• The Republican party is not dead after all.
• The Democratic party is fine on a national level, but the farther down you go the worse it gets.  This is pretty obvious if you take the results apart at all.  In the Senate, the Democrats lost “only” six seats (could end up being seven, but eight is not likely), but the House was a historic bloodbath, the governorships were at least as bad, and the state legislatures were awful in the extreme, with some estimates showing a fifteen-state swing in control.  Unprecedented is far too mild a word.  We’re going for “inconceivable” here, and although I will keep using that word, it means exactly what I think it means.
• The Tea Party was as important yesterday as the peaceniks were in the 1970s.  I don’t think the comparison is inapt.  Both movements were wildly unfocused, both movements involved a lot of bipartisan anger (“don’t trust anyone over 30″), and both movements settled on one party as being the one most closely allied with its interests.  The peaceniks gave Democrats large Congressional majorities for 20 years.  I believe that the Tea Party will have a similar impact.
• The peaceniks, however, made it very complicated for the Democrats to win the White House.  Except for Carter, Democrats didn’t get even close to winning the big seat between Harry Truman and Bill Clinton.  I think it possible, even probable, that a Tea Party-style candidate for the GOP would have similar trouble.  Certainly, if the GOP nominates Sarah Palin, it will lose the presidency again in 2012, even if the candidate on the other side is Barack Obama.  Pooh-pooh this if you like, but it is the case.
• As much as the focus was on how badly President Obama’s candidates fared last night, the fact is that in the mano-a-mana between Obama and Palin, the results were mixed.  Palin notably lost Delaware (expected), Nevada (unexpected), and (it appears) Washington, though there’s balance there from victories for Paul and Rubio and (especially) Johnson.  The place that Palin’s polarizing influence is most obvious, though, is her home state of Alaska, where her candidate apparently lost to a write-in GOP establishment incumbent.  In the hottest of hotbeds, in the lion’s den, the old-guard GOP bloodied the nose of the biggest rising star in the Tea Party movement.  That is hardly the sort of launching pad you want for a Palin 2012 victory rocket.
• As usual, the headlines are about the big races, but the real news is underground, where the GOP taking governorships and state legislatures gives them control of redistricting in 35 states.  That’s not to be underestimated.  2012 is likely to be a circus, but that circus will be slanted as much as Republicans can make it.  This was the year Democrats needed if they were to make the Obama surge permanent.  That didn’t happen.  Now we’ll see if the Tea Party can remake the GOP in its image.  If it can, 2012 could be even worse for the Democrats than 2010.
• 2012 will be EPIC.  The Democrats will know that a desultory showing at the polls will mean defeat.  Republicans will be emboldened.  The Tea Party will have had two years to either implode or become something durable.  I do not believe it hyperbole to say that the 2012 election will be the single most defining in terms of the direction of US politics since 1980, and possibly since 1932.  More than 1994, WAY more than 2008.  2012 is the prize fight for the belt, and possibly permanent control (as permanent as anything gets in politics).  If the GOP wins the House again, and wins Senate control (all but certain), AND wins the presidency, it might be a decade or more before Democrats get back any kind of power at all.  If the Democrat machines counter the GOP and Tea Party surges and hold the Senate and win the Presidency, the Tea Party may just become a true third party and hand the Democrats control over the government in perpetuity.

Stay tuned.

But it’s election season, so I want to get a prediction down before it all breaks loose tomorrow. There’s no question that Republicans are going to win, and win often. The only questions are: will the GOP take the Senate, and what will the new GOP majority in the House be?

The answers are: no, and 23 seats. The GOP will win 7 Senate seats (2 short of a majority), and 62 House seats. The crystal ball has already predicted Harry Reid hanging on in Nevada, which I have begun to doubt seriously. The smart money is all on Angle in Nevada right now. Heck, even Barney Frank is in trouble – you’d think the ball would have seen that one. But I stand by the crystal ball at the moment.

The crystal ball also predicts that I will be watching the results with great interest all night long, and this is one prediction that you can take to the bank.

I’ve been a pretty faithful libertarian most of my life, which for the uninitiated means that I want to leave you pretty much alone unless you actually need my help, and then I’d like the freedom to help you or not without having to pass the assistance through a government agency, whether I like it or not. That’s a passable shorthand for how I regularly vote, as well, but I have another rule that I’d like to submit for your consideration:

Unless I can name BOTH candidates for the seat, I don’t cast a vote in it.

