked at a sawmill. They moved to Greenville, Florida, when he was an infant.

It was the height of the Depression and Charles recalled how poor his family was in his 1978 autobiography, “Brother Ray”:

“Even compared to other blacks…we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. Nothing below us except the ground.”

Charles contracted glaucoma at the age of six, and it eventually left him blind.

Blind by age 7 and an orphan at 15, Charles spent his life shattering any notion of musical boundaries and defying easy definition. A gifted pianist and saxophonist, he dabbled in country, jazz, big band and blues, and put his stamp on it all with a deep, warm voice roughened by heartbreak from a hardscrabble childhood in the segregated South.

“His sound was stunning – it was the blues, it was R&B, it was gospel, it was swing – it was all the stuff I was listening to before that but rolled into one amazing, soulful thing,” singer Van Morrison told Rolling Stone magazine in April.

In his own words:

Originally, soul music had a strong element of the church, of spiritual music. It had a gospel music feeling, and then it incorporated the sound of blues music. That’s soul’s makeup: the fusion of gospel and blues, all mixed up together. It’s the crossover of those forms of music that makes soul unique….

At first I got some criticism for playing soul music. Women sent me letters, accused me of being sacrilegious because they could pick out that gospel music was being incorporated into something that went beyond the sound they heard in church every week. They didn’t realize at first how spiritual soul music could be….

And there were people who objected to soul being played on the radio because of the depth of feeling in the music. Some people thought it was too suggestive, and some thought it was just plain vulgar. But the feeling that comes through in the music –that’s the essence of soul — the word itself tells you that.

Talk about coincidence, here’s a bit of trivia you won’t read in the mainstream press:

Charles performed at Republican national conventions during Ronald Reagan’s years as the party’s leader.

Reader BigTime points out an excellent alternative to the Reagan on Rushmore effort.

Melba King was a 22-year-old nursing student in Des Moines in 1933. She was walking home one autumn night when a mugger came up behind her with a gun and demanded her money.

At that moment, Ronald Reagan — who was a Des Moines radio sportscaster at the time — came to her rescue. Reagan pointed a .45-caliber revolver at the robber from the window of his second-floor rented room.

“And he said, ‘Leave her alone or I’ll shoot you right between the shoulders,’” King told KCCI.

Reagan scared the man off and calmed King’s nerves. Then, the future president said he would walk King home.

They didn’t meet again until 1984, at which time Reagan added to the story:

This is the first time I’ve had a chance to tell you the gun was empty. I didn’t have any cartridges. If he hadn’t run when I told him to, I was going to have to throw it at him.

That’s my kind of president.