…is only indicative of local situations, really – with two caveats.

1. If you run a crappy candidate and a nasty, dumb campaign, don’t be surprised when you lose.
2. If you spend a lot of money and should have won or just barely won, that says more about your campaign and your candidate than anything else.

In Virginia and New Jersey, the Democrats ran really poor candidates and got beat.  In NYC, Bloomberg spent $100M of his own money and won by a much lesser margin than expected; exit polls said that his gyrations to but term limits didn’t go over well with voters.

In New York’s 23rd congressional district (which will go the way of the dodo come next reapportionment and census)  the Conservative Party candidate and his snarky stunts and we’re-entitled-to-stomp-the-unpure approach, hand in hand with Glen Beck, didn’t go over well with the locals.  For the first time since the 1870s, the Republicans lost that seat to the Democrats.

The big lesson for the Democrats is not that Obama’s lost support; his support in VA and NJ was far higher on election day than the sad-sack Democratic candidates.  It’s that they run to the right with cruddy candidates at the peril of losing the active support and interest of their base and of voters who are tired of the same old stuff.    A large majority of voters in both states clearly said in exit polls that their vote had nothing to do with national politics, period, and far more that the other guy was a bigger stinker.

(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend)

Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist.  Really.

Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I’ve never heard of Czar Brezhnev.

…also, there’s no ‘czars’ in the US federal government, except in the pens and imaginations of press writers who deemed some person a ‘czar’, just like there was no ‘Star Wars’ DOD program by that name – headline writers thought that the namess were cool.

I will admit that a ‘abstinence czar’ is indeed a funky title, and I don’t know what the punishments would be for breaking his rules.   (Though the one that Dubya appointed resigned over his hookers…dude, just say no, OK?)

Lesson #3: Inflating the numbers of a rally by a factor of 25-30 (making 50-60 thousand marchers become 2 million) and lying about the source of the information is right up there with declaring to the ladies that your tallywhacker is 53 inches long, and that Obama wants to kill your grandma.  Wait…

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

I am frequently dismayed by various Truthers out there who insist on a Grand Conspiracy theory of the universe; stories about how the moon landing was faked, the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job and how Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled into the country as a very small baby with the connivance of Moo-slims, Africans and atheists to bring our nation to socialism, that Hillary murdered Vince Foster, or how the Queen of England is a drug dealer just get me to a point of saying: you guys are passing over the real conspiracies for this crap?

It’s Calvinball, folks, where the rules change with a whim.   If you argue with the flat-earthers, they just call you part of the conspiracy, or deluded fools, or slaves of the Megatron, and screw on their aluminum foil hats all the tighter.  When is someone going to deliver an original Moon rock to my door so that I can verify it with my home chemical test kit?

And it’s usually motivated by ignorance and fear.   People who are afraid of the idea of the moon landing and the notion of space travel as such will hop on the ‘it’s all made up’ bandwagon.  People who can’t openly say that the notion of a African-American president  is alien and horrifying to them will look to Birther stuff because they feel in their guts that he *can’t* be a legitimate President; he’s the wrong color.

Not to mention that Democrats could not have legitimately won any election without trickery and fraud, etc.   Any concept otherwise would have to accept the fact that somone in the GOP messed up bad enough that they lost an election on the basis of policy issues, and that’s not acceptable in the place where the sky is paisley-colored.

Of course, this also feeds things racial and cultural on the Republican side of a similar nature with their own people: Bobby Jindal’s South Asian ethnicity and citizenship and Romney’s Mormon faith seen as cultism.   My own connection to Unity would be seen as some whacko cult, I’m sure, let alone that I’m a race traitor and Mere is a hanjian.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that they should put in an Amendment to the Constitution that says something like: …and naturalized citizens who have been resident in the USA for 30 years can be President or VP. That way, Meredith can be President and you all can face her mighty wrath.  Bwahahaha.

One blog commenter wrote:

These people didn’t need a black president to make them crazy, they were crazy when he got here. They’ve been told for almost thirty years now that God’s plan for America is a permanent Republican majority, for the last fifteen years that Democrats are “congenital liars” dragging the country into the depths of degradation through [Clinton], and for the last seven that we are now locked in a multi-planar existential conflict and our only hope is a strong Godly deciderer who will protect us all from our enemies. The birthers picked up with Obama pretty much where they left off with a Bubba from Arkansas. Remember, Clinton was accused of rape and serial murder because it was politically convenient to accuse him.

Or this one:

I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.

Being that the only two states that I have never been in are Hawaii and Arizona, I can get behind that notion completely. 

Rush Limbaugh: Sanford was probably driven in desperation to cheat on his wife and get some small pleasure out of life by Barack Obama’s efforts to destroy America, as in what-the-heck-it’s-all-over-I’m-just-going-to-have-fun.

Full quotes at the link.   At the other end of the world, Congressman Michelle Bachmann is suggesting that the Obama Administration is going to use Census information to round people up that it doesn’t like, and cites the Japanese-Americans rounded up during WW2 and taken to internment camps.

