Obamacare To Hike State Taxes

Remember when the Obamunists claimed that their health care plan would allow you to keep your current insurance if you liked it, AND insure all the uninsured, AND would somehow save money and lower costs?

Well, gee, they lied. Here is a math problem for you: Assume that the legislation establishing government control of medical care is passed and that it "brings down the cost of medical care." You pay $500 a year less for your medical care, but the new costs put on employers is passed on to consumers, so that you pay $300 a year more for groceries and $200 a year more for gasoline, while the new mandates put on insurance companies raise your premiums by $300 a year, how much money have you saved?

While Obama has been at great pains to make a show of avoiding taxes on the middle class to pay for his health care changes, his proposed increase in Medicaid eligibility will have a huge impact on the 39 states whose income cutoffs for the program are below those required in the new federal legislation.

All states except for Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Wisconsin (plus the District of Colombia) will have to raise their eligibility for Medicaid under the Senate health care bill. And they will have to pay for part of the cost. Under the House bill, with a higher Medicaid eligibility standard, Massachusetts and Vermont would also have to pay more.

The magnitude of the new Medicaid spending required by Obamacare is such as to transform the nature of state finances. A large part of the reason that some states, particularly in the South, have been able to avoid higher taxes is because they have chosen to keep down the Medicaid eligibility level.

The hardest hit states would be Texas ($2.8 billion in extra state spending), Pennsylvania ($1.5 billion), California ($1.4 billion) and Florida ($909 million). Who knows if Florida could avoid imposing an income tax if it has to meet so high an unfunded mandate?
The Medicaid expansion provisions of the Senate bill are complex. In the first year of the program (2013), states must enroll anyone who earns less than 133 percent of the poverty level in their programs. For a family of four, the national average poverty level in 2009 is $22,000 a year. So any family that size that makes less than $29,000 would be eligible for Medicaid. Many states, particularly in the South, actually have Medicaid cutoffs that are below the poverty level. Arkansas, for example, cuts off its Medicaid eligibility at only 17 percent of the poverty level, and in Louisiana, it goes up to only 26 percent. For these states, the spending increase required by the new bill is huge.

For the first three years of the program (2013-2015), the federal government would pay for all of the costs of the Medicaid expansion. But, starting in the fourth year of operation — 2016 — the average state would be obliged to pay 10 percent of the extra cost.

The following chart indicates the amount of new state money each of the 39 affected states would have to come up with apart from federal aid to cover the unfunded mandate in the Baucus or Senate version of the health care bill:

STATE SPENDING INCREASES IN MEDICAID REQUIRED BY SENATE HEALTH BILL (in millions of dollars)
Alabama $394
Alaska 39
Arizona 217
Arkansas 402
California 1,428
Colorado 163
Delaware 35
Florida 909
Georgia 495
Hawaii 41
Idaho 97
Iowa 77
Indiana 586
Kansas 186
Kentucky 199
Louisiana 432
Maryland 194
Michigan 570
Mississippi 136
Missouri 836
Montana 29
Nebraska 81
Nevada 54
New Hampshire 59
New Mexico 102
North Carolina 599
North Dakota 14
Ohio 399
Oklahoma 190
Oregon 231
Pennsylvania 1,490
South Carolina 122
South Dakota 33
Texas 2,749
Utah 58
Virginia 601
Wash State 311
West Virginia 132
Wyoming 25

Global Warming Ate My Homework!

100 events attributed to man made global warming. Never mind the contradictions, non-sequiturs or other absurdities:

Late for a party? Miss a meeting? Forget to pay your rent? Blame climate change; everyone else is doing it. From an increase in severe acne to all societal collapses since the beginning of time, just about everything gone wrong in the world today can be attributed to climate change. Here’s a list of 100 storylines blaming climate change as the problem.
1. The deaths of Aspen trees in the West
2. Incredible shrinking sheep
3. Caribbean coral deaths
4. Eskimos forced to leave their village
5. Disappearing lake in Chile
6. Early heat wave in Vietnam
7. Malaria and water-borne diseases in Africa
8. Invasion of jellyfish in the Mediterranean
9. Break in the Arctic Ice Shelf
10. Monsoons in India
11. Birds laying their eggs early
12. 160,000 deaths a year
13. 315,000 deaths a year
14. 300,000 deaths a year
15. Decline in snowpack in the West
16. Deaths of walruses in Alaska
17. Hunger in Nepal
18. The appearance of oxygen-starved dead zones in the oceans
19. Surge in fatal shark attacks
20. Increasing number of typhoid cases in the Philippines
21. Boy Scout tornado deaths
22. Rise in asthma and hayfever
23. Duller fall foliage in 2007
24. Floods in Jakarta
25. Radical ecological shift in the North Sea
26. Snowfall in Baghdad
27. Western tree deaths
28. Diminishing desert resources
29. Pine beetles
30. Swedish beetles
31. Severe acne
32. Global conflict
33. Crash of Air France 447
34. Black Hawk Down incident
35. Amphibians breeding earlier
36. Flesh-eating disease
37. Global cooling
38. Bird strikes on US Airways 1549
39. Beer tastes different
40. Cougar attacks in Alberta
41. Suicide of farmers in Australia
42. Squirrels reproduce earlier
43. Monkeys moving to Great Rift Valley in Kenya
44. Confusion of migrating birds
45. Bigger tuna fish
46. Water shortages in Las Vegas
47. Worldwide hunger
48. Longer days
49. Earth spinning faster
50. Gender balance of crocodiles
51. Skin cancer deaths in UK
52. Increase in kidney stones in India
53. Penguin chicks frozen by global warming
54. Deaths of Minnesota moose
55. Increased threat of HIV/AIDS in developing countries
56. Increase of wasps in Alaska
57. Killer stingrays off British coasts
58. All societal collapses since the beginning of time
59. Bigger spiders
60. Increase in size of giant squid
61. Increase of orchids in UK
62. Collapse of gingerbread houses in Sweden
63. Cow infertility
64. Conflict in Darfur
65. Bluetongue outbreak in UK cows
66. Worldwide wars
67. Insomnia of children worried about global warming
68. Anxiety problems for people worried about climate change
69. Migration of cockroaches
70. Taller mountains due to melting glaciers
71. Drowning of four polar bears
72. UFO sightings in the UK
73. Hurricane Katrina
74. Greener mountains in Sweden
75. Decreased maple in maple trees
76. Cold wave in India
77. Worse traffic in LA because immigrants moving north
78. Increase in heart attacks and strokes
79. Rise in insurance premiums
80. Invasion of European species of earthworm in UK
81. Cold spells in Australia
82. Increase in crime
83. Boiling oceans
84. Grizzly deaths
85. Dengue fever
86. Lack of monsoons
87. Caterpillars devouring 45 towns in Liberia
88. Acid rain recovery
89. Global wheat shortage; food price hikes
90. Extinction of 13 species in Bangladesh
91. Changes in swan migration patterns in Siberia
92. The early arrival of Turkey’s endangered caretta carettas
93. Radical North Sea shift
94. Heroin addiction
95. Plant species climbing up mountains
96. Deadly fires in Australia
97. Droughts in Australia
98. The demise of California’s agriculture by the end of the century
99. Tsunami in South East Asia
100. Fashion victim: the death of the winter wardrobe

And the list goes on. The truth is climate change is causing some of these events, but the earth’s average temperature has been increasing and decreasing since the beginning of time. Maybe the increase in UFO sightings can’t be pinpointed to climate change but certainly animals will adapt to new habitats as the climate changes. But climate change and adaptation to it is nothing new. There’s an underlying assumption that human activity is causing the climate to change in many of these stories, but the scientific consensus on what causes climate change is anything but a consensus. Temperatures have risen and fallen many times before and the earth was cooling as recently as the period from the 1940s to the 1970s giving rise to fears of a coming ice age:

“At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

The other implication of this list is that a reduction in Co2 with cap and trade policies like Waxman-Markey and Boxer-Kerry will cure problems as disparate as hurricanes, wars, crime, hunger and…cow infertility. The problem is that no one can actually claim that a reduction of Co2 will prevent these occurrences; one can only speculate that they will be worse in a world that has more rather than less Co2. Given cap and trade’s massive economic consequences and negligible effects on the earth’s temperature, this is a bold and potentially very costly speculation.

Socialized Medicine: The battle begins....

