My favorite video from election night!

I know people are quite amused by Tweety's attempts to get Michelle Bachmann to answer a simple question only to be thwarted by her zombie answers from the GOP talking-points manual.  But I think this exchange between Lawrence O'Donnell and Eric Cantor is so much more telling.  This guy will be the 2nd most powerful person in the House come January and he lacks even the most rudimentary understanding of economics.  These are our leaders.

H.P. Lovecraft on Republicans (1936)

“As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

Politics in the ADHD Age

Americans, as a group, appear to suffer from extreme ADHD.  We run back and forth between political parties, swinging the country left and right, left and right, never allowing one party or the other enough time to solve the complex problems our world presents.  We want quick fixes and easy answers to problems that cannot be resolved with a Tweet.  Look at this chart

The nation is set to swing back to a party that, for the 8 years preceding 2008, managed to run up enourmous debt, get us into two unwinnable wars and divide the nation into haves and have-nots the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1890s.  And yet, in our ADHD frenzy, because Obama and the Democrats weren't able to solve these nearly insoluble problems in 2 years, we're on the verge of handing the wheel back to the party that trashed the nation in the first place.  WTF???