So I guess it’s probably really my fault for voting for Obama and plunging us all into a deep, dark gay socialist hell on earth.  Sorry, Governor Sanford, I just had no idea as to what I was doing.    I was only follwing the instructions of Comrade  Jiang Yu Cai as she was directed by the ChiCom Politburo, too, so they’re involved in the heinous plot.

Feel free on this series to add your captions (photos are under the cut) for the images in your comments.  My caption set (in order) is as follows:

1. “They said - come to DC - we can get you a good job with the new administration…they really need guys like you.  It’s very different work than you’re used to…”
2. “General Phipps, the aliens are either weirder than we ever realized, or they’re having a really good time screwing around with us. “
3. “When I said I could probably lick Daniel Craig, this is NOT what I had in mind!”
4. “Senator Claghorn, this is my first exhibit to prove to the nation that secretly, the Warner Brothers are planning mass cannibalism on an unprecedented scale!”

Senate hearings today on GM and Chrysler dealerships being closed; sounds like there’s going to be a how dare you cut our constituents’ dealerships fuss. Such as:

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who met with the GM and Chrysler executives on Tuesday, said Congress would not try to “go through the administration to get them to do something in the companies.”

But Dorgan said it was reasonable for the lawmakers to ask Chrysler: “Are you sure you’re making the right decision in the way you treat these kinds of dealers in certain rural areas?”

Suuuuuure.  Remember that when GM closed out Oldsmobile, it cost them $1 billion dollars to pay off the dealers.  As I’ve said over and over again, this dealership issue is going to be a big deal.

Iraqi PM to Obama: If you release those unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib, my electorate will go up in blue flame and demand that the US get out yesterday.

Interesting observation on the coming Supreme Court selection (which I am otherwise ignoring all the thrash over) in this blog; in short, the base demands that hell be raised and impossible demands be made on Obama to appoint another Scalia, which will never happen.  Nor will he appoint a pot-smoking hippie.  But the level of ranting and screaming on the subject will further alienate the non-base GOP, who are dropping off the Republicans in droves, especially the younger voters who don’t automatically share those views.

Here’s a map from AP of the major stimulus projects on a county-by-county basis.   Zoomable flash.   In my case, the big project in my area is the resurfacing and repair of a major nearby road that we use on a daily basis that is pothole city (which is unfortunately a widespread problem in the Chicago area after this last winter).    They’re also fixing our own street.

• Making business cards out of beef jerky using a frickin’ laser beam.
• Pundits in National Review that are concerned that Obama is going to appoint someone who will be ready to establish a constitutional right to be cloned.

Jim now breaks out his top hat and cane, and becomes a singing, dancing star of the stage:

There’s nothin’ to it, but to do it…
YOU-Gotta-Have-Cloooooooones!
Miles and Miles and miles of clooooooooones!

Well, the Senate can filibuster a Supreme Court nomination.  And I have no idea who Obama will pick.  But you can rest assured that the confirmation will be messy no matter who he picks, considering what’s been going on over the last little bit.  I’m not looking forward to it at all.

• I will freely admit that I’m astonished at the about-face in the attitudes of the US public about gay marriage.   A couple of years ago, we had several states stomping on the idea via pumped-up public referenda; now we have far greater acceptance of the idea and state after state legalizing it.
• The greed of the big hedge funds for More Money From The Feds to cover Chrysler’s bonds apparently didn’t do them any good, as the company is going to bankruptcy, which will be giving their bondholders a bigger haircut.  I guess they bet on the feds to wimp out and hand them more on the dollar….
• Frightening the horses and forcing Japanese tourists to compare their videos after the fact,  a couple of tourists at Windsor Castle suddenly drop everything on a sunny day, jump into the grass, strip and…

…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries).  Interesting news coming out of it, of course.  Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so on are very non-Bush.

Do I think that the Cuban embargo has worked?  Not really.  It hasn’t worked in 50 years of trying to bring-down-Castro, obviously.  It’s certainly helped out the Big Sugar producers in the US, some of whom are repulsive jerks, and about the only things you can say for it is that it has made Cuba the expensive problem child for either the Soviets or other lefty dictators with money who want to back him up.

I have no stars in my eyes about brutal dictatorships, and can’t stand the Cuban government and / or Chavez’s efforts to become El Jefe Por Vida in Venezuela, but I will note that what got them there was a great deal of idiocy and looking-the-other-way-while-the-rich-got-richer-and-more-brutal in both countries.    It occurs to me that stupid rich bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone else have caused a mighty amount of pain in the world and created revolutionary conditions again and again, and never realized that pushing people repeatedly to the edge will end up in disaster, eventually.

The key word there is *stupid*, allied with *cheap and greedy*.  As I’ve also noted before, most of the consumer protection things that I’ve sen in my time have rotated around that sort of root, where people cut corners and exposed the public to risks because they wanted to make a cheap, fast buck, and didn’t care about the problems they created for the public at large.  Goes for food safety, pollution, you name it.