Saturday night, all 58 Democrats and 2 Independents in the U.S. Senate voted to bring H.R. 3590, the government healthcare takeover bill, to the floor for a debate and possible amendments after Thanksgiving. It was the bare minimum to achieve the 3/5ths majority. The senators are now flying to their home districts for a weeklong vacation.

Whenever that final debate occurs, it will take another 60 votes to invoke "cloture" to end that debate. The good news is several senators who voted "aye" to allow debate say they will kill the bill unless the "public option," the very foundation of the legislation, is removed.

ACTION: Thank you to everyone who called, emailed and faxed senators to oppose government-controlled healthcare. Now, please call and protest at the district offices of your U.S. senator and other U.S. senators -- especially the swing votes (Democrats Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and Independent Joe Lieberman) -- to express your deep concern.

The key vote will be on shutting down a Republican filibuster of the ObamaCare bill, HR 3590. In the Senate, we are faced with a health care bill that:

* Costs $2.5 trillion during its first ten years of full implementation (2014-2023);

* Increases insurance premiums and imposes $376 billion in tax increases -- many on the middle class; and

* Cuts Medicare by $465 billion, while increasing health costs by over $100 billion.

The word "tax" appears 183 times in the latest health care bill. Is Obama serious? Is that what he and Reid want to do to us in the midst of a recession?

Of course, all this increased spending -- and taxes -- means that you will have less money to spend on providing for your family and/or pursuing your real passions.

The strategy in the Senate is to cram this bill down the American people's throats before we have a chance to fully read and evaluate it.

Do you want left-wing bureaucrats appointed by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid determining whether you should own a gun via the health care system?

Remember, H.R. 3590 would increase insurance premiums, increase taxes, costs $2.5 TRILLION over 10 years, imposes an individual mandate that everyone buy health insurance, launches a federal "abortion insurance" program, cuts and restricts MediCare, and would result in rationing.

The Democrats' plan would NOT increase affordability or portability of health insurance. NOR would it restrain frivolous medical lawsuits that have been driving up doctor's insurance and insurance premiums over the last several years. NOR would it reward, instead of financially punish, consumers who live healthy lifestyles.

Criminalizing Health Care Freedom

Courtesy of the Heritage Foundation and Real Clear Politics:

The "reformers" in the White House and the House of Representatives have made all too plain their vision of the federal government's power to coerce individual Americans to make the "right" health-care choices. The highly partisan bill the House just passed includes severe penalties for individuals who do not purchase insurance approved by the federal government. By neatly tucking these penalties into the IRS code, the so-called reformers have brought them under the tax-enforcement power of the federal government.

The Congressional Budget Office stated on October 29 that the House bill would generate $167 billion in revenue from "penalty payments." Individual Americans are expected to pay $33 billion of these penalties, with employers paying the rest. Former member of Congress and Heritage Foundation fellow Ernest Istook has concluded that for this revenue goal to be met, 8 to 14 million individual Americans will have to be fined over the next ten years, quite an incentive for federal bureaucrats.

Who will be included among those subject to civil and criminal penalties if this provision becomes law? For starters, any family of four whose combined income in 2016 is above $102,100 ($88,200 in today's dollars) and that chooses to pay all its medical expenses out of pocket rather than pay the $15,000 a year that the CBO says will be the lowest-priced insurance option for families. Also any healthy twentysomething in a city with high costs of living who chooses to take the risk of going uninsured. And by outlawing the popular high-deductible plans that are currently among the lowest-cost health-insurance solutions, the new law would only increase the number of Americans on the rolls of those who cannot afford insurance. The CBO itself estimates that at least 18 million Americans will still be uninsured in 2016.

The fact that the penalties for noncompliance are enforceable by criminal prosecution is a chilling abuse of the prosecutorial power, which Columbia law professor Herbert Wechsler pointed out 50 years ago is the greatest power that any government uses against its citizens. Using it to enforce one particular notion of appropriate insurance coverage is nothing less than a tyrannical assertion of raw government power over the private lives and economic rights of individual Americans.

How would the penalties work? As a starting point, taxpaying Americans who do not satisfy the law's insurance requirement would be penalized on their federal income-tax returns. Their tax burden would be increased by the lesser of (a) the amount the government decides they should pay for government-mandated health coverage or (b) 2.5 percent of their adjusted income above a filing threshold. An otherwise law-abiding American who fails to pay this "tax penalty" could be criminally prosecuted and sentenced to a year in prison if the feds deem his refusal to be a misdemeanor.

