And over in New Jersey, The Great Election Heist:
Frank Hague would have loved it.Turns out it was a tag team match and we didn't know it!
Somewhere, the ghost of the longtime Jersey City Democratic boss - who famously declared, "I am the law!" - is looking down (or, more likely, up) with a huge grin at the goings on in his state's U.S. Senate race.
Hague's notoriously corrupt fiefdom may have been dismantled decades ago, but the political wisdom that ran it was on display yesterday before the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Lawyers for the Democratic Party argued that the plain language of the state's election law setting a 51-day deadline for removing a candidate from the ballot doesn't really say what it seems to say.
More important, they claimed, the need for voters to enjoy a clear choice in the voting booth outweighs any "arbitrary" deadline.
It's one of the oldest clichés around, but this line or argument is a textbook case of the guy who murders his parents begging for sympathy on the grounds that he's an orphan.
The vacancy, after all, wasn't created by some extraordinary circumstance, like the death of the candidate.
Bob Torricelli is very much alive, although the same can't be said of his political career.
Torricelli simply up and quit because the polls suddenly showed his campaign in free-fall - sort of the political equivalent of Roberto Duran jumping out of the ring after whining "No mas" because he was getting whipped by Sugar Ray Leonard.
Only Duran didn't demand the right to have a younger, fresher fighter step in and immediately take his place.
