New Jersey takes a lot of abuse from late night comedians and others who haven't a clue. Where I live in South Jersey, you could drive for miles and see nothing but pine trees and corn fields. Granted, Northeastern Jersey is a sewer that we'd like to cede to New York but they won't take them, but I digress. We don't need anymore bad press than we already get so the arrests of 11 politicians in a bribery scandal is not helping our case.

Corruption in the Garden State is nothing new, hell, this is the state that the Soprano's was filmed in and it wasn''t too long ago that organized crime was flourishing from Bayonne to Atlantic City and over to Camden. Unions now rule and the politicians will do anything to secure their votes. Our long, proud history of corruption also includes the Abscam scandal--one of Representative John Murtha's shining moments. In the last five years, over 100 politicians in the state have been convicted of some crime.

As we speak, former Senator and now Governor Jon Corzine is fighting serious charges related to his ex-girlfriend who he showered money upon and leads one of the most powerful unions in the entire state. Add that to the resignation (for corruption of course) of U.S. Senator Bob Torricelli and the scandalous way the Democrats cheated state law to get Robert Menendez on the ballot (Menendez stayed true to N.J. Democrat form and got himself into an ethics scandal) and you have an idea of just how strong the Democratic machine is in this state. I haven't even mentioned Jim McGreevey and his secret trysts with anonymous men at truckstops throughout the state.

Update (9/7/07 1606): Another Dem scandal and guess whose name arises again? Rep. John Murtha and this one is $9-million+ in lost funds.

Ted Nugent is again talking about running for governor of Michigan.

"That would be beautiful," Nugent said when asked if he would run for governor of Michigan in 2010. "I have threatened to do so and I was sincere."

Some of Nugent's antics make even Schwarzenegger's past outspokenness appear measured by comparison.

"Michigan was once a great state. Michigan was a state that rewarded the entrepreneur and the most productive, work-ethic families of the state. Now the pimps and the whores and the welfare brats are basically the state's babies."

This isn't the first time he's talked about this. Back in 2005, there was some talk, but no action. So don't hold your breath, or get too excited if you're a Nugent fan. But I have to admit, with one-liners like that, his candidacy would surely get the 2010 MI governor's race a whole lot of media attention.

And don't count it completely out. Since Granholm won in 2006 over Amway bigwig Dick Devos (yes, that Amway), Michigan is continuing on its path of a one-state recession. If this continues on until 2010, Michigan will be ready for someone else, anyone else. Ted Nugent would immediately have a lot of cache with the gun owner population and the Generation X Michigan kids who grew up listening to his music. If he put together enough serious policies that wouldn't scare people off, he would be a serious threat, and be fun to watch.

The runner-up in the Dallas, Texas mayoral election this year was an openly gay candidate, Democrat Ed Oakley.

"By all accounts, Oakley never tried to hide his sexual orientation, but he didn't trumpet it either," Newsweek reported. "Oakley never styled himself as a 'gay candidate' and he doesn't advocate for gay issues."

The race, won by Republican Tom Leppert, showed that Oakley had both strengths and disadvantages when running as an openly gay candidate. There were some unlikely examples of both.

As far as weaknesses, some Democrats did not want to vote for Oakley because of his homosexuality. Scott Bennett, of Dallasblog.com, noted that "Even some liberals he'd spoken to said they were planning to vote for Leppert because of the gay issue, including one socialite who didn't want the headlines to blare that Dallas had become the next San Francisco." Yet I'm guessing Oakley found some support from the city's gay evangelicals: "Dallas even has evangelical gays, and the Cathedral of Hope, said to be the world's largest gay church," Newsweek reported.

Running as an openly gay candidate may be one of the toughest current feats for anyone to accomplish. But it sounds like Oakley did a creditable job, and his effort should inspire future would-be campaigners to make the run.

I can't emphasize enough how important the latest Eliot Spitzer scandal is. A Democrat State Attorney General has issued a 57 page report detailing that close aides to the Democrat Governor of the same state manufactured evidence in order to take down a Republican political opponent. While Spitzer claims ignorance, the aides accused are longtime Spitzer associates who worked in similar positions for Spitzer when he was the New York Attorney General. Imaging the outcry if a Republican Governor (or President) did this to a Democrat. You wouldn't read or hear of anything else in the news for weeks. Methinks a Grand Jury investigation of the Governor's role in all of this should be next.

And as to Spitzer's denial, I offer this from Michael Goodwin in today's New York Daily News:

In the fall of 1998, Eliot Spitzer was winning the race for attorney general. I was the Daily News Editorial Page editor, and my colleagues and I had pressed Spitzer about the source of millions of dollars he was spending on the race. He told us, as he told election officials, that he had taken out personal bank loans. Days before the election, Spitzer confessed to another newspaper that his father really was the source of the money.

