Sean Hannity: Payment Due

In "All Hail the Fact," (Nov. 7, 2012), highwayscribery noted, "One has to wonder what Fox's credibility will be going forward with the true believers who kneel daily in its church. For months it posted news and facts from an alternative universe that never ceased to insist the president's coalition was coming undone and that red state redemption was just around the corner.

"Fool them once, shame on Fox. Fool them twice, shame on them."


Well, the bill has been passed to Sean Hannity sooner than later. It is being reported in various outlets that Hannity has lost exactly half his audience since President Obama's reelection.

One account says he took a particular hit in the 25-45 demographic, which is the one that pays the bills and is known as the "money demo." The pieces suggest Hannity's prognostications left his gullible fans "stunned" on election morning, thereby sparking the exodus.


It was difficult to watch Hannity in days before the election as his reports strained to explain away a steady stream of polls pointing to an Obama victory.

After the election, the grasping continued. An unfortunate Staten Island woman who'd lost everything in Hurricane Sandy was proof "Obama's Katrina" was around the corner.

The pre-election banging of pots over the nefarious murder of American diplomats in Libya continued, Sean confidently promising, "this isn't going away folks" while peddling a notion the unfortunate incident was reason enough to drive Obama out of office.


Hannity palavered and caviled furiously from his not-inconsiderable perch in the court of mass media, laboring to alter the course of American politics. A classic example of overreach from a media pundit soused in his own self-importance.

In the end, it became clear the carnival barkers can't alter the course of national events as well as they can influence (or delude) their own followers.

Obama's photograph is here posted, because Hannity's look just doesn't fit the visual "story" highwayscribery strives for, and because the president's the winner in this mano-a-mano with a snarky gadfly who has made a living insulting Americans that share the commander-in-chief's values.

Hannity made a bet on those who pined for an Obama defeat in 2012, stoking their anger and lifting their hopes. That wager delivered short-term benefits, but now its flaws have become painfully clear.

Black Swan Sandy

A Black Swan is defined by writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb as "an event that is both unpredicted by some observers and carries massive consequences."


As Sandy blasted ashore on Monday night, the usually ham-handed Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked if such a Black Swan, affecting the election, swam in the storm's maelstrom.


It was a reasonable question at the time, which now can be answered in the affirmative, and it signifies the president's reelection.


Prior to the storm, the people of the United States were cultivating, for better or worse, an expanding personal crush on Mitt Romney. He'd handled his coming out party at debate number one with panache and they wanted more, not less.


He gave them less in the next two debates, choosing to ride a rising crescendo of media accounts about his momentum. A comprehensive economic speech was slated for big-time play across the American newscape and due weighty consideration, given Romney's enhanced status.


The storm came and the shrill tone both parties cultivated throughout the campaign became suddenly and obviously off-note. The president had work to do and Mitt Romney didn't, which left the former woven into the ensuing headline stories and the latter to sit around and cool his heels.


Momentum requires continued movement. You stop momentum, it doesn't kick-in when you re-start. Usually, it swings.


Enter Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey. The Atlantic Ocean having taken a sliver of his state for itself, Christie needed help and knew where to get it. Obama was ready. They got together and, like two grownups, set about resolving the misery of millions.


In cooperating with Obama, the governor made the rest of his party look like the small-minded twits they are; challenged them to do their habitual best at putting politics before the good of the country.


When some Fox News talker asked if Romney was going to visit New Jersey to see all the devastation, Christie sent him straight to hell, asserting that this was no time for presidential politics.


Except that it is and Christie praising Obama's competence under fire was naught but a rank betrayal to the cause of no government.


Christie's a loose canon, but the GOP elevated him promptly to national status anyway. They can sit and ponder the wisdom of that move, but they will do so in silence.


The mood is somber and respectful now. Nobody will step forward to criticize a pair of men for doing their jobs. Obama and Christie met at the crossroads of devastation and tried to put an upended community at ease.


Romney was in Florida trying not to sound too political, toothless, robbed of his right to attack with full ferocity. Fox News was working overtime on cooking up a Benghazi scandal, now that the plan for removing Obama at the ballot box is unraveling.


But they will confront some heavy lifting for, like a true Black Swan, Sandy's impact goes beyond the loss of media time and the switching of a national narrative away from rake Romney's progress.


This watershed event has already empowered powerful politicians to reintroduce the need for a real climate change policy and yank the debate away from the no-nothings who have hijacked it for too long.


