QUITE A FEW OF MY READERS believe that Torricelli’s withdrawal — delightful as they find it in itself — represents an underhanded Democratic strategy to win a seat they’ve done everything, up to now, to lose. Some of these theories are a bit elaborate, but now Orrin Judd says he smells a rat:

New Jersey’s Democrats knew full well what they had in Mr. Torricelli when they just recently nominated him to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate that he’d disgraced. The Senator’s unethical behavior was well known when he won the nomination and there’s been no material change in his circumstances. The only thing that we know now that we didn’t know then is that the voters of NJ seem to care more about the Senator’s character than did the Democrat voters who nominated him. But, if those Democrats didn’t care about the brazen choice they were making then, why is it our duty to get them off the hook now? Just because they made a mistake?

I don’t think this argument will fly at the New York Times.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan seems to agree:

Above all, Torricelli’s exit unfairly denies the voters a chance to punish him. Such votes are a critical part of the political system. They help cleanse the electoral palette, they allow the body politic to make a formal statement about what matters, and they drive the point home by humiliating the ethically challenged. Torricelli’s final, cynical move is of a piece with his entire career. It’s a scam and a duck. This time, surely New Jersey’s courts shouldn’t let him get away with it.

And Mickey Kaus observes:

Where does it say New Jersey voters have a right, not just to a choice of candidates, but to “a competitive race” — a right so important it must override trivial concerns like state laws about when names can be removed from a ballot? Is an election like a basketball game that has to be kept close in order to keep it exciting? The NYT editorial board seems to think so. … (It’s way too cheap and obvious to note that if it were the Republicans who had nominated a sleazeball headed for defeat, then ensuring a “competititve” race might not be the highest Times priority. So I won’t make that point. But others will!)

Sounds like another brisk day of Times-bashing in the Blogosphere. They do kind of bring it on themselves, though.

TNR’S BLOG BIDS a not-so-fond adieu to Robert Torricelli: “Rarely is there ever more cause for public glee than when a scoundrel gets his due. In Trenton this afternoon, the Senate’s most loathsome character got his.”

UPDATE: Rich Galen won’t miss him either: “Bob Torricelli’s career is over. It came to an abrupt and undignified end, which is fitting. Bob Torricelli is an abrupt and undignified person.”

Excerpts from The Torch’s undignified, but sadly not abrupt, farewell speech are here.

THE REAL TORRICELLI SCANDAL, according to John Cole.

TORRICELLI MAY DROP OUT OF THE RACE, according to an AP report.

“TORRICELLI’S TERROR PAL$:”

NEW Jersey voters already concerned about Sen. Robert Torricelli’s low ethical threshold now learn that he’s been a paid shill for a group the government identifies as a terrorist organization.

Called on this by his Republican opponent, Douglas Forrester, in a debate Thursday, Torricelli said the group had been pulled from the State Department’s global terror list and given a clean bill of health. Not true.

(Via Orrin Judd).

MICHAEL WALSH: ‘A Tide in the Affairs of Men.’

All of the social changes pushed through by the far left over the past few decades, including expanded abortion, open celebration of exhibitionistic sexual fetishism, decriminalized drug use, weakening national militaries, turning a blind eye to street crime, and the constant propaganda drumbeat of political correctness (as they define it), have finally occasioned a Newtonian reaction, including here in the U.S. Despite their best efforts to criminalize him, Trump is not only leading in the polls but widening his lead as the Biden campaigned has hit a brick wall.

The only question now is whether the Democrats — who are always bleating about “our democracy” — will do the profoundly undemocratic thing and depose Biden in favor of Kamala Harris or Your Name Here after an open convention in August. That Biden already has won enough delegates to claim the nomination matters not one whit to the party that mastered the Torricelli Maneuver in 2002 and whose motto is, “by any means necessary.” Who would be surprised if they junk “their democracy”? If you’re looking for a historical parallel, we’re nearing the moment politically when, with the aged emperor Tiberius nearing his end, his successor Caligula was reaching for a handy pillow.

Read the whole thing.

