The liberal blogosphere, lead by dailykos, has been watching with baited breath to see if and when Romney dips below the 47.5 mark, ala rounding to a full figure brings Romney to the “47 percent” of his campaign lore.  Whatever they consider fun, I suppose.

Other arbitrary measurements are listed at that kos blog page — they off-set the Republican arbitrary measurements along the lines of, oh, Obama being the first president re-elected with a percentage less than his first time elected.  Him doing better than Bush.  We get into some weird partisan wrangling around these parts — in his pre-election “Vote Romney” editorial, Charles Krauthammer chimed in that this is lives up to Big Election with Big Things at Stake line, after the election results came in, he charged that Obama won, sure, but he did so by going small.  Grover Norquist we see moving from his position that the Republican nominee don’t matter much because all we need is for someone to stamp in what the Republican congress sends him to a position of Redistricting has given us the House for the next decade, so there.

I’m looking at this “land unchecked” and pondering this factoid:  if a bunch of California is off-setting, that means we can move into the margins and see if Roseanne Barr has picked up percentage points…

Gary Johnson Libertarian New Mexico 1,265,100 0.99% 0 James P. Gray California
0 Jill Stein Green Massachusetts 458,411 0.36% 0 Cheri Honkala Pennsylvania
0 Virgil Goode Constitution Virginia 119,281 0.09% 0 Jim Clymer Pennsylvania
0 Roseanne Barr Peace and Freedom Hawaii 64,620 0.05% 0 Cindy Sheehan California
0 Rocky Anderson Justice Utah 41,204 0.03% 0 Luis J. Rodriguez California
0 Tom Hoefling America’s Iowa 38,828 0.03% 0 Jonathan D. Ellis Tennessee
0 Other 225,503 0.18% — Other —

Okay, compare this to my last tally, and what do we get?

It looks like Gary Johnson has moved up a hundredth of a percentage point — incidentally by the liberal wanking Romney 47 watch he has gotten to his percentage point; otherwise no.  Stein gets the extra hundredth of a percentage point as well.  The other candidates have gotten additional hundreds of votes, but no hundredth percentage point changes.

From The Nation

Case number one: if Henry Wallace had won the vice presidential nomination in 1944, he would have become president when Roosevelt died in 1945, and we probably would not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and could have avoided the cold war as well. […]  A Gallup poll in July 1944 asked likely Democratic voters whom they wanted on the ticket as veep. Sixty-five percent said Wallace, while Truman came in eighth, with just 2 percent. Roosevelt announced that, were he a delegate, he would vote for Wallace. Claude Pepper, a Democratic senator from Florida, tried to nominate Wallace at the convention, but the conservative party bosses, who opposed him, adjourned the proceedings. “Had Pepper made it five more feet [to the microphone] and nominated Wallace,” Stone argues, “Wallace would have become president in 1945 and…there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War.”

It was all in Roosevelt’s hands, and Roosevelt was being disingenuous the whole way through.  He picked Truman (or asceded to the pick of Truman) and Truman it was.

Case number two: even with Truman as president in 1945, it was not a foregone conclusion that the United States would drop the bomb. Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur both opposed it, along with most of the other top generals and admirals—and they were joined by many of the scientists who had developed the bomb. If only President Truman had listened to them…

This all would go against Truman’s nature.

Case number three: if JFK had not been shot in 1963, Stone is convinced he would have pulled US forces out of Vietnam and negotiated an end to the cold war.

Pick the evidence you must and ignore all other evidence.

Case number four: if George W. Bush had listened to his intelligence agencies in 2001, the 9/11 attacks would not have taken place.

And he’s one for four!

Dateline Georgia
“I care more about this country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge,” Chambliss told Georgia television station WMAZ on Thursday. “If we do it his way, then we’ll continue in debt, and I just have a disagreement with him about that.” […]
“Grover Norquist has no plan to pay this debt down. His plan says you continue to add to the debt. I just have a fundamental disagreement with him about that,” Chambliss said.
Norquist, in response, noted that Chambliss was an author of an open letter to him last year from three Republicans promising support for revenue generation from the “pro-growth effects” of lower tax rates.
“Senator Chambliss promised the people of Georgia he would go to Washington and reform government rather than raise taxes to pay for bigger government,” Norquist said.