Yes, really. I think it behooves me to know something about both sides of an issue. I do take positions. Those can be unpopular, and some of those positions are offensive to some people I care deeply about. I wish they weren’t. But I arrived at those positions by buying a ticket for the destination, not by picking a random train to board. I try to think about what I believe, and revise when necessary. That revision can’t happen without a place in my consciousness for the other side(s). Therefore, even in races like my state House race, where my good friend Ken Sumsion is going to waltz to victory again, I won’t be voting for him, because I don’t know anything about his opponent. There is practically no chance that I’d be supporting the other guy/gal, but the other guy/gal deserves a chance, and I didn’t give him/her one. So either I’m going to do some fast research – on the candidate’s own site (try to see people in their best light first) – or I’m not voting in that race.

It is painful. I don’t like the necessities this rule imposes on me. I’m a busy guy, and researching all the races in the world takes time I don’t really have, but since politics is important to me, I treat it with respect.

So I’m telling you not to vote. Do not vote unless you know what you’re voting for. Do not vote unless you can name the person you’re voting for and the person you’re voting against. Give the challengers a chance. Give even the incumbents a chance. Listen and think. Please. It’s my country, too, and I’d like a little more common sense out of our representatives. I want them to be REPRESENTATIVE. And I want to see that they represent a thinking, intelligent, considerate people. I still think we are that, as a people. Let us prove it tomorrow.

I wanted to take just a second and address a comment made on a Facebook post about current law. Here’s the problem as I see it: while I agree that future law should be based on a correct interpretation of the Constitution, surely you agree with me that laws are made by men and those men don’t seem to care about your interpretation.   Or mine.   Or Mike Lee’s.  They get assaulted all the time by people waving a copy of the Constitution as if it had some talismanic value, like a sprig of wolfsbane.

In point of fact, the fastest way to get a sitting Senator or Congressman to tune out what you’re saying is to invoke the Constitution, as if it were a piece of the True Cross. People don’t buy WHAT you’re selling, they buy WHY you’re selling. First you have to make them care. First you have to get them to see that following the Constitution is good for THEM, and for the people they allegedly serve. That does NOT take debate. Debate is rarely a good way to convince – especially public debate. Mostly what that will do is entrench people against you.

Even worse, once you get them to care about the Constitution, you have then to persuade them that your interpretation of it is correct, and if you think that can ever be done by citing precedent and quoting John Locke, then you’ve never been part of a deliberative body.

What it takes is back-room private persuasion. It takes tedious, personal, intimate relationship-building. It’s a lot less sexy than the Big Speech. It makes terrible television. But it works, and in my experience – which is long, in this arena – it is the only thing that does.

In this election, perhaps as never before in my experience, we have a choice between a debater and a persuader. Mike Lee’s experience is legal and judicial. He has a good understanding of the legal arguments, and, indeed, is reputed to be formidable in a court of law. That is an arena for debate, where a question is to be decided in a public forum, yea or nay, and where the voting is done secretly, and often has a universe of just one (Lee’s experience is almost entirely judicial, instead of juridical, meaning that only one man has to be persuaded), and where that decision must be justified by a blizzard of argumentation.

Legislation also uses debate, but the debate is almost entirely for show. The decisions are made long before the speeches are made, and they never have to be justified to anyone. NO ONE has ever changed his vote on a piece of legislation because of the speech his opponent made on the floor. The very idea is ludicrous. The Facebook poster wants a debate on the Constitution; so do we all. But the poster is mistaken if he thinks that debate will do anything useful about legislation. It will not. Legislation is affected most significantly by private negotiation, not public posturing. It lends itself to a much less visible strategy, something that looks a lot like running a company or a political party and a lot less like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (much as I love Frank Capra movies).

If you want a fiery Senator that will make great speeches and accomplish absolutely nothing, then apparently Mike Lee is your man, because that is exactly what he has done. If, however, you want a man that is willing to muck in the trenches and move things in the direction we want them to go, who accomplishes things without needing to be the center of attention, then I submit to you that Tim Bridgewater is the guy you want, because that’s exactly what HE’S done.

Obviously, I think what the country needs right now is Bridgewater, and not Lee. We have elections to see who is right. I’m looking forward to this one.

On Abortion: Specifically the murder of George Tiller, I condemn in the strongest possible manner the murder of this man. He should have been arrested and tried, and convicted and imprisoned for the remainder of his life. He should not have been murdered. His murderer should now get the same punishment Tiller would have gotten.