NEO: How about the prospects of alternate nominees for the Democrats?

Do you think other Democrats poll better than Biden? See this. Now, granted it’s from mid-February of this year, which is pretty old news. But it’s one of the few polls I could find that shows how Trump would do against leading Democrat contenders, and the answer is “pretty well.” Here are the stats at a time when Trump was leading Biden by only 1 point:

In a hypothetical match-up, Trump leads Vice President Harris 46 percent to 43 percent and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) 46 percent to 36 percent. He also leads Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) 45 percent to 33 percent.

Newsom and Whitmer have increasingly gained national attention as prominent Democrats, and pundits have included them as possible future presidential candidates.

Hey, remember this headline from Politico in 2019? Biden signals to aides that he would serve only a single term.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.

While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.

According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.

“If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”

So was Joe lying then? Similarly, did Dr. Jill plan even back then on being the reincarnation of Edith Wilson?

In any case, Dan McLaughlin argues, “I’m here to say: Sorry, Democrats. It’s now too late to swap out for another candidate. You’ve saddled yourselves to this dead horse. You’ll have to ride him to the losing line. And there are plenty of reasons why that’s the cold hard truth. The last time a major party got rid of an incumbent president campaigning for re-election was 1856.”

“What is Biden to do now, when the Democrat/Media Complex is abandoning him in light of his performance last night?”, Scott Johnson rhetorically asks. “He is to hang in there. He likes being King. Dr. Jill likes being Queen. He’s a stubborn kind of fellow. Is it unreasonable to foresee that they will rally once again to the cause of discouraging us from seeing what is in front of our nose when the members of the Democrat/Media Complex conclude they have no alternative?”

And note the Dems’ current paradox (not that it will likely stop them if they work out a way to do a Torricelli-style swap):

Kinda funny to watch the "Trump is a threat to Democracy" crowd openly strategize how to thwart the will of every Democrat who voted in the primaries by engineering a coup at the convention and placing a candidate on the ticket without a single person casting a vote.

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) June 28, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: Dead People Voting For Democrats.

The New Hotness? Dead People Winning Elections! Dead Democrat Congressman Wins Primary.

A late Democratic congressman secured his party’s nomination for another term in office on Tuesday, despite his passing six weeks ago at the age of 65.

Donald Payne Jr. of New Jersey succeeded his late father in representing the Garden State’s 10th Congressional District.

He had formally submitted his candidacy for re-election prior to his untimely death from a heart attack on April 24, as reported by The Hill.

Help us Obi-Wan Torricelli, you’re our only hope!

MARK HEMINGWAY: 2024 Is Shaping Up To Be The ‘We Were Right About Everything’ Election.

Obviously, making this broad observation is not necessarily an endorsement of Trump or the GOP, and there are probably some finer policy points where you can plausibly disagree. But on just about every issue that has dominated the public discourse post-Trump, the pro-Democrat establishment either staked out a fringe position or was proven wrong by subsequent events. It’s hard to even know where to begin.

On Covid, it’s abundantly clear that red states that refused mass shutdowns and excessive regulations didn’t see any worse health outcomes — and the damage from the shutdowns and Covid mandates is still lasting. The idea that our strained health care system was laying off people for refusing to take a “vaccine” that we now know doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus has been a disaster, to say nothing of our strained military, in the middle of a massive recruiting crisis, forcibly ejecting thousands over vaccine mandates.

Then there’s the fact that Covid killed off 200,000 businesses in just the first year. How many businesses could have been saved with more reasonable Covid regulations? Then there was the distrust sewn with the public through all of the coronavirus propaganda and social media censorship. Your posts could be banned from Facebook for even speculating that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an outcome that the government now acknowledges is more likely than not.

The worst outcome, however, might have been the Biden administration irresponsibly outsourcing its Covid policy on schools to the teachers unions, who fought to keep schools closed for more than a year in some places, followed by an insistence on ineffective and difficult-to-enforce mask mandates on children. Even left-wing publications now openly acknowledge Covid school closures were unnecessary and disastrous for America’s kids, but by the time they found the courage to say what was abundantly obvious to the rest of us, the damage was done.

