really? this gives repugs cause for celebration?

GOP hopes rise, Dems hit rough patch

After three nearly uninterrupted years of favorable political news, Democrats have finally hit a rough patch.

Over a period of fewer than 10 days, Democrats have seen their nominee go down in defeat in the Georgia Senate runoff — eliminating the prospect of a filibuster-proof majority — lost two winnable House races in Louisiana and witnessed House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) sink deeper into ethics trouble.

Then there’s the still-unfolding Illinois Senate debacle, which exposed Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s tawdry attempts to auction off President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat and forced Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) to hold a press conference Wednesday denying any inappropriate discussions with the governor.

Democrats aren’t exactly disheartened by these developments – they’re still set to control the entire federal government in January – but the streak of bad news has tempered the party’s post-election euphoria. And the string of post-Election Day congressional wins has given the GOP some of its first good news in a long time.
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For now, Democrats seem relatively unruffled by their recent defeats in Georgia, where Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss defeated former state legislator Jim Martin by double digits, and Louisiana, where Republicans successfully knocked off Jefferson and defended the seat of retiring Rep. Jim McCrery.

Former Texas Rep. Martin Frost, who ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1990s, dismissed those losses as isolated incidents.

“Two of these were Republican seats,” Frost said, referring to Chambliss and McCrery’s seats. “The Jefferson seat was just an unusual situation where you had this member who was under this enormous ethical cloud.”

According to Frost, those results show little more than that Republicans can win in the South, “the one part of the country where the Republicans are still dominant.”

DCCC spokesman Doug Thornell was even more dismissive in swatting down the suggestion that Republicans have picked up steam.

“Republicans are bankrupt of ideas and lurching for anything to exploit,” Thornell said.

He pointed out that Republicans have had some bad news of their own lately: a slow tally of provisional ballots recently propelled Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy into retiring Rep. Deborah Pryce’s (R-Ohio) seat, and retiring Rep. Vito Fossella (R-N.Y.) was sentenced on Monday to five days in jail for drunk driving.

“The reality is that in the last few days they lost yet another House seat in a district they have held since 1966, had one of their members sentenced to jail time and barely held onto an overwhelming Republican district in the Deep South,” he said. “Clearly, the GOP propaganda machine is working overtime to spin this as a good week for them.”

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Obviously, Politico and the repugs are trying hard to spin some good news for the GOP, but winning two seats where everyone expected them to win - but they had very serious competition for a change, which no one expected - and winning against someone indicted for corruption is not exactly a hard challenge usually. (Plenty more on this from Daily Kos.)

Sure, the Chicago scandal sucks, but it is a local issue and I'll be very surprised if it hurts anyone besides Blagojevich.