F I N A L L Y

Maybe his new year’s resolution was to quit being a schmuck.

After almost two months, Alaska Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller announced Friday that he will end his legal challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s write-in victory, The Anchorage Daily News reported.

Speaking at a news conference in Anchorage, Miller said it was time to accept the “practical realities” of recent court rulings that had gone against him.

Then again, being a schmuck is hard to quit.

In his first interview after his public concession, Miller appeared on “John King, USA,” where CNN’s Ed Henry asked him if he had called Murkowski to personally concede. Miller said, “I have not called her. In fact, I don’t have her number.” When asked if he had sought out her phone number through the Alaska GOP, he answered, “Well, I think we already have conceded. We’ve asked for it before. I don’t have it.”

AK Sen: Why Is the National Media Ignoring Scandal Roiling Tea Bagger Joe Miller’s Campaign?

The campaign for the Alaska U.S. Senate seat has taken a dramatic turn in the past days. Joe Miller, the candidate chosen by Sarah Palin to take out her enemy, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, has been accused of ethical violations that may have led to his forced resignation as a part-time local government lawyer last fall.

He has also been accused of using other people’s computers without their permission to vote for himself by proxy when he ran (unsuccessfully) for chairman of the Alaska Republican Party in 2008. A job he sought, he said, in order to weed out corruption in the party.

Miller, a rookie in major league politics, has reacted to the controversy by stonewalling the media, a move that has had the predictable effect of bringing the local media’s interest in the story to a rolling boil.

Alaska Dispatch, which took an early lead in the investigation, recently sued Miller’s former employer, the Fairbanks North Star Borough, in an attempt to discover whether Miller was forced to resign or was fired outright. Over the weekend, the Dispatch framed its pursuit of information this way:

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Verbatim

Joe, please explain how this endorsement stuff works, is it to be completely one sided. Sarah spent all morning working on a Face book post for Joe, she won’t use it, not now…Put yourself in her shoe’s Joe for one day.

— Todd Palin, in a righteously indignant (and grammatically disastrous) email to Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller. Palin came to his wife’s defense after Miller refused to say whether Sarah was qualified to be president, and after Sarah endorsed Miller over yet another Palin enemy, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R).

Confusing Tea Baggers with the Facts Again: Like Murkowski, O’Donnell Ran Write-In Campaign in 2006

Tea baggers hurling the “sore loser” insult at Sen. Lisa Murkowski for announcing she will be a write-in candidate this fall should remember 2006, according to NPR’s “Political Junkie” Ken Rudin. That was the year Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell did the same thing.

An e-mail from the Tea Party Express on Sunday said that by waging her write-in effort, Murkowski “showed utter contempt for the people of Alaska who rejected her candidacy in the Republican primary.”

O’Donnell was the “sore loser” in 2006

Levi Russell, the communications director of the TPE, added, “Senator Murkowski is a sore loser. Not all the hanging chads in the world can undo the fact that she lost…

Chuck DeVore, the conservative California assemblyman who lost the GOP Senate primary this year, had this to say on Friday: “Blatantly disrespecting voters in Alaska, Murkowski decided that primary results didn’t matter.”

Amy Kremer, the chairman of the Tea Party Express, said this… “She was fired by the people of Alaska. They said it was time for her to go…”

And Sarah Palin, a Murkowski foe whose backing for the ultimate primary winner, Joe Miller, was seen as crucial, Tweeted this: “Primary voters spoke. Listen to the people, respect their will; w/a 40-pt incumbent lead & $2.8 million war chest, voters chose Joe instead.”

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New Crop of GOP-Tea Party Senate Candidates Holds Radical View on Abortion: Believe Govt Should Enforce Births by Rape, Incest Victims

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On her MSNBC show last night, Rachel Maddow reported that, with addition of Christine O’Donnell to the 2010 roster of U.S. Senate candidates, there are now five GOP-tea party candidates who oppose abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest.

The others are Sharron Angle of Nevada, Ken Buck of Colorado, Joe Miller of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Except for Buck, these radical GOP candidates were all endorsed by tea party leader Sarah Palin, who also shares this radical view — even though she once told an audience she considered aborting her fifth child, who was born with Down Syndrome.

Maddow also points to the inconsistency in this position and the tea party’s lip service to libertarian belief in limited government.

What these Republican candidates are talking about is the federal government not only monitoring every pregancy in the country to ensure it ends the way the government prefers, which is a live birth, but they’re also saying that the government should force rape victims — the government should force rape victims, under pain of criminal prosecution, to give birth to their rapist’s baby. The government must force that [outcome] any time someone becomes pregnant because of rape.

If you are 14-year-old girl who is raped by your uncle or your father, the government will force you, as a 14-year-old, to give birth to the child that is the product of incestuous rape.

Remember, this is the year of small-government conservatives. Getting government out of your life. Government just small enough to … [drown in a bathtub].

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