Friends lost in Congress as Bush takes second term

High turn out swamped by Republican tide

WASHINGTON - As ''cold reality set in,'' one TV newsman's words for the U.S. election returns, Indian country awoke to a chillier political climate.

Republican Pres. George W. Bush won re-election with the first popular vote majority since 1988, and his party gained seats in both the House and Senate, the first such political combination since the re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.

Support for Bush was stronger than pre-election polls and even usually reliable exit polls at voting places had indicated. In a clue to cultural and religious currents missed by mainstream media, referenda banning same-sex marriages passed in all 11 states where they were on the ballot.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. an advocate for Native issues with strong support from his state's nine Sioux reservations, lost narrowly to persistent Republican challenger John Thune, in what some Republican leaders called the second most important race in the country. His defeat opened a hole in the Senate Democratic leadership, and his likely successor, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has drawn harsh criticism for his treatment of Western Shoshone land claims.

Although Indian voters turned out in unprecedented numbers, reaching 75 percent of those eligible on some reservations, conservative religious voters also surged to the pools, swamping the Native influence in some key races. In Oklahoma, a landslide vote for Bush swallowed up the Senate bid of Democrat Brad Carson, an enrolled Cherokee, who lost to the controversial conservative Republican Tom Coburn with only 41 percent. In Alaska, a delayed count of absentee ballots in some Native precincts kept hopes alive overnight for Democratic challenger Tony Knowles, a former governor who supported Native subsistence hunting rights, but in the end he was unable to overcome the margin for incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who had been appointed to the job two years ago by her father Frank Murkowski, the present governor.

more...

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096409813

our Native American Brothers and Sisters can make a comeback in some unforseen way!

I actually had a local county commissioner tell me that it is time for the Native American people to "get over it" and be "de-sovereignized ...so they can be discriminated against like all the rest of the brown or white people in US society at large who are not rich. He worked with Senator Reid and Congressman Gibbons to screw the Western Shoshone out of their treaty lands for the international mining companies.

...can contact our senators to lobby against the appointment of Reid as minority leader? What can we do?

http://www3.capwiz.com/y/mail/?id=370&type=CO&state=NV

you can also go away from that page and contact your own senator

He doesn't take crap from anyone.

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