While some were predicting a political tsunami that would wipe out Democrats across the country, the more apt metaphor of what took place on Election Night was the hurricane — which first ripped through the South and then the Midwest, but only nicked the Northeast and West.

The hurricane was destructive enough to dismantle the Democrats’ majority in the House, resulting in a party’s largest congressional-seat loss since 1948.

In particular, they suffered sizable losses in Midwest states that President Barack Obama carried in 2008 (five congressional seats in Ohio, five in Pennsylvania, three in Illinois and two in Indiana).

Democrats also lost both the Senate and gubernatorial races in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as the Senate contest in Indiana and the gubernatorial race in Michigan.

And the destruction for Democrats was equally bad in the South, with Republicans picking up four House seats in Florida, three in Virginia, three in Tennessee and one in Georgia.

Republicans also gained Senate seats in Arkansas and Florida, and governor’s mansions in Tennessee and Oklahoma.

“The path of the hurricane swished up the middle of the country,” says Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate and gubernatorial contests for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “The eye was — bang — over the Industrial Midwest.”

But the political hurricane only touched the Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and West.

In the Northeast, Democrats held on to the contested governorships in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York. In the West, they won the governorship and Senate in California, and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray was neck and neck with GOP challenger Dino Rossi with 65 percent of the vote counted in Washington.

The Democrats’ biggest victory was in Nevada, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid defeated GOP challenger Sharron Angle. And in the battleground state of Colorado, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet and Republican Ken Buck were deadlocked.

Still, Election Day was mostly a rebuke to Democrats and the expansion of government.

According to the nationwide exit poll, 73 percent of those who voted disapproved of Congress’ job, and those people voted Republican by a 64-to-33 percent margin.

In addition, 54 percent disapproved of President Obama’s job performance, and those voters broke 85 to 11 percent.

And 56 percent of the electorate said the government is doing too many things, which equaled the percent from 1994, the last time Republicans won back control of the House.

In 2008, however, only 43 percent said the government was doing too much.

NBC News’ Domenico Montanaro contributed to this report.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): BLOGS.E-ROCKFORD.COM, KENTGH, SEVENSIDEDCUBE

In a poignant farewell for his family and thousands of mourners, the elaborate funeral procession for Senator Edward M. Kennedy is expected to begin from his family’s Cape Cod compound Thursday afternoon on the 72-mile journey north to Boston, where the motorcade will wind around city landmarks that were important in the life of Mr. Kennedy and his family.

Mr. Kennedy died at age 77 late Tuesday night in Hyannis Port, Mass., after battling brain cancer for 15 months.

A Senate stalwart and the longest-surviving brother of a tragic and triumphant political clan, Mr. Kennedy was hailed by many who knew him as a man as fiercely dedicated to public service as he was to his extended family.

Accordingly, the day’s events began in Hyannis Port with a private Catholic mass for the family that was closed to the press. A flag flew at half-staff in the center of the circular driveway surrounded by clusters of fading brown hydrangeas.

Around noon Eastern time, family members entered the white-shingled, green-shuttered house, The Associated Press reported, including Mr. Kennedy’s son Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island congressman; Caroline Kennedy, daughter of Mr. Kennedy’s brother John F. Kennedy, and Maria Shriver, daughter of his sister Eunice, who died in early August.

The Mass, according to a pool reporter, was held overlooking the ocean in a room traditionally reserved for family masses, but one the Kennedy clan called its “fun room.” Father Donald MacMillan from Boston College officiated.

About an hour later, the hearse, a motorcade of black limousines, hulking black Cadillac Escalade sport utility vehicles and motorcycle police from both local and state agencies were still lined up outside the house.

Members of the honor guard, with nine representatives of all branches of service from Washington D.C were stationed in front of the hearse.

