Republicans have a Tea Problem

This isn't new news. But it is important news. It's been ramping up for quite a while now as we move through the Primary season. It started with Sharron Angle. It continued with Joe Miller's defeat of Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. And now, we're looking at Carl Paladino and Christine O'Donnell. Those are the highlights, but you can bet that there are others out there who are a little less wackadoodle but no less unelectable. The Tea Party may yet play Ralph Nader to the Republican Party's Al Gore. Weird analogy, I know. To be sure, as a liberal commentator one of the things I'm going to do is try to be optimistic about Democratic chances in ANY upcoming election. Check out Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight for the statistics. He still gives the Republicans a 2 to 1 shot at winning the House. Get ready for Speaker Boehner, but cross your fingers you won't ever see it. 

The Senate looked much better last week. But, in a rare bright spot, in the last week, Democratic chances of holding at least 51 seats there have gone up. Again, Nate hits the nail on the head when checking out the statistics in this article about the primaries in Deleware the other evening. But in short, we can thank Christine O'Donnell. For those of you who haven't gotten the memo about her yet, here's the short version. She just defeated nine time Congressman Mike Castle for the Republican nomination in Deleware. She now faces Chris Coons. Coons is a strong pick. There are only three counties in Delaware (I know, right?) and as a leader in one of them he has made tough choices to balance their budget and pay back their debt. The have a AAA financial rating. He's honest and upstanding and really about as squeeky clean as you can ask a candidate to be. That said, he had been written off as having little chance while everyone assumed he'd be challenging Mike Castle. But he's not. His challenger is Christine O'Donnell. She has run for several times before, with the most recent instance in 2008 when she tried to upset VP Joe Biden. Even while spending almost all of his energy helping the President with that race, Biden defeated Mrs. O'Donnell soundly. Her 2008 Campaign manager ran robocalls against her candidacy before the primary on tuesday, and though they did not work, to me that says something about how badly the Republican Party doesn't want to have to deal with her. Among other things, this Campaign manager has accused Mrs. O'Donnell of using campaign money to pay personal expenses including rent. She has touted herself as a college graduate for a long time, but only recently received her degree after having finally paid her school what she owed them. And this is one of the people the Tea Party wants to send to the Senate to fix our financial troubles? 

Mrs. O'Donnell has spent most of her pre-campaign days as the founder and organizer of SALT, or Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth. A creepy name for an organization if there ever was one, it gives you no idea what the organization's main goal is. Video exists of Mrs. O'Donnell explaining this so it's not just me making things up.

YouTube doesn't want to embed, but you can check out the video here.

Yes, that was the theme song from Joan of Arcadia, and yes, aside from the 90s hair we all had, that is Christine O'Donnell really telling you you can't masturbate because of the bible. Really. And now she wants to be the senator from Delaware.

In short, many of these candidates including Mrs. O'Donnell and Mrs. Angle may prove to be short lived victories. Yes, the Tea Party got them nominated. But can they actually put them into Congress, or will they do poorly in the general election because of the far right wing values they espouse? I imagine the latter is the answer and Chris Coons and Harry Reid are all to glad for that to be the case.

Don't Remember

This might get kinda long. I had something I wanted to say and now I have more after being out all day.

I spent all day at work today. I guess I haven't gone into much detail about myself on this thing yet so here it is. I work at an amusement park for an unamusing amount of money per hour. I've just graduated and moved to a liberal city on the west coast. I'm about as far from ground zero right now as you can get and still be in the Lower 48.

I regularly see people at work that I assume are Muslim. Mostly women wearing the hijab (headscarves). Sometimes a bit more covered up than that. Nothing too out of the ordinary. It's not often that I see as many presumed Muslims as I did at work today. I have no problem with this. In fact, I saw women wearing the full burqa/niqab combo along with the hijab for the first time today. Still no problem. One of the (many) points of America is that people are allowed to practice all their freedoms here including speech, religion, and right to assembly. It's fabulous really.