The bottom line is that the Covid response fundamentally eroded trust between citizens and the government like no other issue in generations, and Democrat lawmakers were pretty clearly on, as they like to say, “the wrong side of history.”

Of course, the school closures issue was just emblematic of the long-running decline of American education, which is almost wholly a result of teachers unions. Their enormous donations to Democrats effectively serve as protection money, and for decades, this unholy alliance effectively made even the most basic education reforms impossible.

Post-Covid, however, Americans who were forced to see what their kids were learning via remote schooling have largely woken up to the fact that education has been politicized beyond repair. In just the last three years, West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana have all passed school-choice legislation, and more states such as Texas are likely to enact it soon. The good news is homeschooling is skyrocketing in popularity, and private and religious schools are popping up everywhere.

Read the whole thing, including Hemingway’s conclusion that “Abortion is almost the sole issue where things are complicated for the right, and we probably shouldn’t underestimate the Republican Party’s ability to lose winnable elections,” so don’t get cocky, to coin an Insta-phrase. On the other hand, if he’s looking for a campaign theme, perhaps Trump should borrow from Kingsley Amis’ suggestion that Robert Conquest’s history of the Soviet Union deserved to be retitled, “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”

(Though he’d have to be awfully sotto voce about his role in the Covid lockdowns and then freaking out over red states opening up first, of course.)

And on the gripping hand, Jim Treacher writes: “If you’re stressed out about the election, now that it’s too late for either party* to pick an acceptable candidate, you just need to relax. My friend Jarvis has the right idea:”

As Treacher concludes, “It’s a win/win. No matter what happens, I will be swimming in schadenfreude. So I got that goin’ for me.”

*Bob Torricelli smiles.

FREE SPEECH, REALLY? Excellent roundup by Nick Givas of Just the News of the recent revelations from the Twitter Files of the multiple ways in which Big Government and Big Tech cooperated in suppressing unapproved speech.

And Givas quotes this from former New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli:

“We’ve entered into this period of American history where the range of permissible thought and speech has so narrowed that if you depart from it at all you are, you’re labeled, you are censored, and you are silenced. It’s incredibly dangerous.

“And the odd thing about it is the very institutions which have been the safeguard of American free thought and speech — American universities, think tanks, the media — are the worst offenders.”

Instapunditeers will recall that Torricelli’s departure from the Senate was not a happy one, dropping his re-election bid in 2002 amid accusations of corruption. Perhaps with time has come new wisdom?

THE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE TWINS: Panic in the Fetterman Camp.

“After my stroke,” Fetterman opens, “I was just grateful to see Giselle and my kids.” In the soft-focus spot, Fetterman denounces “politicians” who “spend so much time fighting about the things that don’t matter.” What does matter, says Fetterman, is having the economic security to be able to spend time with loved ones because we never know how much time we have.

It’s a touching message, but it hardly allays concerns about Fetterman’s ailments. The point of an ad like this is to “hang a lantern” on the candidate’s negatives, thereby reframing the issue in more favorable terms. That’s a workable strategy, but it comes at the cost of conceding that the negative in question is a real and pressing concern for voters.

More ominously, from the perspective of Pennsylvania’s Democratic voters, is the prospect of President Joe Biden’s imminent return to the state.

As the midterm election season heads into the home stretch, the president will host a fundraiser in Pennsylvania alongside Fetterman. Biden hasn’t been seen with Fetterman in any capacity since September 5; indeed, the president hasn’t campaigned much at all of late. “Biden doesn’t appear eager to land Air Force One in states where he’s underwater in the polls, and incumbent Democratic senators are fighting to hang on,” Axios reported on Friday. “And he’s yet to headline any campaign rallies this month where he is in front of big audiences to make his closing argument.” Pennsylvania is just such a state where Biden’s presence could do more to harm than good for Democratic prospects.

