Kevin Drum does some very good work here:

Why do I keep writing about the exit polls? Because of stories like this from the Washington Post's Alan Cooperman:

Religious liberals contended that a concerted effort by Democrats since 2004 to appeal to people of faith had worked minor wonders, if not electoral miracles, in races across the country. . . .

Once more with feeling: in the the overall national vote, Democrats picked up 5 percentage points compared to 2004.

. . . Among weekly churchgoers they picked up 3 points.

Among white evangelicals they picked up 3 points. . . .

All true. But Kevin, Dems won independents by 18 points and that was NOT a coincidental swing. It was the Politics of Contrast. Good show on this. But don't understate the importance of the Indy swing.

See also digby.

I totally don't get James Carville's attack on Howard Dean as Chair of the DNC. Carville wants Dean out and suggests replacing him with "bible-thumping" Harold Ford.

In an attempt to reinvent himself as a Bible-thumping good ’ol boy, Ford consistently voted — and ran hard — against his party’s mainstream, and even harder against its left flank. He sided with the Republicans on such controversial issues as the bankruptcy bill, the Schiavo bill, the torture, bill, and the wiretapping bill. Throughout his campaign, Ford never missed an opportunity to crow over his ability to frustrate and confound fellow Democrats.

As The Plank notes:

Perhaps he's not aware that under Dean in this midterm election the DNC has raised record cash — all hard dollars — including three times as much from major donors, eight times as much online and made a $30 million investment in the '06 cycle, three times as much as the DNC put into the last midterm. Not to mention we made an $8m overhaul of our voter file which was successfully used in 47 states and through the 50 state strategy invested in states like Pennsylvania, Kansas, Indiana and Montana where we had critical victories on Tuesday.

President Bush is pressing Democratic leaders to have Congress legitimize his warrantless surveillance program. That and confirming John Bolton to the U.N. are high on his agenda for the remainder of the year.

Happily, Democrats don't seem likely to play along.

Senate Democrats, emboldened by Election Day wins that put them in control of Congress as of January, say they would rather wait until next year to look at the issue. "I can't say that we won't do it, but there's no guarantee that we're going spend a lot of time on controversial measures," Democratic Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois said Thursday.

In Senate parlance, that means no.

As to where things stand on the warrantless surveillance bills pending in Congress:

Via DemfromCt, Bush sinks to new low:

President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to just 31 percent, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Bill Clinton’s lowest rating during his presidency was 36 percent; Bush’s father’s was 29 percent, and Ronald Reagan’s was 35 percent. Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s lows were 28 and 23 percent, respectively. (Just 24 approve of outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s job performance; and 31 percent approve of Vice President Dick Cheney’s.) Worst of all, most Americans are writing off the rest of Bush’s presidency; two-thirds (66 percent) believe he will be unable to get much done, up from 56 percent in a mid-October poll; only 32 percent believe he can be effective. That’s unfortunate since 63 percent of Americans say they’re dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country; just 29 percent are satisfied, reports the poll of 1,006 adults conducted Thursday and Friday nights.

Professor Althouse is a nice and bright person, that despite my significant differences with her views. But I must say this post is perplexing:

Okay, I'm depressed about the election.

. . . It's the failure of Americans to support the war. It's the folding and crumpling because things didn't go well enough and the way we conspicuously displayed that to our enemies. They're going to use that information.

For how long? Forever.

Huh? Folding and crumpling? Is that what you call realizing doing the same stupid thing over and over again will not yield different results? I really have to question whether Professor Althouse actually understands what has happened in Iraq. It is not minor setbacks. It is an unmitigated debacle. And she would have us continue that? She would have us stay the course? Explain that to me.

Former Enron CFA Andrew Fastow, sentenced to six years for his part in the Enron scandal, got some bad news this week. Although the judge recommended he serve his sentence in Bastrop, TX, which has both a low security prison and a minimum security prison camp, the Bureau of Prisons designated him to Oakdale, a low security facility in Louisiana.

In other words, no Club Fed near home for Fastow.

