But it seems pretty clear to me that he [Scott Brown] will win, which means that the FNC/RNC machine has succeeded in perpetuating the meme that somehow Obama is a communist elitist out of touch with real Americans who want their government slashed, while they want no cuts at all in any entitlements, who want the budget balanced without any tax hikes or spending cuts, who demand access to unrestricted healthcare for ever, but refuse to support ways to reduce soaring costs. They want an end to crippling occupations overseas, but they also don’t want to retreat or surrender to terrorists. They want to restore America’s moral standing but retain the torture camp at Gitmo. And when told they cannot have all this, they vote for someone else who can promise it, however utopian their plans are.

A politician cannot change this mood. But Obama now has a clear warning that he must adjust his program for change in a more populist direction. How to do this will not be easy. But the attempt to offer a centrist path against a populist wave on both right and left has clearly been overwhelmed by the passion and anger of the moment and the barrage of lies and propaganda promulgated by a shameless GOP and a pusillanimous media.

But we know where we are now. Obama’s George H W Bush-style focus on the merits of government has served the interests of the country well, in my judgment. But it has met the fury and shamelessness of the hard and ever more extreme right and the staggering amnesia of the electorate. With one major propaganda channel perpetuating an alternative reality and an opposition party motivated by anger, rage and populism, Obama’s careful centrism is the right path but a tough sell. That tension – between substance and politics – will define the rest of his first term.

From UCAR:

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb….This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.

These are data points from public opinion polls about the economy. Fewer people are feeling pessimistic, and more people are feeling optimistic, about the economy since George W. Bush left office and Barack Obama became president.

The chart makes clear that it is too early to judge Obama on the percentage increase in national debt relative to GDP. But it is easy to see the record of his predecessors.

Matthew Yglesias articulates one of the cold hard facts about American conservatives:

The presence of a major ideological movement in the United States of America dedicated to the dual propositions that taxes must never go up, and that government expenditures don’t need to relate to government revenue in any real way as long as the Republican Party is in charge simply makes it almost impossible for the country to be governed in a responsible manner.