"... Google now estimates that the average blog is read by one person," says Adam Nagourney at The Caucus, the New York Times' political blog.

(I'm not great with statistics, but I think that means you'd get less than one reader if your blog is below average.)

Nagourney got the stat from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was speaking at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Florida. As Schmidt talked about the struggles facing American newspapers, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said, "You know, if some of them went out of business, it wouldn't be all bad."

But he frowned in concern as Mr. Schmidt went on to talk about the risks of truly unfiltered blogs spreading unverified and often false information about elected officials.

"Most of us now fear or have great concerns about what you are talking about," Mr. Barbour said. "Things can get on the Internet that have no relationship to fact."

Mr. Schmidt responded: "I share your concern, passionately."

In commemoration of National Meth Awareness Day, the U.S. Department of Justice today features links to a bunch of commercials from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

None of the ads, though, can top this as an anti-drug message.

I missed this in a recent edition of The New Yorker — until tipped to it by Rick Anderson in the Weekly today. But a few weeks back the magazine had a fascinating little story about Boeing's ties to the controversy over CIA flights of terrorism suspects.

The connection comes through a Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen International Trip Planning, an aviation logistical support company.

Boeing does not mention, either on its Web site or in its annual report, that Jeppesen's clients include the CIA, and that among the international trips that the company plans for the agency are secret "extraordinary rendition" flights for terrorism suspects. Most of the planes used in rendition flights are owned and operated by tiny charter airlines that function as CIA front companies, but it is not widely known that the agency has turned to a division of Boeing, the publicly traded blue-chip behemoth, to handle many of the logistical and navigational details for these trips, including flight plans, clearance to fly over other countries, hotel reservations, and ground-crew arrangements.

...

A former Jeppesen employee, who asked not to be identified, said recently that he had been startled to learn, during an internal corporate meeting, about the company's involvement with the rendition flights. At the meeting, he recalled, Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said, "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights — you know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way."

The New Yorker said it received an official "no comment" from Jeppesen officials.

The details of Boeing's involvement come from a new book by British journalist Stephen Grey. "Ghost Plane" includes what Grey says are details showing involvement of Jeppesen and other international flight planners in the secret moving of terror suspects.

Writes Anderson in the Weekly:

Since 2003, human-rights investigators and news media reports have described a Boeing Business Jet as one of the most-dreaded planes in the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine air force. The modified 737 — a model rolled out in Renton in 2001 — was built for executive fun and comfort. But it is alleged to be the flagship of the CIA's "extreme rendition" squadron, ferrying suspected terrorists to secret agency prisons or countries where the U.S. is said to outsource torture. ...

Boeing won't confirm or deny the claim. But the Spanish documents, and an investigation by Amnesty International and the Council of Europe, indicate Boeing was making arrangements for as many as 1,000 rendition flights through 14 countries by four CIA planes, including that notorious Boeing Business Jet.

Anderson did get a response from spokesperson Tim Neale at Boeing headquarters in Chicago:

"Jeppesen's flight planning process is to provide the route that is going to be followed, how much fuel is needed on board, where they will stop, and how many people will be on board, for weight reasons.

"We don't necessarily know very much about the purpose of a flight because that information isn't necessary to create a flight plan. What somebody's going to do when they get off is not part of that plan."

The first legislative session I covered in Washington was in 1993. Democrats had just won big the previous November and there were 65 Democrats in the House and 28 in the Senate. Democrat Mike Lowry was governor and Bill Clinton was president.

It was party time for the Democrats. They rewrote state health insurance laws, raised taxes and launched an expansive effort to fight youth violence.

And of course, come 1994 many of those Democrats were defeated. One who survived was state Sen. Adam Smith, a young attorney from Kent. Today he's in Washington, D.C., after an easy re-election to the 9th Congressional District, where he's having some mixed feelings of deja vu.

"I had sort of forgotten how exciting it is to be in the majority," he told me the other day. But he is quick to temper that excitement with some realistic expectations.

"I try to tell people as much as possible, 'It will be better, but this is not everything you have ever dreamed of you will now get.' I really felt that in '93 — that pent up demand was there and when we got in and Lowry got in, every even marginally Democratic supportive group was saying, 'OK, we get everything we want' and then ended up being bitterly disappointed when that didn't happen."

Smith's 10 years in Washington doesn't put him in line for a leadership position in the new Democratic hierarchy. But as a leader in the movement of New Democrats — those who adhere to Clintonomics, free trade and a generally more moderate platform — I expect we'll see Smith's name popping up as House Democrats debate among themselves about policy and ideology.

Already Smith's been mentioned as an example of part a generational split in the House. Writing in the New York Times after the elections, Matt Bai said:

Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological — and not a moment too soon.

This is why the new Democratic majority in Washington may fare no better in addressing the nation's modern preoccupations than the Republican majority that preceded it.

Bai wrote that Democrats were "reluctant to make room for its next generation, a pragmatic and talented group led, perhaps, by Rahm Emanuel, the chief strategist behind the House elections." He also mentioned a group of nine "lesser-known names," including Smith's.

It might be too much to expect the paragons of Democratic politics to look to younger members when the reins of power are once again within their grasp. But the party that controls the next era of American politics may well be the one whose long-serving leaders can eventually summon the wisdom to step out of the way.

Smith said the split comes less with age than the years in which members were elected. He feels more aligned ideologically with others elected in the 1990s. And he says party elders know better than to run the House on a strict adherence to seniority.

"They understand that this is a different Congress than the one they came into. It's not one where the committee chairmen are gods and we all bow down to them. In part, because we watched the Republicans do that top down power thing. They spent about a year and a half condemning that kind of leadership so it makes it harder to adopt that approach."

As for pragmatism, Smith said that to him that means "knowing that there is no one ideology that has the perfect answer for everything" and from learning from experience. He says it does not mean "we have to make sure we don't piss anyone off so we can get re-elected. I reject that completely. That's not what the New Democratic movement is about."

