Driving Lessons

Its been cloudy in LA recently. Light drizzle a lot of the time. Its only the end of October and there's already been nearly a half-inch of rain since the 'rainy season' began at the end of September. In a lot of places a half-inch of rain in a month or so would be cause for celebration but here people wander around wringing their hands asking 'when is this going to end?'

But Thursday's weather report showed a gap in the clouds for Friday! The news warned of massive traffic jams downtown because Obama's coming to town! Most of the time when the prez shows up we only get the traffic jam but never get to see him. California is usually a safe Demo state and the national parties use it as a cash cow. They do fundraisers here and ship the cash to the battleground states. Not this year. California is a battleground state this year. Both Babs Boxer and Jerry Brown are long past their 'sell by' date and even in this commie state the granola-eaters are off their feed and much less likely to vote than they were two years ago.

So Obama and the Dems announce an open-to-the-public presidential speech at USC, about fifteen miles from my house. I decided to go and my daughter Emily and her boyfriend Nate decided to come along. We didnt want to take a car into the predicted jam so we drove into Hollywood, parked and took the subway and a shuttle-bus to the event. We went through security in pretty good time.

The crowd was mainly USC students. There were a few always-scowling union types, all with t-shirts identifying the various groups they were associated with. I had had the foresight to wear my union t-shirt which caused puzzlement on a few faces. The Animation Guild Local 839 was a bit of an anomaly amongst all those SEIU and ASCME shirts and even though I could easily drop twenty five pounds as union t-shirt wearing types go I was svelte and skinny. What is it about union membership that makes you bloat? Maybe there's some money in the stimulus bill to study why that happens.

We tried to find a spot where we could see the podium. The event was in a quad, an open square,and whoever put it together hadnt considered the crowd at all. Apparently Obama can only be photographed from one angle, straight on. It makes sense when you consider that he has the two teleprompter screens that he turns back and forth to read from. What this means is that unlike every other event like this that I've ever been to the press stands were erected dead center in the quad. This blocked the view from a large part of the area and squashed the crowd into two packed groups along the sides. The podium was low on the steps of the building behind it. A bunch of people with Hope and Change signs were lined up behind the podium. Nice for the press, bad for the crowd.

We tried to get close but that was impossible so we finally found a little rise where we could get a view of the speakers through the heads in the crowd. By that time the show had started. They always lead off with the local activists. These people mistake shouting for oratory. The males bellow and the females attack your eardrums with shrill, high-pitched cliches that are so stupid that you're embarrassed to be in a crowd that isnt jeering at these idiots.

But the crowd wasnt listening enough to jeer or cheer. They were milling around, yakking, throwing the free water bottles around or just staring stupidly at each other. Not focused on the Center For Childrens Prosperity founder's heartfelt plea for more money from those evil rich people. Apparently the clueless evil rich people like the student body of USC who are paying $40k per annum to party in the groves of academe and who are just fine with their parents getting a big fat tax hike to support The Center For Childrens Prosperity and their ilk. They must have suspended classes that day to get this apple-cheeked, fashionably-dressed crowd of kiddies. Do universities still have classes on Fridays? Its an awful burden on the professors to not have a three day weekend to rest up from the grueling four-hour days they put in during the week and the students need some home time to download their term papers off the internet.

Then a local rock band came on. Fat white guys who did rock, rap, reggae...a wide range of styles, all of it bad. Emily and Nate, hardcore concert-goers, had their fingers in their ears. In the old days these buffoons would have been described as 'schleppers'; noisy, upbeat and awful! But they opened the real event. as the pain in our ears from the 'music' subsided the big names came on.

The first speaker was Kamila Harris, the Dem candidate for Attorney General, a woman so left wing that she had worn out her welcome in San Francisco. Thats left-wing. Her one aim in the campaign is to keep the Blue Staters focused on the 'D' next to her name and ignorant of her appalling record. The crowd treated her flat nasal whining with the contempt it deserved. No applause, no nothing.

Next was Jerry The Jerk (Jerry Brown to you out-of-staters) who has the same problem as Harris; anyone who knows what kind of a left-wing, incompetent, egotistical moron he is will be voting for his somewhat less liberal, possibly less incompetent but equally egotistical opponent. These USC kiddies were conceived long after Brown's disastrous two terms as governor and are too busy downloading free music to pay any attention to politics. Real Hope And Change types, Brown's core constituency. A couple of people clapped.