Worse, if the feds decide the refusal is felonious, the culprit may spend five years in federal prison and be fined up to $250,000. You could end up in a cell in Leavenworth even if you have paid all your family's medical bills yourself. 

By transforming a refusal or failure to comply with a government mandate into a federal tax violation, the "progressives" are using the brute force of criminal law to engage in social engineering. This represents an oppressive, absolutist view of government power.
What does President Obama think of the criminalization of Americans' economic choices? He trivialized the issue when he told ABC's Sunlen Miller he didn't think the question of the appropriateness of possible jail time is the "biggest question" the House and Senate are facing right now.

We beg to differ.

The idea of imprisoning or fining Americans who don't knuckle under to an unprecedented government mandate to purchase a particular insurance product should outrage anyone who believes in the exceptional promises and opportunities afforded by our basic American freedoms. The idea isn't progressive but highly regressive, the equivalent of reinstituting debtors' prisons, a punishment Americans eliminated 160 years ago.

Of course, the prospect of winding up in prison for failing to maintain government-mandated insurance may be of no personal concern to the president or members of Congress. They each receive a Cadillac version of health-care coverage funded by those same American taxpayers who, in the reformers' vision, will be federal criminals if they have the audacity to make their own decisions about medical insurance.

Badly needed for 2010: Contract With America 2.0

What needs to be in Version 2.0?

1. Border Wall all the way from San Diego to Brownsville.

2. Illegal immigration halted and reversed. NO amnesty ever again. We will have to tell the soft bigots of low expectations like Lindsey Grahamnesty to shut up, and wheel off Juan McLame to the retirement home.

3. Legal Immigration curtailment. Make skills, not family reunification, paramount. End "diversity lotteries" that treat US citizenship like the prize behind Curtain #1 on "Let's Make A Deal".

4. ALL of the various market oriented health care reforms proposed by The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, etc. Make that guy who runs Whole Foods our Joe The Plumber 2.0. (And why in the hell wasn't any of this done back when the GOP ran the House? Didn't Hillary's attempt to pussy-whip us into socialized medicine back in 1993 wake up anyone in the GOP?)

5. Drill here, Drill now. Debunk Climate Fraud for what it is.

Feel free to add to the list.

A Democrat Party Cure For Constipation

Hero?

A man is visiting the zoo and observing the lion's pen area when he sees a little girl leaning too far over the safety rails and into the lion's pen. Suddenly, a lion jumps upward, grabs the little girl by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her over the safety rails and down inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.

The man quickly runs to the safety rail and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.

Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly. A reporter has watched the whole event.

The reporter addressing the man says, 'Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I've seen a man do in my whole life.'

The man replies, 'Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger and acted as I felt right.'

The reporter says, 'Well, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, you know, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page... So, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?'

The man replies, 'I'm an account executive, a former soldier and a Republican.' The journalist leaves.

The following morning the man buys the paper to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on the front page:

WHITE BUSINESSMAN ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT, STEALS HIS LUNCH
 *Ex-Military man with anger issues?*
That pretty much sums up the media's approach to the news these days.

The Coming California Water Rip-Off

The California Legislature and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have approved a convoluted “water deal” that is supposed to quench the thirst of California individuals, farmers and local governments.

Yet beyond the hype, this water deal — which goes to the voters on the November 2010 ballot – will not build more dams and doesn’t fix California’s worsening water crisis. At its core, the water deal is fiscally irresponsible. It would mean more bureaucracy and more government ownership of land. It would actually remove existing dams without providing guarantees to build new ones. It gives $6.4 BILLION in our taxpayer dollars to liberal environmentalists’ projects. And it raises the price of water on us all, taxing us for alleged "overuse".

Sacramento’s bad water deal will raise your rates if you have a yard or children. Regular users will suffer, the government will control more land, and the environmental wackos will control more government. Why don’t we have enough water? It because, under pressure from utopia-seeking "Wild and scenic river" environmentalist groups, the liberal Democrats who run the California Legislature and our RINO Republican governor refuse to build more dams to store water year-round.

Having water throughout the year requires storage during the dry months. Yet California hasn’t built a new dam since 1968, despite the population doubling since that time. What’s in the new water plan you get to vote on next year? Pork for the same environmental groups that oppose new dams!

