Cosmic Irony

After all, two years ago she didn’t know there were actually two Koreas. Now she just needs to decide which ones she’s standing with.

In a bad economy and a bad election year the voters made it loud and clear that they are very unhappy with the unemployment rate and the slow rate that economy is improving. What better to do than oust the party that is in power? Especially one who has not been able to organize itself into a strong enough force to roll over the “Just say no” political game the Republicans have been playing since Obama took office.

This election cycle saw the rise of the Tea Party movement that swept the GOP primaries as Republican voters-angry over the bogey men created by AM radio and Fox News-joined forces and started showing up to rallies screaming and yelling and carrying guns. Some races to the Senate became nationally known and watched by all in anticipation of not just a House takeover by the GOP, but the establishing of the Tea Party as a new force in government.

But something went wrong. The moderates and independents who were pissed off at the Democrats for not doing enough in the last two years, many of whom voted against McCain simply because they were scared of the extremism of the likes of Sarah Palin, came out in droves to beat the Tea Party. Just about one-third of the Tea Party candidates, all told, won office. That’s not a statement, that’s a failure.

Lisa Murkowski, Senator from Alaska, lost the GOP primary to Tea Party hopeful Joe Miller. Murkowski must have known that primary elections aren’t always telling of how the general population will vote; they only show the direction that voters already in the fold want the party to go. She ended up orchestrating one of the largest “write-in” campaigns in history and it’s starting to look like she’s won.

When it comes down to it, the American people don’t want far-left or far-right leaders in office. They want people who they feel can come up with solutions. The Tea Party has proven itself not to be those people.

The supposedly non-partisan commission on debt reduction has come out with a report that says cuts to Medicare and Social Security, raising the retirement age eventually to 69, cuts to mortgage-interest tax relief and other things that help the middle class raise families and buy homes while cutting the top income tax rate from 35 to 23 will solve our debt problems in the years to come.

In other words, we can reduce the deficit by putting it on the backs of seniors and the middle class. It’s not even flying by Republicans, who would love to see the top tax rates go down, but don’t want to come up with a way to pay for them. The increase in taxes to the middle class are even too much for them to swallow. Obviously, something needs to be done, but this commission needs a reworking of members and they need to start over. There’s no way this thing is going to get by Congress or the American people.

The military junta of Myanmar, or Burma has kept it’s rightfully elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, from her , her family, and her freedom for twenty years. The people of Burma are broken and battered under the military rule of the nation. Last week the junta held an obviously fixed election, the first since 1990 when Suu Kyi and her party won a landslide and were subsequently stripped of power and brought up on fake charges. Suu Kyi has won the Nobel Peace Prize and has stayed in her country despite her ill treatment. She is said to be released on Saturday. Her supporters wait hopefully at her home and party headquarters.

I was hard pressed to find a news source that would begin discussing the obvious implication of the election: Americans do not want the Tea Party in power. Of course, the one relevant hit I found on Google was from msn. Despite their suspension of Keith Olbermann, they are still keeping a watch on the conservatives.

The article was written two days ago, so some races that might have been too close to call could raise or lower that percentage and we won’t know if the 41% of write-in ballots will go to Murkowski’s unprecedented write-in campaign, but even if that is a high number, Miller only has 34% of the votes and chances are that he will not be in the Senate come January 3rd.

What’s even more telling is that most of the big names in the Tea Parties went down. O’Donnell, Angle, Murkowski. It seems only Rand Paul is left out of all the nationally-known. big name pot-stirrers and his entire campaign was co-opted by the RNC as soon as he won the primary. He began breaking promises to his constituents before November 2 even came along by lining his pockets with GOP dollars after swearing he wouldn’t and that he’d fight the establishment if he became the GOP candidate. So really, there’s hardly a Tea Partier left to uphold to the nation as an example of the turning tide.

Tea Partiers are too extreme for independent voters. While they are disatisfied with Democrats and unhappy about the still-high unemployment rate, they are willing to come out and show their grievances by voting for the GOP, but they are hardly siding with the old, angry, white guys in clownish-and sometimes outright treasonous-costumes and signs that have showed up at Town Hall meetings and Fox News rallies the last 18 months.

When the Tea Partiers are disillusioned by the fact that A) most of their candidates didn’t win and B) the ones that did can’t affect the change they want (no GOPer or Tea Partier elect has yet been able to describe how exactly they will cut the deficit), they will go home and hang up their signs.

All I can say is that on this dark day, I can at least be happy that CA has a better memory than the rest of the nation. It took the rest of the US just four years to forget twelve years of Republican fail and only two years to forget eight years of Bush fail. Of course, they refuse to remember anything important in the meantime, like this stuff.

This entry is being cross-posted on all my blogs in honor of the victims of American illiteracy and ignorance, such as the great Ted Strickland and Russ Feingold.

Obama is considering negotiating an extension of the Bush Tax Cuts for the richest 1% of the nation, which means more billions down the drain. You know those fiscally conservative Republicans in the House are going to happy to line their pockets with the special interest groups that are keeping this bleeding of the budget deficit in place. Democrats are spineless, Republicans are liars, and Americans are now f*cked.

Congratulations to Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, Alyson Huber, Gavin Newsom, John Chiang, Debra Bowen, Dave Jones, Bill Lockyer, Tom Torlakson, Alyson Huber and other Democrats who managed to win or gain seats in this volatile political environment.