September’s Franklin & Marshall Poll of the Keystone State showed that only 28 percent of Pennsylvania’s registered voters say the president is doing a “good” or “excellent” job. Seventy percent describe his performance in office as “fair” or “poor.” While that poll showed the race for Senate tightening significantly from August, Fetterman maintains a narrow lead over his Republican opponent. Moreover, the Fetterman campaign has outraised and continues to outspend Mehmet Oz, who has pumped at least $17 million of his own wealth into his campaign. The wisdom of the Fetterman camp’s decision to tether itself to the Democratic Party’s unpopular figurehead is questionable unless we assume that Democratic wallets are starting to tighten up as enthusiasm for the candidate wanes.

The media are doing all that they can to bail Captain Pike out: Rolling Stone: Gisele Fetterman became the “de facto candidate” after husband’s stroke.

As Michael Graham wrote in 2004 after Frank Lautenberg was swapped in to replace Bob Torricelli on the Democrats’ Senate ticket in NJ, “Don’t assume you know who’s on the Democratic ticket until Election Day.”

IT’S NOT A TUMAH — Maybe: So we’ve finally seen Senate candidate John Fetterman’s neck since his stroke and the internet has questions … and a whole lotta memes.

Related: Fetterman’s 9/11 Abortion Rally Is His Most Disturbing Performance Yet. “You really have to press play on the clip and watch it to understand just how bad it is because it is that bad. This is not a man who is well enough to be a US Senator, and there are no signs that he’s getting any better. In fact, I would suggest that he’s in worse condition now than he was a month ago.”

Bob Torricelli, tanned, rested, and ready!

WHY, INDEED? NYT: Say, why is Biden being so “cagey” about his health?

More interestingly, why is the NYT raising it now? Is there a last minute move to pull a Torricelli with Biden?

BIDEN WOWS MSM!

● It is far too early for Democrats to panic over Biden.

—Karen Tumulty, Washington Post, Friday.

● Biden’s Virtual Campaign Is a Disaster.

—Andrew Ferguson, the Atlantic, Friday.

● Biden campaign doesn’t consider Latinos ‘part of their path to victory,’ political operatives say.

—Kathryn Krawczyk, the Week, Thursday.

Unlike Roger Simon, I think it’s way too soon, given the craziness that is 2020, to go with “Why Joe Biden and the Democrats Are Going to Lose Big” headlines. Or to even assume Biden will be on the ticket come November. (Bob Torricelli, tanned rested and ready!) But the above headlines are a far cry from the hagiographic prose that Obama and Hillary were receiving about this time in the election cycle.

NICE COLUMN, KID. DON’T GET COCKY. Stacy McCain: Has Trump Already Won Reelection?

Ever since President Trump was elected, conservatives have nervously watched the poll numbers to see whether constant attacks from Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) were damaging the president’s popularity among his core constituency. Of course, Trump has sometimes suffered from self-inflicted damage — at times, he is his own worst enemy — but never in recent history has any president faced such unrelenting opposition from the moment of his election.

Trump’s shocking 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton, which contradicted nearly every expert forecast, triggered a series of events that included the “Russiagate” investigation, the Democrats’ takeover of the House in the 2018 midterm election, and Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment proceeding against the president that culminated in his acquittal in February. As soon as that crisis ended, Trump was immediately plunged into the COVID-19 emergency, in which his leadership was questioned and the strongest suit of his reelection platform, a robust economic performance, melted down in the span of a few days. Throughout his term, the major national news media have worked hand-in-glove with Democrats to treat Trump as an enemy to democracy itself, with journalists enlisted as part of the “resistance” to the president’s alleged authoritarianism.

Because all of this is so unprecedented, no one had any idea what the ultimate result might be, and many pundits who succumbed to poll-gazing obsession were inclined to believe two things: First, that Trump, who fell short of a popular-vote majority in 2016, faced an uphill challenge to win reelection in 2020; and second, that Joe Biden was the Democrat best qualified to beat Trump. Both these beliefs might yet prove true, but there is evidence that the poll-gazing pundits are as wrong now as they were four years ago. In fact, Trump’s reelection could already be a near certainty, and the establishment Democrats who lined up behind Biden’s candidacy may be leading their party to a landslide defeat in November.

