I predicted this, but didn’t consider it much of a prediction.  A minor league baseball team has dropped on the world Alvin Greene Bobblehead dolls.  Or, something like them — I don’t quite know what these things are.  It’s just another twist in the somewhat uninteresting somewhat interesting but non-essential story of the Alvin Greene Senate campaign — a campaign which may be receiving attention disproportionate to its import, but which you can kind of shrug off as the equivalent of a four sentence blurb on page A11.

Is he worth following?  There is something a bit more straight-forward to that question than with the various tea party candidates that abound, that represent some electoral strength and show it in various elections, but whose presence on the national stage is representative of savvy media manipulation rewarded to shiny inflamation over dull reasonableness.  The case of Rick Barber.  The good thing about Rick Barber is I never heard of him before he came in second to force a run-off, meaning that he had to obtain some level of election success to become identified.  Then again, his conversation fever dreams with Abe Lincoln and Ben Franklin — impeaching Obama for policies began in the 1910s and concurring that Health Care Reform is Slavery — probably would have gotten him to national fame before the primary.
Some of my thoughts parallel some of Dave Weigel’s thoughts.  But you can’t ignore them — a run off is a run off which means something, 40 percent is 40 percent which means something — but everything needs to be noted with the media savviness of it all.

I don’t quite know the viability of this candidate, Ed Martin in Missouri, but again he does represent a tendency and a thought process endemic in our politics.
I thought I could explain his premise — thought it was insane, but I heard an interview with him last night on the Alan Colmes Show (yes, Alan freaking Colmes) that went in a different direction than I thought he was going in — though equally insane.  The Colmes interview wound up with Ed Martin saying that Obama and Carnahan are taking our Freedom of Religion away by promoting Abortion policies.  While he did manage to squirrel ACORN in tangentally, his main and overwhelming focal point was Abortion.  Logic eludes me, but that is probably by design.

More broadly speaking, and what I gathered his “the growth of government endangers religious freedom and the “ultimate freedom … to get your salvation” statement to mean — and work with me on this one — it’s a perverted form of Calvinist doctrine, and a bit of a descendent of some anti-Communist rhetoric.  Two directions we go with this: #1 — The omnipresence of Government is filling in the gaps where God belongs.  #2 — and more evil — it’s an argument on behalf of pain.  If we go by the premise that people find Jesus during points of desperation, then, for instance, extending unemployment insurance will ruin people’s lives because it will stop them from finding Jesus.

Rand Paul comes into that spot from a slightly different direction.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul says the poor in America are “enormously better off than the rest of the world,” citing an old Cold War film that showed even impoverished homes had color televisions.
Paul’s recent remarks at his first forum with Democratic opponent Jack Conway stirred some anger in impoverished pockets of Kentucky, where as many as a third of residents live in poverty.
The libertarian-leaning Paul addressed the issue of poverty by alluding to a decades-old, anti-American propaganda film by the Soviet government designed to criticize the free-market system.
“They filmed a building in the poorer section of New York with some broken windows and they said, `Oh, this is how the poor in America lives,'” Paul said at last week’s forum. “But it backfired on them because the Soviet citizens looked at that video closely and they saw flickering color television sets in all those windows.”
Paul went on to say that “the poor in our country are enormously better off than the rest of the world. It doesn’t mean we can’t do better. But we have to acknowledge and be proud of our system of capitalism.”

His is an argument that will tend to lead to complacency, at all junctures in our history.  I will note that this is the first time my gut has been undecided on who is going to win this Senate contest, when before I’d have sided with Paul.
A bit more parallel in thinking to Ed Martin, even if somewhat more secular, is the Unemployment is keeping people from grabbing onto perhaps more modest jobs line.

I note a contradictory point in today’s “Just Say No” Republican Party.  The very same Mitch Mcconnell whose party blames easy credit lending on behalf of Freddie and Fanny lombasts the new banking regulatory bill as “restricting credit”.  Necessary for an economic recovery to not do so, I suppose, though the credit has to flow to some productivity and grounding.  But therein lies the contradictory nature of Economics.

Say, What’s Sharron Angle up to?

Typical religious right crap.  I’m pretty sure she’ll reference the anti-religious designs of Big Gumnint next.

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