Fastow and his wife had interesting deals. Because Fastow cooperated with the Government, he not only got a reduced sentence, but got to stay out of jail while his wife, Lea Fastow, served her year sentence, so their young children would not be without both parents at the same time.

Herman Wallace has been in solitary confinement in a Louisiana prison since the 1970s. This week, a court commissioner recommended that Wallace's conviction be overturned.

[Commissioner] Morgan presided over a hearing in September where Wallace's lawyer argued that the conviction was tainted because prison officials had failed to inform the defense lawyer that prison authorities had bribed the star witness.

Wallace was convicted of stabbing a guard while serving a sentence at Angola. The Warden bought the testimony of one inmate witness against Wallace by promising him an early release, while another inmate received favors in exchange for testimony. The prosecution didn't tell Wallace's lawyers about the Warden's efforts to influence the witnesses.

The recommendation now goes to District Judge Michael Irwin, who will make the final decision.

So when I got home this evening, this was on my answering machine:

Hello Mr. Kelly. My name is David Kramer with Congressman Tom Reynolds and the National Republican Congress Committee in Washington. We wanted to recognize you with our National Leadership Award and I need to speak to you about a press release we want to send out.

Yeah, I've been a great Republican leader here at TalkLeft. I'm tempted to return David's call just to gloat about the change of leadership, but in the words of another famous Republican, "that would be wrong." And after Tuesday, it's easy to be generous of spirit.

Amusing thoughts about this NRCC fundraising scam (moving into desperation mode if they're calling me) can be found here, here and here.

Yesterday I wrote about the lawsuit the Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups are filing in Germany seeking a war crimes prosecution against Donald Rumsfeld.

Time Magazine has more on the lawsuit today.

Here is the backgrounder from C.C.R. (pdf) on the lawsuit.

As I predicted, the lone GOP bright spot this election was Lieberman's win in Connecticut. It strikes me as funny as (1) Lieberman is voting for Reid for Senate Majority Leader and (2) Rumsfeld got canned the day after. But the GOP needs its bright spots - and it is either the Dems are conservatives (I think they may have figured out that was not too bright. Have not read that much today) or Joementum. They choose both sometimes:

Jonah, . . . [T]here has been precious little said about who won on the left. In as much as you can say it was a failure of politics instead of policy for the Republicans, doesn't the failure of Lamont to take out Lieberman also point to a failure of policy over politics for the Kos crowd? They purged their ranks in the primary only to have their head handed to them in the actual election. I know this was expected, but I think seeing it actually occur bodes well overall for the general direction of the political discourse in the US. the Democrats won in places where they looked and sounded like conservatives, and where the Kos crown had influence, they were trounced.

Of course, Webb, Tester, most of the Dem candidates, including the two NH House winners, etc., were also Kos candidates. The funny thing is the GOP worked harder and cared more about Lieberman than their own GOP candidates. And they still do. And they wonder why they lost.

I'm recovered from the election frenzy and thinking about the direction TalkLeft will take between now and the 2008 election, which is not far away.

Personally, I'd like to concentrate as I've always done, on the politics of crime, the crime in politics, civil liberties, criminal justice legislation in Congress, prisons, sentencing, the detainees and the War in Iraq. I haven't asked, but I suspect TChris and Last Night in Little Rock feel the same.

But I'm also grateful to Big Tent Democrat who posts on TalkLeft on politics and often exposes the non-liberal media, and glad that he has agreed to continue posting on TalkLeft even though the elections are over. After all, 2008 is right around the corner.

But, let's take a poll.

Six young men were accused of gang-rape and faced life in prison, if charged. But for a videotape, that showed the female accuser "orchestrating" the sex, it might have happened.

A Dana Point woman was told today she must serve at least 90 days in jail for falsely accusing six men of kidnapping and raping her at gunpoint. [Tamara] Moonier went to Fullerton police in June 2004 and reported that she had been kidnapped outside a bar by six men and taken to an unknown location and raped.

But one of the men videotaped the sexual encounter, and the tape contradicted Moonier's story, said Deputy District Attorney Paul Chrisopoulos. The videotape showed that instead of being a victim, Moonier was actually the instigator of much of the sexual activity, Chrisopoulos said.