The congressional song and dance on the extension of the Bush tax cuts has been fascinating to watch. The Democrats try to position themselves as the champions of the middle class while excoriating the Republicans as tools of the filthy rich. The Republicans, meanwhile, push for extending the tax cuts to all Americans rather than just the middle class. That puts them in a bad light in the eyes of some, but those who can analyze and think clearly realize the stakes:

Taxing the rich never helps the middle class. Hopefully, a large enough segment of the middle class is beginning to recognize the false posturing for what it is.

Regardless of how this turns out in the lame-duck session, Republicans can revisit in January any horrible decisions made now. I’m disappointed by the results of the Senate race in Alaska, of course. Even though a Republican (of sorts) won there, that winner won’t be of much help righting the ship of state. Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign led to some strange vote counting:

In spite of the inertia Murkowski and some others bring to the Republican table, I’m still generally hopeful. There are some principled representatives taking their seats for the first time next month; let’s see what they can accomplish.

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s post, where I listed the politicians who most deserved to lose this year, today I’ll focus on the positive—those who really deserve to win. Now, that doesn’t mean they all will win, but the nation would be better off if they did.

I’m going to start close to home with Florida’s Senate race. No one, when the race began, expected Marco Rubio to gain any traction. He had been speaker of the Florida House, and many expected him to rise up in the future, but not now, not against sitting governor Charlie Crist.

What I admire most about Rubio is his commitment to principle, which is what led him to challenge Crist in the first place. He knew Crist was not a truly principled conservative, and he wanted Republicans to have a chance to vote for one. It was a hard task he took upon himself, yet he began chipping away at Crist’s lead. The chipping then turned into a full-fledged electoral demolition. A shocked Crist found himself behind the young upstart.

Now Rubio is leading in a three-way race with Crist as a so-called independent, and the Democrat no-hoper Kendrick Meek. National Republicans have diverted funds elsewhere, secure in the belief that Rubio will be the next Florida senator. He deserves to win.

Crossing the nation and making a sharp northern turn to Alaska, my next deserving candidate is Joe Miller, who surprised everyone when he won the Republican Senate primary against incumbent senator Lisa Murkowski. Miller is a true constitutionalist. He wants the federal government to be held to its constitutional limitations.

That outlook has apparently scared some sitting Republican senators who are far more comfortable with Murkowski—they refused to remove her from a leadership position when she rejected the voters’ choice and decided to run a write-in campaign to keep her job.

Polls show the two running neck-and-neck, with Miller holding a slight lead. If he were to be turned back now, it would be a stinging defeat for the forces of reform and devotion to limited government. This is a race worth watching for the future of the soul of the Republican Party. Miller should be that future; he deserves to win.

Sharron Angle, in Nevada, has the unenviable task of knocking off Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Yet she is proving equal to that task. Derided as an extremist by Democrats [and some Republicans], she has had to fight for the right to be heard. Last week, she not only held her own in a debate with Reid, but the consensus seems to be that she won that debate.

Like Miller, Angle is a constitutionalist who is in sync with the Tea Party movement. That by itself is enough to get one labeled an extremist in the mainstream media, but early voting indicates that more Republicans are casting ballots right now than Democrats. Will that trend hold through the actual election day? If righteousness and justice mean anything, Sharron Angle will be the next senator from Nevada. She deserves to win.

My next choice may be a surprise for some readers, particularly if you have fallen for a media hit job. Christine O’Donnell, running for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat in Delaware, has suffered a barrage of ridicule, but most of it has been manufactured. Whenever Bill Maher decides to inject himself into a race, you have to know something is rotten. An old tape of one of O’Donnell’s appearances on his show [which, I understand, actually never even aired], has her talking about a teenage flirtation she had with witchcraft. She makes it clear she never really got into it, but the media jumped on this as a sign that she was unfit for office.

Since when is the media concerned about witchcraft? I didn’t know it bothered liberals that much. I mean, aren’t they the tolerant ones? In fact, Christians have a better grasp of what happened here. Teenagers sometimes experiment and get involved in foolish ventures. Then they grow up. That’s what happened with O’Donnell.