There already is plenty of advice for Democrats if they are searching for an ideological path. That's particularly true on economic issues. As Bloomberg reported recently:

The dispute over trade and budget policies prompted a high- level private meeting earlier this month between AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who is now chairman of the executive committee at New York-based Citigroup Inc.

AFL-CIO leaders, contending Democrats won the midterm elections because of voter concern about job security and stagnant wages, say it's time to set aside the free-trade policies touted by Rubin.

The New York Times reported Sunday that out of those sorts of disputes, economic populists in the party are "emerging and strongly promoting an alternative to Rubinomics."

They want to rethink America's role in the global economy. They would intervene in markets and regulate them much more than the Rubinites would. For a start, they would declare a moratorium on new trade agreements until clauses were included that would, for example, restrict layoffs and protect incomes.

Smith says something needs to be done to "reset the balance of power between corporations and the super-rich and the rest of us." But he will be a strong defender of Clinton's economic legacy:

"There are a lot of people in the progressive community who think Clinton's thinking was the beginning of the downfall. We will have to fight that out. ... I think Clinton and Rubin were right about a hell of a lot more than they were wrong about."

To turn away from that, he said, "would be a very bad thing for the working people of the country." And he's skeptical of "economic populism" if that "means anti-trade, anti-immigration, work against business 100 percent of the time, bash them, regulate them, tax them."

One commentator wrote recently that Democrats should embrace Rubinomics to show they have an economic plan. In the Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby wrote:

Now that they have won Congress, the Democrats must prove that they are more than the mirror image of their opponents. This means reviving the pro-market centrism of the Clinton era — a spirit that lives on in the form of the Hamilton Project.

(The Hamilton Project was started at the Brookings Institution as what Mallaby described as "a center for Rubinomics in exile.")

Clearly there's a split among Democrats on economics. And one of the places the divide will be seen most clearly is over international trade agreements. From AP:

Many Democrats campaigned against Bush's trade policies in the November congressional elections, saying the administration had failed to do enough to halt the loss of manufacturing jobs to low-wage foreign countries such as China. Since Bush took office in 2001, the country has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs.

The Democratic takeover of the House and Senate has raised speculation that the administration's trade agenda will face serious obstacles in the new Congress.

Smith thinks it'd be a mistake to stop the trade agreements. He says, "amend it, don't end it." That was a phrase that began popping up toward the end of the Clinton presidency, post-Seattle WTO, when Democrats wanted to shore up protections for workers and the environment in international trade agreements.

That's why Smith said he and other Democrats voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement. It was a message, he said, to the Bush Administration to renegotiate the agreement.

"The CAFTA vote said, 'We're not going to keep doing it the way it's being done.' We have to make a stand at some point. If we're going to force their hand we have to vote against something."

At Sound Politics Eric Earling worries that the CAFTA vote by Smith and others may signal a weakening of support among state Democrats for trade.

The Bush administration knows there "are those in the extremes of both parties ready to preach retreating to protectionism and economic isolationism," but will continue to push for trade liberalization, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in a speech today.

She said the administration also hopes to wrap up negotiations by early next year on free trade deals with South Korea and Malaysia and said that talks should be concluded soon with Panama.

She called gaining congressional approval for agreements already completed with Peru and Colombia a high priority.

Smith said that the Colombia and Peru agreements likely will need side agreements on worker and environmental protections to win passage in the Democratic Congress. He said that New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, who will become Ways and Means chairman, is a strong supporter of free trade and that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will give the chairman leeway to win House approval of trade agreements.

Smith said that two other powerful Democrats on Ways and Means, Michigan's Sander Levin and California's Pete Stark, "might be more problematic" on trade. Stark is the second most senior Democrat on Ways and Means. Levin is third, and is in line to be chairman of the Subcommittee on Trade.

Said Smith:

"What I hope we don't do is adopt the Lou Dobbs extreme position, which is every trade policy is horrible unless the other country has to buy everything from us and we don't have to buy anything from them."

Dobbs is the Greek chorus of sorts in the trade debate. The CNN anchor has emerged as a leading spokesman against free trade. And he weighed in today, using his weekly commentary to urge Democrats to halt the administration's trade agenda:

Victorious Democrats will, with the opening of the 110th Congress, have a historic opportunity to right the course of a country that has been hell-bent on permitting free-trade corporatists and faith-based economics to bankrupt the nation.

As the New Year approaches, newly elected Democrats in the House and Senate will be battered by calls, even demands, to stay the course rather than right it. And we can only hope they and their new leadership in both houses will have the courage and character to be rationalists and realists and overcome their partisan political debt to corporate America, and U.S. multinationals in particular.

The pressure is already building on Democrats to signal a trade agenda. And "New Democrats" like Smith, particularly those from trade-dependent states like Washington, will be in the middle of the inevitable intra-party struggle to find a cohesive party message.

That's at least more possible than it was before Nancy Pelosi told Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings he wouldn't get the post.

Hastings, in an interview with The Palm Beach Post, said Pelosi did not indicate who she would select to head the sensitive panel, which oversees the nation's intelligence community.

The Washington Post says:

Among those seen as potential picks for the committee chairmanship by Pelosi are: Democratic Reps. Silvestre Reyes of Texas and Rush Holt of New Jersey, both members of the Intelligence Committee, and Norman Dicks of Washington state, who serves on the House Homeland Security Committee.

Who knows how much of it is an echo chamber, but Dicks' name is in nearly all the stories moving this afternoon about the intelligence panel.

Said Hastings in a statement:

Sorry, haters, God is not finished with me yet.

In case you're not familiar with Hastings, here's the AP's summary of what prevented him from heading the intelligence committee:

Hastings, who came to Congress in 1992, was charged in an FBI bribery sting but acquitted by a federal jury in 1983. Some judicial colleagues said Hastings fabricated his defense, and their allegations led to his impeachment by the U.S. House in 1988. He was removed from the bench by the Senate the following year.

In 1997, the Justice Department found an agent had falsely testified against Hastings, but no action was taken to reopen his case.