I heard the most disgusting things coming out of the mouths of some of my fellow Americans today. Mostly out of my fellow white Americans. I've never been so ashamed of people of my race in general. Some of the things I heard shouldn't be typed or repeated. But of some of the milder there were many scoffs of "foreigners" and a lot of talk about how we could "let them into the park on 9/11". Because clearly, since 19 men none of these people knew or agreed with doing horrible things on the other side of the continent nine years ago is a good reason to bar an entire class of people from freely going about their business.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me talk about what I wanted to touch on originally. Segue!

Many of the kids I was helping amuse today weren't alive in 2001. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was in school. Some business class that didn't do me any good. At the time I didn't even know what the World Trade Center looked like. Sheltered southern girl. I suspect that this is very similar to people talking about how they remember what they were doing when they found out that the Challenger blew up, or Kennedy was assassinated, or Pearl Harbor was attacked. The world has changed so much in the last nine years. Much of it for the worse. I and grew up in those nine years. I came of age, started driving, voting, and drinking in those nine years. (I just got really close to telling you how old I am.) In essence, who I am as an adult has been changed by the events on 9/11/2001. I would not be the same sort of political thinker if I had come of age under an inept and awkward Bush Administration who was not armed with the political power gifted it by the events of that day. I would not be a liberal in all probability. And there are people who have never known anything else!

I know this isn't groundbreaking. I imagine the same can be said by older people than about me and the Vietnam War, the Nixon Administration, or (again) the Kennedy Assassination. But knowing how our country and our world have changed since then, I cry for the children of the post-9/11 era. Don't get me wrong, I know the world wasn't all sunshine and daisies before then. But these children are growing up in a world where the First Amendment isn't a given. You're only allowed free speech and free exercise of your religious liberties if you don't look like you might be a terrorist. They have a world where anyone who says the wrong things is looked at suspiciously by their government. Where the economic stability of the now as well as their own futures are not too high a price to pay for two ill-advised wars. And lets look at these wars for a moment.

First is the joint invasion of Afghanistan by the US, UK, and the "coalition of the willing" shortly following 9/11 in 2001. We're still there. We've been fighting and dying in Afghanistan for nine years now. That's longer than any other war America has ever fought aside from Vietnam. And we're on the way to passing that one. Believe me. Second is the even more ill-advised invasion of Iraq originally to be termed Operation Iraqi Liberation until some genius at the Pentagon realized that spelled OIL. Known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, we've been fighting there since 2003. "Combat Operations" are over now. Twice. Once for each President, natch, and we only have 50,000 more fighting men and women there.

But you all know this. In short, these kids don't remember. They have never experienced a world without these problems. And unless we get our house in order and start framing our policy around something other than a regrettable tragedy of nearly ten years they won't ever know anything else.

Getting Personal

This post is going to be a lot more personal and a lot less political than usual. Feel free to skip it. I'll try not to do this too often. Then again, as the feminists taught us, the personal is political.

I have lots of things I'm good at. Unfortunately, right now they feel like they're none of the things I NEED to be good at. I just graduated college in what has to be the crappiest job market since the early Eighties (see, this IS political) and now I've moved all the way across the country to live where I want to. I have my Bachelors in Landscape Architecture (really, politics is just a hobby). So, I'm good at all sorts of things. Staying amused through the internet, video games, riding my bike, blogging, photography, bonsai, fishtanks, all sorts of things. But I'm not good at things like this. Applying for real jobs, interviews, treading the fine line of honest but not too honest during interviews, paying bills consistently, finding a job that pays more than minimum wage, seeming like I can actually do what I went to school for, and generally acting like an adult.

Unfortunately, those are the things I need to be good at right now. In another time, in another economy I could get an entry level job at some firm somewhere where no one expects me to be good at anything particularly other than learning to be good at things. Which is something I'm good at. But in this economy all the jobs I'm finding are jobs that require experience or being able to feign experience. Which I'm bad at. In short, to get the job I've been told I need I need to be good already at all the things I'd just pick up along the way in an entry level job.

