So, to review, the wingnuts took a seat that would have been a win for the Republicans, so much so that the seat had not gone to a Democrat since Reconstruction and the Democratic candidates had been getting about 35% of the vote the last few elections, ran the Republican out of the race, brought their own special kind of crazy to town, and the voters rejected them handily.

Even I didn’t expect Owens to win. I seriously hope they pursue this strategy nationwide.

In other news, a Goldman employee has finally lost a job, with Corzine out in NJ. I know nothing about the election there, nor the one in Virginia, but I do know that Terry McAuliffe is not Governor. That is a good thing.

The only really bad thing is the repeal of the gay marriage law in Maine. Other than that, I’d be hard pressed to draw any conclusions from yesterday other than that Sarah Palin is still a loser. I’m sure that won’t stop the right-wing hacks from claiming this has been a bad result for Obama, but let’s face it- everything is good news for Republicans.

Erick Erickson:

The race has now been called for Democrat Bill Owens.

This is a huge win for conservatives.

[....]

I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman winning would just be gravy. A Hoffman win is not in the cards, but we did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed GOP candidate.

[....]

For all intents and purposes, NY-23 is a trial run for Florida. And in Florida, the conservative candidate is operating inside the GOP. If John Cornyn and the NRSC do not want to see Florida go the way of NY-23, they better stand down.

How much more of Erickson’s bullshit is the Republican party going to take? The guy is quoted in Politico every freaking day now. Okay, so are Lanny Davis and Doug Schoen, so maybe that’s a bad example. But you see what I mean, right?

It looks like the tea bagger lost in NY-23. And you know what happened in the other two races.

There’s not much of a lesson to be learned from a bunch of low turn-out races in an odd year. But if you didn’t already know that running to the center in a state your party lost last time (I’m referring to McDonnell in VA) is smart and running to the far right in a swing district (NY-23) is dumb, this is more evidence.

There was a period under Bush where it became accepted wisdom that Bush had “won the center by moving to the right” (this is pretty close to a verbatim quote from Howard Fineman). I think that era is over.

Update. I am now putting all posts in the category “Good News For Conservatives”, btw.

Update update. Also consider this a late-night open thread.

As goes the special election in Michigan’s 19th State Senatorial district, so goes the nation.

I remember talking to voters in this district back in 1980, with Jack Germonde and R. W. Apple, at an old diner that only served coffee, donuts, and burgers. You could tell something was in the air. You could tell the Reagan revolution was coming. People were angry. Regular people, gritty people, blue-collar workers with plastic crucifixes on their dashboards.

For your comments on V or the HBO Obama show.

I found this story to be interesting (and, for me, local):

U. ROCHESTER—In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.

The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and coauthor of the study.

It brings up a couple points:

• Does the fact that this is happening so quickly make the theory of plate tectonics more believable to young earthers?
• Thank God this wasn’t Kenya or they’d be looking for a birth certificate in there.

Update. This is good news for conservatives.

Just got an email reminding me of the Obama election movie on HBO tonight.

I’ll probably watch it at some point, but I still find movies like this kind of creepy. Whatever, though. I’m weird.

From the NYT obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss:

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective… he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare…

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

Of course humans have always had an obsessive interest in the odd ways of That Tribe Across the River, but how many scholars can say they’ve had so much influence on the way “we” discuss “they” today, whether as political bloggers or Media Village Idiots?

I’m actually kind of excited for the series opener of V tonight- I wonder how it will compare to the series from the 80’s. With Morena Baccarin, they have the hotness factor covered, that is for sure.

Also kind of excited about Dragon Age. Everything Bioware touches turns to gold (and I still think KOTOR is one of the greatest games ever made).

I guess I missed this particular episode of wingnuttery. I’m a big fan of how after they made asses out of themselves asserting Wright and Ayers and others falsely visited the White House, they then blamed it on the WH for not warning them that different people can have the same name.

Mr. Furious, On the Blue Ridge Parkway, north of Asheville.

Moonbatting Average, Moonrise through the yuccas, Whipple Mountains, CA

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.

I’m really loving this special election in NY. I’m sorry that those people are going to be represented by a Bachmann style wingnut, but hey- they voted for him, so they can just deal with it.

But what I find really amusing is that they are taking a win for the Republican in that district as a sign of a conservative resurgence, emboldening them to take their tea party on the road to savage other apostates and those insufficiently loyal to the ideology, when that district hasn’t elected anything BUT Republicans since the Civil War. Again, nothing but Republicans for 70 straight elections, and they are taking the 71st (or whatever it actually is) as a “sign.”

When you think about it, that is funnier than the birthers.

And what makes it extra special is that they will probably succeed in a few safe Republican districts, and primary out a couple of people and replace them with Glen Beck following religious nuts like Hoffman. I wonder if the short-sighted fools at Reason are proud of the monsters they helped create when they were pimping the teabaggers the last six months. I bet Hoffman has really enlightened views on marijuana, pornography, the justice system, and individuals rights. Well done, glibertarians!

I have to admit that the teabagger candidate in NY-23 is polling better than I expected he would. Though, in retrospect, it makes a reasonable amount of sense: the teabag movement appeals largely to the old and the district is old. But I’m wondering if there’s even more to it. It’s my sense that the basic tenets of teabaggerism are:

• Low taxes!


• Small government!


• Get off my lawn!

Conspicuously absent are

• Jesus!


• Fight the new Hitler!

In particular, the Dick Armey outfit FreedomWorks seems to be about promoting freedom (I guess from taxes and regulations) here as opposed to freedom (to be a quasi-western American puppet state) abroad. And they don’t seem to talk about Jesus much. Obviously, all kinds of crazy people showed up at the 9/12 festivities, mean of them Hitler-obsessed and heavy into Jesus. But some of that is just that, to paraphrase James Carville, if you drag a Fox News crew through a retirement home, there’s no telling what you’ll find.

I think that a Jesus-reduced, Hitler-reduced conservative message might work reasonably well in some parts of the country, including the rural northeast. It’s probably too anti-union to really work in New York State at large and too anti-immigrant to really work nationally, but if teabagging is traditional wingerism with more Rand and less religion, more Galt and less GWOT, it may end up less fringey that I originally thought.

Bobo’s obsession with chain restaurants took a disturbing turn this morning:

Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex. (He meets one Midwestern couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s.)

Insomnia, Day Three:

Haven’t slept since more than a few hours since getting back from Florida. I keep telling everyone I am “catching up on sleep.” Even my good friends, because I don’t want to burden them. No one told me it would be like this. You are either sick, your pets are sick, or you are stressed, or you have too much to do to think, or you don’t have the time to do what you want to do, or someone is pissed at you and won’t explain why, or your car breaks down, or your dishwasher breaks, or your plants get blight, or something. Always something. Guess I should just consider the fact that my mom, dad, brother, sisters, and pets are healthy. But it just always seems like it is something.

On the other hand, I am watching a lot of old Sopranos episodes. Thank ALLAH I do not have kids. I feel for you people.