Gary Johnson     Libertarian     New Mexico     1,237,720     0.98%     0     James P. Gray     California
Jill Stein     Green     Massachusetts     445,398     0.35%     0     Cheri Honkala     Pennsylvania
Virgil Goode     Constitution     Virginia     117,810     0.09%     0     Jim Clymer     Pennsylvania
Roseanne Barr     Peace and Freedom     Hawaii     60,541     0.05%     0     Cindy Sheehan     California
Rocky Anderson     Justice     Utah     39,517     0.03%     0     Luis J. Rodriguez     California
Tom Hoefling     America’s     Iowa     36,297     0.03%     0     Jonathan D. Ellis     Tennessee
Other     150,843     0.12%     —     Other     —

Hm.  Going down this list… Gary Johnson was trying hard for that one percent.  He failed to hurdle that psychological mark.  He is now wavering on his two election commitment.

Here’s one way to look at Jill Stein’s results:  Stein may have gotten just under 400,000 votes (0.3% of all votes), with her name on 85% of ballots, but that figure is actually over double those received by the Green Party presidential candidates in 2008, and over three times those received in the 2004 elections.
Yeah, but let’s face it.  She’s in the shadow of Ralph Nader’s results in those elections.  To be fair, had the Party wanted to sacrifice easy results for serious ideological trudging, they would have gone for Roseanne Barr…

… And this is the interesting result. Roseanne Barr beat out Rocky Anderson.  Pretty badly.  Barr had only 18.5 percent potential seeing her on the ballot; Anderson 28.1 percent.  Dissecting these results — the difference between point oh five and point oh three percent of the vote against that backdrop — well, even as Barr was a bit of a joke, she had the power of a name brand “Peace and Freedom Party” behind her, and… Anderson’s Justice Party?  Interesting to see how it’s come together:
The other result for the party:
U.S. Senator for Utah – Daniel Geery^[15] 7,444 votes (0.81%)
Does that make it worth more than the PandF Party, which needed a stunt candidate with Barr?  Who’s to say?

Virgil Goode… practcial post election day concerns:  On his agenda for the day: “Rest up and make sure all the signs are off the highways.”

Okay… the other candidates out in that wikipedia “other” category, preliminary from Village Voice.

Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist, got 8,700 votes.
Richard Duncan, an Ohio ex-postal worker who wants to avert nuclear attacks by terrorists, got 6,400 votes.
Tom Stevens, the “objectivist” party candidate and a historian, got 3,500 votes.
Stewart Alexander, the socialist party USA candidate, got 2,000 votes.
Pete Lindsay, an anti war activist, got 1,520 votes.
Merlin Miller, who says ‘are you tired of the two-party system,’ got 1,475 votes.
And then we come to Jeff Boss, our favorite candidate who believes the National Security Agency paid people off to allow the 9/11 attacks to happen. He got 263 votes. Impressive!

I deleted the comment on (ugh) Hoefling, because they got his impact wrong by a mile… if wikipedia is to be believed.  So… I’ll have to find my results elsewhere, I suppose.

Okay.  Amuse ourselves at such a thing as that National Review article — which I admit isn’t so bad as “bad angst poetry”, but it is… I don’t know what the point is.