There’s a good argument that Joe Biden is Bob Dole without the war heroism, the legislative achievements, the dry sense of humor, or the ability to speak in complete sentences. But everything is up in the air, and there’s a good chance that the Democrats will try to pull a Torricelli and replace Biden at the last minute.

WEEKEND AT BIDEN’S: The Democrat’s mental decline is a bigger problem than sex accusations.

Sleepy Joe has spent the past six weeks quarantined in his basement in Delaware, but if he’s really going to be the Democrats’ nominee, he’ll have to go out on the campaign trail sooner or later, and eventually face Trump on the debate stage. Does anyone really believe Biden is up to such a challenge? Or is this campaign turning into a dark comedy we might call “Weekend at Biden’s”? Given the probability that such a farce would conclude with Trump’s reelection, Democrats might yet decide to rewrite the script.

Related: NYT op-ed: Time for a “plan B” that doesn’t include Biden.

As Michael Graham wrote in 2004 after Frank Lautenberg was swapped in to replace Bob Torricelli on the Democrats’ Senate ticket in NJ, “Don’t assume you know who’s on the Democratic ticket until Election Day.”

MORE ON MILBERG, WEISS, in The New York Times. “Last year, the firm was indicted on federal charges of fraud and bribery. But the political partnership has not been entirely severed. Since the indictment, 26 Democrats around the country, including four presidential candidates, have accepted $150,000 in campaign contributions from people connected to Milberg Weiss, according to state and federal campaign finance records. And some Democrats have taken public actions that potentially helped the firm or its former partners. . . . Beyond campaign contributions, Milberg Weiss became deeply ingrained in the financial firmament of the Democratic Party in other ways. Members of the firm gave $500,000 toward construction of a new Democratic National Committee headquarters, and some of them became partners in a private investment venture with several prominent Democrats. They included former Senator Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey, who is a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton, and Leonard Barrack, a Philadelphia trial lawyer who was once the national fund-raising chairman for the Democratic Party. . . . The firm found a friend in President Bill Clinton, who, a few days after being seen chatting and shaking hands with Mr. Lerach at a White House dinner in 1995, vetoed legislation to make it more difficult to sue for damages in injury cases. Congress overrode the veto, but the image remained of a close relationship between the president and Mr. Lerach, a Lincoln Bedroom guest during the Clinton presidency who donated more than $100,000 to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.”

A NEW JERSEY SWITCHEROO:

For pure entertainment value, not much can compete with the blood sport of New Jersey politics. Last week federal investigators launched a probe into whether U.S. Senator Robert Menendez illegally benefited to the tune of more than $300,000 from a rental-income deal he had with a nonprofit agency that received millions of dollars in federal contracts. Even liberal good government groups agree that the relationship may have violated congressional conflict-of-interest rules.

The allegations have sparked a mini-panic among state Democratic operatives, who not so long ago thought Mr. Menendez — who was appointed by Jon Corzine to complete his Senate term after being elected Governor in 2005 — had the November election in the bag. Now they see Republican Tom Kean Jr. surging into a lead. If Republicans were to pick up a seat in this deep blue state, Democrats’ chances of winning control of the Senate would be all but slammed shut.

That’s why, as reported by the Newark Star-Ledger, there’s now widespread speculation that the party brass may decide to throw Mr. Menendez overboard and replace him with an alternative — nine-term Rep. Rob Andrews, perhaps — who is regarded as more electable. This has become a familiar practice in the Garden State and has become known derisively as the New Jersey Switcheroo. . . .

If this story seems like déjà vu all over again, it should. This isn’t the first time New Jersey Democrats have nominated ethically challenged candidates for high office. Last year Jim McGreevey resigned the governorship after he hired his gay lover as the state’s national security director. In 2002, Senator Robert Torricelli was implicated in a bribery and campaign finance scandal, prompting the party oligarchs to throw him off the ballot and handpick Frank Lautenberg as his replacement on the ticket. Never mind that the deadline for ballot changes had passed. Senator Lautenberg kept the Senate seat from falling into Republican hands.