The storm has further revealed the rickety nature of our infrastructure and highlighted the fact that we are, in terms of development and building, an old country now.


Sandy has been a theater for government assistance and cooperation at all levels, a real-time display of what tax revenues buy, and what a lack of them doesn't.


In one felled swoop of terrible violence, the storm has put into relief the primary issues of American political life and resolved them in favor of those who prefer a country of neighbors and civic officials to one of individuals and ideologues.

Tuesday's Results: The Dirt(y)

Another series of primaries done and highwayscribery is still waiting for the big "anti-establishment" revolt at the polls that will crush the Democratic majorities and usher in another era of shoddy governance.

Let's see, the guy backed by the president in Colorado won. Jeff Zeleny's piece in the "New York Times," noted that Senator Michael Bennett's victory, "interrupted the story line that all incumbents are doomed by voter discontent."

These damn primaries keep interrupting the same story line but the media, which can't be "mainstream" if perpetually wrong, continues to peddle it.

Some guy named Ken Buck beat up on the Republican establishment's candidate of choice, which only confirms what we've been saying about Tea Party types since the last round of primaries/elections: These people are dividing the Republican Party.

Rand Paul, the Tea Party guy from Kentucky, can't get anything right and may give the Democrats a chance at stealing a seat they have no business contesting.

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party gal picked by Nevada Republicans has done more to resurrect Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's career than anything President Obama might have.

The Connecticut GOP is going with a former wrestling executive, effectively snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Dan Quayle's kid Ben, not content with the mess his daddy made of the family name, got nailed on some old posts he wrote for "The Dirty" (Scottsdale, Ariz. edition).

highwayscribery doesn't think that should disqualify Quayle fils, but that's because he's a Democrat out of the Kennedy tradition who thinks presidents and other political fauna should be allowed to have testes.

But Quayle's neither running on a blue ticket or in a blue state so he's got some explainin' ta do at the next church social.

And, of course, the shelf-life of Sarah Palin continues to grow as stale as the Democrats-are-doomed meme we've been hearing since, oh, the Republicans came up with the cockeyed idea of saying no to every Obama effort at fixing what ails the country.

"The Washington Post" has a great graphic charting the success of Palin's self-proclaimed "Mamma Grizzlies."

It is understandable that you might not click-through given her increasing irrelevance, but suffice it to say, 10 candidates she endorsed won, and eight have lost, which is mostly a wash, just as her run for the vice presidency and half-term as governor of Alaska were.

There is no difference between what the Republican Party is enduring and the trials undergone by their Democratic counterparts in the 1980s when the liberal wing, of which the scribe was an active member, forced uncomfortable and unpalatable positions on the likes of people like Michael Dukakis.

'Nuff said.

And while the Democrats have picked up baggage by adopting long-term fixes and strategies for our declining country, the Republicans offer no alternative, since there is little change to what or who they, in truth, care about and represent.

To wit: Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator ever, just died as he lived: in a plane crash on his way to a corporate junket...even though he's been out of office for a few years now.

Boilerplate Bunk

Unsurprisingly, nobody listens to highwayscribery.

On May 14 the “New York Times,” once again, peddled the “death of the Democratic majority” narrative in a prominently placed piece.

This time, it was written by Katharine Seelye, and uncovered the strong “shift of ground” in a Massachusetts congressional district currently represented by Niki Tsongas, a Democrat.

With no poll numbers to boost its contention the incumbent is in trouble, the story sticks, after the Republican/conservative fashion, to the unscientific and anecdotal; mostly impressed with the fact Ms. Tsongas is watching eight Republicans of zero stature savage one another for the right to oppose her.

You’ve read this piece before and will continue to read it for months to come as the conventional wisdom slowly petrifies into the institutional kind nobody dares challenge.

(exceptin’ us!)

Particular to all these stories is what highwayscribery calls the “boilerplate” paragraph.

Seelye uses it, as all the reporters to do, to explain the over-ballyhooed “anti-incumbent fever” which, she claims, “is rooted in anger over the federal economic stimulus package, the new health care law, and the succession of bailouts, as well as a desire by voters to feel empowered.”

That last one is a phenomenon of her own invention and not part of the classic boilerplate paragraph.

