Did you vote this past Tuesday (if not sooner)?
I did.
At a little after 12:00 Noon, I arrived at my neighborhood polling place (Omaha's Dundee Presbyterian Church) and spent the next 45 minutes filling out my four-page ballot, being careful to fill the circles completely. (Lots of candidates and lots of special ballot issues this time.)
Yes, I got home just in time to rest a little bit before going off to my factory job. Man, I was still fired up about having voted.
When I got home from work and turned on my TV set to find out just how this year's US midterm election went, I was furious.
MSNBC's and CNN's election-coverage hosts were talking about how the Nuts had just snagged complete control of Congress.
That's right. I said "Nuts."
The Associated Press had reported that America's voters, as a group, were in a funk over the state of the nation's economy. The online article that AP reporter turned in talked about how a sizable number of electors were displeased over the way Barack Obama had been doing things lately.
What's more, the report stated that, in general, those who cast ballots this past Tuesday didn't like the leadership of either major political party.
That didn't stop most voters from giving the Nuts enough seats to give them 52 Senate seats all together when the 114th Congress convenes on 1-7-2015. To top it all off, voters enabled the Nuts to extend their lead in the House.
That's right. I said "Nuts." (After all, Republican leaders had chased the moderates out of that party...leaving the Nuts to dominate it.)
The way I tell it, voters had no good reason to give the so-called GOP control of the US Senate while giving the party more US House seats than it's presently got.
Voters: You really believe the people who shut down this country's government and who continually ignore your needs because you don't have Karl Rove's or David Koch's or Charlie Koch's money actually have your back?
This past Tuesday, you poured gasoline on an already-raging fire.
And when John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Co. get through, we're all going to pay.
You've signaled that you've given up on this country. That's the only way I see it.
.
Today's Republicans- especially the Washington ones- have already made it clear that they don't care about passing jobs bills or infrastructure bills or immigration-reform bills or stronger gun-control laws or raising the minimum wage (let alone making the Affordable Care Act- whose guts came from Republican minds to begin with- better).
They only care about getting Obama out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It's a question of time when it comes to how fast McConnell will call for a vote to repeal the ACA...and another one to impeach the nation's first non-Caucasian chief executive (simply because he's non-Caucasian).
You voters, as a whole, let that happen...and so did the ones who wouldn't darken a polling place this week.
Tuesday night, a coworker at my job asked some of her fellow crewmembers if they'd gone to the polls that day.
It HURT to hear some of those coworkers say "no," let alone hear their excuses: "I didn't study up." "I didn't know it was Election Day." "I forgot."
Not even the presence of a minimum-wage-increase initiative here in Nebraska could get those folks to the polls. (Luckily, this state's lowest wage, now $7.25 per hour, will go up...to $9.00 an hour by 2016.)
And what about the Wisconsinites who've been complaining about Gov. Scott Walker's antics...only to let him get back in? And the Kansans who've taken their governor, former US Sen. Sam Brownback, to task over his gutting education funds in the Sunflower State...only to reelect him anyway?
These people had better not complain the next time their governors throw rank-and-file citizens under the bus!
Now I've got a message for the Democrats who lost a couple of days ago (especially the ones seeking national office or trying to upgrade their national gigs):
STOP BEING SO DAMN MEALY-MOUTHED!!! TELL PEOPLE WHERE YOU REALLY STAND...AND DO IT AS FORCEFULLY AS POSSIBLE!!!
Democrats keep throwing away all sorts of votes in midterm elections because these people just won't stand up for their accomplishments. For instance, instead of sticking up for the ACA, too many Donkeys ran away from it!
Gutless!
Alison Lundergan Grimes really didn't deserve to trade her secretary-of-state-in-Kentucky job for a US Senate seat from the Bluegrass State. It hurts to say that...but when Grimes didn't have the guts to say she voted for Obama (in at least one leap year), she probably lost a ton of support.
And Bruce Braley ultimately cut his own throat by saying that Chuck Grassley was just a farmer without a law degree. Not even an endorsement from The Des Moines Register could bail Braley out. (Sure didn't help Willard Romney in 2012.)
You just don't knock farmers in Iowa...home of some of the world's most productive topsoil. I spent most of my childhood in Des Moines, and even I know you don't knock the men and women who feed the world.
What's more, I wanted Braley to win in the very state I came from!
Instead, voters in the Hawkeye State elected Joni Ernst...only because of her cute little "hog castration" commercials.
You know what? Ernst is going to prove just as embarrassing to Iowans as- if not more embarrassing than- the newly-reelected Steve King.
I can imagine all the meetings Ernst, Thom Tillis (North Carolina's newest US senator), and Ted Cruz are going to have to spread their nut-job ideas.
So, there you are. I'm still angry about what just went down.
It's hard for me to see whatever silver linings emerged from this century's fourth US midterm election...even the fact that some Florida voters kicked the oily, despicable Steve Southerland out of the US House and replaced him with Gwen Graham, or the fact that here in the Cornhusker State, some of us voters threw Lee Terry Jr. out on his rear end and enabled Brad Ashford to get the seat.
Now Terry the Younger can enjoy that "good house" a lot longer.
Still, I'm at the point where I'm reluctant to turn on my TV set and watch the 114th Congress spend the next two years doing further damage to the American Brand.
But then, too many of us asked for this.
SHAME ON US!!!
One of my pet interests is politics. (Okay...if you've read "Boston's Blog" for any length of time, you get that I'm into politics as well as being into many other things.)