Wednesday update: Dicks is not trying to get the Intelligence job, says the AP.

What do you do now that Democrats have strengthen their hold on the state House, marginalizing Republicans to a degree not seen in years and boosting your claim as one of the most successful political players in the state?

Well, there's always infighting.

At the Slog, Josh Feit says House Speaker Frank Chopp wants to dilute the power of House Appropriations Chairwoman Helen Sommers. Sommers is the most veteran member of the House and clearly not a Chopp favorite. The two Seattle Democrats often disagree on spending, with Sommers resisting Chopp's attempts to assert his power on her committee.

Feit says Chopp wants to create three subcommittees at Appropriations with authority for education, general government and human services, "watering down Sommers' famous hold on state spending."

I just spoke with Chopp. He says the subcommittees are just one of many ideas the House Democratic Caucus is considering. He says there are two pages of proposals. He wouldn't say whose idea it was to restructure Sommers' committee.

"I don't really want to go into details. These are confidential discussions we had in caucus and a lot of ideas were suggested by a lot of people."

As to the suggestion that the subcommittees would take power away from Sommers, Chopp said, "That was not the intent at all. We're trying to figure out the best way we can organize to get the job done."

I think Feit underplays the tensions between Chopp and Sommers when he says:

The two have sparred over transportation issues in the past and there's probably some bad blood over Chopp's indifference when Sommers faced an intraparty challenge from progressive candidate Alice Woldt (a friend of Chopp's) in 2004.

I'd say there is plenty of bad blood from that and other clashes.

Chopp does face a problem with his newly fattened majority. What do you do with all those Democrats? Creating a few subcommittees or naming some co-chairs could help.

There are six House Democrats who want to be Transportation chairman. At least some of those who don't get that job could be mollified with an Appropriations subcommittee appointment.

But with 62 members in his caucus, Chopp also faces a challenge to keep infighting to a minimum. An early threat to Sommers' power isn't likely to help that effort.

The decision will be made by a 15-member Committee on Committees.

In this morning's Times, Andrew Garber writes about deep Republican losses in suburban legislative districts.

Before the election there were six Republican state senators from the region. Now there's only one: Sen. Mike Carrell, R-Lakewood, in Pierce County, and he was not up for re-election. The party also retains three Senate seats in nearby districts that are largely more rural.

The suburbs are where Republicans have been focusing efforts in recent years. This was a major push for former state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance who argued the party had forgotten "how to speak cul de sac." He said GOP candidates in the suburbs needed to be more supportive of growth management and mass transit and focus less on taxation and property rights.

The Nov. 7 Democratic tide took out some who clearly spoke cul de sac and some who stuck to more traditional GOP fare. And, as USA Today reports this morning, what Garber found here is true around the country, where Democrats pushed "Republican turf to the outer edges of major population centers in a trend that could signal trouble for the GOP."

Democrats carried nearly 60% of the U.S. House vote in inner suburbs in the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas, up from about 53% in 2002, according to the analysis by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.

They received nearly 55% of the vote in the next ring of "mature" 20- and 30-year-old suburbs, with 45% going to Republicans and third-party candidates. In 2002, the last midterm election, Democrats received 50% of the vote there.

UPDATE: At Sound Politics Matt Rosenberg says the deep GOP losses gives the party a chance to remake itself and regain some relevance.

The president-elect of the Christian Coalition quit this week after "he realized he would be unable to broaden the organization's agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage."

The Orlando Sentinel reports on the split between Central Florida's Rev. Joel Hunter, of Northland, A Church Distributed, and the prominent Christian political organization:

He hoped to include issues such as easing poverty and saving the environment.

"These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," Hunter said.

"They pretty much said, 'These issues are fine, but they're not our issues; that's not our base,' " Hunter said of his conversation with the group's leadership.

A statement issued by the coalition said Hunter resigned because of "differences in philosophy and vision." The board accepted his decision "unanimously," it states.

As you could expect, the left is enjoying a little schadenfreude today. From DailyKos:

The continued implosion of the Christian Coalition, which represents the people currently in control of the Repugs, is one more sign of why the Repugs lost this month and why they will continue to lose as long as they hitch their star to Robertson, Dobson, et. al.

...

I'm actually quite happy that the Christian Coalition is continuing down its self-destructive path, because that just means its total irrelevance will come all the more quickly.

And An Angry Dakota Democrat says:

I want to say Thank You to the Christian Coalition, you have shown me that you are not really religious. You are only a right-wing hit squad that uses religion as a cover.

In the Bible Belt, George Sand writes at Arkansas Politics:

This is yet another case of how the powers behind the scenes don't care or are out of touch with the body, in this case, the body of this Christian organization, in our nation's case, the body of the people. The Coalition spoke loudly and clearly, they wanted Hunter and presumably his vision of the mission of that Christian organization. It appears that the big boys did not, and Hunter found that unacceptable. How refreshing and how sad for those Christian soldiers who agreed that hunger, poverty, and the environment were more important than abortion and gay marriage.

But it was the "powers behind the scenes" that wanted Hunter. He was recruited last summer by the Roberta Combs, chairman of the Christian Coalition. And Hunter's views could not have been a surprise to Combs. He's made no secret of his discomfort with the tactics and tone of the Christian conservative political movement. He published a book about it in June: "Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians."

Since his appointment, Hunter was inspired by a film about global warming to get his congregation to become more ecologically responsible.

Clearly the leaders of the Christian Coalition knew they were getting a different brand of political activism in Hunter. But by the time the appointment was made public in September, the Orlando Sentinel -- which has covered the issue in greater depth than any paper -- showed what now looks like the beginnings of a public split between Hunter and Combs:

"The Christian Coalition is in decline," Hunter acknowledged, citing his discussions with the organization's board during the past year. "I think they were desperate when they asked me. ... I've always been drawn to lost causes."

Roberta Combs, chairman of the Christian Coalition of America, put it differently.

"I recruited him to be the president, and I'm looking forward to working with him," Combs said. "It seemed we needed a pastor that could communicate with other pastors."