They should have had Jerry introduce Barbara Boxer but couldnt resist turning it over to another shouting nonentity, Hilda Solis, who completely lost the crowd within two seconds. But Babs arrived at the podium at last and began her rousing rhetoric. Babs is short. Too short for that venue and no one thought to bring a box for her to stand on. She was invisible to most of the crowd and her speaking style is monotonous and boring. Every so often she rises to an atonal squawk at the end of a sentence. Every word was a twenty-five year old potboiler progressivist cliche. The crowd was lost. Nobody came here to see any of these doofuses, of course, but even minimal courtesy was breaking down.

Finally Babs wrapped up and introduced The Man. The crowd perked up like the ears on a doberman when it hears the burglar jumping the fence. He's here! The first burst of actual enthusiasm occurred as El Presidente took his place between the teleprompters. People were climbing the trees in the quad and the crowd compressed forward. The speech began.

How did this guy ever get a reputation as a good orator? He has Jesse Jackson's policies but I've heard Jackson speak and now I've heard Obama speak and believe me there is NO comparison. The speech itself would have been a challenge to someone of Jackson's talents and was lead in the mouth of a much lesser speaker.

It turns out that the car is in the ditch and was so stuck there by the Bushies that when Obama got there he didnt have time to get the car out of the ditch but you see that when you want to move a car forward you put it in 'D' and backwards you put it in 'R'. The college-educated crowd was easily able to grasp this taut metaphor but by that point they werent listening.

OK dont listen to Kamila Harris or Jerry or Babs, that's understandable. But hadnt these people come to see Obama? The biggest cheer he got was when he arrived, always the sign of a bad show. In this milling crowd I was thinking about the driving metaphor...if the Republicans had driven the car forward into the ditch wouldnt putting the car in 'D' make it go deeper into the ditch? That seems to be the direction we're moving in with Obama. But I digress.

The most interesting thing about this whole speech was the complete lack of attention by the crowd. All the pleas to vote and tell all your friends to vote fell on deaf ears. I had gone to the first Tea Party rally on April 15th, 2009 and that small crowd, faced with what we all knew was the coming disaster, was focused and as enthused as it could be faced with the situation we were in. This Obama rally was nothing like that. This was a freak show. The crowd was here to see the Prez, not to listen to boring speeches. They saw him. That made them happy. But applause line after applause line got sparse applause; laugh line after laugh line got no laughs. This reminded me of a speech by Bob Dole I saw in the 1996 campaign. It was that bad.

I know this is anecdotal, that I'm often wrong, but I smell Dem disaster. The people at this rally were not filled with a grim resolve to go out and vote to save the Obamunist agenda. They didnt even have enough resolve even to listen to Obama when he was standing there right in front of them. There was no big traffic jam; the vast majority of the audience were USC students out for a lark. Will they vote? Not like 2008, you can be sure of that. The magic is gone, the dream has failed. The ADHD electorate barely remembers two years ago and they can clearly see the current failure. Obama's excuse that things were so bad when he arrived and that the Dems have made lots of progress fixing it got no applause at all, even from this crowd. They havent fixed anything. On November 2nd they will get skunked. Brown and Boxer will lose. The non-political default Democrats will not show up. They dont even want to think about whats going on around them. Bye bye Babs!

The October Dip

Oh no! If you look at the polls it seems that there has been a minor 'counter wave' to the Republican wave of 2010. Some races that were Republican blowouts a couple weeks ago are now described as 'tightening up'. With the Dems making every political mistake in the book, with Obama running around the country saying things that can only be described as bizarre, with a raging population angry at just about everything the Demos have said or done in the last two years, with an economy that ensures that school-leavers and middle-aged downsize victims are looking at more or less permanent unemployment, what could be the cause of this unlikely surge towards the Party Of Compassion?

If you have a brain in your head you can see that nothing has changed in the political tide in the last year, except that people have gotten more mad and more frustrated with what has been going on. So where has this mysterious 'surge' come from? What has caused the tidal flow to start running in the direction of the Demos? All their negative attack ads? The ones in my state, Gollyvornia, have reached the point of absurdity. Barbara Boxer is attacking her opponent for supporting 'job-killing offshore oil drilling' and quotes the president of the Sierra Club to underline the seriousness of this charge. Its scary to live in a place where that is considered a winning argument. What kind of a moron do you have to be to swallow that? It turns out that Babs and Jerry Brown are the two most powerful engines of job creation since Henry Ford died.