We get overstatements on Obama’s 2008 speech rhetoric and then to…

It is not surprising to find people mistaking a man for a corn god, they have doing that since the beginning of time.
I don’t know who confused Obama for a corn god.  I’ll take the man’s word for it.
It is surprising to find them so insensible to their own natures, so snugly settled in their own complacencies, that they are unconscious of how much primitive darkness lies concealed beneath the fragile surface of their civilized selves .
I’d have to accept the premise of the corn god concept in order to accept this.
The same impulses that are exalted  the shaman and the witch doctor, the prophet, and the priest, king… etc.  oracles of Gallup, etc.  Nate Silver, blah de blah.
There’s a “speak for yourself” aspect to his blah de blah on opinion polls, which article after article in this magazine point over toward, and are… generally true… or truish… for trendlines and such.  As for Nate Silver… this became a conservative creed this season —  “Damned you Nate Silver”, and…
I have sometimes caught myself taking seriously even the artfully contrived hogwash of Nate Silver, who solemnly asserted the other day that President Obama has a “70.4 percent” chance of winning on November 6.  The prescision of the decimal point is a nice touch.
Doesn’t come by accident, though.  It’s a poll of polls and history put through a blender.  No, you ought not run around claiming it with… such precision.
We are less remote from our primitive ancestors than we like to think, and in some respects more deficient in self-knowledge.  The ghosts and goblins that haunted our forebears — the evil spirits they feared would lead them into temptation — were only aspects of their own natures that they personified as distinct beings.  In
Okay.  Follow this to the end and we get the statement that they knew their limits, and the voting public that brought us Obama doesn’t, and thus… his liberal policies and stuff… and his unawareness that raising the top marginal rate will destroy the corn seed and not raise any person’s standards of living … this may be the only policy statement in the article, and by and by at any rate…

According to a statistic published in the Telegraph, 26 percent of British workers have been diagnosed with depression.  The statistic is questionable.  When someone is said to be depressed today, it very often means only that he believes he ought to b e happier than mortal beings ordinarily are.  AE Houseman said that “the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort”.  But in an age of inflated expectations, what is normal has ceased to accord with what is tolerable.

Hm.  Follow the logic and we can proceed with any number of implications.

I look into the last pre-election issue of the National Review.  I expect I will have a bit of schaudenfruede at some things as they look about to various elections, but I’m too puzzled by some things to get there.

So there’s an article by Jay Nordlinger on Congressional candidate Tom Cotton of Arkansas.  Written in a kind of scat beat.  Full of weird incomplete sentences.  To show a certain hipness and excited enthusiasm or — WHAT IS THIS?

Skpping along pas the feature on Candidate Mourdock of Indiana — the most fascinating thing about the article is the formula of wrapping it around statements he made about Petyon Manning… and the same article format for candidate Mia of Utah — wrapped around half marathon running…

The cover article… something like the opposite problem with the article about Tom Cotton of Arkansas…  Pompous and serving no practical political purpose, I imagine it can be written about any Democratic candidate and it would be thus as meaningless…

It unfortunately isn’t online, which is a shame… no, I suppose I wouldn’t want to vote for such shadows in the bleak plasticity our darkened souls or whatever the hell Michael Knox Beran is talking about (at times I feel like I’m reading bad teen angst poetry with this one*) — — too bad Romney didn’t work to expose this problem of Obama’s governance — his first debate would have sank him instead of knocking Obama astride.
I see Jonah Goldberg has a new book out on how liberals stake out the claim of non-ideology “whatever gets things done” (like I’ve never seen conservative political figures do the  “good ol common sense” card).  Yeah.  Well.

* When I get the chance I’ll post up the particular piece of the article that brought that comparison to mind.

In the proud tradition of radio stations “flipping” in the most dickish of manners, we have this entrant: Clear Channel and KPOJ 620 AM.  Once word gets out, the scheduling of the change is moved upward to the middle of programming. Evidently a bit like this.

So, I log on about 4:20 PM. Somehow find this story at the WWeek announcing the change was two days out. Well. I turn on the radio, tuned to 620, of course, and there’s Randi Rhodes as clear as you please.
And then I read the update: just to be whoever it is that they are, they decided to move the changeover to Friday. Which was, at that point in the proceedings, right now.
And, five minute later I was listening to FOX Sports Talk 620.

I had the sense a few weeks’ ago that KPOJ wasn’t long for the world.  Just a sudden flash of a thought.  But I had a hard time figuring out what they could possibly put in its place.  Surely there isn’t anything that’d up the station’s mediocre ratings.  And there isn’t.  So it’s been replaced by (drum roll please) Fox Sports.  This figures.  I believe this follows the pattern of how Clear Channel has dispensed of its liberal radio stations in each of its markets — I’d just as soon that Clear Channel revert 620 to its perpetual Elvis loop of an oldies format that it had between its two talk formats before KPOJ.  There was the great question floated by media observers when a second sports radio station came in: can this market handle two sports radio stations?  And the answer was a solid: Ugh.  But at least “The Fan” has team broadcast rights they could log time behind.    The logic in Clear Channel’s move here seems a bit like: it’s cheap, and you can hold a spot on the dial down that would otherwise go to some other competition to our other stations — and maybe someone will trip over this and confuse it with the sports talk station nearly next to it on the dial.