There were objections from some corners, including the Traditional Values Coalition. But Hunter was moving ahead with his plans to "rebuild and rebrand" the Christian Coalition. The strategy is clear from looking at Hunter's book, where he writes about his disagreements with how some politically active Christian conservatives read scriptures to justify political activity.

It is not that we think these involved evangelicals are wrong. We agree with so much of what they have to say. Yet hopping on the bandwagon does not fee quite right either. We need to do some thinking first.

The religious right has become allied with the political right to form the right wing -- a more conservative or, as some would say, reactionary -- political force. More subtly, the Christians have theologically unified and confused the biblical forms of government with America's forms.

The religious right has not declined in recent years as some have speculated; it has just become more strident and calcified in its focus. I t has developed a strong following on several key issues including abortion and keeping God references in the public square. (Conversely, it has not developed a broader list of concerns well-documented in the Bible, including poverty, injustice, and the environment which resonate more with younger evangelicals and Catholics.)

Hunter writes that it's an illusion that "governmental power is better because a believer holds it" and says the New Testament "does not recommend such an overwhelming infusion of Christianity into government."

He draws a distinction between "Christian" and "Christlike" approaches to politics:

A Christian approach to politics may show those in opposition just how wrong their opposition is. The Christlike approach to politics respectfully acknowledges the points at which they are right. A Christian approach could tell everyone how to vote; the Christlike approach directs the attention of the voters to underlying values. A Christian approach could give us certainty; the Christlike approach gives us a biblical perspective.

The question I'm left with is why was Hunter recruited in the first place? And why did he accept? Both sides knew where the other stood. Perhaps as Jan. 1 approached -- when Hunter was due to take over -- the practical application of those differences made the relationship unworkable.

Whatever the case, I doubt this is the last we will hear of Joel Hunter. The failed partnership may now give him an even higher profile as Christian conservatives struggle to find their way.

MORE: This is only a little related, and a week late, but here is a great article by The Weekly's Nina Shapiro about World Vision and AIDS.

I see that while I was away some Democrats and environmentalists said they look forward to working with Congressman Dave Reichert to try to get him to be a little more green.

But before any good-natured reaching out happens, Reichert could find himself on the spot over global warming. In the campaign Reichert said, among other things about climate change, that he wasn't convinced that it was caused by "man's activity or if global warming is one of the natural temperature fluctuations we've seen over the course of the earth's history."

Reichert said he would investigate the issue.

Congressman Norm Dicks, though, is not likely to wait. Dicks told me he will reintroduce a resolution he pushed in May to get Congress on record that "global warming is a scientific fact and it is caused by human causes."

Dicks' resolution was approved by the Appropriations Committee and put in the Interior funding bill for 2007. That would have led to the the first-ever House floor debate and vote over imposing mandatory limits on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But Republicans stripped it from the bill and wouldn't allow a floor vote. Dicks told me:

"I want to bring that back up and force the Administration to come to the reality that this is a real threat to the planet. I think Al Gore, my good friend, is totally right on this thing. The scientists are 99.9 percent in agreement and the only people saying something different are paid for by the industry."

Here's what the "Sense of Congress" amendment said:

The Congress finds that: (1) greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere are causing average temperatures to rise at a rate outside the range of natural variability and are posing a substantial risk of rising sea-levels, altered patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation, and increased frequency and severity of floods and droughts; (2) there is a growing scientific consensus that human activity is a substantial cause of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere; and (3) mandatory steps will be required to slow or stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

It is the sense of the Congress that there should be enacted a comprehensive and effective national program of mandatory, market-based limits and incentives on emissions of greenhouse gases that slow, stop, and reverse the growth of such emissions at a rate and in a manner that (1) will not significantly harm the United States economy; and (2) will encourage comparable action by other nations that are major trading partners and key contributors to global emissions.

It was hardly a radical move. It was non-binding and came with no increased funding for study of climate change. As Dicks said himself during debate, "This provision authorizes nothing."

It led to some great debate, though.

Alaska Republican Don Young: I am a little bit concerned when everything that is wrong is our fault, that the human factor creates all the damages on this globe. That is pure nonsense. That is nonsense.

And so I am asking you, let's have the hearings, let's have the scientists, let's have some debate about really what is occurring here instead of having hysteria and saying it is all our fault.

And, by the way, it is always the fault of the Americans. It is never the fault of the bigger countries that burn as many barrels of oil as we are doing today, not per capita but as many barrels of oil, and burn the coal as we are trying to do. It is never their fault. It is our fault.

So let's have a sound debate about this issue and not be caught in this attitude that we must do something right now because we are the Federal Government. Let's do it the right way.

...

Wisconsin Democrat David Obey: Mr. Chairman, I knew we still had charter members of the Flat Earth Society walking around this country. I didn't realize there were quite so many in the United States Congress.

Young: I am just curious, were you referring to yourself?

Obey: The rules don't allow me to say who I was referring to.

...

Dicks: I mean at some point can the majority here not figure out we ought to have some study, we ought to look into this, that this is a real issue that affects everyone on the Earth?

While Alaska melts away, their Congressmen will be down here in D.C. and everybody will be wondering whatever happened to Alaska.

All I am saying is this is a serious problem, and it is time for serious people to get serious, including the gentleman from Alaska.

...

Young: Mr. Chairman, I just want to remind him, if you look at any of the studies that are taking place now, the polar bear pack is very healthy and, in fact, increasing. Keep that in mind. Read something that really has some merit to it. Do not just read the fear tactic. This is science from the Fish and Wildlife people. Read that. They will tell you we are increasing the numbers, not decreasing. Where you got this idea, I have no idea. Because someone told you that.

Dicks: Mr. Chairman, I do not think you and I will be here to figure out who was right. I would rather do some serious research about it now than wake up 10 years from now and find out if we would have acted back in 2006 and done something about this, we might have been able to save all of humanity.

I mean, this is real and it is an important issue, and I hate to see it be treated so frivolously by the gentleman from Alaska.

