Sometimes they don't have a clue what are saying. At least I hope not.

The Ed Show on MSNBC is as perfect a reverse mirror reflection as you'll find of the sort of crap you see on Fox News every night, totally political and partisan. Indeed, when the host periodically trots out shameless GOP strategist Ron Christie to be the right side of a left-right he said/he said segment and all the participants giggle back and forth as they reveal they are all the same, knowing what each side is going to say, it becomes vomit-inducing.

Tonight, after just such a five minutes of dreck, Ed Schultz welcomed Rhode Island Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse to discuss the issue of why, now that Nancy Pelosi is calling back the House to finish the jobs bill, the Democrat leadership in the Senate doesn't do the same and at least ratify the House's work so the bill can pass into law this month.

This was Whitehouse's answer, not verbatim, but substantially correct:

"Well, you know, Ed, with all the amendments and obstruction that would take a full week and there are a lot of members who have elections and it's an American tradition that you go home and take care of things and take care of your campaign..."

Um, senator...

Bullshit!

We do not elect our senators so that they can insure be re-elected. We do not elect them to make sure they have a job next year.

We elect you people to do the job this year.

This. Damned. Year.

I might be terribly disappointed if my senator gets beaten in his next election. I will take every action of which I am capable to make sure that does not happen if I believe he is representing my and the nation's best interests (not necessarily in that order).

But you tell me that a major piece of legislation which can benefit millions of Americans by creating news jobs in the midst of the worst economic conditions since the Depression is not more important than US senators trying to preserve their own jobs, then you, sir, are a disgrace.

And you should be ashamed, if that is still possible.

If the wingnuts really want to accuse the Obama Adminstration of racism...

...it's pretty easy.

As soon as any black person connected to the Administration in any shape or form, past or current, is accused of anything, that person is fired, dismissed, blacklisted, gone.

Meanwhile, the criminals from the Bush Administration, mostly if not entirely white, roam free about the land collecting big bucks from TV News Propaganda Networks, Right Wing charitable groups Non-Profits and other Wingnut Financial Support Systems.

The fetal position into which most of the Democratic Establishment curls up whenever someone on the Right pokes at them is really sad to see.

While nobody is paying attention.

The polls indicate that the nation is losing its Obama love for a variety of reasons. These opening paragraphs from this morning's Mike Allen's Playbook (the "must read" email for the Washington establishment) suggest that they are missing the big picture...

--TOMORROW'S NEWSPAPERS TODAY -- Two legs of the triple crown: This means President Obama will sign health reform and Wall Street reform within four months of each other. Plus there's the likelihood he'll get some sort of energy-climate bill by year's end -- an astounding year.

--TIME's Mark Halperin, on 'Morning Joe': 'The president said he'd do certain things when he ran, and he's getting a lot of them done. ... That is a LOT of accomplishments in half a term. And you can bet the president's going to talk about that come September, when he's trying to rally the country behind the Democratic Party, saying: We're getting stuff done.

Whether or not the President and the Democrats can get that message out before next November in this teaparty world is a big question. It will still probably come back to the economy and jobs. It always does.

Obama's Katrina?

That was an early meme the right wing tried to introduce into the political dialogue when it became apparent that the gummint had no real idea how to deal with the BP oil spill. It caught on briefly--I saw it take root slightly when a right-inclined pal who usually has no interest in politics telephone breathlessly and those were the first words out of his mount. Wiser heads in the GOP eventually prevailed, it seems. Do they really want to bring back "Heckuva job, Brownie" and that classic photo of the Worst. President. Ever. flying high above the destruction five days too late?

That said, it's not a bad question to ask, not because the other side is, or was, pushing it, but because the White House has allowed itself to appear disconnected from the issue, lackadaisical was James Carville's devastating word for it, and doing a lot of talking but not much walking.

Perception or reality? And, in politics, does it really matter either way?

The evil among us.

The evil billionaire businessman or the evil corporation have been been staples of crime fiction since the middle of the last century, right after we got over all that gray-flannel-suit melodrama, and of more mainstream fiction for at least half that time. Such entities always used to seem somewhat overblown and sensationalized. No longer.

In the age of Halliburton and BP Oil, of Wall Street criminals and health care liars, in a time when great national banks have pissed away a significant portion of our wealth with risky and self-serving schemes, it has become more obvious than ever to anyone paying a modicum of attention that true evil lives among us. Such characters are all too real. If anything, the malevolence and disinterest in anything other than putting more money in their own coffers at any cost manifested by "corporate" sorts make most of those fictional versions almost laughably ineffective and short-sighted.

Oddly though, with all the evidence right there before our lyin' eyes, the same large minority of the population which suffers most from the machinations of connivers at the very top is still buying in to the self-serving myths propagated by big business and big media, still clinging to the idea that somehow allowing the rich to become richer and businesses to be entirely unfettered will work to their benefit in the long run.

That this condition still persists, indeed prevails, is an example of mind control beyond the visionary capabilities of most practitioners of fiction. George Orwell's 1984 and the host of anti-Utopian novels which followed in its wake envision a beaten and defeated populace held down by drugs or military forces or some other physical manifestation of power. But it was much simpler than that. All it took was a constant drumbeat of misinformation and the acquiescence of the comfortable. Which is to say, you and me.