You’d think that the Jersey Democrats might try nominating people who aren’t crooks.

A LOT OF PEOPLE EMAILED ME about irregularities in John Kerry’s citations, including the fact that his Silver Star citation was signed by John Lehman, who wasn’t Navy Secretary until the Reagan Administration. I put it down to some sort of paperwork mixup (I didn’t even link this piece when everyone was sending it to me).

But now the Chicago Sun-Times’ Thomas Lipscomb, who had an article on those records yesterday, has another article out today, quoting Lehman as saying that the whole thing’s a “total mystery” to him. (“It is a total mystery to me. I never saw it. I never signed it. I never approved it. And the additional language it contains was not written by me.”)

I think it’s far too early to speculate, as some readers are, that this is a case of fraud or forgery, and it’s entirely possible that there’s an innocent explanation, but I’m glad that someone with Big Media resources is looking into it. It’s puzzling that Kerry hasn’t simply released all his military records to clear up these questions. Nonetheless, I continue to regard the medals issue as a distraction, though perhaps a better-founded one, on closer examination, than I had originally thought.

UPDATE: Reader Andrew Lloyd emails:

When I got a law school transcript reissued to me a couple of years ago, it was certified by someone who wasn’t the registrar when I was there. That doesn’t mean I didn’t graduate in 1997 because someone else signed it in 2002.

I don’t know Navy process, but Kerry may have asked for a new certification in the 1980’s, and Lehman’s signature may have ended up on it as a matter of course.

See, that’s what I thought initially. But the language of the citation also changed, suggesting that it’s not a simple clerical thing. What’s more the “V” on the silver star doesn’t exist. You’d certainly be suspicious of a transcript with a different signature and different grades. Or of a Yale Law School transcript from recent years that showed an A+ average (Since Yale doesn’t have those letter grades). . . To the extent that analogy applies, anyway.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey:

Just when I think this story may lose momentum, it just grows new legs. The Torricelli option continues to beckon the Democrats the longer Kerry refuses to release all the records and put an end to all the speculation.

Meanwhile, ABC’s The Note is looking to the future:

The new joke in Washington — told by all gallows, quasi-panicked Democrats — goes like this:

“John Kerry read in The Note that this was his race to lose, and he’s giving it his best shot.”

Someday, Karl Rove’s precocious grandchildren will say to him, “Grandpapa, what’s it like to run a presidential campaign against an opponent who has had his own background thoroughly researched well before the general election; who is broadly personable and possessed of great campaign skills; and who projects an image of constancy?”

To which Grandpapa Rove will reply, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

(Via Power Line.) Somehow, though, “Grandpa Rove” makes me think of Grandpa Munster, but they’re in different parties.

MORE: This John Kerry timeline may be useful in keeping track of what happened — or didn’t happen — when.

More observations here, making me wonder if Kerry didn’t order duplicates and get “crosstalk” between the Bronze and Silver Star citations.

STILL MORE: Meanwhile, Matt Rustler is looking into questions about Bush’s medals. Bush had medals? Well, that’s the question. No clear answer yet, but we do learn that Mark Kleiman is now getting his stuff from Democratic Underground, which is informative in itself. And certainly Rustler’s inquiry is more searching than anything the left side of the blogosphere — including Kleiman — engaged in when the Kerry / Cambodia story was appearing.

KERRY THE “MOST LIBERAL SENATOR?” Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler thinks that the press is giving Republicans a free ride on this issue. He’s probably right about that — though he’d be more persuasive if he’d provide a list of senators that he thinks are to the left of Kerry.

UPDATE: A different take on the just how liberal is John Kerry question, from Stephen Bainbridge, who compares Kerry’s record with Paul Wellstone’s. “So if Kerry and Wellstone were so close in score, did that make Kerry a ‘Wellstone liberal’ or Wellstone a ‘Kerry liberal’? Either way, they were both pretty far out of the mainstream.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Kastellec rises to the challenge, sending this:

I’m taking up your challenge to see how many senators are more liberal than Kerry. The following are NOMINATE ratings compiled by Professor Keith Poole (available at Link, along with a description of how they are calculated). While the method use to calculate them is complicated, they are basically measures of liberalism-conservatism based on a Congressman’s entire career, not just on one Congress as the flawed National Journal ratings are. Because they incorporate all nonunaminous vote and are not biased by absention, NOMINATE scores are considered far superior to interest group ratings.

