Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest: Bloggers Were Right: It WAS Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

Steve Bates at the Yellow Something Something: Hey Democrats… The Election Could Have Sucked Worse.

Lambert at Corrente: The midterms were a referendum on Obama from the D base, and that’s why the Ds lost.

Duncan at Eschaton: Here We Go Again

I don’t know how politicians lacked the self-preservation skills to recognize that if they failed to deliver on the economy they would fail, but that’s what happened.

Paul Krugman: Blame The Whiny Center

So, we’re already getting the expected punditry: Obama needs to end his leftist policies, which consist of … well, there weren’t any, but he should stop them anyway.

What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street. And now we’re in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we’re stuck.

The first President I voted for was a Texan who came into office with the same type of flood that Obama did, but instead of putzing around and being conciliatory, Lyndon Baines Johnson went to work and got his Great Society programs passed. It wasn’t easy, parts of the program were filibustered by Democrats, but Barack Obama couldn’t have been elected without LBJ’s program. He took his “political capital” and spent it to get things done. With LBJ, “kicking butt and taking names” was not a figure of speech.

He damaged his legacy with the Vietnam War which is why people tend to forget the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and the other Great Society bills he pushed through in his single term.

Both of the redistricting amendments exceeded the 60% threshold and are now part of the Florida constitution. In addition, the attempts by the legislature to overturn the public financing and classroom size amendments failed.

This makes the election of Scott as governor less of a blow and signals real change in the make-up of Florida’s legislature and its Congressional delegation. The Republicans will have to turn in their crayons.

After being sandbagged by Markos of DKos [he suggested Crist run as an independent] and Obama [the rumor that Meek was dropping out in favor of Crist was traced back to the White House], Kendrick Meek didn’t really have a chance, so we are stuck with Rubio.

The turn-out was just under 50%, which isn’t exceptionally low, but the win on redistricting shows that liberals and progressives were voting, but not for a number of Democratic candidates. If the leader of the party won’t support the party’s candidates, why should voters?

Position: 15.4N 75.2W [10 PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: North-Northwest [330°] near 6 mph [ 9 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Wind Gusts: 55 mph [ 90 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 70 miles [110 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1003 mb.

Currently about 295 miles [470 km] Southwest of Port au Prince, Haiti and about 210 miles [335 km] South-Southeast of Kingston, Jamaica.

A Hurricane Warning is in effect for Haiti.

A Hurricane Watch is in effect for the southeastern Bahamas including the Turks & Caicos Islands.

A Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for Jamaica; the southern coast of the Dominican Republic from the Haiti border eastward to Barahona; and the Cuban provinces of Guantanamo, Santiago de Cuba, & Holguin.

Tomas is again strengthening and turning to the North.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]