A quick look around the nation:
- No surprises in New York, as Hillary Clinton moved on to the general Senate election with no trouble at all, and Eliot Spitzer defeated Thomas Suozzi in the gubernatorial primary to continue his march towards becoming the first Jewish president of the United States. Come on, he has as good a chance as anyone.
- Keith Ellison, who I wrote about in my column the other week, won the Fifth District Democratic Congressional primary in Minnesota, and will face only token Republican opposition in the fall. I have mixed feelings- it's good to see Minnesota finally elect an African-American to Congress, and I've heard from multiple sources that Ellison isn't nearly the liberal boogeyman he's been made out to be. But he's way way (way) to my left, and is likely to be much more controversial in his first year than predecessor Martin Sabo was in all 30 years in Congress put together. Expect to hear about this guy quite a lot in the next couple of years.
- Adrian Fenty won the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington, D.C. I didn't even know this race was going on until the day before yesterday, so I don't have much comment, except to say that I'm glad the DC voters didn't do something foolish like elect Marion Barry again. (Barry, by the way, was ticketed by the Secret Service last weekend for running a red light, and officers smelled alcohol on his breath).
- And Lincoln Chafee won in Rhode Island. Nobody likes this guy- Republicans think he's a traitor, and Democrats think he must be a fascist just because of the "R" by his name. But the Rhode Island voters must see something in him.
Posted by Stephen Silver at September 13, 2006 04:46 PMSteve-
you're not living here so you don't know the whole truth about Keith Ellison. He's worse than you think. In the middle of trying to convince everybody his past was behind him, he held a fundraiser on Aug. 25 where Nihad Awad of CAIR (who has publicly supported Hamas) spoke and gave him a big donation. Apparently, he and Keith are good buddies from college. There's more to the story, but the StarTribune won't report on this fundraiser. It's very troubling. I hate to see "read the conservative blogs" (like Powerline) but you need to in order to find out the real story on Ellison. He is not what he seems.
It's not that Chafee himself is a fascist; it's that his personal views (which are admittedly to the left of some Democrats) don't mean a thing if the Republicans have 51 seats and continue to control all the committees.
Posted by: BZ at September 15, 2006 07:44 AM