Mourners gathered along the streets of Hyannis Port and in the Boston Common on a refreshingly cool, sunny late summer day to view the procession Thursday afternoon. The planned route was scheduled to end late in the afternoon at the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Mass., where Mr. Kennedy’s body will lie in repose for public viewing Thursday evening and Friday. The funeral mass will take place at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Boston on Saturday morning, with President Obama delivering a eulogy. Mr. Kennedy is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington on Sunday, near his brothers John and Robert. The motorcade on Thursday is due to reach Boston around 2:30 p.m., heading first to St. Stephen’s Church in the city’s North End, where his mother, Rose, was baptized and her funeral mass was celebrated, according to a statement from Mr. Kennedy’s office.

From there, the motorcade will cross over the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, the park Mr. Kennedy helped create, and pass by Faneuil Hall, the colonial-era landmark where Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston will ring the bell 47 times — once for each year Mr. Kennedy served in the Senate.

It will also pass by 122 Bowdoin Street, where Mr. Kennedy had his first office as an assistant district attorney. His brother John lived on Bowdoin Street while running for Congress in 1946.

From there, the procession will pass by the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, where Senator Kennedy maintained an office in recent years, and travel to Dorchester Street in South Boston and then to his brother’s presidential library and museum, which Senator Kennedy helped to build.

The visitation will be held at the library’s Stephen E. Smith Center. The Boston Globe reported that since Mr. Kennedy’s death, museum officials have been hastily constructing an exhibit in the center’s foyer, with photographs and artifacts relating to his speeches, including his 1968 eulogy for his brother Robert F. Kennedy and his Democratic National Convention addresses from 1980 to 2008.

By late morning, crowds had gathered at the library, and mourners had already left American flags, flowers and a stuffed teddy bear, according to The A.P.

James Jenner, a 28-year-old culinary student from Boston, placed his Red Sox cap at the impromptu memorial.

“It was Teddy’s home team,” Mr. Jenner said, according to The A.P.

“It just seemed appropriate to leave him the cap. It symbolizes everything that he loved about his home state and everything he was outside the Senate.”

Source (article): NYTIMES

Source (pictures): OURCOMMONCONCERN, LEWISCOUNTYDEMOCRATS, I.DAILYMAIL

(CBS/AP) “The ordeal is over.”

So said newly-sworn-in Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, referring to the State Senate’s vote yesterday to remove Rod Blagojevich from office.

After weeks of shocking twists and turns, the conclusion of Blagojevich’s tenure as Illinois governor offered little surprise.

Accused of trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, Blagojevich becomes the first U.S. governor in more than 20 years to be removed by impeachment.

Once the State House impeached him earlier this month for abuse of power, the Senate did what was expected and voted to throw Blagojevich out of office. And on an identical 59-0 roll call, it barred the two-term Democrat from ever again holding public office in the state.

“He failed the test of character. He is beneath the dignity of the state of Illinois. He is no longer worthy to be our governor,” said Sen. Matt Murphy, a Republican from suburban Chicago.

The state’s Democratic Lieutenant Governor (and one of Blagojevich’s strongest critics), 60-year-old Quinn, was promptly sworn in as governor.

Blagojevich, 52, had boycotted the first three days of the impeachment trial, calling the proceedings a kangaroo court. But on Thursday, he went before the Senate to fight for his job, delivering a 47-minute plea that was, by turns, defiant, humble and sentimental.

He offered familiar lines: He was innocent. The trial rules were unfair. His goal always was to help people.

“You haven’t proved a crime, and you can’t because it didn’t happen,” Blagojevich told lawmakers. “How can you throw a governor out of office with insufficient and incomplete evidence?”

“I think what’s been very disappointing and very frustrating to everyone involved in the process … is that the governor could have brought forward information and evidence and witnesses, and he refused at every turn to do so,” Illinois State Attorney General Lisa Madigan said on CBS’ The Early Show. “He didn’t participate when the House was considering impeachment. He obviously refused to participate in the actual trial in front of the Senate.

“But he did come to make a closing statement where he wasn’t under oath, and therefore said a whole series of things that ultimately were taken as incredible, as well as potentially going to be used against him in his ultimate criminal trial.”