Well, I'll get to that in a moment. But first some interesting findings from the P.O.P. general election guessing game. (I originally called it an "election contest" but that caused palpitations among some Seattle lawyers still recovering from 2004's contested election.)

There were dozens of entries. And no one guessed the size of Sen. Maria Cantwell's victory margin. The closest was Particle Man's 56 percent, which is pretty darn close to the 56.7 percent reported by the Secretary of State's office. Most guessed Cantwell would win with about 52 percent of the vote.

And nobody guessed that Justice Susan Owens would win re-election with 60 percent of the vote. The closest anyone came was 57 percent, but most thought the race would be within a few percentage points.

Only our winner accurately predicted the size of the Democratic victory in the state Legislature. (I do know that one entrant was equally optimistic in talking about it, but couldn't quite pull the trigger to put those rosy guesses on his entry. It might have made him the winner if he had gone with his gut.)

And the winner is, Mike Ryherd. He wrote on his entry that his guesses were "based on the fact that I do not believe the vaunted GOP GOTV will be vaunted, and I do believe the D's crest will be almost as big as 1994 was in reverse."

There are still some votes to be counted in House races. But no matter how they turn out no one will come as close as Ryherd in his guess that Democrats would hold 63 seats in the House and the 32 they hold in the Senate. He got the U.S. Senate spot on, too, and was closest of anyone on the U.S. House with his pick of 230 Democrats. He guessed the winner in every race except in the 8th Congressional District.

Ryherd is a well known lobbyist in Olympia. He works for the Teamsters, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, cities and others. A prize will be on its way soon. And Mike, I don't want to list all those who entered the contest, but rest assured that you were competing against at least a few of your Third House colleagues, some legislative staffers and a couple of bloggers.

Thank you all for playing. And congratulations to Mike.

I've returned from a week of badly needed time away from the blog. I'll start posting again soon as I work my way through e-mails and phone messages. I will also sort through the election result predictions and find a winner to post today.

Big thanks to Jim Brunner for sitting in while I was gone. I think he did a great job, and certainly kept up the level of debate post-election.

With the election behind us some decisions will be made soon about the future of this blog. The initial commitment was to keep it going through the election and now the bosses and I will look for a chance to sit down and talk about what worked and what didn't and whether there is something worth keeping going on a year-round basis.

I have your comments from last month when I asked for input for my talk to the Canadian journalists. But if you have anything more to add, or didn't get a chance then, please post your (hopefully constructive) thoughts here about what you'd like to see happen to the blog.

I see I came to the right room for an argument.

Given the mighty reaction to the Darcy Burner comments yesterday, here are a few parting thoughts.

In any race as close as Burner's, you can pick your own favorite reason for why the race turned out like it did. Some have cited the ticket-splitting nature of the 8th District. Over at the pro-Burner Slog yesterday, Josh Feit said Burner lost because she "wasn't such a good candidate" and added "there was a lot of truth to the Republican rap that her experience didn't match Dave Reichert's." Others blame (or credit) the media, including The Times editorial board's endorsement of Reichert. I tend to side with the people who believe Reichert's comparative advantage in experience was enough to get him re-elected despite the prevailing Democratic current.

For the record, I don't think it loopy to look at the role gender can play in an election. You can see it in the "gender gap" which generally has men favoring Republicans and women leaning Democratic. Male and female candidates can be perceived differently. (Some commenters in yesterday's thread only strengthened Burner's argument by calling her "honey" and telling her to stay at home with the kid.)

But for every male chauvinist out there, there are others who prefer to vote for women. As long as I've covered politics here, I've heard consultants speak about women candidates as having an advantage. Our state Legislature ranks 3rd in the percentage of women in the Legislature, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, which also has loads of other data on women in elected office.

For another perspective, researchers here suggest that many Congressional districts treat Democratic women differently than Republican women. In Washington's 8th, they predict Republican women having an easier go than Democrats. The methodology is complicated, so take a look for yourself.

I'll leave it at that. Thanks to all of you who commented this week with critiques and arguments, especially those who refrained from calling each other names.

David Postman should return to blogging here next week.

Darcy Burner this morning offers a new theory for why she narrowly lost to Republican Dave Reichert in the 8th Congressional District race: her gender.

In an email to Seattle Times reporter Jonathan Martin, who covered the race, Burner listed 20 Democratic challengers in U.S. House races around the country who had raised at least $1 million as of June.

Of the seven who lost (or are trailing), six are women. Among the 13 winners, only one is a woman, according to Burner's tally. Burner ended her email with this statement:

"Notice a pattern? You asked me why I thought I didn't win. Some answers I am not allowed to give."

While it is true that women historically have had a hard time penetrating the good old boys club of Congress, Burner's theory ignores some facts.

First, Washington State, including the 8th District, has had little problem electing women. Does anyone remember Jennifer Dunn? Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell? Gov. Christine Gregoire?

Second, Burner's list of six women who lost includes two who lost, or were trailing in the latest vote counts, to other women (Democrat Patricia Madrid is trailing Republican Heather Wilson in New Mexico's 1st District and Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy trails Republican Deborah Pryce in Ohio's 15th.)

The Washington Post reports last week's election resulted in a net gain in the number of women in Congress.

I asked Burner to clarify her point. She responded with another email:

There has been a lot of talk about this year's Democratic wave, but it was clearly a wave that helped men more than women. A reasonable hypothesis would be that the wave was related to voter feeling about the war, and that voters responded by preferring Democratic male challengers to Republican incumbents (of either gender), but did not apply that same preference to Democratic female challengers. (The one exception on the list, Gillibrand, ran her entire campaign on a corruption theme - a noticible difference from everyone else.). Why would the issue of the war help men but not women? I'll leave that to you. But I think if we're going to talk about the wave and the macro environment, it's important to recognize such a striking pattern.

(Gillibrand refers to Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democrat who beat Republican John Sweeney in New York's 20th District. Sweeney self-destructed with reports of inappropriate ski trips with lobbyists, photos of him partying at a fraternity house, and allegations of spousal abuse.)

