Well, I'm glad Akaka won :D not Mazie tho! AND I DO NOT SUPPORT THE 'MACHINE'!!

after 14 hours at the poll, I'm still tired but glad Case didn't win because of his support for the Iraq war and the fact he did not raise ethics violation charges against Tom Delay.. it could of given him the support he needed.. but he either wasn't brave enough to do it or didn't find Delay's behavior unethical.. either way, not good :(




Hawaiian punch

A moderate Democrat is trying to unseat one of the islands' iconic senators by calling him a far-left liberal. Sound familiar?

By Neal Milner and Alex Koppelman

On a recent warm Sunday afternoon, Rep. Ed Case, a Hawaii Democrat, and an audience of about three dozen had gathered in the living room of a private home in a Republican area of east Honolulu for what Hawaiians call a "talk story" -- an informal conversation. The two-term congressman was explaining to the mostly Filipino crowd why he had chosen to take on 82-year-old incumbent Sen. Daniel Akaka in the Democratic primary.

"I'm a moderate," Case, in a lei and aloha shirt, told the assembled. "That's where most people in Hawaii are today. That's where most people in the country are today." And though he stressed that he has "no problem being a Democrat," Case called his opponent a "far-left liberal" and said his natural friends in Congress are "15 or so moderates," including, he added without prompting, Joe Lieberman....

...But the race is oddly similar to a much more prominent primary battle that took place on the mainland, 6,000 miles east of Honolulu and seven weeks ago, in another deep blue state, and involved the senator that Case referenced as a natural ally. Case vs. Akaka is a mirror image of Lamont vs. Lieberman, except that in the Connecticut race the challenger was a liberal, and the challenger and his supporters were harshly criticized for taking on an incumbent -- even accused of trying to "purge" the Democratic Party.

"The comparison between Connecticut and Hawaii is overblown, in my estimation," Case said in a recent interview, as he traversed Oahu in a campaign bus. But that doesn't stop him from claiming that he and the moderate Connecticutt senator are in the same boat. "I certainly am facing the same thing that Lieberman did ... There's definitely a faction within the party that wants to purge me right out of the Democratic Party, because I'm not ideologically pure from their perspective, just as was happening with moderate Democrats and, for that matter, moderate Republicans throughout the country."...

...In this race, unlike Connecticut, the incumbent is against the war, and he is as ready as Ned Lamont to talk about it. He has put Case on the defensive.

"Senator Akaka wanted to run exclusively on the war, and made the war a central issue of the campaign," Case says. "I believe the war's an important issue. It has to be an issue in any congressional campaign; it cannot not be an issue. But Senator Akaka apparently believes that that was a way to make sure that Democrats didn't support my argument that we needed to move to the next generation in the Senate, that Hawaii faced great danger with two 82-year-old senators. He just essentially was trying to draw a distinction between the two of us and ride that as hard as he could."

Though the state does appear to be moving to the center, having elected a Republican governor in 2002 who is all but unopposed this year, Hawaii politics have long been dominated by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the state generally opposes the war. That opposition has galvanized what most observers agree is a unique coalition behind Akaka
...
SEE DAD, I'm not the only one!!!

Read the Salon article here