With this Demo surge the Dems are acting very strangely. Instead of counterattacking into states that had formerly been leaning Republican that are now 'in play' according to the polls the Dems are sending their big guns and moola into places that have supposedly been sewed-up Blue. Why are they all going to Delaware? Did BJ Clinton hear about the herd of plump interns grazing in the fields just outside of Wilmington? Did Obama hear of a must-play golf course near Dover? Did Biden get lost trying to drive to West Virginia? If that creepy critter Coons had this seat in the bag why are the celebs all crowding into this hard-core Blue State?

And look at West Virginia. Manchin's numbers were tanking. All of a sudden some off-brand leftist group releases a poll that has him ten points ahead, it gets averaged into the RCP average and whoa! Manchin is ahead! There was some phony made-up story about Raece's ad agency casting 'hickey' actors but in a state worried about Cap And Trade anti-coal rules and super high unemployment is that 'hickey' piece of WaPo-NYT wonk-chow likely to change a single vote?

Here in my beloved home state of Gollyvornia there has been the same Demo bump but it seems to be sagging. Babs Boxer is a hard sell, probably because the assonance of her name makes it easy to snarl 'BAR-bra BO-xer!' in the ads attacking her. Even the most Photoshopped photos of her cant conceal her overripe condition and dwarf stature. Boxer has never polled at fifty percent. Now Fiorina is neck and neck and Babs knows that a low Demo turnout will Scott Brown her into the trash can of history.

Meanwhile back at the desert depression, there has been a mainstream media news blackout since Sharron Angle took the sniveling Majority Leader to the woodshed in their only debate. She's polling over fifty, the lines of Older White Males are around the block at the early voting stations and the hapless Reid campaign has shown its completely unable to come up with a new message that has any resonance. If there was a Dem surge surely the supposedly razor-tight Nevada Senate race would be up in the air. But it aint.

So what's with the Demo bump? Its easy. First, this happens in every election. In the last one there was a McLame bump a couple of weeks before the election. It was probably generated by a bunch of McLame-hating Tea Party-types who told the pollsters 'yeah, I guess I'll go vote for that moron' who were then counted as 'likely voters'. When it came right down to it they just couldnt get past the lines of glue-sniffing Hope And Change voters and the baseball-bat-wielding New Black Panthers to cast a vote for a stuttering liberal that everybody knew was going to get skunked.

The same thing is happening now. After being begged by Obama, Biden, BJ Clinton (not Hilly BTW), and every local Democrat that they can round up the Hope And Change voters are feeling guilty that they are having such ambivalent feelings about what's going on and are telling the pollsters that 'yeah, I guess I'll go vote for those morons.' So what has happened is that people who have seen that 800 number on their screen and picked up the phone and stayed on the line for the interview have included more Dems than there have been lately. This has generated a slight bump for the Dems.

The Dems need a bump like this two weeks out. What it does is generate money and volunteers for campaigns that are actually terminal. Sestak, Boxer, Feingold, Manchin, Murray all are watching the real numbers slip away. Boxer and Murray are also worried that the polls in their states will still be open while the Dem wipeout back East becomes crystal-clear, suppressing the Dem turnout in their states. The coming O'Donnell victory in Delaware could cause loses in Senate seats in CA and WA as Dems shrug and say 'whats the point?'

What will happen? In the last few days the pollsters, worried about their reputations, will tighten up their methodology. The last poll is the one that everyone looks at when they are judging how accurate any polling organization is. What these last weekend polls will show, when its too late to make a difference, is a huge Scott Brown-type surge all over the country but especially in places like Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Colorado and Illinois. And dare we hope New York? They will show a sudden surge towards the Repub candidates when in fact they are only showing what was there all along.

Republicans will vote this time and Dems will stay home. The real numbers on Nov. 2nd will bear this out. There wont be some huge turn on the last weekend; there was a huge turn the day that the stimulus failed to lower the unemployment numbers, the day that people realized that the Health Care Bill was going to raise their insurance rates to the breaking point, the day Obama stood up for the GZ mosque, the day the Dems jumped all over Arizona. The anger that was always there will still be there on Nov 2nd. The despair amongst the Hope and Changers will still be there. The X Factor in all this polling, turnout, will be shown to be all on the side of the Repubs.