In a solemn scene, more than 30 lawmakers rose one by one on the Senate floor to accuse Blagojevich of abusing his office and embarrassing the state. They denounced him as a hypocrite, saying he cynically tried to enrich himself and then posed as the brave protector of the poor and “wrapped himself in the constitution.”

“I think this is a new beginning for our state and one that is absolutely necessary in the aftermath of a very destructive tenure of the governor,” Madigan (left) told Early Show anchor Maggie Rodriguez. “And so it is actually a good day. Certainly difficult times ahead and challenges, but we are going to move forward.”

Blagojevich did not stick around to hear the vote. He took a state plane back to Chicago.

He did, however, use his last day in office to grant clemency to a prominent Chicago real estate developer and a former drug dealer, just hours before the vote to oust him.

However, his troubles are not over; Federal prosecutors are drawing up an indictment against him on corruption charges.

The new governor also canceled the former governor’s security detail, which ended when Blagojevich arrived home from the state Capitol.

Outside his Chicago home Thursday night, Blagojevich vowed to “keep fighting to clear my name,” and added: “Give me a chance to show you that I haven’t let you down.”

Madigan was asked by Rodriguez if Blagojevich’s actions up to and after the trial were delusional or signs that he was in denial about what was happening to him.

“I think a lot of people have speculated,” Madigan said. “Certainly you’ve heard what our mayor has had to say, that there’s something the matter with the governor.” [Chicago's Richard Daley had called Blagojevich "Coo-coo."] “You know, it’s incomprehensible to me as a lawyer why you would conduct yourself in the manner that he has. If you were really serious about being innocent and if you believed that you can prove that you are not guilty, then use the forum that’s presented to you - work within the law.

“Instead he chose to fly off to New York and be on every possible TV talk show that was available to him and really never directly answered the questions that were posed to him, even on those talk shows, but [which] obviously were being dealt with by our State Senate. So obviously it appears that there must be some sort of a problem.

“At a bare minimum, he seems quite comfortable in mispresenting the truth.”

“Do you think this will end with the governor being convicted and going to jail?” Rodriguez asked.

“I do.”

“We Have This Thing Called Impeachment And It’s Bleeping Golden”

The verdict brought to an end what one lawmaker branded “the freak show” in Illinois. Over the past few weeks, Blagojevich found himself isolated, with almost the entire political establishment lined up against him. The crisis paralyzed state government and made Blagojevich a punchline from coast to coast.

Many ordinary Illinoisans were glad to see him go.

“It’s very embarrassing. I think it’s a shame that with our city and Illinois, everybody thinks we’re all corrupt,” Gene Ciepierski, 54, said after watching the trial’s conclusion on a TV at Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern. “To think he would do something like that, it hurts more than anything.”

The verdict capped a head-spinning string of developments that began with the governor’s arrest by the FBI on Dec. 9. Federal prosecutors had been investigating Blagojevich’s administration for years, and some of his closest cronies already have been convicted.

The most spectacular allegation was that Blagojevich had been caught on wiretaps scheming to sell an appointment to Mr. Obama’s Senate seat for campaign cash or a plum job for himself or his wife.

“I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden, and I’m just not giving it up for (expletive) nothing. I’m not gonna do it,” he was quoted as saying on a government wiretap.

Sen. James Meeks, a Chicago Democrat, mocked Blagojevich during debate: “We have this thing called impeachment and it’s bleeping golden and we’ve used it the right way.”

Prosecutors also said Blagojevich illegally pressured people to make campaign contributions and tried to get editorial writers fired from the Chicago Tribune for badmouthing him in print.

Mr. Obama himself, fresh from his historic election victory, was forced to look into the matter and issued a report concluding that no one in his inner circle had done anything wrong.

“Today ends a painful episode for Illinois,” the president said in a Thursday night statement. “For months, the state had been crippled by a crisis of leadership. Now that cloud has lifted.”

