Everybody wanted to know on Tuesday whether Sarah Palin was still good at backing the right horses, of has she begun picking losers lately? Well it looks like in the US Senate race in Alaska on the republican side, we are seeing a sickening political upset. Congresswoman Lisa Marcosky is apparently going down to defeat and will be beaten out by Sarah Palin backed candidate Joe Miller. Miller is one of one of these way far out tea baggers who wants to make social security voluntary and privatize it- - end Health Care before it begins and eliminate unemployment insurance while you’re at it. Lisa Marcosky being an incumbent probably didn’t expect to be defeated in the primary. I think she was leading in the polls. But as of now she is trailing by about a thousand votes with fifteen thousand absentee ballots to count. So there is still hope. In Arizona you have Ben Quayle, son of Dan Quayle, who is a far right protogee, who had been trailing in the polls, but he won anyway. He was involved in some scandal writing for a pornography site. And John Mc Cain also beat J D Hayworth as the nominee for Arizona’s U S Senate seat. One might think with all these tea party victories it would mean a lot of victories for the Democrats in November. I no longer see it that way. The tide is too strong. The political pathology of society is too great. We are too much the victim of these simplistic, cleverly if tersely worded political commercials, which spoon feed us all the facts they think we need to know. That these commercials are an insult to our intelligence is a thought that never enters their minds. In Florida the case gets a little tricky. On Star Trek they accuse the Romulans of being deceptive and manipulative (something you haven’t seen in my writings about them) but here is a case where President Obama himself has to be careful. As you know the Republican candidate for senate is Marco Rubio. Rubio is a Latino and not a straight down the line tea party candidate. He, for instance, doesn’t believe English should be the exclusive language in the United States, in fact he gave some of his acceptance speech in Spanish. Neither does he believe in SB 170 or whatever that Arizona bill is on immigration. The independent candidate for Senate is Charlie Crist, who just might be caucusing with the Democrats come January, in Congress. We can hope. The democratic candidate is a man many liberals like. But if President Obama campaigns for him, he may take votes away from Crist, and with it chances of winning the election with 35% of the vote or whatever. Because it will syphen votes away from Crist to the democrat- - and it might just be enough to tip the balance and make Rubio the victor. But Randy Rhodes is most upset, and understandably so, about the republican winner for Governor. This is a guy named Rick Scott. He is a far right winger and has apparently run some really vicious and disgusting adds on TV in a saturation manner. He was the executive for some health care company who defrauded Medicare to the tune of millions of dollars. He spend fifty million on the campaign for his bid, but arguably it’s really the money of all the people he swindled. Apparently the media in Florida is so biased nobody is comenting on any of this so he skates free. He apparently pled guilty to some charges of malfeasance to the Bush Administration and has taken control of a lot of hospitals and mismanaged them badly so that patients have died. People are already talking as though he had already won. I guess it’s one of those cases where the underdog democrat has to take courage and mount a convincing campaign. Perhaps he can get Raphael Hernandez as his campaign manager- - who has some incriminating taped conversation. We can wish.
Our whole electoral system in this country has evolved into a pathological state. You have candidates like this candidate for governor in Florida who spent fifty million of his own money to win. You have Meg Whitman and Carley Feurina, who both were apparently screw ups in the private markets, now getting into government. Of course it’s insane to think that anyone could get rich by going into government. But then, how do people like Bill Clinton do it - -that is, get rich? The power must be intoxicating. I always believed a person was entitled to spend his money however he chooses on himself but now I’m beginning to wonder. In the old days we had industrialists like Norton Simon running for state office. But they were relatively harmless. You can’t say that today. This sleaze bag in Florida is going to drag our society to new low standards. Well there come a time when someone says that by the sheer presence of all that money hopelessly corrupts the process, even if it’s your own money? You tell me why all these rich people want to run for political office. Of course the tea party crowd is a hypocrite because they love rich people in government. It’s just people who belong to a union whom they can’t stand in government. And so you have them leveling the charge that all these low level pencil pushers in government don’t deserve the pensions they get, and they say they make out better than the private sector would. Actually someone ran a survey and that said that only high school drop-outs do better with a government job than in the private sector. After high school it’s just about even. And with people with a bachelors or master’s degree, people who choose to go into the private sector fare much better than those who choose to dedicate their lives to government work. People love to spread lies on the right. Marco Rubio made a speech the other day where he said that only in America can a man be want he wants to be. He said that in any other country you could think of in the world, what your job is is pre-determined by what your parents did in life. So if I’m from Italy and my father was a violin maker, then I am pretty much set to be a violin maker for life myself. Of course this isn’t true. The world is changing and industrializing rapidly. You have places like Japan and Germany after W W II that changed radically. You have your China, your Sweden, your Kweit- - your Austrailia. You have all these countries that are rapidly evolving in this modern world. One of the ways in which the US is behind most “civilized” countries in the world is the way we do elections. There are two “schools of thought” concerning how to fix our electoral process. One is eliminate the closed primary and make all candidates open to vote for, for everybody. The problem here as Hartman points out is in Michigan you have Wallace winning the Democratic vote in Michigan in 1982. This is what you might call the Swartzenegger model, since, unfortunately we have adopted this model of “idealized perfection” here in California. The other model is the Hartman model. Here you have a run-off. You take the two highest vote getters and have you choose between them. This way you will never have a candidate winning with less than a majority vote. But Hartman had an even more intriguing idea. He says you could enter a second choice along with your first choice. That way if your first choice came in less than second or something, the vote would shift to your “second choice” for the office. We need a man with almost Solomonic wisdom these days to run the world. It’s too bad we don’t have one. If there were some Hollywood script involving an anti-Christ I’d like to see that script to see how many brilliant ideas the guy wants to implement in advance.
If you’re Nicole Walker right now your last bastion of hope just got torpedoed, much against your choice. If anything happened to me I’d want my next of kin to sue Raphael Hernandez, and especially Victor Kiriacus, who as it were, placed the knife in his hand that eventually cut my throat. If I were Nicole I’d be taking another look at those cyanide capsules in my purse because now might be an excellent time to use them. There is something about dying on your own terms that’s appealing if you’re in her shoes because you deny all your enemies the pleasure of salivating over your destruction.
Well you’ve been hearing it for seemingly months on the Mc Laughlin round table. The Real Estate market is falling apart. Home sales of pre existing homes are down 25% and sales of new homes are down 15%. They say the level of economic activity in general is the lowest that it’s been since last November. The stock markets have been trending down for the past couple of weeks. I don’t know but I imagine the value of my Mom’s property that she will pass on as an inheritance one day, is markedly diminished because she has a lot of Chevron stock, and IRA’s and other instruments like CD’s that are flat in value. Of course in my Mom’s case- - her expenses are up this past year. As of now she can well afford it. Of course my two brothers stand to inherit a lot more than I will because of my screwy situation with Social Security. People will start to believe this economy has really turned when the state governor, preferably Jerry Brown says to us next January, “Guess what. We have an unexpected influx of tax revenues and now I’m asking for your help as to how to spend it”. We can hope. It looks from here as though the probability of a double dip recession is approaching certainty. That means that Team Obama is pretty much all washed up as far as the November elections are concerned, and there is going to be a political blood bath come election day. And it means there will be Hell to pay because if you think the economy is bad now, just waituntil the Republican’s are in charge and you’ll see what economic hell is really like
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