And I will be in front of my TV set watching a weeping Chris Coons, a brave-in-defeat Bloomberg, a shocked Gianouliaus, a shell-shocked Harry Reid saying 'the election is lost' to a crowd of weeping public employees, a Mom In Tennis Shoes cursing the voters in Washington and most of all I will be dancing and cheering as an over-coiffed, sawed-off little shrimp of a haggard Marxist dwarf berates the Tea Party extremists here in Gollyvornia who wouldnt let her return to the Senate.

Harry Goes To Girlie World

I tell myself I dont believe a word in the mainstream media. I sat down to watch the Reid-Angle debate thinking myself free from that little curling-lip sneer of contempt that Chris Matthews has when he talks about Sharron Angle. But you know what? I was resigned. I know she's right and he's wrong but c'mon guys, this is a housewife from Ely, Nevada going up against the Senate Majority Leader.

Have you even been to Ely, Nevada? Its small. Its real small. The big bragging point is that its right near the largest open pit copper mine in North America. The only time I went there I took a great panorama of the copper mine but no shots of Ely itself. A couple of tiny casinos, a couple of legal whorehouses; other than that it could be any small western town. Bigger than Searchlight, I'll grant you that, but to my urban eyes Ely is a tiny cow town.

So this Ely housewife has the audacity, after twenty or thirty million bucks worth of ads branding her as a mental defective, after Chris' rolling eyeballs and contemptuous curling lip, after the news media highlighting every stumble, every slip and weaving the tapestry of a mentally-challenged extremist lunatic; after all that this woman has the temerity to walk onto the stage with the third most powerful person in a country of 300 million people and debate him? I was prepared to weep. To explain things away. To be charitable. But my heart sank at the thought of what I was going to see. The Big Lie wins again and control of the Senate is lost. Chris' curling lip had gotten to me. I live in LA. I'm way closer to Chris than I like to think.

But Mama Angle walked into the Debate Kitchen and opened up a family-sized can of Whuppass and she served it to the mighty Majority Leader piping hot. From being resigned to Angle losing and hoping against hope that she would do well enough to survive I began to feel sorry for Harry Reid. Yes, you read it, I felt sorry for the guy. It was like on the elementary school playground watching the class sissy get beat up by one of the tough girls from one of the upper grades. I literally couldnt believe it! She didnt take any of his crap.

She whupped him, she whupped him bad. There wasnt one single Harry Reid moment in the entire debate. This was the Rodney King beating, debate-style. Watching Harry, quivering like my chihuahua does in the vet's waiting room, twisted onto the podium like he needed a giant dose of Preparation H, trying to run away from himself, was painful. He didnt take credit for any of the last four years. Or blame. You would have thought that the guy who was on the air in commercials every five minutes on every channel talking about how Nevadans needed the influence of a powerful man in the Senate would at least admit that he had occasionally visited the place. He was like one of those career criminals who infest MSNBC after the commies go home, guys that describe the crimes they've committed in the most neutral terms, as though they had only observed that a 7/11 had indeed been robbed and somehow a bullet had found its way into the clerk.

The two big zingers were the one about Social Security and the one about how Reid made his money. Sharron Angle turned to that weedy, lying, Uriah Heep-like varmint as he toted out the shopworn liberal lie that she wanted to take away every senior citizen's Social Security checks and told him to fess up about the theft of a trillion dollars from the so-called trust fund to pay for his giant useless government programs. She painted that low-down weasel as the Bernie Madoff of Social Security and she did it in hot colors. She said it mad! Man up you skinny little chicken...you stole everybody's money! I dont remember his answer. Who cares what he said? This was reality TV at its finest! Sharron Angle is the Snookie of politics!

Then she said it. At first I didnt believe my ears. I know Reid didnt believe his ears. If this had been a fight the referee would have stopped it. No one ever dares to ask big time politicians this question...'How have you managed to become one of the richest men in the Senate on the government salaries you have earned all your life?' Willie Brown lived in a mansion, drove a new Porsche and wore $1000 hand-tailored suits on his income of $40k per annum and nobody ever asked him that question. Reid's eyes bugged out. He looked like he had gotten his wing-tip stuck in an electrical socket. It was Dan Quayle after Lloyd Bensen said, "You're no Jack Kennedy."

