Democrats narrowly won a plurality in New York's 23rd Congressional District Tuesday, a District that hadn't been held by a Democrat in more than 100 years.

The 2009 elections brought complicated results: Republicans swept both Governor's races, Democrats won both congressional races, and incumbents swept mayoral races. But advocates of small government also won the ballot initiatives.

New York Republican congressional nominee Dede Scozzafava withdrew last weekend from the special election that will take place Tuesday and endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens, in a race where a third party candidate, Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman, has become a major contender. Yes, you read that right. In one of the most Republican districts in New York, one that borders Canada, Scozzafava ran up against a mass revolt by mainstream Republicans who charged that her long list of liberal credentials made her a “RINO” or Republican In Name Only.

Glenn Beck is clearly on a roll. First he exposes the radical past of Van Jones, who was until September the Special Advisor for Green Jobs for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. It was heavily due to Beck's coverage of Van Jones on his Fox News Television show (and his radio show) that Jones resigned from his position. Now Beck has unearthed footage of Obama's White House Communications Director Anita Dunn at a high school graduation last spring praising Mao Tse-Tung as one of her two “favorite political philosophers.”

An outburst at an angry South Carolina town hall meeting has exemplified the growing fissure in the Republican Party across the nation. “We're not going to be the party of angry white guys," liberal Republican Senator Lindsay Graham told a Greenville, South Carolina, audience at Furman University where some supporters of Congressman Ron Paul were heckling him.

President Bill Clinton resurrected the spectre of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against President Obama in a Sunday interview with NBC's September 27 Meet the Press program. Asked by host David Gregory if he believed that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” his wife spoke of back during his presidency was behind the opposition to Obama's agenda, Clinton replied: “Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It's not as strong as it was, because America's changed demographically, but it's as virulent as it was.”

Peter Schiff, a former economic adviser to the Ron Paul presidential campaign, announced his candidacy Thursday for the U.S. Senate on MSNBC's Morning Joe against longtime Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd. Schiff became an Internet phenomenon last year after YouTube activists posted a compilation of his amazingly accurate predictions of the current economic crisis during 2006 and 2007 on national television shows, while other television pundits laughed at him.

While the U.S. mainstream media is awash in news that the Bush-era policy of torturing detainees “worked” in the case of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, neocon-influenced media outlets have virtually blacked out coverage of the case of child prisoner at Guantanamo Mohammad Jawad. Perhaps that because Jawad — who was released without charges last week and days later announced he would be suing the U.S. government — is a textbook example of how the Bush policy of torture not only didn't work, but how it corrupted the entire U.S. system of justice.

When two-term congressman Zack Space decided he didn't want to hold any public town hall-style meeting in his Ohio district this summer, local high-school football coach Dave Daubenmire took his right to air grievances straight to Rep. Space's doorstep. Daubenmire has been camping out in front of Space's district office since August 27, and says he will continue to do so until Space agrees to a “a fair and open forum” where citizens can air their complaints against the "Blue Dog" Democrat.

Massachusetts' senior Senator Ted Kennedy has reversed an earlier stance with his recent appeal to change Massachusetts' rules of Senate succession once again.