Here is what the water deal claims about itself, followed by what will really happen:

1. “Authorizes an $11.14 billion bond measure to pay for dams, underground water banking, water recycling, Delta restoration and dozens of regional projects.”

Sounds good, right? But BONDS ARE NOT FREE MONEY. We cannot afford another $11.14 billion in debt, which will cost more than twice that amount to repay. Unlike the federal government, California has no way to print money or inflate away the value of its debt; we have no choice but to pay back every penny, with interest. Even if there are catastrophes and crises in the future, we still need to pay back this pork-barrel bond first. That is fiscally irresponsible.

2. “Provide assurances about a proposed Delta water diversion canal. It would prevent the Department of Water Resources from starting construction until the Water Resources Control Board approves a diversion permit for the project....That diversion permit must specify ‘flow criteria’ that set new stream-flow requirements to improve Delta habitat.....Water contractors must sign contracts to pay for the canal project and to offset property tax losses to Delta counties.....The canal, as proposed by the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, must help endangered species recover, as required by the Natural Communities Conservation Plan, a higher standard than species protection, called for by current federal rules. Without this enhanced standard, state funding can’t flow.”

Despite all the hype, this bond does not authorize or require the construction of the peripheral canal. Like a magician re-directing the public’s attention while secretly pulling a “magic” coin from his pocket, this water bond is designed to trick both sides into seeing what they want to see about the peripheral canal. People who want the canal think that this bond will smooth the way for it, even though it does very little to accomplish that goal. People who don’t want the canal think that the bond deal will kill it by placing even more legal obstacles to prevent its construction. The former are wrong, the latter are correct.

3. "Create new Delta Stewardship Council, which must prepare a comprehensive, long-term ‘Delta Plan’ by Jan. 1, 2012. The council can require state agencies to follow the Delta Plan....Reform the existing Delta Protection Commission so that it expands Delta recreation; promotes agriculture; seeks federal status for the Delta as a ‘place of special significance’; and promotes emergency preparedness, appropriate land use and strategic levee investments.”

THERE IS ALREADY A DELTA PROTECTION COMMISSION; WHY IN THE HELL DO WE NEED A DELTA STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL??? This horrible deal creates a new layer of government, which will not only waste taxpayers’ money, it will make it more difficult to resolve our water problems because there will be one more hurdle to getting anything done.

4. “Create Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy, which will receive funds and make grants for habitat restoration activities from a pool of $2 billion set aside for Delta sustainability, restoration and conservation projects. This can include flood protection projects and ecosystem restoration associated with Bay Delta Conservation Plan. However, no bond money may be used for canal planning, construction, operation, maintenance.”

Yet another duplicative layer of government! This new conservancy guarantees that there will be yet another agency to create new hurdles to prevent common sense solutions to our water problems. What is worse, the primary mission of this new Conservancy is to acquire even more public lands in a state where three-fifths of the land is already owned by federal or state government. Only about 8% of our state is currently available for development, but the Legislature is creating another Conservancy to put even more land off limits to economic activity. If history repeats itself, this new Conservancy will squander taxpayers’ money to purchase private land from special interests at inflated prices, and then barbed wire fences will be erected to keep the public off lands that they paid for. (Anyone who is not familiar with this process should visit the huge tracks of public lands that were acquired several years ago in the Sutter Buttes in Colusa County. Aside from the millions spent to acquire the land from private owners, the state’s only “investment” in the last few years has been to install locked gates and “Keep Out” signs.)

5. “Provide $400 million for ‘drought relief’ that may pay cities for water that’s instead used to improve Delta flows; $250 million for a Klamath River dam removal project (plus up to $20 million to offset Siskiyou County economic impacts); $60 million for salmon migration projects in Sacramento River watershed; and $50 million in matching grants to improve upstream wastewater treatment.”

This is an eco-Luddite's wet dream, along with more special interest “pork” spending that California taxpayers cannot afford. It makes no sense for taxpayers in San Diego or Redding to pay for so-called drought relief in the Bay Area. Removing the dams along the Klamath River is criminally insane. It costs boatloads of money, destroys the local economy, exacerbates our electricity crisis, and does not necessarily help the salmon at all. The California Republican Party just unanimously passed a resolution against this particular act of insanity, so it will be interesting to see if any Republican legislators paid attention.

