Well…have been reading some of the postmortems of the recent election and there are a couple of things that I find striking about the election here in Michigan. First is the turnout…where only about 50% of the people in Kent country voted versus about 66% in the 2008 election…a drop that is significantly larger than normal for a mid-term. But, the second thing are the excuses and rationalizations that are being offered by the non-voters on why they didn’t vote this time. “It doesn’t matter who is in charge”, “I was turned off by the negative ads”, “I had too much to do”, “I forgot about it”….were just a few of the excuses that were offered in the Press this morning…and what this says to me is that apathy, not the repubs message is what lost this election for the dems.

But, what is more important than voting? What is more important than keeping this country on the path back to equality in economic possibilities…what is more important than voting in your own self-interest? What these excuses have done is to make certain that income inequality will get worse, that the richest one percent will continue to steal more an more of the economic pie that should go to the people that make the profits possible. We are now in an experiment here in Michigan where we go back to the bad old Engler days of unbridled capitalism and the god-like reverence that the repubs have for the “free market”…a market that is always rigged for their rich buddies while the middle class disappears with a whimper and not a bang…geez…