After years of observing these matters of media company decisions, my guage has become along the lines of this … it’s not politics, it’s not the dollar, it is the logic of a kind of  big box cookie cutter one fits all stichery.

I can put any number of caveats on 620 AM.  Some of its broadcasting was unlistenable… in the same way I find Republican broadcasting stations unlistenable.  It becomes a solid block betwen noon and nine that I don’t have to bother with this dial spot.  The rest you can go in and out of as you please, I suppose.  I always found the old argument of “Conservatives have Limbaugh; Liberals NPR!” bemusing — there wasn’t really any way to get at its equivalence gag.  But maybe there’s truth therein — how can you go back in and bother with so much of congratulating one another for holding the same opinion, and coming in just a bit too solidly behind one of the two political parties?

So now where are we?  Carl Wolfson will probably be back somewhere, I’m guessing.  But radio is dead as a medium — and in some regard not really worth saving worth saving.  You have pandora for music; podcasts for this sort of news and commentary.  Stick in a fork in it; stick a dead bird on it.

It’s rare to see Romney bumper stickers in this sticker.  But I saw one.  A mini-van, if that says anything about the red state / blue state thingabajing and there’s this —

Young people may defer buying cars until the economy improves or they may live out their 20s in urban areas, but at some point they will have families, move to the suburbs and need vehicles, said Erich Merkle, Ford’s U.S. sales analyst.
“They might be able to hold off for a period of time,” said Merkle. “But Ford takes the long-term view — They are going to be around for a long time and they are going to purchase many, many new cars.”

The political fight is always fought in the realm of Suburbia fading out of blue Metro and into red exurbia.  Or you can do what Rick Scott and other governors do and find ways to gut the votes in the urban.

More pointedly, the sticker was under another sticker which read… “One Nation Under God”.  Any reason to assert such a premise?
I’ll be on the lookout to see if this is owned by a older guy (likely visiting) who was wearing a t-shirt of Commissar Obama, calling the President a Stalinist.  Probably not — his bumper sticker would probably be blunter in assailing the president.

A quote from Lindsey Graham
“If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn’t conservative enough I’m going to go nuts,” said Graham. “We’re not losing 95 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough.”

Sure enough, I see that the point people on Immigration Reform, the 2012 post Republican Party freak-out edition, are… Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham.  And I google Lindsey Graham — for the moment let’s ignore that the first clarion check listed in google is “Lindsey Graham gay” — and see that the news aggregator headlines with an article from a Conservative source saying “Graham about to sell out on immigration”.

Lindsey Graham is, for the 2014 elections, Tea Party “RINO Hunters” target number one.  There are others on the list, I suppose — though it takes a kind of hear swirl to figure out what they did to earn Republican rank and file animus.  The one thing about the South Carolina picture is that there really is no Democratic Party — this is entirely the Mods versus Rads (as best epitomized by the state’s two Senators — Lindsey Graham here and Jim DeMint)… the last two Democratic Senate candidates were Alvin Greene and a John Bircher-ish figure named Bob Conley.  It is enough that a Democrat might as well hold his/her nose, re-register as a Republican and hold his/her nose and vote for Lindsey Graham in the primary, even though this largely enable the next candidate is along the lines of the last two.

The rumors of Lindsey Graham’s sexuality will probably slide into a subtext somewhere.  Lindsey Graham is so liberal because he’s gay or… he’s selling out because people have the goods on him.

While we wait to see if the Hispanic Tea Party figure of Texas, Ted Cruz, is absolving the strange racial nature of this problem…

Petitions for secession filed from Louisianaand Texas have already received well over 10,000 signatures. Per the website’s own rules, petitions that garner 25,000 signatures or more within 30 days require a response from the Obama administration.

Similar petitions from Alabama, Tennessee, and, interestingly, Oregon, are also gaining traction, with each receiving thousands of supporters over the weekend alone.