And from time to time, I've mentioned that I was born in, raised in, and educated in Iowa.
I reached voting age while living in Iowa. In fact, the very first year I could actually cast an official ballot was 1976, and the very first move I made as a registered voter was to pull the lever for Jimmy Carter.
I-O-W-A.
That's right. The Hawkeye State.
The Reasonable State.
It's the first state you visit if you have any iota of interest in becoming America's next commander in chief. After all, every leap year means that Iowa's the first state to get to decide who ought to be the Last Two Standing that November.
The state I was born in- its reputation as The Reasonable State notwithstanding- inexplicably (or with good reason, depending on your point of view) sent a man named Steve King to the US House next month in 2002.
If you've been watching TV these last dozen years, you've seen King interviewed on lots of political-discussion shows and seen him make plenty of sound bytes...and seen him make plenty of remarks that make you wonder: "Was this man really born in Iowa? Who let him out?"
I'm going to go Natalie Maines (remember her from the Dixie Chicks?) and say: "I'm ashamed that Steve King came out of the same state I did: Iowa."
When Iowa's junior US senator, Tom Harkin, announced that he was going to kick back after spending forty years in Washington (first as a US representative), some political pundits thought King would go after Democrat Harkin's seat and give it back to the Republicans...and, in the process, make the exact same move Harkin and Republican Chuck Grassley did: Supersizing a US House seat into one from the US Senate. (Grassley officially became a US senator in 1981; four years later, Harkin got in...and went on to successfully champion the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law by George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990.)
Yep..what a field day King and Texas' newest US senator, Ted Cruz, would have in that division of Congress, complaining about some people's "cantaloupe-size" calves (and plotting plenty of government shutdowns).
As things have turned out, Reince Priebus and his pals in the Republican National Committee didn't need Steve King to run for the US Senate here in 2014.
With US Rep. Bruce Braley looking to keep that Senate seat in the hands of the Donkeys, his biggest challenger is a state senator from Red Oak...a woman known for her "hog castration" commercials.
Iowa's one of the few US states still yet to elect a woman to Congress.
This year, it might elect two...or one...or none.
One thing's for sure: I'd rather see Staci Appel get Tom Latham's US House seat than see Joni "Hog Castration" Ernst beat out Braley to replace one of Congress' leading lights, Harkin.
Jimmy Fallon might like Ernst's campaign commercials...but if he ever decided to pull back the curtain and see behind the hog-castration demonstrations, The Tonight Show's newest host might not be so quick to fall in love with this farmer-turned military veteran-turned Iowa state senator.
First of all, at a time when more and more American workers continue to lose their buying power [due to 33 years (and counting) of GOP-led assaults on the nation's middle-income and low-income families], Ernst doesn't want the country's minimum wage increased.
I'd like to see her try to live on $7.25 an hour...let alone raise a family on that amount.
Second, Ernst wants to criminalize abortions...across the board.
Period.
End of discussion.
Iowa's latest Republican nominee for a US Senate gig has called Barack Obama a dictator...yet she probably, like so many of the Senate Republicans she's trying to join, just flat-out admires the job Vladimir Putin's doing heading up Russia's government.
And you know that, if the GOP takes over the United States Senate next January, and Joni Ernst is part of the takeover, she'll stump for Obama's impeachment.
Ernst, last but not least, thinks the very US government she's trying to join gives the country's citizens practically everything, and has attacked large groups of people for depending on the very organization she's trying to join.
I just got through reading, on www.dailykos.com, an article that talked of a 2013 radio interview Ernst was part of. In it, the Woman from Red Oak spoke of "reeducating" Americans about the values of being self-sufficient: "It's going to be very painful and we know that. So do we have the intestinal fortitude to do that?"
Yeah, Joni. Right. It takes great intestinal fortitude to further penalize millions of wage-earning Americans who don't get to log in enough hours of work to try and support their families and other loved ones.
In that same interview, Ernst complained about how Americans don't rely on family too much anymore...let alone on churches and on private organizations: "They used to have wonderful food pantries..."
Those food pantries are still out there, contrary to Ernst's teachings.
It's just that, in this day and age, the pantries are swamped.
What do you expect when items in general continue to get priced out of the range of rank-and-file Americans...Americans who probably haven't received a raise in pay since Mike and Molly premiered?
When people can't financially contribute to churches and private organizations because those same people can't get raises in pay and, in too many cases, have to decide whether to purchase groceries or get the utility bill paid up for the month, and those same people find that their relatives are in the exact same boat, where are those same people supposed to turn...in an economy that, in the 1980s, got flipped from consumer-friendly to investor-friendly?
Where?
Let's see Ernst answer that one.
You know, the last time a major political candidate went out to talk this same kind of trash, only to see that rhetoric go out nationally on TV, radio, the Internet, and every other medium you can think of...well, that candidate lost.
That candidate was Willard Mitt Romney...the same man who recently went to Iowa to fight to get Joni Ernst elected to the US Senate.
Yep, we've heard so much about how this year's midterm election is THAT crucial...about how control of this country's Senate is at stake.
And we've heard about how it all could come down to whether those Iowans who decide to vote on 11-4-2014 want to let Braley take the next step up the political ladder...or if they want to bring Ernst in.
Really, Iowa...are you sure you want to take a chance on a woman who truly doesn't want you to make ends meet?
Iowans: You sure you want to vote against your best interests, your self-interests?
Are you sure you want to put your reputation as the nation's Reasonable State on the line by giving Cruz another sidekick?
ARE YOU REALLY SURE?
