Scott, it's been a mess since you took office.

That it has, Eileen. He's just being a whiney wuss, as usual. I'm sure the hearty, resilient souls in Nome (http://www.alaskapublic.org/) feel really badly for him today - not.

What did they EXPECT to happen? If you call public union members like the police the enemy, then what's the solution? Replace them with Blackwater? Vilify the heroes of 9/11? Really?

We ARE all in this together. What's happening is that some folks are being prevented from kicking holes in the boat just because the Koch bros have a sweet deal on rafts.

Further, word is that Gov. Snyder has lined up Flint Michigan as the next on the list for Emergency Financial Management and there are still too many states that regard this as a wonderful new innovation they want to try out if given an excuse.

Victory laps? The work has barely even started.

aren't they trying to recall Synder?

hope they can!

The Republicans got in bed with the Tea Party. Despite the fact that there are 50 ways to leave your lover, the Republicans haven't found a way to leave the Tea Party. Don't expect sympathy from the Dems.

Tea Party support has fallen to about a quarter of the American public. Tea Party rallies now mostly consist of the speakers and the press sent to cover them. Basically they are now just a nome de plume of the the people who were backing them in the first place, i.e. Dick Armey and the Koch bros.

I'm actually w/ John on this one although I do understand the sentiments of everyone else. I believe it is better to turn a hand out to the Republicans and show them there actually is a difference between the parties and how each group operates. Our victory was not, nor should it ever be confused as being so, for the direct benefit of Democrats although yes the Democratic Party as a machine will benefit from these victories. The point here, however, is that our policies are meant to help people and not disparage them. Turning the finger now to Republicans and saying *in Nelson's voice* "Ha-ha" doesn't really help to establish that, in fact, progressive policies are meant so that we can all benefit. Republicans- at least the more fringe of the Tea Party and the elected officials representing them- believe that focusing policy on coddling the egos of the top 1% will invariably make things better for the bottom 99%. Progressives believe that if you look out for the bottom 99% the top 1% will invariably do better. Our goal should be to show people that if you are a part of the 99% this is your victory too, even if you have been fooled into thinking the Republican lies are good policies.

'Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly' -Thomas Kuhn

We understand the conventional conservative organizational roots of the Tea Party and the role of conventional progressive organizations in the Ohio vote.

What we didn't expect was Mississippi vote or the impact of the Occupy movement, or the Arab Spring. This is new stuff. As Hayes very aptly put it: "successful social movements innovate. They create new kinds of politics. They reform what we think politics look like."

We understand the conventional state of the art championed by folks like Rove and Penn basically transferring advanced mass market techniques to politics. Both sides basically run in a tier structure of a multi level marketing campaigns and sell their candidate or issue as if it were tupperware. At the leaves of the tree are carefully identified individuals who have significant informal networks into local churches, PTA and community organizations. It is a machine, but they use the term "grass roots" organizing to refer to it. This is utter crap because it has very little grounding in the emotions of bonding, service and community. Volunteers instead feel like they have been used- especially when the initiative or candidate create conditions that lead the people to believe they have been duped. Even during the excitement of the campaign, people can't help feeling they are being treated like drones- probably because that is precisely how the apparatus of elite political operatives regards them. They are the brains, the elites and we are the Hobbesian body. They feel that without them, we would be a headless body- a mob. That may very well be true of the Tea party followers- as they stampede desperately from one candidate to another. Rove looks on in horror as the establishment right seek to re-assert control. But in his case, the real conservative grass roots know the truth- after they put Bush in power, Rove and the other conservative elites had no use for them. Ater the country was driven into the ditch, it was as if the steering wheel was broken off and their vehicle of angry conservatives could no longer be controlled by the establishment elites.

The powerful emotional narratives on conservative talk radio are those of fear and anger. Fear and Anger are powerful motivators, but when commentators go off on that sort of reduction of the Occupy movement, it rings false. Sure there is a great deal of indignation and anger about the financial elites both here and in Europe. But Zuccotti park and the other occupy protests embrace nonviolence, not symbols of coercion like the gun toting protesters at Tea Party demonstrations. What binds them is more about empathy than hate.

That is the structural weakness of the conservatives, because surges of anger are good for momentary bursts, but not for sustained efforts. It can be understood in very simple neurobiological terms. Narratives favored by conservatives achieve limbic system resonance with much greater reliance on norepinephrine system emotions of fear, anxiety and anger. Progressives narratives tend to achieve limbic resonance in mass groups by relying on the dopamine system which by contrast promotes empathic harmony.

The rationalist elite feel they have a driver seat where they have the levers of power. But they are playing from an 18th century theory of mind, and theory of societies composed of such non existent minds. The election of 2011 in Ohio will suggest to many Dem elites that the steering wheel is still connected to the body politic. And that is where they are very very mistaken. They haven't a clue about the power murmurring in Zuccotti park.

I don't see Dems doing a victory dance with these elections because they have little bearing on the future elections. The Ohio referendum on health care is at odds with the progressive movement. This fact is not lost on the Dems. But there is no point in trying to work with Republicans as long as the Tea Party is in control. Dems are just as bewildered by OWS as the Republicans and they are unsure how to deal with the burgeoning movement. Both sides understand the reason why OWS has spread nationwide and the world, but they have no real plans on doing anything including discourse to address the issues with elections so near. If OWS continues growing, the political leaders across the world will be forced to deal with the fairness issue sooner rather than later or they will be buried under voter anger directed at those in power.

If it is a conventional movement with no particular innovation, then it will pass. I am interested in whether there is a murmur of a new kind of politics at work here.

It is too soon to tell whether OWS is going to change politics beyond the next elections. Both parties are going to pretend to do something responsive. But whether cosmetic changes in our political system are enough to satisfy the movement remains to be seen. I would expect the parties are going to look to a divide and conquer strategy be trying to co-opt a segment of the group. Republicans may throw some bones to older people while Dems may throw some bones to the younger more liberal people. The breads and circuses approach may not succeed for either party because the issue is the structure of the political and economic system, not some transient issue that can be easily dealt with in the current system.

Your comment for some reason made me recall Willie Brown's response to Occupy Wall Street early in October. He was on Matthews show I think and they were just trying to make sense of it and his response jumped out due to its orthodoxy. He was advocating a commission to investigate and to bring those responsible to pay for their transgressions. It seemed to so utterly and perfectly miss the point.

The sense that it is an new kind of politics is that Arab spring, OWS and Indignados spread like a contagion in a leaderless fashion. That is one of the hallmarks of a superorganism. The metaphor of a murmuration of starlings seems to model this phenomenon closest- both of spontaneous group political action but also of thought emerging from large numbers of harmonic synapse firings in a way that makes a macro pattern visible.

To go a little non-linear on you, possibly a particular kind of social software can be designed to better surface these harmonics to members of a swarm with the same affinity. That sort of thing might not be relevant to 2012, but maybe 2016. This would be a radical departure from the statistical market segment analysis that Dean's system does, and would be somewhat subversive to the goals of such systems, because it is not a mechanism useful for elites to govern a crowd, but to amplify the ability of a crowd to spontaneously develop its own themes and service functions largely on its own initiative.

That would provide some infrastructure for a new kind of politics- a swarmer sort of politics that is much less reliant on media or political elites. (No offense to Maddow, or Obama, Hayes or Warren).

The software will most likely be an app(s) for the ubiquitous cell phone which is the universal device for communication in the world.

Of course. My hammer is computational linguistics and maybe this is not that great a nail but looking at these starlings it just really makes sense to me. On the other hand maybe I am having a John Nash delusional moment. What the heck. It is worth a shot.

It says so on their bumper stickers.

Okay, morbid and may be a little inappropriate...but I always like humor. And I'm a conservative!

TRMS doesn't have control over advertisements. The adds are annoying as hell, but TRMS can't do anything about it.

You have to view the ads as a great waste of advertising dollars. Exxon and Chevron are operating on the assumption the repetitive commercials on their "wonderfulness" is going to change people's minds. On Fox it might work, but I doubt anyone who watches MSNBC has changed their opinion. But if the companies want to keep throwing their advertising dollars away, then MSNBC is more than happy to take their money.

Don't forget Bank of America. Get pissed, stay pissed, don't give them one thin dime.

I agree. It makes it look like you are so hard up for advertising dollars that you have to take it from the oil companies and perpetuate their lies. TRMS does a great job, the ads don't fit.

I don't see it as looking hard up, but rather it is pure capitalism when a company that is philosophically opposed by its audience chooses to advertise in that media. It really demonstrates that the people in the PR arms of those companies are not very bright. Even though the ad rates are cheap, you still want to reach a receptive audience.

I usually enjoy the ads simply because it confounds my thinking-machine (brain) that Exxon and everyone else thinks that these commercials are some how going to convince people fracking is safe. Like for instance the new add where the engineer is talking about how fracking operations take place directly under wells and waterways, but because those waterways are protected by concrete there's "very little" danger to the consumer. I seriously wish I could've sat in on the board meeting w/ the PR department to hear the guy pitch "Hey let's tell people that a few feet of rock and concrete are all that separate them from ingesting chemicals that can kill their children overnight, cause cancer, and cause massive birth defects. What do you guys think?" It's just like wow.

LOL well after his phony phone call from the Kock bros, they will not aloud him close to a phone. so he can do is tweet.