The bailout was bipartisan and accrues to the debit side of every incumbent’s account, Republican or Democrat, although it is not often presented in those terms

The rest is pap about the stimulus package and health care reform being the stuff of Democratic debacles

We are told a majority thought the stimulus unnecessary. Like numbers feel health care reform is something that, as Republicans repeated ad nauseum in their ill-fated effort to Kill-The-Bill, “was shoved down the throats of the American people.”

Rarely, if ever, is there an article focused on the millions of folks, bit-players in the current governing coalition, who fought for health care reform.
Nobody wanted it you see. Representatives and senators did what they damn well pleased because they don’t listen to or need votes.

There is a dearth of articles interviewing happy teachers who kept their jobs, parents whose kids’ schools stayed open, or construction workers relieved to be laboring on infrastructure projects funded with stimulus money.

highwayscribery does not believe this is because such stories don’t exist.

Similarly, few are the stories about where, and on what, the stimulus package is being applied.

The overall impression is that health care reform will cost Americans much, but offer them nothing while the stimulus money was poured down some black hole of unaccountability when, actually, the opposite is true.

Certainly, a goodly portion of Americans opposed these measures, but the coverage we’re talking about here renders them a majority, which is to regurgitate a Republican talking report rather than practice sound journalism.

The oft-predicted Republican resurgence set for November occurs on the commentariat’s chessboard where all things remain equal and the opposition party holds its own in spite of a pathetic performance over the course of the Obama reign.

But there are telling exceptions.

In Sunday’s “New York Times,” an interview with the former chairman of Bear Stearns,
Alan C. Greenberg confessed that, “I was a Republican for years. After the way the Republican leadership acted when the health care bill was passed, I changed my affiliation to Democrat.”

Election-year coverage, to date, suggests he is utterly alone in these sentiments.

We doubt it.

Reform This!

Three filibusters and out.

That was fast. The "New York Times," reported that the Republicans had "relented" in the face of considerable pressure the likes Goldman Sacks be brought to heel. This means the party is very NOT relentless and Mr. Peebles, otherwise knows as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, just the opposite.

You can't judge a nerd by his glasses.

The Republicans' was a great performance in legislative self-gratification and another example of the neutered Republicans' over-reliance on the filibuster.

As "Times" reporters David Herszenhorn and Edward Wyatt, or one of them anyway, pointed out, "While the Republicans can still filibuster, they are at a disadvantage during the floor debate given the Democrats' 59 to 41 majority. And the decision to allow floor debate appeared to be a significant retreat by the minority, reflecting a calculation that further delay was politically untenable."

You can say that again!

"And the decision to allow floor debate appeared to be a significant retreat by the minority, reflecting a calculation that further delay was politically untenable."

Hurts so good.

The Republicans don't want President Obama to succeed at anything regardless of what that thing means to the country. It's a clumsy posture forcing the GOP into uncomfortable, pretzel-like political positions:

"Among the challenges for Republicans, "The Times" writers write, "was explaining how they could participate in an oversight hearing on Tuesday criticizing Goldman Sachs executives and proclaiming the need to tighten regulation of Wall Street, but then go to the Senate chamber and vote to block debate of the financial regulatory bill."

"Salon" has a problem with some of the ensuing coverage, which grants the President's party a victory without being sure of what has been won. But it's "Salon's" self-appointed to be whine about Democrats in between election seasons and support them when the line outside the polling place starts taking shape.

Speaking of polling, that same outlet's Joe Conason parses an upturn in Democratic support out of a new sampling of voters from the "Washington Post."

It's a question of whether you believe in polls or not. highwayscribery does, like all of us, when they confirm his beliefs.

Conason quotes the survey which concluded, "The public trusts Democrats more than Republicans to handle the major problems facing the country by a double-digit margin, giving Democrats a bigger lead than they held two months ago when Congress was engaged in the long endgame over divisive health legislation."

There's more. President Obama's numbers are up and, despite all the "anti-incumbent" sentiment we are told is out there, the Republicans come off much worse in the poll.

Proof of highwayscribery's hard-earned lesson that you must be more than AGAINST something to win an election.

we told you so four months ago, and four days (or so) ago as well.

Same goes for our prediction that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist would leave the Republican Party and run as an independent, thereby increasing the Democrats' chances of taking that Senate seat.

Tea anyone?

Naturally you are wondering, "How can highwayscribery be getting it so right?" But we must confess that has not always been thus. In fact, back when the scribe's belief in the minimum wage left him "outside the mainstream of American politics," he confused his anger with that of everybody else's in the country, much the way Tea Party people do now.

But the presidential election of 2004 fixed THAT.

Now, the scribe is a piece of particulate matter in the same political class around which the President has built his core support, demographically, intellectually...by many measurements.

So much so, that he was offered to apply for a job with Organizing for America, the Obama crowd's grassroots storm-troop group.

the highway scribe declined.

Our support is contingent upon specific policies we are, for the most part, getting from Barack Obama. Plus, we don't do propaganda. If the Obama administration wants to subpoena a reporter over his resources, for example, we observe how the policy runs counter to the First Amendment and our hallowed free press traditions.

And besides, the job requires relocating to D.C., where there are no waves for surfing.

Democrats Banking on Reform

Even as its business model is shredded to smithereens by the Internet, our mainstream media persists in propagating a wisdom utterly conventional.

Why the information industry's foot soldiers insist the Democratic Party is headed for doom in this year's elections, and bury an article headlined "Democrats Top GOP in Fund-Raising for Midterms" is anybody's guess.

Hee Haw!

Back on January 10, in "Dem Dead Dems," the highway scribe said the Democrats' problems were relative and the Republicans were in no position to take advantage of them.

Although highwayscribery hates repeating itself, the popes of American news do not, and so we are obligated in our gadfly's mission to follow suit, repeat, and refute this widespread fallacy.

We are not going to serve up a bunch of stuff you are supping on daily, just a few recent examples of the aforementioned popular pap.

The "San Francisco Chronicle," which ought to know better, put a California spin on things.

The state's Democrats just adjourned their convention and the reporter wonders how they're going to rev things up to 2008 levels of excitement, which, of course they can't.

This begs the question of whether a governing party needs to generate the energy of historic, watershed elections every time voters are convened to settle the polity's direction.

We would suggest there is margin for error and that, in the wake of the health care debate, the Democratic Party is holding its own, hardly imploding as the present-day narrative strains to assert.

At the national level, "Salon" throws in the towel on the mid-terms, too. Then it sugar-coats things for its liberal audience with some high-falutin', demographically based hoo-hah about how 2012 will be better for Democrats.

The article only affirms the highway scribe's hypothesis that journalists think way too much before arriving at like conclusions.

Our editorial board's take, honed over years in opposition, is that Republicans will not fare well just because folks are unhappy with the other guys.

It's a cyclical analysis of American politics that sees parties rise to power, expend themselves of ideas, crash on the shoals of a popular clamor for change, engage in internecine policy purges, and then start hatching ideas anew.

In today's speedy world, this takes less time than before, but it's still a process that requires some years unfold.

highwayscribery's prediction is that, as the premier and dominant figure on the American political landscape, Barack Obama remains the focus of our national narrative by holding serve in 2010, slowly wearing down the opposition, and imposing those programs he was elected to affect.

We predict he gets reelected in 2012 for lack of fresh Republican talent, coupled with a bruising 24-hour cable-news-ified primary season on the right, before getting his hat handed to him in 2014.

If that comes as cold dousing given what you've been reading and watching, witness the flailing Republicans push each other to the right, waffle over keeping or dumping their ineffectual party chairman Michael Steel, while slowly losing their ability to gum-up the legislative works.

Here, an article in the "New York Times," about the Democrats effectively moving on nominations held-up by the GOP for nine months.

It notes that, "Under the threat of late-night sessions, Republicans have agreed to allow votes on two federal judicial nominees, and Democrats hope to force votes on two others this week."

From which we can only surmise that Republican legislators are willing to surrender their ideological bona fides for an early ride home.

Here's another "Times" piece about follow-up health care legislation regulating insurance premium increases.

No GOPers are predicting the end of freedom as we know it this round. So either they've accepted socialist enslavement or don't think that line of reasoning worked too well for them.

The Republicans bet everything on the health care debate. It was a careless wager against something a lot of people have been clamoring decades for.

There was never a clear policy from the opposition.

We never knew if they were against the drug companies, who backed the measure, the insurance companies whom Obama had wisely co-opted early on in the process, the medical community, or the American people themselves.

What they were clearly against, was President Obama's achieving anything.

As Tom Friedman noted in "Everybody Loves a Winner," one needn't be Machiavelli "to believe that the leaders of Iran and Venezuela shared the barely disguised Republican hope that health care would fail and, therefore, Obama's whole political agenda would be stalled and, therefore, his presidency enfeebled."

Now, the highway scribe and countless leftists wanted and worked for much the same in the case of George W. Bush. But he stole an election.

As Frank Rich recently noted, the problem for Tea Partiers, who are otherwise "doing fine," is that Obama is black.

That is less an offense than rigging an election in your big brother's state. Except in the south, the regional rock to which Republicans cling for a modicum of relevance.

As Democrats continue their efforts to keep us healthy at a cheaper price, we'll see how the world did not come to an end and that their positive labors in this area will match their good deeds in the credit card business.

Have you seen your statement lately? It tells what you've forked over in fees and interest for the year to date, maps out your future expenses at current rates of payment, and details alternative sums that wipe out your debt sooner.

The changes are due to new laws, not some new predisposition on the part of big banks who want to be your friend.

They really don't.

And as the "New York Times," noted on April 19, the Democrats have seized a great combination of populist ire at banks and fancy pants investment houses, and their opponents' predilection for all things financial, to make hay at the GOP's expense.

You have to hand it to the Republicans. They know what they stand for and they don't back down when the political climate is searing their values on the grill.

They like banks. The lunch with banks. They want to help banks. They tell bankers not to worry about congressional staffer "punks" harassing them.

Obama was out here in Los Angeles raising money for Sen. Barbara Boxer; someone who is supposedly vulnerable in November, which is not likely.

The President informed his audience about where his opposite number, politically speaking, has been of late. That would be Mitch McConnell, Senate minority leader whom, the president noted, recently convened a little confab including Wall Street Brahmin, himself, and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

"Now, the Senate Republican leader, he paid a visit to Wall Street a week or two ago," the president narrated for his partisans. "He took along the chairman of their campaign committee [that's Cornyn]. He met with some of the movers and shakers up there. I don't know exactly what was discussed, all I can tell you is that, when he came back, he promptly announced he would oppose the financial regulatory reform. He would oppose it. Shocking. And once again he's threatening to tie up the Senate with a filibuster to block progress."

The health care debate turned McConnell's once obscure tools of obstruction into household words so that now "filibuster" is officially a dirty one, unless you're the kind who ties teabags to your NASCAR baseball cap.

The Senate minority leader explained that he was on Wall Street, "gathering information" regarding peoples' views on the proposed reform.

Which is fine, but highwayscribery is still waiting to talk with McConnell so he can air some views, too. He hasn't heard from Mitch yet.

Have you?

While the Obama crowd and their suddenly cohesive cohorts in Congress were working to get financial reform on the Senate floor within a week (the House has already passed a bill), the federal government sued Goldman Sachs for fraud.

The firm just posted another $zillion quarterly profit and word has it the government's case is a tough sell, but the timing's right, isn't it?

If you think it's a mistake an Obama Department of Justice filed the lawsuit around the same time the administration would like the Senate to take up financial regulatory reform, than you're one of those people who thinks the president is stupid.

You are invited by a supporter of the administration to keep doing that.

McConnell is backtracking, because his threat to kill legislation reining in predatory financial institutions, while railing against predatory financial institutions, is fooling nobody and he can't get the 41 votes he needs.

The strategy of gridlock is being affected by a law of diminishing returns and financial reform represents the second big loss in a month's time for Republicans.

And this time it wasn't even close.

By now you should see where things are heading, but might be distracted by flack from an endless barrage of mentions about the Tea Party. The biggest white elephant in American politics since Ross Perot.

Essentially Republican voters, the only thing that would make this 18 percent segment of the population newsworthy is if they actually turned on the GOP and helped consolidate Democratic control.

And it is happening.

They've made Florida's Marco Rubio a poster-boy for the new conservatism, and a dumping ground of Sunshine State Gov. Charlie Crist's political career.

The feckless Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), in a dog-fight with a newly, self-identified Tea Partier, J.D. Hayworth, just "distanced" himself from Crist.

Ham-handed and craven, the Republican establishment has treated one of its proven and successful moderates so roughly that Crist is threatening to run as an independent.

Can you say "split ticket?"

Michael Gerson, a right-leaning columnist with the "Washington Post," thinks McCain's in trouble. The operative phrase to his piece is, "in an environment where anything can happen to an incumbent."

Which is one of our points here. If the electorate is still in a foul mood seven months from now -- something that is open to dispute -- it won't be the President's party alone that pays the price.

With the pain equitably distributed, the Democrats can be expected to hold onto power.

Bank on it.