Even as lawmakers were deciding whether to launch an impeachment, Blagojevich defied the political establishment by appointing a former Illinois attorney general, Roland Burris, to the very Senate seat he had been accused of trying to sell. Top Democrats on Capitol Hill eventually backed down and seated Burris.

As his trial got under way, Blagojevich launched a national media blitz, rushing from one TV studio to another in New York to proclaim his innocence. He likened himself to the hero of a Frank Capra movie and to a cowboy in the hands of a Wild West lynch mob.

The impeachment case included not only the criminal charges against Blagojevich, but allegations he broke the law when it came to hiring state workers, expanded a health care program without legislative approval and spent $2.6 million on flu vaccine that went to waste. The 118-member House twice voted to impeach him, both times with only one “no” vote.

Seven other U.S. governors have been removed by impeachment, the most recent being Arizona’s Evan Mecham in 1988. Illinois never before impeached a governor, despite its long and rich history of graft.

By Thursday night, Blagojevich’s name and picture had disappeared from the state’s official Web site. Instead, an unobtrusive “Pat Quinn, Governor” was in the upper right corner.

CBS Station WBBM also reports that signs on the Illinois Tollway system touting open-road tolling will be replaced. The signs, which prominently feature the name of Blagojevich (who had pushed for the open-road tolling system) were erected in 2004 at a cost of $480,000.

The Financial Burdens Accrue

CBS Station WBBM correspondent Mike Parker reports the former governor also faces financial stress, having lost his $177,000 annual salary just weeks after wife, Patty, lost her $100,000-a-year fundraising job.

Blagojevich also won’t be able to collect state unemployment benefits because he was fired for misconduct. Blagojevich will also lose his governor’s pension if he’s convicted in federal court.

In addition, Federal prosecutors could try to seize the multi-million dollar Blagojevich campaign fund. If they do, he won’t be able to use those funds to pay for his legal defense.

Meeting these financial burdens will be difficult given Blagojevich’s limited options. Cindy Canary of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform told Parker, “He’s tarnished goods. He is in a bad spot.”

SOURCE: CBSNEWS.COM & ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - Roland Burris failed to capture President-elect Barack Obama’s old Senate seat Tuesday in a wild piece of political theater, but the Democrats’ opposition cracked when a key chairwoman said seating him was simply the legal thing to do.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein rejected the reasoning that all of the chamber’s Democrats, herself included, had cited in a letter last week — that corruption charges against Burris’ patron, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, tainted his appointment.

“Does the governor have the power, under law, to make the appointment? And the answer is yes,” said Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Rules Committee, which judges the credentials of senators.

Burris marched into the Capitol earlier Tuesday, declaring himself “the junior senator from the state of Illinois.” But Secretary of the Senate Nancy Erickson rejected his certification, as he knew she would, saying it lacked Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White’s signature and the state seal.

Late Tuesday, Feinstein urged the Senate to settle the matter.

“If you don’t seat Mr. Burris, it has ramifications for gubernatorial appointments all over America,” the California senator said. “Mr. Burris is a senior, experienced politician. He has been attorney general, he has been controller, and he is very well-respected. I am hopeful that this will be settled.”

A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier, Reid had said, “Mr. Burris is not in possession of the necessary credentials from the state of Illinois.”

Burris, meanwhile, pivoted from his rejection at the Capitol to the Illinois Supreme Court, asking it to order White to certify his appointment.

Burris was expected to meet with Reid on Wednesday.

It would be his second appearance at the Capitol in two days. His first included an escort by Capitol police officers to Erickson’s third-floor office for what was described as a highly cordial, 21-minute meeting.

Burris, 71, then led a small mob of lawyers, consultants, police and reporters across the street in pouring rain, to a news conference which Burris aides said Reid had tacitly allowed.

Erickson, Burris reported, had advised him that “I would not be accepted, and I will not be seated, and I will not be permitted on the floor.”

The former Illinois attorney general said he was “not seeking to have any type of confrontation” over taking the seat. In addition to his court filing late in the day in Illinois, Burris said he was considering a federal lawsuit to force Senate Democrats to seat him.

