Month: June 2010

Antic weirdness is infecting the midterm elections in the form of manipulative shenanigans being pulled by incumbents in both parties seeking to dilute the effects of a disenchanted electorate. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

First, there was the Alvin Greene story in South Carolina. Like Venus from Zeus, he sprang fully formed from the forehead of some Republican political operative who passed him the do-re-me required to enter the South Carolina Senate primary. He didn’t campaign, is up on a felony charge, is unemployed, probably brain-damaged and yet more than 100,000 South Carolina voters — at least some of whom don’t really exist — voted for him and now he’s the Democratic candidate for Jim DeMint’s Senate seat.

Most of those who voted for Greene said they thought they were voting for legendary singer the Reverend Al Green. But then, that’s South Carolina for you.

Next came allegations that U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has, like Dr. Frankenstein, created a female Tea Party candidate from leftover parts of a “quasi-paralegal assistant who works in a law office” and part-time pollster named Victoria Torres to siphon off Republican votes from his opponent in November. As with Greene, Torres appeared out of nowhere and declared herself a candidate running for the Tea Party, despite protestations from actual Tea Party members that there actually is no such thing as the Tea Party party, that it’s just a political movement, not a party.

Right. Tell Sarah Palin that.

[…]

Earlier this week — with Texas GOP Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to BP still still ringing in the public’s collective ear — Thomas Sowell, an elderly right-wing economist and commentator, published a bizarre defense of BP in an op-ed for Investors.com in which he compared Pres. Obama’s deal with the company to make a $20 billion down payment on its promise to clean up the Gulf to the Nazi Enabling Act of 1933, a law passed by the German parliament two months after Adolph Hitler’s election as chancellor:

[D]uring the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law “for the relief of the German people.” That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people — indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others. If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.

Yes, that’s right. In defending BP’s role in destroying the Gulf of Mexico, Sowell compared Hitler’s strong-arming the legislature of Germany into voting to give him dictatorial powers through the Enabling Act with Pres. Obama convincing BP CEO Tony Hayward to put in writing his company’s promises to clean up the Gulf and pay reparations to small business owners and others whose livelihoods have been devastated by the oil spill.

[…]

The “small people” — middle-class and low-income people in the United States and abroad — who saw their income and the value of their assets slashed during 2009, the first full year of the Bush Recession, may have wondered where all that money went.

Here is a clue from the annual Capegemini and Merrill Lynch Word Wealth Report. Read it and weep, fellow serfs:

State of the World’s Wealth: The world’s population of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) grew 17.1 percent to 10.0 million in 2009. HNWI financial wealth increased 18.9 percent from 2008 levels to $39 trillion. After losing 24.0 percent in 2008, Ultra-HNWIs saw wealth rebound 21.5 percent in 2009.

Steve Bertoni at Forbes.com provides analysis:

[…]