Good Lord.  There was enough drama with the Canadian Election as it was.  (This drama, naturally, was wholly unexpected.  It’s Canada, for Christ’s sake.)

Jack Layton, for the NDP (Team Orange in your programs, what the Democrats would look like if they were actually uniformly progressive) is actually set for a big breakthrough.  Given the fact that he comes across as actually not being a total douchebag, and that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff (Team Red) actually has managed to be more boring than Al Gore, and that Quebec is sick of voting for federal politicians that want to end Canada (that’d be the Bloc Quebecois, Team Light Blue), Layton might actually form the second largest party and — if Fatboy and the Conservatives (Team Labatt’s Blue)  are held to a minority win (still the most likely outcome) — might actually become Prime Minister himself.

And then Osama got a cap or twenty in his ass.  This might give the Conservatives a bunch of juice, and not a moment too soon.  Canada’s involvement in last night’s thing was nil, but they have been putting a lot of time, treasure, and blood into Afghanistan.  Harper — in the course of reading Dubya’s playbook — has doubled-down on the war.  And Layton was campaigning, hard, on pulling out.

And so, a rarity: an election night where absolutely nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen.  Coverage on a C-SPAN network (C-SPAN2, I think, starting soonish), along with this open thread for your Canucking pleasure.

Anyway.  If you’re up watching this crap from Merrie Old, feel free to vent here.

I will say this: the quality of media coverage of this was not unexpected, yet is still shocking.  The buy-in is total.  Only with an event like this can you have somebody bringing trees inside a church for a wedding, and have talking heads come across and say that they were going for “sustainable” rather than “absurdly decadent.”

And yet the media are shoveling this into their mouths as if it were oatmeal on a cold, winter morn.  And so are the great unwashed masses, lining the Mall with fake plastic crap on their heads, and lining up at the buffets at street parties with fake plastic crap on their heads (perhaps with feathers sticking out or something).

Really. When the President rolls by (whoever it is, however you feel about the guy), we either wave and shout a little bit, or flip him off and shout a little louder.  When they see the Queen rolling (or, in this case, kids who won’t be King and Queen for at least 40 years), everybody acts like they’re back in the first grade.

No (more) official commentary from me.  Your observations, as events (finally) unfold, in the comments box, please.

We interrupt the serious and worldly for what has been charitably described as the worst song ever sung.

This probably has already hit you across the face with a claw hammer. (10m Youtube hits in the space of a week. No words are adequate for that.) But, if not… I proudly give you… Rebecca Black.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0

Resolved: that whoever put this girl (age 13 if Twitterstan is correct) up to this — her parents, an unscrupulous producer, whoever — should (1) fork over every dime earned off this song, from whatever source, to the American Red Cross, and (2) be banned for life from the music industry.

Discuss.

Maybe now is a good time to take a step back and see this whole Wisconsin thing for what it is.  On this evidence, what happened tonight might just be the final blow for one of the two dominant political parties.

No.  Not the Democrats.  The Republicans.

Seriously.

Full explanation, post-jump.

Read more »

And now the whole thing in Wisconsin has gone supernova in the last couple of hours.

The premise of the Flying Fourteen was that they could deny quorum, because you need three-fifths of the chamber present for fiscal bills.  The union-busting stuff that has caused all the ruckus was inserted into a budget bill (on the insistence by every Republican in on the thing that it was necessary to fix the budget mess); thus, the Democratic Senators could get out of the state and block the bill.

This afternoon, the Republicans in Madison decided to create a new bill with only those union-busting things in it.  And then they voted on it. — which apparently sends the thing to conference committee and, reportedly, quick passage as an agreed-upon bill by both chambers tomorrow and signature by the Governor before anybody can do a damn thing about it. [EDIT — it was first passed by a conference committee — which was caught (devastatingly) on tape through the Wisconsin version of C-SPAN — and then immediately sent to the Senate, which voted on it.  Last stop before Walker is a vote by the Assembly tomorrow morning.  That should be must-see teevee.]

The protests, which had to be honest waned a bit this week, started up again almost instantaneously.  The crowd, from what little I’ve gleaned from this, looks to be absolutely livid.  There was also a report that the hold-out Senators decided to come back to Madison to fight this, but then a decision in mid-trip to turn around.  (No confirmation on any of this, naturally.)

All sorts of angles here — the first of which has to do with Scott Walker’s claim that this was related to the fiscal health of the state, but then changing tack in order to ram it through after three weeks of pure legislative chaos.

There will be more to this as the night moves along, but it is safe to say this: WOW.

Local news: the Psychometer feature is no more.  It has ceased to be.  (Frankly, it has ceased to be for months now.  Now it is official.)

The fault, dear cynics, lay not in the concept, but myself.  We were all gung-ho to track the stupid.  Then real life happened to your humble servant.  Now we look at it and the House segment of the Congressional Record runs to almost 1600 pages.  Sifting through that to find every stupid thing that the GOP said for the record?  Though offers for help came (and thank you, btw), you could put the entire staff of a major metropolitan newspaper to that task, and it would never get done.  Through my overreaching and reality-based sloth, the idea has wasted away, and has now died through my own fault, through my own grievous fault.

So hail and farewell to Psychometer — an ingenious plan that turned into a brilliant mistake.  Sleep well.

So I figured I’d make the drive up from Chicago to see what all the hub-bub was about.  I decided to leave early, as word was that all the downtown and campus parking ramps filled up quickly; come late, and I’d have to park in a fallow field or something.

Turns out I came too early.  Thus I had forgotten one of the most important things I learned in law school — Sunday mornings are dead as a doornail around here.  Saturday night, after all, is Saturday night — if you were up-and-at-em at 9:00 in the morning on Sunday, you were either going to church or you didn’t party hard enough.

But things did get rolling around 11:00 at the Capitol — the Letter Carriers’ union was kicking things off.  A stroll around, and inside, the Capitol gave me a taste of what has been going on here for the past three weeks.  The general impression you get was that this was, exceedingly and without question, a civil crowd.  There were maybe one or two signs that pushed the limits (like one with a picture of Osama bin Laden with Scott Walker’s face superimposed — carried by a firefighter, of all people).  Other than that, the reports of violent overthrow and armed rebellion have been greatly exaggerated.

More visuals, post-jump.

Read more »