Most of you know I am absolutely opposed to infanticide, no matter what euphemism it gets wrapped up in. I have been for a long time a proponent of the death penalty, but I have recently decided that my distrust of the government should extend to the justice system as well, and I now support a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution that would make the taking of any life, except where there is imminent danger to the life of another person, a crime. I am willing to give up the death penalty in exchange for the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent children. No executions, no abortion.

One More on Abortion: There’s a lot of chatter about how if we who deplore abortion and think of it as (at the very least) manslaughter are really upset, rather than get violent, we should lobby the legislature and get the law changed. I deplore violence. I am not a violent man. That has never been an avenue for me. But we on the pro-life side of this debate have a serious frustration, and that is that we CANNOT lobby. No legislature can change the abortion laws, because there are no abortion laws. There used to be, but then came Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court struck down all the laws we had made regarding the legality of abortion.

Essentially, the Supreme Court – in an effort to SETTLE the debate, according to the decision – created a “right” out of thin air. There hasn’t been any real debate about abortion since. Every attempt to protect the unborn in any fashion is met with fierce, howling resistance from the left, because it infringes on a “woman’s right to choose” (to kill her child). If that is, indeed, a right, then they absolutely should howl about it, but the right most of us recognize as inviolate is not the right to “choose”, but the right to life (remember the Declaration of Independence?), which is absolutely violated every time a woman aborts her child.

The pro-life movement has had a terrible time even getting restrictions on a doctor’s being able to butcher a child that has already been born, let alone one that has been partially delivered (everything but the head is out of the birth canal).  This difficulty, however, in no way excuses the violence perpetrated by anyone who is a part of this movement.  You can’t win this way, people.

No true Chicago politician would EVER have been caught like this. It’s unthinkable that Mayor Daley could ever have been so obvious about taking bribes.

Boy, the quality of our corruption has really declined recently.

People splutter at me when I says stuff like this, as if I’m spitting on the Constitution.  As if most of them would know a passage from the Constitution from a line from Sidney Sheldon.

Urging people to vote, even if they don’t know one thing about any of the candidates or issues, is exactly like urging people to take medicine – whatever medicine they can lay hands on – regardless of what the medicine is or whether or not they are sick.  Just any random pill will do!  It’s your civic duty!

Bull.  It IS your civic duty to know about the issues and the candidates.  It is then your PRIVILEGE to vote.  IF YOU CAN’T BE BOTHERED, PLEASE GET OUT OF THE WAY OF THOSE THAT CAN.

Most people are a lot like me; they don’t really know what the bailout contains, so they’re generally opposed to it because this is not what government is supposed to be doing (or, alternatively, this IS what government is supposed to be doing, but it should be doing it for ME, and not for other people, depending on your home base on the political spectrum). But they also recognize that something is very, very wrong with the world financial system, and the only people that seem interested or capable of doing something about it are the people in Congress. So we’d like to see something happen, and sooner rather than later.

Several comments need to be made here:

1. It’s silly, and I mean really silly, to blame Republicans for the bailout not passing. If you’re Speaker of the House, you have to get more than 60% of your own party on board. No, the GOP isn’t helping you, or the President, who is supposed to be a member of their party. Guess what? Right now he’s ideologically closer to you than to them, Nancy, a point which I guarantee you won’t be emphasizing in the next 5 weeks.

2. Early reaction is that the Republicans are going to catch it for voting this thing down. Nah. There are two reasons this is incorrect: one, the fact is that most of the nation, and by far the majority of people likely to be voting in November, were not supporting this bill, and two, something is finally going to get passed, and if it’s even marginally better than what failed, the GOP comes off looking like Horatio at the Bridge. This will not be good for the Democrats.

3. There is a lot being made of how this bill would cost taxpayers $700 billion. This is just silly. It wouldn’t cost even close to that much. [note: I am not saying this to support the bailout. I am saying it because it is true. I don't like winning arguments using bad facts or bad logic, even if I can win that way. There are reasons not to vote for the bailout, but this isn't one of them.] The government would be buying assets (at least some of what they spend will buy straight mortgages, for instance), and those assets have value. In fact, they almost certainly have greater value than their cost. I predict that if the bailout finally passes, that the government will eventually turn a substantial profit on the deal. This is actually worse than if the government lost money, and I’ll elaborate below.