So I guess Burner is arguing last week's Blue Wave was actually a Blue Male Iraq War (Unless You Were A Woman Talking About Corruption) Wave.

Well that didn't take long.

Scarcely a week after winning majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats are fighting over who ought to get credit, and complaining that they should have done much better, the NYT's Adam Nagourney reports.

State Democratic leaders are saying Howard Dean, the party chairman, is not receiving the credit he deserves for the triumph.

Offering a rather different view, two leading party strategists rebuked Mr. Dean on Wednesday, saying the Democrats could have captured 40 House seats rather than 29 had Mr. Dean bowed to demands by Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, leader of the effort to recapture the House, to put more money into Congressional races.

"I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its incompetence," one strategist, James Carville, said of Mr. Dean.

The biggest griping in the article comes via the Bill Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. The other main complainant quoted is Stan Greenberg, Clinton's pollster and adviser.

Mr. Greenberg said that Republicans held 14 seats by a single percentage point and that a small investment by Mr. Dean could have put Democrats into a commanding position for the rest of the decade.

"There was a missed opportunity here," he said. "I've sat down with Republican pollsters to discuss this race: They believe we left 10 to 20 seats on the table."

Carville and Greenberg made the comments at a breakfast gathering of "newsmakers and reporters," Nagourney writes.

Washington's 8th Congressional District is not mentioned by name in the article, but I'd wager it is one of those "10 to 20 seats" Greenberg is talking about.

State Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz (a Howard Dean fan), refused to second guess Darcy Burner's close loss to Republican Dave Reichert when I spoke with him Tuesday:

"She ran a fantastic race -- she challenged an incumbent congressman and took him down to the wire on this thing. Dave Reichert has to prepare for a lifetime of battles because that district is turning Democratic and we're coming after it."

Last night's Frontline piece on the late Spokane Mayor Jim West superbly captured the man's downfall.

The piece examines in detail how the Spokesman-Review pursued its controversial stories on West, and includes interviews with investigative reporter Bill Morlin and editor Steve Smith.

In case anyone forgot, the paper employed a consultant to pose on a gay web site and draw out West -- a former Republican state legislator who had co-sponsored and voted for legislation opposing gay rights -- into conversations about sex and a possible (unpaid) City Hall internship. The paper then confronted West with his secret life -- and when Frontline replays the actual taped interview of that moment, you can sense the mayor's world collapsing before his eyes.

The Spokesman-Review published a story that not only detailed West's secret life as a closeted gay man trolling the Internet, but also brought up allegations by men who claimed West had abused them in the 1970s, when West was a Boy Scout leader and sheriff's deputy. That was the beginning of the end for West, who denied the allegations but was drummed out of office by a recall campaign. He died of cancer in July.

The Spokesman-Review's controversial tactics get examined in the Frontline piece. There seems to be some painful hair-splitting when Morlin explains how he couldn't have gone online and posed as someone else, because it would have violated the paper's code of ethics. But, he notes, the code of ethics didn't prohibit the paper hiring a consultant to entrap the mayor. The paper's editors also appear gloating and making jokes about possible headlines on the night West lost his recall election.

More than anything, Frontline captured the tragic loneliness of West, who never seemed to come to grips with himself. After what he termed his "brutal outing," West started attending a local church that condemns homosexuality as a sin.

I'm curious what others thought of the Frontline segment. In particular, did it change your view of the Spokesman-Review's tactics? Should the paper's initial story have tried to tie allegations of decades-old sex abuse with the contemporary Internet trolling by the mayor? Did the paper prove its worst allegations? Did West simply get what he deserved?

At the Frontline web site, you can watch the whole program, and see transcripts of interviews with reporters who covered the story (including David Postman), community leaders, some of West's accusers and members of Spokane's gay community.

UPDATE: Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith has written a critical response to the Frontline piece here.

Darcy Burner's press conference this morning was a bit odd.

Burner came out to a room jammed full of supporters and media cameras and delivered a four-minute speech in which she tried to sound upbeat but looked a little misty-eyed. She clearly had not wanted to concede -- saying there were still many votes to be counted -- and did not want to speculate much on why she narrowly lost.

As she had for much of her campaign against Republican Dave Reichert, Burner focused on the national picture, and celebrated the new Democratic majorities in Congress.

"I think it will be a wonderful thing that for the first time in six years we will have some integrity and accountability again in the halls of the Congress, and for the first time in the history of Washington's 8th District, Democrats came together and made this the most competitive race that this district has ever seen."

She also thanked her supporters for waging a scrappy underdog campaign.

"This has been an incredible journey. Two years ago when I started this race nobody thought it was gonna be possible for us to even come close but we, you and I, knew what was at stake in this election and we believed what was possible."

Burner finished her brief speech by saying "this isn't an end, it's a beginning" and thanked her volunteers and donors. Then she walked off without answering any questions, much to the irritation of reporters in the room.

After walking outside for several minutes to chat with supporters, Burner reconsidered and returned to take some questions. But she did not have many answers.

When asked why voters did not send her to Washington, D.C., Burner paused. "Well," she said, and then laughed a bit nervously. "It's a good question."

She said, "Obviously it's still close. We don't know how close it will be." Then she grew more animated, gesturing as she recounted the massive GOP effort it took to save Reichert's seat.

"It was certainly the case that the Republicans threw everything they had into keeping this seat: $6 million in Republican expenditures, the President, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the First Lady, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove -- and with that they barely kept it."

When asked whether she will run again for political office, Burner said the only thing she knows for sure is she's taking her young son to Disneyland.

After the press conference, Burner's campaign manager, Zach Silk, told me Reichert was one of a "set of Republicans" in supposed swing districts who managed to survive the Democratic wave this year.

He said they did it in large part because they got so much help from the national party.

"The only common thing that I can see about them is the amount of money that was spent on their behalf to diminish their challengers."

If there was a bright side for Burner's supporters, Silk said, it's that districts like WA-08 gobbled up a lot of Republican energy and cash.