6. “Require 20 percent water conservation statewide by 2020; provide several paths to local water agencies for achieving this; agencies that fail will not be eligible for state water grants.”

The conservation mandate implies that water saved in one part of the state is automatically available to water users everywhere else, but that concept is ridiculous. In many cases, all the water “saved” will simply flow into the ocean, just as it would have done if it had been “used” and then treated. There is no net gain and no purpose served, excite to expand the size and power of government bureaucrats. Worst of all, San Francisco and many Democrat coastal strongholds are exempt from this statewide conservation mandate! What does that tell you????

7. “Increase statewide debt load, though half of the bonds can’t be sold until after 2015 to minimize negative impacts.”

The last thing we need is more debt for our state! How do we know that conditions will be better in 2015 than they are now?

8. “Provide $1.9 billion for regional water management; $1.5 billion for watershed protection projects; $500 million for groundwater protection projects; $500 million for water recycling and conservation for urban and agricultural users.”

Nothing that actually increases supply other than water recycling! Moreover, we have passed at least four other water bonds in the last decade that did this sort of thing. Add this to the $2 billion allocated for “Delta sustainability, restoration and conservation projects,” and the usual Luddite "environmental" groups that are more concerned about fish and plants than people will get $6.4 billion in this terrible deal.

9. “Require statewide monitoring of groundwater supplies, starting Jan. 1, 2012.”

This might be the most insidious part of this water deal: when you strip out the rhetoric and focus on what they are really trying to do, you find out that this is nothing but a thinly-disguised scheme to increase taxes. For years, the liberals have sought every possible excuse to force people with private wells to pay taxes on the water they are pumping out of their own ground at their own expense. It appears that they have finally achieved their goal. The bond talks about “groundwater monitoring” as if it will be done by the Tooth Fairy at no cost to property owners, but the reality is that property owners (or the people who own the water, at least) will be forced to pay taxes for government bureaucrats to install water meters, check the water meters, and threaten people who use “too much” of what is by property rights their own water.

10. “Allocate $3 billion for potential new dams, but only the ‘public benefit’ portion of those projects, such as ecosystem flows, flood control, recreation.”

This is another magician’s trick. The water deal will not build any new dams, even if it appears that it creates a hypothetical possibility that dams will be built if an infinite number of conditions are met.

Off Year Elections: Pretty Damn Good!

The corrupt Commiecrat Corzine was sacked in New Jersey and a pretty good patriot was elected to Governor of Virginia, despite the atempts of President Obama to prop both of them up!!!

Doug Hoffman rose out of nothing as an Independent Conservative Party candidate to almost take New York district 23, despite RINO backstabbing. Think about that: Mr. Hoffman nearly won an election even though the RINO phony Republican candidate suspended her campaign and endorsed the Democrat.

Oh, and by the way, the RINOs say that we patriots quickly have to embrace "gay marriage" (sic) because opposing it is so obviously a losing issue. I mean, the anti-gay-marriage forces can only manage a bare majority in the Deep South states of California and Maine, right? (snicker)

Even here, in California, the special election in District 10 didn't go all that badly for the Republican. It was basically handed to John Garamendi on a platter, given the gerrymandering of the district:

David Harmer (Rep) 53,441 / 42.69%
Jeremy Cloward (Grn) 2,314 / 1.85%
Jerome "Jerry" Denham (AI) 1,435 /1.15%
John Garamendi (Dem) 66,311 / 52.98%
Mary C. McIlroy (P&F) 1,672 / 1.34%

Look at CA-10 on a map. This blob of a district takes parts out of FOUR counties, and stretches a pseudopod out towards Berkeley and the Richmond ghetto, in order to get enough Commiecrat voters and thus nullify the patriot voters of Travis Air Force Base and rural Solano and Delta farming regions.

The only guy I really have beef with here is Jerry Denham, American Independent candidate, John Birch member, and associate of the late John Katz. Not that his votes would have made any meaningful difference in this race, but what if he and his patriotic and well meaning John Birch Society types stopped squandering their energy in the American Independent Party, actually *joined* the Republican Party, and worked to get a Real Republican elected? From what I know of him, David Harmer was definitely such a man.