"That was a low blow..." he gasped before he explained that he was lawyering and investing in his spare time, dontcha know. See, the guy that not only read the danged Health Care Bill but wrote all 2,000 pages of it and wouldnt let anybody else see it until after they voted on it, Mr. Obsessive Knit-Picker Detail Man has got plenty of time on his hands and he uses this spare time to earn hundreds of millions of dollars. Thats like one of those ads that used to be on the backs of comic books; 'Earn Thousands In Your Spare Time.' Harry's the right age. Maybe he clipped that coupon, mailed off his $1.98 and got the secret to earning huge amounts of money in his spare time. And I thought I was so smart not being dumb enough to send my meager allowance off to an obvious fraud. An obvious fraud like Reid's answer. We all know how he got rich...he's a crook, that's how!

None of the rest matters. In those two magic moments Angle paid Reid back for every insult, every attack ad, every lie he tells about her. The curled lip the next day on Chris Matthews' face was for Reid, not Angle. The panel shook their heads solemnly. How could Reid let himself get sucker-punched like that? And then silence. How could this have happened? He got into a debate with a media-certified retard...and he lost! You can tell how badly she beat Reid by observing that within 24 hours of the debate there was almost total media silence about the debate or the candidates. The state of Nevada disappeared from political maps behind the noble commentators.

Too late. Angle has destroyed the narrative that Reid and his advertising geniuses had spent tens of millions of dollars constructing. His aura of competence was destroyed as was hers of extremism. She asked the questions any person would want to ask one of these big shots, and now one of us got the chance to do it. I was convinced Angle would win the election before this but she could have lost the debate and the election. It took a lot of guts to come at Reid like that, not many people would have been able to keep it going the whole time. A miracle might still save Harry Reid but no one will ever be able to say that Angle didnt have the Mighty Majority Leader whining and on the ropes. You go girl!

Desperation 2.0

I'm scared. The Chamber Of Commerce wont release its donor list and they're fooling honest Americans into canceling my health care by voting for extremist Teabaggers. If this foreign-funded Chamber Of Commerce plot succeeds all the air will be polluted and the Earth will catch fire and we'll all die a horrible death just like the polar bears! You think I'm crazy? Well PROVE that stuff isnt going to happen! Ha! I've got you there, dont I?

Welcome to the World Of Axelrod. Even a slavish liberal mainstream-media bootlicker like Bob Schieffer couldnt deal with it; the look on his face was the one usually reserved for someone like Sarah Palin or Christine O'Donnell when they talk about spending cuts. In shock he asked, "Is that all you've got?"

It is all they've got! Their unpopular agenda fails more every day. This month's undercurrent of failure is the apparent destruction of Medicare as private insurers drop Medicare Advantage plans, doctors opt out of the program entirely and prescription drugs take a huge jump in price. Seniors living on Social Security who have been told that inflation is so completely non-existent that they havent had a cost of living increase in two years are realizing what Hope And Change might mean for them. You see there is no inflation if you take food, energy and medical care out of the equation. These dumb, shovel-ready seniors are overlooking the fact that they can go down to the local auto dealer and purchase a brand spankin' new Jaguar for a lot less than they would have had to pay two years ago. It all averages out... but NO! that foreign Chamber Of Commerce money has blinded them, making them think that they are much worse off than they were under the Evil Bush.

The Evil Bush is looking mighty good these days as the undignified and cravenly dishonest current president flies from campaign stop to campaign stop blaming his abject failures on Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, the oil companies, Big Insurance, greedy Wall Street speculators, teabaggers, and lazy Democrats who wont vote while at the same time he brags about how many cushy, overpaid, useless government jobs he's saved to audiences filled with desperate people hoping Barak will announce some plan to get us out of the current morass. The tangled metaphor about giving the car keys back to the people who drove us into the ditch is a little shopworn after the car has somehow slipped deeper into the ditch during the last couple of years instead of moving back towards the road. What have these idiots done to get the car out of the ditch or even to stop it sliding farther in?

But this must be Recovery Autumn if it follows Recovery Summer! The 20% unemployed populace is unable to look past their foreclosure notices and unemployed school leavers and suicidal middle-aged relatives and realize that there are some great statistics out there proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that any so-called 'recession' ended nearly a year ago. What are you going to do with people that stupid?

