Links With Your Coffee - Wednesday
- Celebratory Limerick » Mad Kane's Political Madness
- Yes We Did / Party like it's 2009, 'cuz baby, now the real work begins
This is no time for gloating.
This is no time to get carried away by some sort of rapturous rose-colored ROTFLMAO celebration full of streamers and confetti and blissful weeping in the streets, all wrapped in a big creamy ribbon of stunned disbelief, the overwhelming sense that, oh sweet God in heaven, our wary and battered nation has finally agreed, after all these years and seemingly all at once, to grow the hell up.
- Daily Kos: Wednesday Newspaper Front Pages - PRESIDENT OBAMA
My favorite foreign headline so far.
- BASICS | OBAMA AND MCCAIN WALK INTO A BAR ...
- Obama Wins Election - NYTimes.com
Comments
Google translates the headline "The question of madness
From today there is hope again in America - and the world breathes on"
Could somebody who speaks german please tell me if they really meant "The end of the madness?"
PS I just tried bunching together "endedes" which came up as "The madness ended."
Anyway, what is right?
Feels great. Being a humorless unhappy liberal though, I've a few things to point out...
Mumford: "...our wary and battered nation has finally agreed, after all these years and seemingly all at once, to grow the hell up."
...except for the 46% that persisted in voting for McCain, that is.
...didn't get the filibuster-proof majority. Though the Minnesota race was "uncalled" less than 1 hour ago (571-vote split that was in Norm Coleman's favor will be contested). Proof that pricks run rampant in this country, even in Minnesota is that more than half of them prefer one of the worst pricks in the Senate.
I suspect Coleman will be in, and he's massaging his pipes in anticipation of reading the Encyclopaedia Britiannica on the Senate floor instead of letting our leaders legislate.
and... say goodbye to campaign finance reform and hello to cycles of attack ads and automated dialers ringing you at all hours of the day and night, both from contests in and from outside your state. Obama and others proved it works, which pulls the rug out from under the argument of "big monied interests" running our elections (even though it's true). Now the media (the ultimate profiteer of this madness) has arguments to push all across the left-right spectrum to leave the system alone.
Damn... I was feeling good before I typed all that. Back to normal already.
Hey, we're starting from the bottom of the barrel, slow down a little. I'm just ready to start pushing for Habeus Corpus to be restored and Torture to be stopped.
As dumb/annoying as election politics are, they are bottom of my list of important shit to do right now.
Campaign finance reform is more than reducing annoyances every 2-4 years... it would return candidates' priorities back to doing the bidding of the electorate (supposedly), from where it is now (candidates doing the bidding of the monied interests in return for $$ for campaigns to buy air time).
I want Habeus Corpus restored, torture stopped, etc. too... which is why I think reforming campaign laws and media access is critical. Open those doors... turn on the lights.
Did you finish Morford's article? It's worth the entire read. really :~)
Yup - did finish (and enjoy) Morford's article. Just picked a bone out of it, that's all. Then misspelled his name (thanks for the correction).
I translated the headline as "The end of the Insanity"
And: "Starting today hope is back in America --- and the world sighs a breath of relief."
"End of the Insanity" is correct.
Stu (living in Germany)
"...except for the 46% that persisted in voting for McCain"
I don't think that Mumford meant "became liberals" when he said "grew up". There are plenty of conservative grown ups in the country and I don't see why they would all vote Obama. In fact on NPR yesterday they interviewed a bunch of average voters about their choices, and for the most part I think people were thinking things through, even those who voted for McCain. A lot of them liked Obama but were worried that he wasn't ready yet and that he faced a lot of tough challenges. Sounds pretty grown-up to me, even if they made the wrong choice.
I know a few really, really intelligent dyed-in-the-wool Reagan-type Republicans... not many... just a few. I suppose I know a bunch more really, really smart Goldwater-type Republicans. Not a huge number, mind you.
I'd brand myself a fiscal conservative, social liberal type... I'd be willing to wager my left nut that a hell of a lot of that 46% are motivated by nothing more complicated than: "voting for the Democrat gets your paycheck handed over to the blacks; vote Republican, and you get to keep more of what you make."
Simple, shortsighted, lame-brained assessment of their own situation, which keeps them voting against their own interest. I'm talking about members of the vanishing middle class here, not the super-rich. (But even the super-rich aren't voting in their own interests anymore, if they vote R. It's in the super-rich's interest to have a thriving society with people with tons of wealth to spend on more things that keep the super-rich rich.)
Anyway, it seems to me to be a big thread in the way politics works in this country; hence the urban/rural and the north/south divides. It seems to me to be a fractal phenomenon. The whole country is roughly divided into two hunks... better and less educated (e.g., Connecticut vs. Mississippi)... and within the states, one can see the same division (urban/rural). City slickers vs. the "real" main-street good-ol' American types. Zoom into the county level, you see the same thing. It only breaks down when you finally get to the neighborhood level.
Didn't mean to imply that, in a perfect world, we'd have 0% voting for McCain... I supported him in the primary, actually... but that's another story...
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