The manipulators of what the average American sees and (much less often and  much more selectively) reads have managed to inculcate their message so thoroughly and completely that it is seen in many quarters as Un-American to even question that version of reality even at the edges, much less to challenge it openly. The Tepid Middle and the Timid Left bow before the roaring, if empty, winds of talk radio and Fox News. The Bright New Hope in the White House seems more and more The Conciliatory Overseer, the occasional flash of anger quickly erased by day-to-day policies which, in the face of all evidence, seem founded in a numbing belief that there is a way to reconcile with those who feast on the growing and continually stoked anger that threatens the very principles of the nation with platitudes and watered-down fixes.

We are becoming a nation which prizes ignorance above all else, just so long as it coincides with our own uninformed world view, because is easier and more comfortable than the truth. We rail against the present and long for a past that never was, all the while refusing to see who was to blame and how we got here.

It is a time when Dick Cheney, a creature who would have made Dr. Strangelove cringe in fear, was once the most powerful man in the country and remains a behind-the-scenes force for all that is wrong in our natures. That snarling visage is the face of the nation. God help us all.

Wait, what's that sound?

 Just me slinking back into the room and turning on the lights. I'll open the windows and dust a bit later.

Three weeks of silence is long enough. I hear crickets in the background as I type so maybe everybody got tired of waiting and went home. Serves me right. But just in case...

Following yesterday's Most. Important. Primary. Elections. Ever. the media, never wanting to give up a good narrative no matter what the facts, is all over the anti-incumbent meme.

Hogwash.

Certainly there was some of that, but in the Big One here in Pennsylvania, the real and only issue was Arlen Specter his very own self. This was a referendum on Specter more than anything else, on his long "say one way, vote another way" career and his inescapable record as a Repugnant. Consider it this way, as a Democrat, his "incumbency" was less than one year old.

In the real Big One hereabouts, the election for the seat of longtime kingpin Jack Murtha, the race the GOP was set to herald as another "Scott Brown moment" where an entrenched Democratic seat was taken by a Repugnant newcomer, the Democrat won relatively easily. In a district which Kerry barely won in 2004 and Obama lost by a hair in 2008, a district trending GOP on all available evidence in other words, that sends out a strong message that 2012 probably will not be the big GOP sweep the media would like you to believe.

Not that they are taking sides, understand, but they set the storyline a while back and, once set, the storyline must be adhered to at all costs.

I think that the Repugs have been counting on inchoate anger, the default mode for  "we are furiously furious about things we are furious about" crowd broadly described as teabaggers, to allow them to run on nothing other than "throw the bums out" as a platform. I think they are going to realize, much too late, that you have to stand for something, you really do, when it gets down to running against the other side and not just some guy you can out-shout and out-outrage even though you both want basically the same thing.

Here's a prediction for you: Rand Paul, the ultimate tea party victor,  will not win the Kentucky general election. I think he is exactly the sort of candidate I refer to in the paragraph above, I think he will reject the move to the center most of the other teabag sorts will try (he even refused to take the congratulatory call from his defeated opponent last night) and I think he doesn't really have much to offer. Democratic primary winner Jack Conway, the state's attorney-general, drew nearly 221,000 votes to Paul's 192,000 across the state.

History.

I may not be here to see it (or may not be able to understand it if I am here), but history is being made this weekend and in the days to follow.

Make no mistake about it, this will be one of those times which, as the nuns used to threaten (and as nuns perhaps helped make possible now), will go onto the permanent record. Because of what is happening in Washington now and in the hours ahead, America will be a better place and this moment will be seen as laying the groundwork for many changes to follow.

This is a turning point and those who are on the wrong side of history will pay the price.

Perhaps sooner than they might think, say this November?

The president addressing the Democratic Caucus today.

It's the Democratic way.

NOW he starts to make sense and talks tough.

50 Most Loathsome Americans, 2009.

This is quite a list.

"The Era of Ozio."

This post by Joe Klein at Swampland the ensuing comments made for interesting and thought-provoking reading for me while washing the taste of Villanova Georgetown out of my mouth with beer (and excuse, you know). Check it out.

Graphic Evidence of Something That Will Not Be Mentioned at This Weekend's Tea Party Convention.

Nancy Pelosi (yeah, that Nancy Pelosi, yada, yada, yada, dumb sexist joke etc.) has put together the following chart which records the ever-increasing rate of  job losses under George W. Bush (red, but of course) and the steadily rate decreasing of job losses under Barack Obama (blue):

Your Misfortune and None of My Own.

That has been the attitude of Wall Street and the Big Banks throughout the nation's financial crisis. Essentially, they are delighted to allow, if not herd, the little dogies (i.e. the rest of us) along the pathway to economic disasters so long as they continue to reap the benefits of the greedy.

What is going to prove fascination is to see how voters react when it finally comes to their attention that the Repugs are steadily moving into lockstep with Big Money as they continue to oppose anything and everything proposed by the other side.

Plus there's also this, the moment when the Senate jumped the shark and a single conservative nutjob stopped the government dead in its tracks until he gets his massive payoff...IF the Democrats don't finally say "Enough!" and ignore the bastard and "tradition" and get on with what they were elected to do.

Anybody think they have the guts?

"Act Like a Lady."

Everybody got their panties in a bunch when crotchety old Arlen Specter said that to fatuous not-as-old Michelle Bachmann on the radio.

Hey, ever since he switched parties, Darlin' Arlen must have noticed that it's actually the way the whole damned Democratic Party, from the White House on down, acts as a matter of course while the Repugs walk all over 'em.

Poor old fella just got confused.