The Dems have trotted out their not-so-secret weapon...BJ Clinton. They figure that in Blue States that are turning Red that a look at BJ and hearing a few of his absurdly dishonest soundbites will bring the apparently confused independents and Reagan Democrats back to the fold that the left-wing radical policies of Pelosi, Reid and Obama have chased them from. Clinton looks like Bilbo Baggins after he got to Rivendell; old age and too much Cialis have finally caught up with him. The old fire is gone and in some of these races even a visit by BJ is pointless. It just reminds people that every Democrat is one hundred percent behind the policies that have caused so much misery. Telling people to 'stay the course' when they see their country and their lives falling apart is counterproductive politically.

Now that people really want and need some Hope And Change telling them how great things are and how we need to stay the course is not really the right approach. But the Dems, and especially the ones in the White House, figure they've already delivered a truckload of Change and they Hope you like it. We dont. Nobody does. Even hardcore Democrats are moody and defensive. They'll vote against the current mess by staying home. The polls are trying to measure likely voters and are giving grudging 'I guess I'll vote' Democrats the same weight in surveys as 'I cant wait to get to the polls to send those creeps a message' Republicans and Independents. The polls are way oversampling Democrats.

The Democrats know it, too. Why are they sending money and key people to Delaware? According to everyone that race is completely sewed up. Why the air of desperation in the supposedly ahead in the polls Barbara Boxer campaign? Its the Scott Brown effect. Was Brown ever ahead in the polls? Maybe in the last couple of days but no one believed he could win. Now we see the same poll numbers flowing slowly towards candidates like McMahon in Connecticutt and even towards O'Donnell in Delaware. In both of those cases we're not supposed to judge female candidates on their good looks so we'll just concentrate on the spectacular unphotogenicness of their male opponents. Those feral-looking critters are TV poison. They dont have a tenth of the pizzaz the gals they're running against have. I've been in the TV industry all my life and let me tell you that when you're selling anything on TV LOOKS MATTER! MESSAGE MATTERS!

The only message the Democrats, who have controlled Congress for four years and Congress and the White House for two years is that each individual Republican candidate in every race has such a horrendous past life that a vote to put them into office is a vote to turn your nation over to a pack of heartless criminals. The ads for every Democratic candidate for every competitive office are exactly the same; this guy/gal is unfit for office and belongs in a jail/insane asylum. Every business person is accused of driving jobs overseas, even if they ran a Subway franchise in South Dakota. The nasty opposition research is all they've got. No Hope. No Change. Just smears. It wont work.

The Senatorial Wave

Last week's mainstream media fantasy was that the Republican tide had crested and was now ebbing. The media and the libs have always been under the mistaken impression that if only they could find the right tone to take, if they could just adjust the message a bit, the independents would break their way, the Dem base would be energized and the magic of 2008 would repeat itself. The smug smiles of the lib pundits were oozing all over my TV screen as they announced that Pelosi would hold the House and that the Senate was safe for the sure-to-be returning Harry Reid.

As the Dems see it this current wave of rage is non-specific, directed against 'incumbents' and not related to anything they might have done. According to the leading experts the recession ended almost a year ago so cant we all just get with the program? Look at all the growth statistics! The market's up, the bonuses got delivered on time...whats wrong with these flyover idiots? OK, the boobs in the Red States might get fired up, that's no surprise; these rednecks are generally irascible and we all know that they are racists at heart. Everybody knows those signs at the Tea Party rallies against Pelosi and Reid are just a blind to cover up the racism against Obama. But c'mon...Kentucky? Arkansas? Missouri? Deep redneck country.

Well Missouri is a bit of a disappointment. With the ballot-box-stuffing operations in St. Louis and Kansas City Missouri had become very competitive for Democrats but last week, in the middle of this supposed Democrat recovery in the polls, the Democrat Senatorial Committee pulled all its money out of the Missouri race. There arent any Red States where any Dem Senate candidate has a ghost of a chance. Florida, long a Dem hope, is gone. North Carolina, New Hampshire...all long gone into the red column.