A few days ago, she debated her opponent, Chris Coons. In the course of the debate, the media did it again. They portrayed her as not realizing the First Amendment includes the separation of chuch and state. But if you actually listen to what she said, she was questioning the phrase “separation of church and state” as not being part of the First Amendment. And she’s right. The words “separation,” “church,” and “state” are nowhere to be found in the Amendment. That’s simply the description liberals have used in their attempt to keep religion out of the public sphere. The First Amendment only says there will be no establishment of religion [i.e., no official state church] and that Congress cannot prohibit one’s freedom of religion.

O’Donnell was accurate in what she was saying, but you’d never know that by the press reports. The media is in the tank for her opponent. O’Donnell probably won’t win this seat, but you never can tell, especially if this turns out to be a Republican tidal wave. At the very least, she deserves to win.

I’m returning to Florida now for my final candidate—Republican Rick Scott, who is running for governor. Scott’s upstart primary victory over longtime Republican official Bill McCollum startled many. The race was so intense that there was concern as to whether Scott could mend fences with the state GOP, but the fence-mending seems to be almost complete.

Scott’s Democrat opponent, Alex Sink, is following the same playbook McCollum used in the primary: depict Scott as a crook because the hospital chain he ran was fined by the federal government for Medicare fraud. I’ve done a lot of reading about that incident and have come away convinced Scott was not attempting to defraud anyone. A recent well-researched article from a source outside Scott’s campaign has explained the situation more fully than anything else I’ve read, and in my mind exonerates Scott from all those accusations. For those who are interested, you can find that article here. It is a little long, but it covers the issue comprehensively.

While CEO of Columbia/HCA, Scott created the best hospital chain in America, working closely with doctors and cutting costs. Later, when Obamacare came to the forefront, Scott started an organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, which effectively attacked the philosophy behind Obama’s quest for control of American healthcare. As governor, Scott would continue his cost-cutting measures to bring fiscal sanity back to the state and would maintain a principled  position against the healthcare takeover.

Additionally, Scott is an evangelical Christian who helped start a church in Naples, and who sits on the church board. He has worked with organizations such as World Vision. His faith appears to be genuine.

The latest polls keep bouncing around in this race, so it’s anyone’s guess who will come out on top. However, with Obama’s popularity at an all-time low in Florida, there is hope that Scott can pull it out. After all, in case you haven’t heard this refrain yet, he deserves to win.

Today, I would like to single out those running for office who are so unacceptable that they truly deserve to lose their races. Of course, if I tried to list everyone I thought should be included in that category, this would be an exceptionally long posting, so I’ve decided to concentrate only on those who have a chance to lose. Consequently, you won’t find individuals such as Nancy Pelosi in this list; she is a mirror image of her district. However, if things go as I hope they do, she will lose as well—her post as Speaker of the House.

We can start, though, with her counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Reid used to be pro-life. At least that’s what he claimed. As the premier pusher of the Obama agenda, he scuttled whatever small amount of credibility he had on that issue. He also famously declared the Iraq War lost—then came the surge, which he still refuses to recognize as having achieved a measure of stability in that country. Reid has shown himself to be insufferable in his constant comments—”only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good”—and the Rush Limbaugh name for him, “Dingy Harry,” seems rather appropriate. Nevada needs to divest itself of this national embarrassment.

Barbara “don’t call me ma’am” Boxer is trying for her fourth term as senator from California. She is about as prickly as they come, which led to that comment above to a military officer during a congressional hearing. She really loves being a senator and having the perks of the office. Boxer also secured travel for the radical group Code Pink to go to Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004 to give aid to the people who had killed 51 Americans that same month. Even the extremely liberal newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, refused to endorse her this year due to her undistinguished record. Her opponent, Carly Fiorina, a pro-life woman who has experience in the business world, would be a welcome relief to Californians who have had enough of Boxer.

Let’s stay in California for the Retread of the Year Award. Yes, Jerry Brown is running for governor again. He already had that job back in the 1970s, following Ronald Reagan and ruining most of what Reagan had accomplished. He was known as Governor Moonbeam back then for his New Age philosophy. He hasn’t changed much. When California voters rejected a referendum on homosexual marriage, Brown, who is currently the state’s attorney general, made it clear he wasn’t going to enforce that vote. A real attorney general cannot make a decision like that. Brown as governor would be a disaster—again.