Soon after I got to my office that day, the phone rang. It was Spitzer, calling to explain. "Eliot," I said, "you lied to us."

His response was prompt and certain: "I had to," he said, adding his father didn't want his role known.

So, he lied, confessed to a paper (probably after the paper had found out the truth), and then told everyone that he "had to lie". Tells you alot about the guy's character. I think that perhaps a Grand Jury should not only look into this event, but into Spitzer's past as Attorney General of New York as well.

Read the rest of Goodwin's column - it's a real shocker. We could, and should, be watching the downfall of a governor. Can we say emergency state-wide election?

We're not talking about Democrats in Washington. It's Democrats in the House of Representatives in Michigan. And I really can't do much better than this headline in this Detroit News editorial: An iPod for every kid? Are they !#$!ing idiots?. Computers for every kid? I can buy that, and can even support it, especially in the inner city where many families probably can't buy those types of things for their kids. But an iPod?

We have come to the conclusion that the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark, House Democrats Thursday offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3 player or iPod for every school child in Michigan.

No cost estimate was attached to their hare-brained idea to "invest" in education. Details, we are promised, will follow. The Democrats, led by their increasingly erratic speaker Andy Dillon of Redford Township, also pledge $100 million to make better downtowns.

Their plan goes beyond cluelessness. Democrats are either entirely indifferent to the idea that extreme hard times demand extreme belt tightening, or they are bone stupid. We lean toward the latter.

There is a legitimate case to be made for students at advanced grade levels having computers, if not for research then for at least getting used to using them for everyday tasks. But for not much more than the price of an iPod you could probably buy individual Dells in bulk. For a little more you could get a bunch of Macbooks. Probably get the company to donate some as well -- great publicity.

But an iPod? A bad idea for any time, but especially bad while you're dealing with a $1 billion dollar deficit.

Conservative talk-radio host and State Republican Senator, Dan Patrick, has been doing some late-night math, and he's come up with a nifty way to cut the abortion rate in Texas. Give each mother considering the procedure $500 cash if they agree not to. Since it costs more or less that much to give birth to, clothe, feed, educate, and house a child, this proposal is sure to be a big hit.

"If this incentive would give pause and change the mind of 5 percent of those women [of those who get abortions annually in Texas], that's 3,000 lives. That's almost as many people as we've lost in Iraq," Patrick said.

Hey, true enough. And since he's so concerned with the lives we're losing in Iraq, we might extend that same logic to the poorest of the poor who are enlisting in the Army. $500 bucks not to join. That would surely save lives, too, right? And while we're at it, we could start clicking off the Ten Commandments, too. $500 not to covet thy neighbor's wife. Actually, this could get pretty expensive. Why not just tell KSEV radio to can Patrick, vote him out of office, and save everybody a whole lot of money.

John Kasich is a rock star in the Ohio GOP, but it's mostly because he's the last man standing. Or at least one of the few in the Ohio GOP who still look good after the party's big collapse in 2006. Now, he's making the rounds and appears headed for a coronation toward a governor run in 2010. (Yes, that's a long time from now). The Columbus Dispatch reports on his openness toward race:

"I've made it clear to people that I'm going to look at the governor's office. I hope that Ted Strickland will do a good job so I won't have to go around the state doing this stuff."

More than three years away from that potential confrontation, Kasich, the 54-year-old former congressman from Westerville and 2000 presidential aspirant, is preparing to re-enter politics by hitting the rubberchicken circuit to reconnect with the state's Republican grass roots.

He's certainly had the best of both worlds. National exposure on Fox News keeps his credentials alive as well as his conservative views current, while at the same time he's been able to stay away from any dirty business. So he was nowhere around when the local scandals hit the Ohio GOP.

It's now clear that the best way to get your state GOP congress critters to move is to give them a deadline.

In these closing days of the 126th Ohio General Assembly, Republicans are working feverishly on a conservative, pro-business agenda by placing newly introduced bills on the fast track for passage and shaking the dust from stymied ideas that have been shelved for months.

Democrats are crying foul, denouncing the GOP lawmakers for rushing bills through without thorough debate. They maintain many bills cater to traditional Republican constituencies while leveling parting shots at the Democrats' base: unions, big cities and minimum-wage workers.

Here in Ohio, the GOP has owned the state lawmaking machine for the last 12 years. It took them most of that time to pass a concealed carry bill, they never did expand school vouchers much past the Cleveland Pilot. It took almost all of that time to kill the hated Ohio E-check, etc.

I'm monitoring an interesting debate between some of my fellow Ohio bloggers as to why the GOP had such a rough election, especially in Ohio. Matt Hurley of Weapons of Mass Discussion, and sees the loss as a problem within the party and something that needs to be addressed by cracking heads within the GOP:

I fear that we are not actually taking appropriate action in the face of such a huge loss at the state level. Something really bad happened and I haven't heard a peep from the political guru class just what exactly happened and what they propose to fix it. If Bennett isn't the problem, I think Ohio's Republicans deserve an answer to two questions: What was the problem? And how are we going to fix it?

