Seriously, Screw Alaska.

So all the votes are not yet counted in the Alaskan senate race with approximately 40,000 absentee and provisional votes waiting to be sorted. I'm confident that by the end, Begich will be declared winner. But why the hell is it even necessary to look at those to determine who is victorious? I'm all for counting every vote on principle, but when one of the choices is a recently convicted felon seven times over for not reporting what were essentially bribes, the race should have been such a landslide as to be called for his opponent shortly after the polls closed. Yet at the end of the night, Stevens was up a few thousand votes. WTF were those Alaskans thinking when they voted for Stevens?

There might be some Technicality Republicans who rationalized a vote for Stevens via the fact he has not yet been sentenced and thus, technically, not yet a convicted felon. Though somehow I doubt many people settled any cognitive dissonance this way. Maybe there were some who just did not know Stevens had been found guilty on seven felony charges a mere week before the election. Alaska might be rural, but the majority of the Alaska population is not out in the wilderness without a radio or television.

I suspect the reason Stevens got as many votes as he did is because, well, Alaska is full of crazies who simply don't have any qualms with being represented by a felon as long as it is a Republican. I can understand if they don't want to vote Democrat but no one is forced to only two choices. They could have easily written in the name of any Republican they trusted to represent them or simply abstained from voting for that office. Yet a large number of voters still cast their ballot for Stevens.

Say it with me now: Convicted Felon? It's OK If You're A Republican!

A bit of musing of what might happen if Stevens still wins after all the votes are counted. He'll either step down or get booted leaving an empty seat to be filled by special election. I'm curious if Palin will put her name on the ballot. Think about her likely major competitors in the Republican primary for 2012: Jindal, Romney, Huckabee. They're all governors like her. They're all far right social conservatives with religious ideology on their agendas like her. This could be the thing to set her apart: the only one (edit for correction: Jindal spent a little time in the House before becoming governor) with both executive and congressional experience. It probably won't happen given that Begich will be elected, but it would be interesting to see if she's thinking along these lines. Then again, maybe I'm giving her too much intellectual credit like my fellow contributor suggests.