4. There is at least one plan I have heard that makes much more sense (I think) than what was voted down on Monday. That plan would still authorize the expenditure of hundreds of billions, but would require that those billions be spent exclusively on the whole mortgage notes being held by banks, and not on the Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)those mortgages ostensibly back, much less other debt that banks are holding. This does several positive things, in my opinion. First, it allows the government to demonstrably spend our money on things with real value. Not 100% of face value, I grant this, but some value. Even houses in downtown Detroit or suburban Cleveland have some value. The mortgages can be bought cheap and the value maximized by, second, negotiating the terms of the note with the homeowner when he’s in default, to allow him to stay in the house. In a rising market, foreclosure is a good option for recovery of value. In a declining market, it sucks. It not only loses immediate value on the note itself, but it exacerbates the decline of property value across the board, further harming the asset value of your other mortgages. The government has been yammering at mortgage servicers to undertake this negotiative process; this plan would allow the government to just do it themselves. Second sub a, it would put shims under dropping property values by reducing foreclosures. Third, it would pour liquid cash into banks, which is desperately needed, and fourth, it would put a floor under the CDOs, because the bad mortgages that have destroyed their value would now be backstopped by the government. Those notes would therefore begin to trade again, and the machine would re-start.

This plan, I suspect, has no possible chance of being enacted. It would still have two bad effects; one, it would give government a huge windfall if it did its job properly and two, it still isn’t what government should be doing with taxpayer money. But since it is going to do something with it, this seems the least harmful in the long run.

5. When the government makes money on an investment, it spend it on some pet project it couldn’t get taxpayers to back. This is true at every level of government. Did you know that the Chrysler bailout in the 80s produced a $500 million windfall? No? YOu don’t remember getting a check for your share? Darn right you don’t. And if the government succeeds in getting this bailout to pass, and if it works, the government will get a profit that will dwarf the Chrysler windfall and make Exxon-Mobil look like a kid’s lemonade stand. If the government gets these assets at .20 on the dollar, which seems likely, and they are worth .45 on the dollar, which, if the bailout is successful, also seems likely, the government will make a trillion-dollar profit. That money will not be paid out to you and me. It will instead be used to fund all the pet projects Congress can’t get popular support for, like, most certainly, universal health care, among many many others. It will also lead Congress to believe that other intervention in other markets can have the same effect, and what you will get is socialism on a grand scale and the destruction of the free world. I do, in fact, predict that this is what will happen.

6. Europe is supposed to be immune to this cycle of crash and boom, because of its superior controls (read: socialism) provided by the government. Haha. Watch the news. The problems in Europe are worse, and they have no way to fight them. The EuroFed is only supposed to keep inflation in check, and has no mandate to stabilize markets. Oh, inflation is in check all right. It usually is when you have rising unemployment. The EU needs a bailout package as badly as we do, but they don’t have any mechanism for getting one.

7. From a free-market perspective, the best thing to do is nothing at all, or to repeal some of the stupid regulations that contributed mightily to the current crisis. If the government will stop “rescuing” some things and not rescuing others, so that everyone knows they have to win or lose by these rules that exist right now, things will get worse very fast and better starting fairly shortly. I will lose my business, but I’m volunteering to do that if it will help convince the government to force the market to deal with its own problems. I’m not advocating some nebulous “hard time” for others; this would be my own financial ruin, despite my not having contributed in any way to the crisis. But it’s the right thing and the best thing.

Instead, what we’ll do is keep the comatose patient alive until all the organs fail at once and we have global meltdown and blood in the streets.

8. This brings me to the religious portion of this post, which you may skip if you don’t care for that sort of thing. We know that this kind of financial meltdown is going to happen eventually. Most of us will have no idea it’s happening until it’s too late, which is why we are advised to be ready at all times. As the canary in the coalmine, so to speak, let me say that I do not think that this is the “big one”. I think this is a head fake. It is a very clear, very obvious, somewhat painful warning that God is not kidding around when He tells us to be ready. But it is not going to be the beginning of the end. It is, however, the beginning of the beginning of the end. It is the day and a night and a day with no darkness. Right now, it’s really obvious that the warnings we’ve been given to prepare are serious, but the signs will fade and things will go back to “normal”, and we will forget, and the shock will be somewhat complete when, a few years from now, we get the three days of darkness and the tempests and the floods and the earthquakes. DO NOT FORGET. No matter what semblance of “normalcy” we get from whatever bailout passes, we must not forget. Get out of debt. Get food and water stored up. Lean on Christ and come to know Him well. Get close to the Spirit and listen to his voice. We have been warned.

And that’s it for the longest post of my career. Let the comment wars begin.