No Jingle Bells Yet

No, it's too early. Not Christmas music on the radio. Not yet. Don't hurry me. I'm having too much shaudenfreude watching the Republicans stampede to see who can disown their Grinchlike karma the fastest. Listening to their top honchos on the talk shows, you'd think it was all a matter of window dressing, a couple more Bobby Jindall types, a few more Michelle Bachmann-like women running for office and their problems will be solved. They just don't get it, apparently. Their plantation South political strategy of racial divide and conquer with the intent of preserving a uber-capitalist status quo doesn't work any more. People looked at their platform, listened to the Romney flip flops essentially in the business of protecting the privileges of the one percenters because why? You could presumably end up with more jobs at Staples or Walmart at minimum wage with no health care? No, thanks. We could do better than that and now we will.
And in the end, even the forces of nature seemed to conspire to keep the Romney wave from reaching all the way to the White House, although the flooding from Hurricane Sandy came close.
Everything is apparently going to happen very fast now. The fiscal cliff will be just a speed bump as Boehner bends to the new political reality and Washington finds a way to do business again. Geopolitically, Palestinians feel that they have waited long enough and the only way to get Israel to the bargaining table is to start a war in Gaza and count on world opinion to step in and put a stop to the slaughter before it spreads. Hold on tight for that bloody mess.
And my favorite chess move - California initiated the nation's first cap and trade system to stem carbon dioxide levels this week. You recall cap and trade. No? One of Obama's first legislative initiatives, it died when Democrats from the coal belt allied themselves with Republicans to stall passage in the Senate, and then when the Tea Party swept to power in the 2010 midterm elections it was tarred and feathered as the idea from communist hell and then euthanized as us environmentalists went on a two year carrot fast. It's riding back in on the favorable wind of progress. Activists are hoping that the world's ninth largest economy, California, will provide a model of how to decouple economic growth from fossil fuel dependence using the market based incentives of the cap and trade model. That's the kind of hope I'm talking about. But hold off on Jingle Bells until after the turkey.