Other states in which residents have expressed an interest in going their own way include Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Missouri.

Interestingly, Puerto Rico wants in.  Kind of.  That’d make the nation a tad more Hispanic.
I’m a hypocrite if I don’t mention some affinity for a bit of some secessionist impulse of this… Glorious Cascadia and First Republic of Vermont and all … this slides a bit too far into the partisan nature of things (Obama wins re-election: Boo!), and the whiff of the old Confederacy. See:

 It was almost midnight, just minutes after President Barack Obama was re-elected Tuesday, when University of Mississippi police officers came across a large crowd of students “shouting racial slurs and taunting other students with chants about the recent presidential election.”

According to the University of Mississippi police report, a crowd of 550 “agitated and angry” students and spectators gathered to not only attack Obama’s policies but shout about race.

More than 700 miles away in Virginia at Hampden-Sydney College, about 40 students shouted racial slurs, threw bottles and set off fireworks outside the Minority Student Union within minutes of Obama’s re-election. The disturbance late Tuesday and early Wednesday also included threats of physical violence, College President Christopher Howard said in an e-mail to parents.

Well…

Slade Gorton, a moderate Republican in the Washington legislature , noticed a trend in the state’s party elections after 1976 that would hold important implications for the future.  In 1964, moderates had lost to  Goldwater supporters in the intra-party contests of that critical year, and the local and state organizations remained in the hands of conservatives even after Goldwater’s electoral wipeout.  But across the 1960s and 1970s, “the Goldwater people who were in the party organization became more pragmatic” as a consequence of governing and attempting to appeal to a broader constituency.  This lead conservative supporters of Reagan, who were energized by his presidential bids, to run against the Goldwaterites and turn them out of office.  The newly elected Reaganites in their turn were to become more pragmatic by the very act of attempting to govern and win reelection, until a dozen or so years later they would be deposed by people to their right in the 1994 elections, and the same cycle would repeat itself with the Tea Party Movement.  “The people who are in party organizations and want to win elections have to make certain compromises in order to win” Gorton condluded, and “then they get thrown out by true believers”.
This logic implied the Republican Party’s ability to govern would always be undercut by the demands of its most fervent supporters.  The same dynamic also implied that in some ways, each successive wave of grassroots activism would move the definition of movement conservatism further to the right, like a ratchet.

from “Rule and Ruin” page 350-351, Geoffrey Kabaservice …

……………………………

Outgoing Republicans
Olympia Snowe — Maine
Scott Brown — Massachusetts
Richard Lugar — Indiana
Kay Bailey Hutchinson — Texas
Jon Kyl — Arizona

Incoming Republicans
Deb Fischer — Nebraska
Ted Cruz — Texas
Jeff Flake — Arizona

What we have here are four of the more moderate or less conservative Republicans along with one figure who can be said to be on the conservative side of the party departing and being replaced by three “Tea Party” conservatives.

The Democratic picture …

Ben Nelson Nebraska  —- Joe Donnally Indiana
Kurt Conrad North Dakota —- Heid Heitkamp North Dakota
Joseph Lieberman Conncecticut — Angus King Maine

These three are pretty well analogous switches.  The next four are a step to the left by, for the most party, simple vitality of getting younger in the case of Hawaii, or moving from a culturally conservative Reaganite figure to a more liberal in Vivginia’s case, or low profile figure to higher profile figure liberal in Wisconsin and New Mexico’s case.

Jim Webb — Tim Kaine; Virginia
Herb Kohl — Tammy Baldwin; Wisconsin
Jeff Bingaman —  Martin Heinrich; New Mexico
Daniel Akaka — Mazie Hirino; Hawaii

Add to this the two Senators, both on the liberal side of the Democratic Party’s spectrum.

Chris Murphy — Connecticut
Elizabeth Warren — Massachusetts

On the House side, the Republicans maintained their majority for the 2012 election by some 2010 state election contests — namely Secretary of States governors in Ohio, Florida, and Texas.  It was why these contests were more important for partisan purposes than the Congressional landslide.  This is mainly in reference to redistricting.  I suppose it’s part of the continual process.