The scores range from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most liberal). Below are ratings for all the senators of the 107th Congress (sorry for the poor formating), ranking from most liberal to most conservative. You can see that 15 Democrats are to the left of Kerry, which means that while he is by no means a conservative Democrat, he is not on the fringe of the party, and is clearly not the most liberal senator. Edwards, meannwhile, is well toward the moderate wing of the party, belying claims of his liberal extremism.

Click “more” for, er, more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oliver Willis — earning his pay from David Brock — sends this link, and this one, too. Gosh, you’d think that being “liberal” was bad or something!

And I still think Oliver belongs on TV.

(more…)

HERE, VIA HOWARD BASHMAN, is a link to the Republicans’ petition for Supreme Court review of the New Jersey decision.

VIRGINIA POSTREL likens the New Jersey decision to “Calvinball” and asks:

If they’re so worried about giving the voters “the choice they deserve,” where were the New Jersey Supreme Court and the NYT in 1984, when my ballot offered the choice (I am not making this up) between Tip O’Neill and a Communist?

Howard Kurtz, meanwhile, observes that:

Bob Torricelli is no longer a New Jersey issue.

He’s an albatross that conservatives want to hang around the neck of every breathing Democrat.

He’s their new symbol of self-indulgent sleaze, rule-bending and evading responsibility.

Judging by what I heard of Neal Boortz’s show on my drive into the office, I’d say he’s right.

PATRICK RUFFINI thinks that Forrester can still win in New Jersey. Reason: “On the whole, Lautenberg has been a pretty lousy politician.”

Yes, Forrester’s big advantage has been that he’s Mr. Not Torricelli. But, of course, that’s Lautenberg’s main claim to fame, too. Yeah, he used to be a Senator, but, well, that can cut both ways.

Ruffini has a lot more analysis. Check it out.

MICHAEL KELLY is landing one more blow on Al Gore:

There was Al Gore, telling the world that the killers of Sept. 11 had “gotten away with it” and broadly (if, in his trademark weaselly fashion, coyly) suggesting that the president of the United States was pursuing war for the selfish purpose of winning votes in November. Two days later, there was Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle picking up on Gore’s repulsive slander and vastly amplifying it on the floor of the Senate. A few days later, there was House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt, in a mostly reasonable op-ed column, echoing the calumny: “President Bush himself has decided to play politics with the safety and security of the American people.”

And, last Sunday, there were — most memorably, most indefensibly, most obscenely — two Democratic congressmen, former whip David E. Bonior of Michigan and Jim McDermott of Washington, beamed live from Baghdad, to literally parrot Hussein’s line — to tell Americans that, as McDermott said, “the president would mislead the American people” in order to get his war, but that, by contrast, “you have to take the Iraqis on their value, at their face value.”

This is not a little cabal of contributors to the Nation telling the world that the American president is not to be believed and that he wishes to send Americans off to fight and possibly die in Iraq because war is good for his party. These are men in the leadership ranks of the Democratic Party. This is the party’s mainstream. This is what it, again, has revealed itself to be. Parties do the darnedest things. To themselves.

I think that some Democrats were hoping the Torricelli flap would at least push these things out of the news. Hasn’t happened yet. As I said Monday: What were they thinking?

SHILOH BUCHER explains why she’s leaving the Democrats behind:

What kills me is that being a Democrat means never having to pay for a mistake. The New Jersey Democratic Party knew all about the allegations against Torricelli when they nominated him. On the last legal day to change the ballot, they gambled that they had a better chance with Torricelli than with anyone else. Now they suspect they were wrong.

Sentiments like these may be the most potent check on the doings of both parties in New Jersey, and elsewhere.

UPDATE: Or maybe not. But here’s another former Gore voter’s perspective.