"What it created was those became the frontlines, the candidates like us, and then all these other challengers they couldn't spend money on swept in. So you've got places like rural Minnesota and Kansas and just unusual places that were flipping."

Silk credited a couple late ads in particular with helping to knock Burner down in the public's mind. The first was an ad quoting newspaper editorials critical of Burner, which ran heavily in the closing days of the campaign. The second was an NRCC ad which made Burner look like some kind of evil zombie - a Democrat zombie who would raise your taxes.

Diane Tebelius, state Republian chairwoman, did not return my phone call this morning, but issued a statement: "Dave Reichert won based upon his 35 years of distinguished service to the community and for his independent voting record," said Tebelius. "The Republican Party's get-out-the-vote effort also played a major role in the election."

Meanwhile, some Democrats have to be wondering whether they blew a shot at taking the 8th because of Burner's lack of political experience.

State Rep. Ross Hunter had been considered a possibility but declined to run, in part because he was diagnosed with cancer. Other locals with business backgrounds were also courted by the Democrats. But in the end, it was the relatively inexperienced Burner who took the chance.

I called Benjamin von Ullrich, chairman of the 48th Legislative District Democrats, who admitted a more experienced candidate might have closed the gap on Reichert. "I've wrestled with that myself," he said.

But Ullrich reminded me that Burner got into the race in 2005 -- when few anticipated how far President Bush and Congress would plummet in popularity.

"I think the experienced politicians looked at it and said 'Republicans are still strong, Reichert is still popular, why would I run?' Politicians like to win. They don't like to lose."

She tried with all her might to hang on, but Darcy Burner reluctantly conceded last night in the 8th Congressional District race after the Associated Press grew tired of waiting for her and called the race for Dave Reichert based on vote trends.

So why couldn't Burner ride the national Democratic tide in this fairly blue state? I'll have more on this later, but looking quickly at the voting trends, it appears the later votes broke for Reichert in a big way - not just in the more conservative Pierce County parts of the 8th District, but also in King County. By last night, Burner and Reichert wound up virtually tied in King County - with Reichert creeping ahead by 9 votes. With Pierce County added to that mix, Reichert built a 4,727 vote margin as of last night.

I don't think Reichert ran a perfect campaign. He got himself in trouble with muddled statements on global warming and defended the Iraq war in a debate by saying "we were attacked."

So what happened late in the race to cement Reichert's victory? A couple possibilities come quickly to mind. First, Reichert ran what I thought was a pretty effective ad - the "job interview" piece - mocking Burner's lack of experience. He also ran an ad quoting state newspapers on the race.

In the end, it appears voters bought the notion that Burner was largely a vessel through which Democratic rage flowed. And that wasn't enough for them to fire Reichert.

Burner is holding a press conference this morning. I'll report back with more later.

Jim Brunner here. I'm taking a break from writing about strip clubs and Sonics arena politicking to fill in for David Postman, who is taking a well-deserved vacation. (Thanks for the intro, David.)

While I find my blog legs, and await the latest vote totals in the Reichert-Burner race (will she concede today?), Talking Points Memo has a nice roundup of other U.S. House races that remain too close to call.

I am taking a week's vacation and will not be blogging again until Nov. 21. Times reporter Jim Brunner will be filling in here. He's a great reporter with a good eye for interesting political stories so I'm confident he'll round up some interesting things in this post-election season.

A little on Jim. I met him in 1995 when he was a UW intern covering the Legislature for the Spokesman-Review. He also did a session for AP and one with the Times, where he's been since 1998. He's covered City Hall for the paper and currently follows the saga of the Sonics.

Please send him suggestions. But save up the nasty comments for when I return.

See you then.

Washington Democrats are split on who should be Nancy Pelosi's No. 2 when Democrats take charge and she becomes speaker in January.

In the race for House majority leader, Norm Dicks and Jim McDermott tell me they're backing Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania and Jay Inslee and Adam Smith say they're backing Pelosi's current No. 2, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer. I'm waiting to talk to Rick Larsen and Brian Baird.

Democrats will meet Thursday to elect their leaders. It's an active campaign, Dicks said, and "both sides are going all out."

The race seems like inside baseball to many. But it will help decide an important committee assignment for Dicks, Washington's senior member, and has laid bare some frustration about all the attention given Murtha when he came out in opposition to the war last year.

It's not about ideology. McDermott, the delegation's most liberal member, is part of the whip team for Murtha. Said McDermott:

"He's a centrist, at best. I'd say he's a little more further to the right than I'd like."

Dicks agrees:

"Murtha is a real centrist. He is not a big liberal -- only on the war. And he is doing that as a matter of conscious."

The war, though, is how most people came to know about Murtha. He's a former Marine and supported the invasion of Iraq. In November of last year he came out against the war and emerged as the spokesperson for the anti-war wing of House Democrats. McDermott said:

"A guy like Jack Murtha has been here for 30 years and outside whatever district he's from in Pennsylvania, I'm sure he's an absolute unknown. His one time putting his head up in public really high made him look like he was with me. When he made his announcement Jay Inslee stopped me in the hall and said, 'The apocalypse has happened. Jack Murtha's with you.

"Jack came to it from a totally different position. He started out as a supporter of the war and very big supporter of the military and wanted to be supportive of his president, and all the rest. So he was not coming from the political position I was coming from. It took him a long time, but once it was done, that was the end of it for Jack."

Murtha's standing with liberal Democrats was boosted when he was attacked by Republicans. And that's led some to the mistaken impression that Murtha leans to the left. Said Inslee:

"As far as the ideological part of this, it is kind of an interesting race because the progressive wing of the party is much more aligned with Steny on a whole host of issues -- choice, the environment, energy - then the other fellow.

"It's an interesting dynamic. I would encourage those who are on the progressive side of our party to hitch their star to Steny because he has been a very, very vocal voice on a whole bunch of progressive issues."

