New York: New Jersey

Cheers to the AP for the initial brief filed on the victory in Virginia for Republican Bob McDonnell. This is, of course, a severe blow to the Washington Post that exerted massive efforts to derail McDonnell, dredging up college papers or some such nonsense and trying to create a surge against him. It failed.

The initial brief from the AP is quick and honest - hard to tell if this type of honest, sober analysis will continue through tomorrow's post-mortems. I've underlined the stuff I'm (pleasantly) surprised the included:
Republicans wrested political control of Virginia from the Democrats on Tuesday as independent voters swung behind the GOP, a troubling sign for President Barack Obama and his party heading into an important midterm election year.

If you were reading the rightweb a few months ago you were seeing a lot of gloom and doom for Republican chances in 2010. They were analyzing races and the number of Senate seats up in 'safe' districts and all that and it was looking like unbridled Obamamania for at least 4 years.

My, how the worm has turned. In what the media will surely describe as non-representative of the general mood of the country, you should see what is happening to Specter. You'll recall that he flipped parties, again, to get away from a sure primary loss to Pat Toomey. In a generally left leaning state he sought the warm embrace of the left to continue his 'career' in the Senate.

Bonus...heh...good one.

IBD on California lyin':
Did Proposition 13 ruin California? Yes, says a now-popular myth, which explains the state's budget crisis as punishment for keeping taxes too low. But statistics are stubborn things.

There are only two ways to get into a fiscal mess on the scale seen in California right now: You either spend too much or tax too little...

At the "root of California's misery," says Time, "lies Proposition 13, the anti-tax measure that ignited the Reagan Revolution and the conservative era. In Washington, the Reagan-Bush era is over. But in California, the conservative legacy lives on."

This sort of argument is emerging now, we'd guess, to help soften voter resistance to higher taxes not just in California but, sooner or later, at the federal level to pay for the spending frenzy of Congress and the Obama administration.

Got long again this week. As an aid when Saturday's run long I'll put a little decriptive phrase that you can use to help you 'skip' stuff that you don't think you'll find interesting.

Mona Charen (socialized medicine is worse than private):
Advocates of single-payer commonly cite infant mortality rates because the U.S. lags behind other industrialized nations on this measure. But, as many studies have revealed, these numbers are not reliable. In the first place, nations have different standards about how to measure infant mortality. In some countries, a severely premature infant is labeled a fetal death instead of an infant death.