This is all due to the economy. Since there are no entry level jobs I have two options. I can fight it out in the viper pit for something minimum wage at the nearest grocery store or whatnot which seems to be what most people with an education below PhD are doing. Which is why I'm having no luck there. Why hire someone with a Bachelors when you can hire someone who has a Masters to stock shelves at Safeway or Kroger? Our economy is so week right now that people with Masters Degrees are looking for part-time, minimum wage work. How am I supposed to compete? Or for that matter people who dropped out of high school or have GEDs? Geez. They're really screwed. My other option is to apply for all those jobs I feel totally unqualified for. And even if I am, and even if I get hired, I'll be scared to death to even go to work. I mean, really? Putting me in charge of things?

2010 Overview

On September 4th I think it's about time to take a minute to talk about the election coming up in November. Overall the narrative coming out of the 24/7 news machine is that it's an anti-incumbent, anti-democratic year. That's only partly true. It is an anti-Democratic year insofar as every midterm after a new president is elected is an anti-enter President's party here year. It isn't as much an anti-incumbent year as has been harped on by that same news machine. Only a couple handfuls of incumbents have lost so far; Arlen Specter, Bob Bennett, and Lisa Murkowski coming to mind. If this were truly as anti-incumbent a year as the media wants to claim it is you'd have seen upsets of other candidates like Blanche Lincoln and John McCain from the determined challengers they faced. But lets look more broadly at what we can expect.

For breakdowns of individual races, and all the statistics you could ever want check out Five Thirty Eight, which recently moved to a shiny new NY Times page. You'll find Nate Silver and his team's regressions predicting what will happen come November based on polling data. I'm going to go with something close to an educated guess using what I know (which includes Nate's regressions). All of what I said is true above. It's still a nasty year for Democrats. We can talk about why that is for hours. Some of it is the Bush Economy that we're still reeling from, some of it from simple electoral functions, and some of it from how badly the Democrats have dropped the ball on their messaging. Despite the Party of No, the DNC has plenty to run on including Health Care Reform, Credit Card Regulation, changes in the Student Loan department, and much more. And they're doing a terrible job messaging. This whole summer has been about nothing but how crazy the right is now. And even if they're scary, if that's all we're talking about, somebody at the DNC isn't doing their job. Scratch that. Everybody at the DNC isn't doing their job.

I expect the Democrats to hang onto control of both the House and the Senate this year. There. I've said it flat out. I don't expect it to be pretty and I don't expect their majorities to be described in terms besides words like small, pitiful, and ineffective, once the voting is done though. On the ugly side, that means we're likely to end up at 112th Congress that's even less effective and even more gridlocked than the 111th. On the good side, if the Democrats can maintain control of Congress, then they get to do the redrawing of the House District lines. That is something that we simply can't afford to have Republicans doing. Redistricting occurs only every ten years to match up with newly updated data from the Census. It has a much more far reaching effect on the country than having the Democrats receiving the blame for a highly divided and ineffective 112th Congress. As not fun as that will be. I'll be this up front about it. It is imperative that men like Jim DeMint and Chuck Grassley do not get to redraw the House Districts. Not that I expect the Dems to be wholly non-partisan if they get the opportunity, but because when Republicans do it, the do it for keeps. They use (dare I say abuse) the power to disenfranchise large groups of people of color and other maligned minorities. They manage, in essence, to mathematically for stall the day when conservative, white, fundamentalist Christians don't rule the roost. That day is coming, and having house lines drawn to represent the new makeup of America rather than fight it can make it arrive sooner.

And if I'm wrong? I expect the House to fall before the Senate. And while the idea of "Speaker Boehner" scares me to death (for the record, I'm not a massive fan of Speaker Pelosi either), it's better in the long run than having the Senate full of Republicans again. Not to be forgotten is the tiny (teeny tiny teeny teeny tiny) advantage of having the President of the Senate on our side. Who's the President of the Senate? Why, the Vice President of course, Joe Biden. In cases where the Senate ends in a tied vote, the Vice President casts the tie breaker. One of the many rewards for winning the Executive two years ago.

So in short, get on message, get out the vote, cross your fingers.