...

The problem that I see is that there was a breakdown in the coalition of social conservatives and the moderates. Someone with some credibility in both camps is going to have to step up and bridge that divide...I don't know who that might be, but the party ought to be seeking that person out pronto. (Might this be a job for John Kasich?)

Deval Patrick was not the only person who made history on November 7. Martha Coakley was the first woman to be elected Attorney General in Massachusetts. Coakley earned her stripes as a prosecuting attorney and as a politician. She won easily because the voters of Massachusetts realized how lucky they were to have an attorney who could protect the people of the state from illegal activities.

Her most recent case has involved the trial of Neil Entwhistle. He is the person who murdered his wife and baby in their bed. He then fled to England to avoid prosecution. Coakley got him back to the United States and has methodically put together a case that will insure a guilty verdict.

We had a number of controversial propositions on our ballot this election cycle. Californians are known to love governing by proposition.

We voted down parental notification for teenage abortions (again). We voted down the huge tax increase on tobacco. We voted down the alternative energy fuel tax (my opinion: good idea, bad way to do it). Unfortunately, we also voted against restrictions on eminent domain. I guess it was just too easy to check that "no" box.

There were other propositions with varying results, but these were the big ones. Not to worry -- there are probably people already collecting signatures for the next batch of propositions for the next ballot!

It's election day so I thought it would be appropriate to take you inside a campaign. This could be almost any campaign but rather than identify the particular campaign, let's just say it is a statewide campaign. There are a small number of staff people, the campaign manager, the candidate, the candidate's inner circle of advisers aka the 'kitchen cabinet' and the media. Election day is full of tension and anticipation--hectic, frenzied, the inevitable last minute snafus-- but it is also, in a way, anticlimactic.

There's really not a lot for the candidate to do. They will vote go to some polling places to shake hands, maybe do some media interviews but there is not much to say. Sure, we'll be optimistic, forward looking and thankful to the citizens of our great state but most of the candidate's time will be spent at home (constantly interrupted by well wishers who have the phone number). Headquarters tells the candidate to stay away. At this point the candidate is just one more person who wants information. Basically, the same thing is going on at the other campaign.

The Providence Journal has issued their endorsements for this year's candidates. As the ProJo is the only real game in town, and Rhode Island TV and radio stations take their cues from it, these endorsements are pretty important. Here they are:

Senator: Lincoln Chafee (R)
Not surprising after all the campaigning the ProJo did for Chafee against his primary opponent, Steve Laffey!

Governor: Donald Carcieri (R)
While I've criticized him in the past, he is the best man for Governor in this race. His opponent, Charles Fogerty, is also a good man, but he owes his career to the entrenched Democrats in this state. Therefore, his vow to clean up the cesspool that is Rhode Island politics rings false, since most of those needing cleaning out are his Democrat colleagues without whom he would be here today.

Congress: Patrick Kennedy (D)
Anyone other than a Kennedy who's done the things he's done would have been thrown out of Congress by now. Having said that, I've met him and like him. He and his family have gone through so many tragedies that many people (including myself) feel somewhat sorry for him - he has to be of strong character not to have been destroyed by his family's legacy, as several of his cousins have been. Although I hate his rhetoric, he's grown to be a pretty good Congressman for Rhode Island. He's never had a great candidate run against him, which is what it will take to beat him.

I live in Arizona's 8th District, and haven't made up my mind whether I should support Democratic candidate Gabrielle Giffords or Republican Randy Graf. You see I consider myself moderate but I have to admit there is something extremely likable about the former golf professional, Graf. For one thing, I love a good fight, and secondly, I often root for the underdog.

The truth is Randy Graf's victory over Jim Kolbe's hand-picked candidate Steve Huffman makes me smile. Kolbe thought Graf was too far on the right to win the Republican nomination. Even so, Kolbe took a "principled stand" (his words) after Graf's victory over Steve Huffman. Graf, the self -proclaimed Minuteman, even manged to get Senator John McCain's endorsement, a very good development considering The Washington Post believed the GOP had written off the seat.

About that White Separatist email .... guys I didn't even realize what I was reading before I forwarded it to my constituents.

That's what Arizona lawmaker Russell Pearce is saying by way of explaining his latest brush with racism.

But the AP story (see link above) goes onto say:

In a radio interview last month, Pearce called for the revival of the 1950s deportation program for illegal immigrants. He refused to apologize for using the pejorative term "wetback."

I always have trouble believing people like this are still out there. But they are. In droves. Scary. They are empowered behind closed door by enablers we never see in broad daylight.

That's why lapses such as the ones above are so instructive.