AND
Chambliss, who is up for re-election in 2014, was asked in the interview whether Norquist would retaliate against him.
“In all likelihood, yes,” Chambliss said.

See here
Remember Karen Handel? She was the subject of national interest several months ago when Handel, a former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and staunch opponent of abortion rights, directed Komen for the Cure to cut off all grants to Planned Parenthood. […]
“She’s considering it,” says Rob Sims, a Republican campaign consultant who worked on Handel’s unsuccessful run for governor in 2010. Kay Godwin, the co-chairman of Georgia Conservatives in Action, says Handel is among those she’s hearing who could successfully challenge Chambliss.

…………………..

The classic line of attack where the big money capitalist wig would use the social issues they don’t particulary care about to down their slightly off key figure.

Dateline South Carolina

Graham, by contrast, held a conference call with West Virginia’s Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to tout bipartisan support for foreign aid. “Foreign relations are not a Democrat or Republican issue, but an American issue,” he insisted.
Replies Rand Paul: “I don’t see myself campaigning against a Republican in a general election ever, that’s why I think it’s extraordinary that Graham is supporting a Democrat in a general election.”
The battle lines are drawn. The Club for Growth’s president already hinted in September that Graham would be on the conservative pressure group’s target list. “If you are looking over the horizon of 2014,” he told a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, “the sun may rise over South Carolina.” Tea Partiers are anxious to collect another Republican establishment scalp.”
………….

His bi-partisanship, of course, sucks a bit, as it basically skews over toward protecting the Military Industrial Complex.

One question though…
“I don’t think it’s any secret that Lindsey Graham has not always represented a consistent, pro-growth record,” Chris Chocola, the group’s president and a former Indiana congressman, said in a telephone interview. “If an attractive alternative — a viable alternative — emerges, we’d take a look at the race. And I don’t think we’d be alone in that.”

Does an organization that prefigures “Tea Party” get to be called a “tea party group”, as opposed to tea party astroturf organizer or something?
Also, as for candidate… how about 2008 Demcoratic candidate Bob Conley?

Dateline Tennessee

Tea Party members were further angered this weekend by a Nashville fundraiser Alexander hosted for several Republican moderates, including Olympia Snowe of Maine and Richard Lugar of Indiana, that are disliked by many Tea Party member for their willingness to compromise.

“Apparently Al Franken and Harry Reidcouldn’t clear their schedules,” one local conservative wrote to The City Paper.

I believe Lamar Alexander was running somewhat to Bob Dole’s right in the 1996 Republican Primaries.
A question… is there any Democratic Party nominee in these three states who can sit in the wings and pick up moderate (or quasi-moderate) Republican support going into a general election?  We note that the trio of candidates who are claimed “at risk” because Grover Norquist is chomping at the bit all lie in the South… So, for instance… Dateline Maine and the new “Least Conservative Republican in the Senate” gets the query: so…?  Do they dare do a Christine O’Donnell?

This was weird.  I passed by a group of bar-hoppers leaving a bar — the individuals located in a gray area between full control and a tad tipsy.  And I heard this jab tossed backward:

“You’re like… The Trenchcoat Mafia!”

And then a woman in the group made her way out of the exit, and I see, yep, she’s wearing this sort of long trenchcoat.  She laughs at the jibe and repeats it.

Quickly scanning them I see that, yep, they’d have been in high school in 1999.  The Trenchcoat Mafia, to refresh one’s memory (and set a couple things straight) were a cliquish set of students at Columbine High School, largely graduated in 1998, a pair of mass murderers on the edge of this social grouping making for an unfortunate retro-fit recoloring of their high school years when it was plopped into a popular narrative via media distortions off of peer misapprehensions.  I would be tempted to suggest this would make for a horrible high school reunion experience, but (1) they’d be largely the type to forego such things anyway (2) Technology has largely shoved high school reunions aside (a positive aspect of facebook finally) and (3) I imagine any high school reunion out of Columbine would be a little odd.

None of this figures into the chuckling toss-aside.  It is a strange reference point.  It’s about the same as “Don’t drink the kool-aid”, but probably rather narrowly generational specific in probable usage.  Just a few years older and the likely automatic jestering reference would be to a creepy (sexual assaulting) flasher.

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.