It was a distraction for majority Democrats eager to project an image of progress with Obama on an economic stimulus package estimated to cost as much as $800 billion.

Democrats and Obama have said that the corruption charges against Blagojevich would strip credibility from anyone he appointed to the seat.

Blagojevich denies federal accusations that he tried to sell the seat Obama has given up for the presidency.

In a written statement Tuesday, the governor said allegations against him shouldn’t be held against Burris, whom he called a “good and decent man.”

“The people of Illinois are entitled to be represented by two senators in the United States Senate,” Blagojevich said.

An attorney for Burris, Timothy W. Wright III, said that “our credentials were rejected by the secretary of the Senate. We were not allowed to be placed in the record book. We were not allowed to proceed to the floor for purposes of taking oath. All of which we think was improperly done and is against the law of this land.”

In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.

The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.

Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.

Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.

In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens.

“He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter,” said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. “He totally, totally scared the heck out of her.”

In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4,” said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake.”

Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen “an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities.”

The Obama campaign and civil rights advocacy groups have signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards.

Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also black and Hispanic.

Activist groups say it is this fresh crop of ballot-minded citizens that makes some Republicans very nervous. And they say they expect the dirty tricks to get dirtier in final hours before Tuesday.

“Oh, there’s plenty of time for things to get ugly,” said Zachary Stalberg, president of The Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group that is nonpartisan.

Other reports of intimidation efforts in the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania include leaflets taped to picnic benches at Drexel University, warning students that police would be at the polls on Tuesday to arrest would-be voters with prior criminal offenses.

In his Jewish neighborhood, Stalberg said, fliers were recently left claiming Obama was more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel, and showed a photograph of him speaking in Germany.

“It shows up between the screen door and the front door in the middle of the night,” Stalberg said. “Why couldn’t someone knock on the door and hand that to me in the middle of the day? In a sense, it’s very smartly done. The message gets through. It’s done carefully enough that people might read it.”

Such tactics are common, and are often impossible to trace. Robo-calls, in which automated, bogus phone messages are sent over and over, are very hard to trace to their source, say voting advocates. E-mails fall into the same category.

In Nevada, for example, Latino voters said they had received calls from people describing themselves as Obama volunteers, urging them to cast their ballot over the phone.

The calls were reported to Election Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group that runs a hot line for election troubles. The organization does not know who orchestrated them.

“The Voting Rights Act makes it a crime to misled and intimidate voters,” said McDonald. “If you can find out who’s doing it, those people should be prosecuted. But sometimes it’s just difficult to know who’s doing what. Some of it’s just anonymous.”

Trying to mislead voters is nothing new.

“We see this every year,” said Jonah Goldman of the advocacy group Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It all happens around this time when there’s too much other stuff going on in the campaigns, and it doesn’t get investigated.”

In 2006, automated phone calls in the final days leading to the federal election wrongly warned voters they would not be allowed to vote without a photo ID. In Colorado and Virginia, people reported receiving calls that told them their registrations had expired and they would be arrested if they showed up to vote.

The White House contest of 2004 was marked by similar deceptions. In Milwaukee, fliers went up advising people “if you’ve already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the presidential election.” In Pennsylvania, a letter bearing what appeared to be the McCandless Township seal falsely proclaimed that in order to cut long voting lines, Republicans would cast ballots on Nov. 2 and Democrats would vote on Nov. 3.

E-mail assaults have become increasingly popular this year, keeping pace with the proliferation of blogging and Obama’s massive online campaign efforts, according to voting activists.

“It is newer and more furious than it ever has been before,” Goldman said.

And Republicans are not exempt. “Part of it is that election campaigns are more online than ever before,” said Goldman. “During the primaries, a lot of Web sites went up that seemed to be for (GOP candidate Rudy) Giuliani, but actually were attack sites.”

New York City’s former mayor and his high-profile colleagues Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney were also targeted in fake Internet sites that featured “quotes” from the candidates espousing support for extreme positions they never endorsed.

SOURCE: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS