Who are the voters who'll find this even remotely persuasive?

Have you not heard of this "Tea Party" "phenomenon"?

I wonder if these deregulating fools would prefer baseball games without umpires? Or football games without referees?

The chaos you'd have in those games is what we have witnessed in the financial markets and the Gulf of Mexico because of their bankrupt philosophy.

The same 24% who still think Barrack Obama was born in Kenya - who likely make up a still larger percentage of the Nevada electorate. Add to them the probable 24% who pay no attention to issues and will vote solely on whether or not the incumbent has pissed them off, and you still have a majority leader in deep doo.

The entire GOP establishment, the Teabag/corporate front groups, and a large swath of the population, that's who.

Angle is another conservative victim of MSM gotcha journalism.

The simple fact that Angle appeared on "ResistNet' and won't take questions from the 'regular media' should be a talking point as well. Candidates who choose to appear on ResistNet, Alex Jones, or on Janet Folger Porter's program if it is revived deserve condemnation for that fact alone.

Unfirtunately a left-wing Congressional demagogue (sorry, but I expect we will come to regret our infatuation with him and find him an embarassment in the long run) has weakened that argument.

They are the tea baggers and the hard core 27% dead enders.

we know that a huge part of the problem with goobermint is 90% of the elected congress critters are corporate concubines.

as for the angle radical speak. just a canard for tea party votes, i think. its the old "government is the problem, elect me to to fix the problem."

then become part of the problem.

Hey, I think a series of strip mines would improve the looks of the Sierra Nevadas. A forest of oil wells would fix the unclutteted feel of Hoover Dam. Oh and I hear they have discovered Gold next to Reno.. and with all that water near by, I think a few gold mines and ore processing plants would be make the area nicer for both residents and tourists.

I think you might be surprised at the percentage of the voters who are caught up with the notion of "resisting" and "taking their country back". As conventional wisdom goes, nobody ever lost much money betting on the overall doziness of the American voter, and few seem to notice the delicious irony that they're being asked to help "take the country back" so that it can return to corporate rule - which was never really gone, just mildly threatened.

You can get Americans to do almost anything as long as you can convince them it's their patriotic duty. Republicans are brilliant at it, and Democrats have just never been much good; they always seem to put initiatives forward with the kind of tentative guilt that begs to be scorned, as if they know you're the one who found their copy of "Hustler" under the mattress.

Oh, and can we kindly stop exaggerating about our enemies. We sometimes write as if they are all puppets being controlled by a union of Magneto, Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor and Master Darque, with Davros behind even them. (I understand why this tactic was valuable in 2004 -- when it looked like Rove was right and we were in a permanent minority. If we know we are going to lose, how much more noble the loss is if the enemies we faced were exaggerated. But we've been winning regularly since then, and now the tactic is hurting us.)

Not only is it simply false, the whole meme insults the American people -- and makes me wonder sometimes if the people who use it are really attached to the basics of democracy.

Of course, these are many of the same people who wrote here -- and more vehemently in other venues -- as late as September 08 that "Obama's blown it. He won't 'swiftboat back'; Americans are far too racist to really vote for a black President; the voting machines are all fixed already; let's just get used to a McCain Palin Presidency and find someone who can actually win in 2012."

And the same people are sure that Reid will lose, that we'll lose gigantically in the November elections, that we may even lose control of the House. And once again what they are saying is what is south of a north-going bovine.

We're going to pick up seats in the Senate, maybe lose about a dozen House seats -- mostly people who will be no big loss to our causes, only to the numbers in the caucus. Unless of course we manage to spread our 'noble defeatism' to the electorate and candidates and they just give up.

I got a question for her...

Given that she seems to want to outlaw the biblical vices, drinking, fornication, etc.,
What is her position on the continuation of gambling in the US and Nevada?

I hope that the strategy of lying low and saying as little as possible works as well for her as it did for Martha Coakley in Massachusetts.

Oh, and Mark, yes I've heard the cliche too. (Wasn't it a variation of a Mencken line -- the same Mencken who fought the New Deal every step of the way, condemned Hitler -- but only for being a 'buffoon' -- but opposed our entrance in WWII, and whose diary showed his anti-Semitism and a Nietzschian attitude that would have made him a fit partner for Ayn?)

The fact is that the Democrats spent almost 32 years underestimating the American voter, letting the Right have the 'moral high ground' on issue after issue, letting them even define the terms of discourse (It's not 'pro-choice' v 'pro-life' it's pro- or anti- forced pregnancy.), and running like hell from the term 'liberal.' And they pretty damn near went broke, at least politically.

(Look at the list. We have Watergate and a chance to build on our majorities from the '74 election, we're running against an unelected and unqualified President -- even he admitted he was not Presidential meterial earlier -- and we pick Jimmy carter, the most apparently conservative of the candidates, and somehow almost blow the election. After Reagan we have as an opponent the totally uncharismatic Bush, with almost no personal following -- and we pick the clownish Dukakis, whose only argument was that, with the "Massachusetts Miracle' he'd been 'good for business.' (And don't forget, in an election we were doomed to lose anyway, we took the bold step of nominating a woman -- but chose "Archie Bunker's Congresswoman" which was true in more than geography. Her racism has been an embarrassment since, but it was obvious even then.)

Once we blew that one we went back to a Southern Governor and combined him with a Southern Senator who wasm't -- and still isn't, anywhere except environmentally -- half the man his father was. We won that one -- because Ross Perot ran. Clinton only got a plurality.

Then we ran Gore against Bush, and whatever the 'truth' about Florida, there was no reason why Gore should have run so badly that Florida could determine the election. Then we picked John Kerry, who ran as "Bush-lite" (Remember "Reporting for Duty!") despite an honestly Liberal record.

Then we picked the most progressive, the most liberal candidate we'd run since the (worn-out) Mondale, the first true liberal to be chosen when we had a chance to win since Humphrey.

And for those of you who haven't noticed, he actually won!.

Who has been right about the appeal of our values to the American people -- the ones who consider them too stupid to learn, or people like me who know that Democracy takes time, but that it usually gets where it is going -- which is towards liberalism.

And what? Now it's not permitted to paraphrase a common quote without implying endorsement of all the author's proclivities and idiosyncracies? I'm just fond of the turn of phrase; I know nothing about Mencken outside that, and didn't think it was necessary to learn.

I devoutly hope you're right, and that it's simply a case of the Right getting all the airtime and yelling the loudest that substitutes for actual momentum. But to me, the electorate reminds of nothing so much as Charlie Brown falling for the football trick one more time. Remember the man-on-the-street interviews in 2000, and the moonie-eyed midwesterners rhapsodizing that it was "s'nice" to hear a candidate "come right out and say that he loved The Lord"? They were speaking of that slick-talkin' Johnny-come-lately Texan, George W. Bush, of course, and if he ever obeyed a single implied Christlike dictate after his election, I don't know about it. I recall dissing him repeatedly to a bedrock Republican friend who lived (at the time) in Montana, and only backing off when he appeared to be getting genuinely angry. He's certainly not "too stupid to learn"; he's a very bright and perceptive man with a generally realistic outlook. He just has a little blind spot about Republican leaders, and an immovable prejudice about Democrats; even now, his annual family newsletters (full of folksy tidbits about family outings and hobbies) speak of "getting used to living under socialism".

To me, he's symbolic of the American voter; not necessarily stupid, but set in his ways and not interested in listening to any message that might contradict his mindset. It's extremely difficult to reach an electorate that has dialled off your frequency, because they're not listening to you - they're listening to somebody who tells them what they want to hear.

Again, I sincerely hope you're right, because I respect your opinions and mostly support your reasoning. There's no reason to be defeatist, and I have no stake in American elections anyway. But I've seen too many people unable to identify what they're being fed once they have a blindfold on to downplay the effect of message control. And there's no denying the Republicans are good at it - they have to be, because they've got nothing else.

Who are the voters who'll find this even remotely persuasive?

The Beckheads who have been convinced by thirty years of conservative propaganda that government and unions are responsible for all of their woes, and if they just "let the free market work" (meaning eliminate all regulation) it will somehow produce only what they want, rather than whatever makes the most money.

Hopefully, there aren't enough of those in NV (combined with voters who will vote against Reid even with an alternative this insane) to win a Senate seat.

I agree with her that Massey was over-regulated. The problem isn't with the regulations. All of their violations prove how many are in place. The problem is with the pathetic consequences for breaking the regulations. Massey and others like it should have been bankrupt years ago after paying the overwhelming fines and penalties for their chosen method of operating.