You’d think some folks would learn…

I also found it interesting that the only ‘anglo’ in the bunch is now the PM of Canada; and if the Governor-General of Canada was there to represent the nation, there would be a shutout (she’s a Haitian refugee who came to Canada as an 11 year-old.

Personally, I have no trouble with the CEO of GM getting ‘laid off’, forced out, or what have you.  His mismanagement helped get the place where it is now…where no-kidding-GM sorts like me and Susan, who own a Buick SUV and a Chevy Van, are talking favorably of getting a Ford or Toyota to replace them.

My auto mechanic Dad called Fords Fix-Or-Repair-Daily, and hated them, and retired from a GM plant (where my parents met) after many years there.

The question is more whether (1) this shows that there’s accountability at the top for outfits that take the federal dole, and (2) whether Wall Street joins in on the fun.

Major stuff is coming down tonight and tomorrow in regard to the big automakers; the CEO of GM was forced out by the government, which said essentially that neither Chrysler or GM were putting forward ‘viability’ plans that were any count.    GM has 90 days to try one last time, and Chrysler has 30 days to set up a merger/buy-out with Fiat or someone else.    Not clear on the details; keep your ears open in the morning.

Dan Froomkin puts forward the questions he would have had for President Obama last night at the news conference; if you’d had a question or three for the President, what would they be?

I’ve been reading up on the Geithner Plan and other stuff related to it, and while I share the general levels of outrage of the present situation, I think Ezra Klein may have something in his analysis of the situation; that Obama and Geithner are more interested in how to handle the long road on all of this and ignore a desire to beat the hell out of some idiots publically.   In which case, having a grownup in the White House (what a concept) who can do a good job selling the package publicly is a Very Good Thing, and put Geithner and company back in the back room trying to deal with this crap.

Read Klein’s article and tell me what you think.

The problem is that if Obama’s people are looking at a vast mess, what about the Republicans who allowed it to get out of hand in a big way?  Well, frankly, they don’t have a clue as to what to do, because they really didn’t have a clue about the whole affair in the first place.   Or they knowingly let their buds in for a slice of the pie without a care in the world for the long-term results.  And if Obama manages to pull this one off, they’re politically screwed; a grateful public won’t listen to them any quicker than they listened to Herbert Hoover after he left office, and for the same reasons.   So their only strategy is to take out their “money” wrenches (the monkey wrenches they used to get money out of lobbyists and contributors) and wooden shoes (sabots in French) and throw them into the works of what Obama’s doing, in the hope that they can gum things up enough to blame him for everything.

At the same time as they go on about how horrible earmarks are and the stimulus is, the same characters fight like hell for the earmarks for their voters.    Why?  Well:

Of course a certain number of Republicans are so solidly safe that they can get along one way or the other. But the bulk of members of congress need to be able to say to constituents and donors alike that they’ve done something. And absent earmarks, that would require members of the minority to forge some kind of compromises with members of the majority on the big issues of the day. Which is precisely what almost no Republicans seem inclined to do at the moment.

Of course, all the crash is also hitting the lobbyists and the buddies, who are being beaten to death.  The collapse of the Dow has beaten the crap out of many companies, especially those who where most dependent on a share of the financial services pie (like GE and GM and AIG, sucked dry and down by the debt-handling end of the business).  Also, the more you were dependent on wild consumer shoppies for bigger ticket items, and on lots of cheap and easy credit to keep your business going, the more you are well and totally screwed.    Once the spigot dies on those two taps, your business is irredeemable hash.

I’m not worried about a bunch of wanna-be John Galts out there who proclaim that you can’t regulate or tax me, and if you do I’ll pick up my toys and go home.   Go right ahead and try, since you idiots were the ones who got us in this mess with your bonuses-all-around, your bigger-size-of-the-company-means-my-manhood-is-supreme, your I-have-no-idea-what-it’s-doing-but-isn’t-it-purty management of your businesses.  Obama didn’t make you get stupid with wild debt stuff and wild ideas about jacking the quarterly reports and buying up competitors so you could hear the lamentations of their vimmen and the rending of their garments as you rode supreme through Wall Street.  You did that all on your own.   If that’s the sort of talent we’d lose, my heart will be broken.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to know that you can’t have CEOs whose companies have received billions in bailout funds going to court and threatening to sue employees to keep the public from knowing which executives pocketed millions in bonuses — and you can’t have them pretending that no bailout money was used to pay said bonuses.

You can’t have insolvent banks pretending that the problem is one of liquidity, and then using taxpayer money to protect their balance sheets instead of lending money to credit-worthy businesses and consumers.

And, ultimately, you can’t allow the same people who were part of the problem to be part of the solution. There is absolutely no way on earth that the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess will ever get us out of it. We need to clean house, taking the steering wheel away from the executives and the compliant boards that steered us over the economic cliff. They didn’t get it then; they still don’t get it now (see handing out bonuses, hosting spa retreats, redecorating, and throwing lavish parties while America teeters on the verge of economic collapse).