Maybe. But there is a lot of progressive support behind Murtha. Arianna Huffington is urging people to lobby their Democratic representatives to vote for Murtha. And she wants to see Murtha win another honor, too:

When Rick Stengel, TIME's new editor, asked me to take part in a panel in New York this Tuesday to discuss who should be the "Person of the Year", my mind immediately turned to Murtha. Why? Because, contrary to what Karl Rove would like you to believe, this election wasn't about corruption, it wasn't about a few formerly closeted homophobes, and it wasn't about spending. As I've said before, it was about three things: Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq (Click here for backup). And Murtha was a key reason the election was a referendum on Iraq.

...

I strongly urge House Dems to remember why they're even picking a Majority Leader in the first place. If it weren't for Jack Murtha, they'd be voting for Minority Leader.

"There probably won't be a whole lot of difference between a Majority Leader Murtha and a Majority Leader Hoyer," says Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics.

The Nation, in a June blog post praising Murtha and criticizing votes by Hoyer, said:

The point here is not to suggest that Murtha's a perfect progressive -- in fact, he's really an old-school New Dealer who breaks with liberals on some social issues -- or that Hoyer is Tom DeLay in Democrat drag. For instance, while Murtha's been a more consistent critic of corporate-sponsored free-trade pacts than Hoyer, both men have lifetime records of voting with the AFL-CIO around 90 percent of the time.

But the Nation makes clear it's more than just the war that attracts progressives to Murtha.

No member of the House leadership has more consistently echoed the talking points of the corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council than Hoyer, who once told a DLC event that Democrats lost control of the House in 1994 because "too many Americans believed that our party had become weak on crime and national defense, incapable of making hard decisions on welfare reform and fiscal policy, and irrevocably wedded to the idea that all of our problems could be solved by government and more spending."

Inslee says he has a lot of respect for Murtha, who he says is a "dear person, has a big heart and has been a very strong leader." One reason he's backing Hoyer is the work he did to help get Democrats elected this year. Inslee said that through Hoyer's campaign work this year "he has done as much or more to get us out of Iraq as anyone in our caucus" because he was instrumental in making sure enough Democrats won to take control of the House and put the party in a position to do something about Iraq.

Hoyer campaigned in more than 80 districts. Murtha was planning on campaigning in 41.

Inslee doesn't think Murtha's or Hoyer's positions on the war should sway votes in the majority leader's race.

"They both started the war. They both voted for the war and frankly that's when the chips were down. In my opinion that was a misjudgment for both of them and I don't think either one has a leg up on that front."

In talking to Inslee about the majority leader race it seems that the Murtha-Hoyer contest has poked at sore spots about Democratic opposition to the war. He said of Murtha's high profile:

"His voice on this Iraq issue has been very important to us. It's good that the media finally gave a voice to us against the war. It has been extremely frustrating to some of us who have been fighting against the war. There were 156 Democrats against the war, but we were never given any voice.

"But when Jack surfaced, all of a sudden the media said 'There is a debate.' There's been a debate for three years. But it's been ignored. ... All of us who have been against the war since day one were treated like potted plants. I always found that kind of curious."

Dicks said he's served with Murtha for 28 years on the Defense Appropriations Subcomittee. If Murtha moves up to majority leader Dicks said he'd be in line to be chairman of the subcommittee.

The race appears to be close. Pelosi this weekend publicly backed Murtha. According to the Washington Post:

The unexpected move signaled the sizable value Pelosi gives to personal loyalty and personality preferences. Hoyer competed with her in 2001 for the post of House minority whip, while Murtha managed her winning campaign. Pelosi has also all but decided she will not name the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) to chair that panel next year, a decision pregnant with personal animus.

I awoke this morning to hear it suggested that the Democratic election landslide was good news for enemies of the United States. Apparently Iraqi insurgents are popping the bubbly.

This time though it wasn't President Bush or Vice President Cheney making the connection, but NPR's Daniel Schorr, the thoughtful, veteran political analyst. He's certainly no GOP partisan. Here's what he said on Weekend Edition Saturday as part of his answer to host Lynn Neary's question, "How is the rest of the world reacting to the news of this election?"

I suspect that the insurgents are probably sitting around drinking champagne, and saying, 'Hey look, we drove a cabinet secretary out of office, we got the president all upset' and so on. This must look very good in terms of the rebels in Iraq.

If Bush, Cheney, Rush or O'Reillly had said that I bet there would be outrage from Democrats.

Bush said the week before the election:

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses. ... That's what's at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq."

That prompted Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to say the President "resorted to the same tired old partisan attacks in a desperate attempt to hold on to power."

And there was a great outrage when Cheney said in August:

The thing that's partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.

Dan Froomkin wrote then in the Washington Post:

By insinuating that the sizeable majority of American voters who oppose the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy, Vice President Cheney on Wednesday may have crossed the line that separates legitimate political discourse from hysteria.

But by saying that rebels were celebrating the election victory, wasn't Schorr making the same point? Certainly it was in a much more sober and non-partisan fashion. And he's not saying that was Democrats' objective. But he's clearly saying that Iraqi insurgents fighting U.S. forces are cheering political developments here. And when he says it, it seems to make sense and does not come with the tinge of arch partisanship and questions of patriotism inherent in what Bush and Cheney have said.

Here's the fuller excerpt of Neary's conversation with Schorr:

Neary: Well, how is the rest of the world reacting to the news of this election?

Schorr: Well, on the whole, quite favorably. I mean, American popularity was at a very, very low ebb under the Bush Administration. I suspect that a little of that will be abated because it'll be seen that Americans have talked back to the president, talked back to the government, and that things are going to change.

Neary: And in Iraq, I get the sense there is a little bit of nervousness.

Schorr: Well, Iraq, what we have there is, those people who want American troops to stay and are worried that now with Rumsfeld gone they're going to try to do something about that. And there are also those, I suspect, that the insurgents are probably sitting around drinking champagne, and saying, "Hey look, we drove a cabinet secretary out of office, we got the president all upset" and so on. This must look very good in terms of the rebels in Iraq.

You can listen to the full segment here.