How about a Republican? Well, perhaps a Republican. It’s a little hard to tell right now. Her name is Lisa Murkowski, and she lost the Alaskan Republican senate primary to attorney Joe Miller. Only Murkowski refuses to believe it, so she’s now spearheading a write-in campaign because … well, because she wants to stay a senator. She doesn’t exactly have a solid set of philosophical beliefs that guide her besides wanting to be a senator. She’s not pro-life, so she dilutes the Republican side of the aisle on that issue. How did she get to be a senator in the first place? Her dad, who resigned from the Senate to become governor of Alaska, appointed her to take his place. She really earned that job, didn’t she? The main thing driving her now seems to be that she is a sore loser. May she remain one.

Then there’s Massachusetts icon Barney Frank. He first hit the national radar many years ago as one of the first outspoken homosexual congressmen. Shortly afterward, the House ethics committee had to investigate accusations that a prostitution ring was operating out of his D.C. townhouse. Those accusations turned out to be true. Frank’s response? Gosh, I had no idea that was happening! A mere slap on the wrist later, he remained in the Democratic leadership. He’s been back in the news as one of the key proponents of forcing banks to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, thereby triggering the massive econonic crisis we’re still experiencing. He also, along with Sen. Chris Dodd, has been the main supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, blocking any real oversight of those corrupt lending institutions—which still march on uncorrected today as he helps derail any legislation that would hold them accountable for their actions. For the first time in his political career, he actually has a real race to run against a genuine opponent. Will Frank’s many sins catch up to him this year? It’s still a long shot, but it would be one of the most gratifying of all the races if he were to go down to defeat at last.

Let’s go to my current state of Florida for the final two who deserve most to lose. How can I neglect to mention Congressman Alan Grayson, the most obnoxious man in Congress—and that’s going up against some pretty stiff competition. I had an entire post on Grayson not long ago, so I won’t try to repeat everything again. If you don’t remember him, you can remember one of his most arresting moments when, on the floor of the House, he concluded that the Republican healthcare plan was for people to die quickly. May his tenure in Congress suffer the same fate.

Last, but not in any way least, is the winner of the Chameleon of the Year Award, Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Forcefully declaring himself to be a Reagan conservative who was proud to be a Republican and who would never leave the party to run as an independent, Crist thought he had clear sailing into the open Senate seat. Then he ran into a buzzsaw named Marco Rubio. When it became painfully obvious to Crist that he couldn’t win the primary, he cut his ties with the Republicans and ran as an independent. Over the past couple of months, he has changed his position on almost every issue as he attempts to get Democratic votes to go along with independents who are scared and not thinking clearly [thanks to President Obama for that brilliant insight]. Now he’s trailing Rubio badly in the general election. This may be Crist’s swan song; for the sake of all Floridians, and the nation at large, let’s hope it is.

Well, that’s my list of those who most deserve to lose. If they all do lose, America will be the winner.

I’ve waited a while to comment on the Alaska Republican Senate primary. Virtually no one gave Joe Miller any chance of unseating incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski. Yet the inconceivable actually occurred. The race was close, and the win was razor thin, but a win it was for Miller, who is much more conservative than Murkowski and allied with the Tea Party.

Sarah Palin, from the outset, gave her support to Miller. The Murkowski family has owned Alaska politics for some time; Palin is the one who defeated Frank Murkowski, the incumbent governor, in an earlier primary a few years ago. Could it be that the dynasty is dead?

Sen. Murkowski has been fueling rumors that she’s not necessarily finished with this race. She is toying with two possible scenarios: one, as the candidate for the Libertarian Party; two, running as a write-in. Either possibility could spell defeat for Miller, if not victory for Murkowski. In other words, she is considering acting as the spoiler in the race.

For someone like me, who lives in Florida, this has a familiar ring: a Republican incumbent who assumed an easy victory turning to an independent bid for a seat. Is Murkowski trying to be the new Charlie Crist? Perhaps she should check on how that’s working for him. The latest poll shows Crist ten points behind Marco Rubio, the Republican whose popularity drove Crist from the Senate race to begin with.

For some people, letting go of political power is unthinkable. It’s as if they would have no real life without it. Actually, I feel sorry for that type of person. Life is more than politics, and if that is what gives you an identity, you are to be pitied.

I’m reminded of this poignant comment:

If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will he give in exchange for his soul?

Life is found in Jesus Christ, not in any glories or positions of authority we achieve in this world.