Georgia on my Mind

Regarding Clinton's debt, I'm not sure why that's allowed. The fact that she's a multimillionaire doesn't really play into it, I know, as the campaign is a seperate entity from the candidate personally. It's kind of like when you start a business alone but incorporate so that you're not personally liable.

As I understand it, there are a whole series of rules related to how a defunct campaign handles its debt. For instance, I don't think the candidate is allowed to raise money to pay debt owed to herself, which in Clinton's case is substantial. As for the other "joe and jane sixpacks" she owes money to, they may wind up getting stiffed per this article if Hillary becomes SoS.

I actually haven't seen the Daily Show bit yet and the website isn't working right now. It is a strange rule they have in Georgia, and a really stupid one given the current political reality that there are two major parties and that's that. I can see it making some sense in a situation where there are 3 or more major parties. I wonder why Georgia has this rule. My pure speculation would be that maybe they implemented at some during the Jim Crow days when there were portions of the Democratic party that split away and formed the "Dixicrat" party, most famously headed in a presidential election by Strom Thurmond.

Who knows, but the upshot is that Democrats have a far better chance at 60 senate seats than has been commonly recognized in the mainstream media since election day. They've already locked up the AK senate seat, which brings them to 58, and Nate Silver's analysis showed that there's probably better than a 50% chance that Al Franken is going to win in MN once all the "undervotes" are put in his column. That would bring it up to 59 and runoff elections are all about who can get their people out. Obama has demonstrated that his people are pretty good at this, and right now a lot of his people are in GA working on it. If you had to think about which party's partisans are more motivated at this point, I'd say its probably the Democrats. In any event, 60 is really more of a symbolic number than an important one at this point. 58 is probably more than enough to get almost anything the Democrats want to do past the filibuster stage given that you can usually pick off a handful of Republicans, particularly of the Olympia Snowe/Susan Collins variety, to at least be willing to end debate on most issues. Most importantly to me, as a lawyer, the Democrats should have no problems getting almost all of Obama's judicial appointments, most famously Supreme Court nominees, but almost as important, or perhaps moreso, all the lower court judges that actually decide 99% of legal issues, through the confirmation process with a minimum of stalling.