But where the Dem's hearts have been broken is in Ohio, Colorado, Robert Byrd's West Virginia, Barak's old seat in Illinois, Harry Reid's baronial estate of Nevada, Washington and even the perpetually blue California. They should not have to be spending a penny in any of these but the first two. California has always been a cash cow for out-of-state Dems to raise money for tough campaigns but the aging and stumbling Boxer is in huge trouble and sucking up every penny her union owners can spare. As a long-time resident of Cali I can witness to the fact that the public polls always way oversample Democrats but even with that said Boxer has yet to crack 50% in any poll. The turnout will determine this race and I think Babs is in big trouble.

Ohio is a long-held dream for the Dems. This is the ultimate state for them, the state that could have made John Kerry, the only person in the country less qualified for the Presidency than Barak Obama, president. If Ohio would turn Blue America would be Blue forever. Not this year. Ohio is blood red. The Dems dream of bagging a Repub stronghold is gone. Nevada, a state I grew up in and have visited several times in the last couple of weeks on family business, is gone. I dont care what the polls say, its not even going to be close. People hate Reid, even the ones who will vote against Angle. There is no chance for him to pull this out at this point. After tens of millions of dollars in smear ads any more spending would be like laying poultices on a dead man.

Now the real bad news for the left. The fight is in the Blue States, states they shouldnt have to be fighting for at all. Pennsylvania is over, Washington is sliding out of reach, Feingold is tanking in Wisconsin and now the Dems are diverting resources and campaign visits by the celebs to Connecticut and Delaware in a last desperate gasp to retain control of the Senate.

In this landscape of disaster the Dems have yet to admit that their own actions are behind this almost universal rejection of their candidates. The only criticism of the completely failed 'Stimulus' program is that they didnt spend enough. Health Care is unpopular, according to the lefties, because Big Insurance is using the love that all good rednecks have for them to turn the populace against what's good for them in the long run. There's no Depression; this is Recovery Summer! The debt is all Bush's fault.

But its a summer where millions of middle-aged people have lost their jobs forever, where college grads are home living with Mom and Dad wondering how they'll be able to make the next payment on the six-figure student loans that financed their worthless degrees. The people still working are gripped with terror that they are on the list for the next cut by their employers. Every industry is cutting workers and even minimum-wage fast-food jobs wont touch a 55 year old laid off middle manager. The Dems have taken every opportunity to insult regular Americans with stuff like the Ground Zero Mosque and calling the people in Arizona racists for complaining about their state being overrun by foreign criminals.

The truth is that the lie that had sustained the Dems for nearly a generation was cast aside in their euphoria in 2008. Demos had always run on the lie that they were way more conservative than they were. They painted themselves as a more humane alternative to those crabby, country-club Republicans. In 2008 they mistook a turnout by the Marching Morons to support the Hope And Change fairytale as real support for their leftist agenda so they abandoned the pretense of moderation and for a year they partied, secure in the knowledge that the country, except for a few pathetic teabaggers waving their sad little homemade signs in the public park, loved them and believed in what they were doing.

One in five is either unemployed or underemployed. The Iranians are developing nukes and we have lost the ability to do anything about it. The dollar is falling. The Bush Tax Cuts will expire on Jan 1, further tanking the sick economy. If capital gains rates are due to double at the end of the year you can look for a wave of selling in the stock market that could turn into a stampede down to 5 or 6,000. Banks will teeter again as the wave of foreclosures intensifies and their 20%+ credit card rates push more and more people into default. The geniuses educated at Princeton and Harvard and similar 'elite' universities do not have sufficient knowledge or reasoning skills to deal with this and the Administration and top of the state and business bureaucracies are composed of nothing but careerist Ivy Leaguers, completely at sea but convinced of their own infallibility.

The Senate will be Republican. They will gain at least twelve seats. Most of the races wont even be close. The House will be a similar wipeout. Barry Obama will be faced with a Congress controlled in both houses by a majority which will contain a minority of energized ultra- conservatives brought into office on a wave of anger and a faction of 'moderates' who are now terrorized that they are on the Tea Party death list for 2012 and who wont be crossing the aisle anytime soon. Meanwhile the demoralized Dems will have to contend with the fact that their leader in the White House is an arrogant, out-of-touch, hopeless incompetent and that its every man for himself. The idea that the Dems will walk away from an historic defeat and pass Cap And Trade and Card Check in the lame duck session is ludicrous. They cant be that stupid, can they?