Chilly-air and overcast on the first Monday in November — every once in awhile this morning, my little section of California’s north coast does get washed with some cloud-filtered sunshine for a few minutes.
Maybe if the wind kicks up a bit, so will the shine.

Tomorrow is Election Day, but here on the Left Coast, it’s ho-hum as ‘…a non-competitive gubernatorial race, a fairly noncontroversial drought-fighting measure and the state isn’t a factor on the national stage for Tuesday’s midterm elections where Republicans are trying to take control of the Senate.’

On a national scale, though, a $4 billion idiot’s fancy.

According to CNN, that’s how much will be spent for this lever-pulling no-show event, making tomorrow the most-expensive mid-term election in US history:

That kind of money could also buy 25 F-18 fighter jets, pay for more than 12,000 students’ K-12 education and have enough left over to produce a summer blockbuster.
Or, maybe it makes more sense to think about elections for what they are — glorified marketing campaigns.
It took Apple, the world’s most valuable company, the last four years or so to spend four billion advertising dollars.

And the bad-reamed asshole of the above, the state of Kentucky — Joseph Gerth last Saturday in The Courier-Journal of Louisville, KY:

80 million.
By the time the last commercial in this year’s U.S. Senate race airs sometime Tuesday, that’s how much will have been spent on the Kentucky election.
That’s not a typo, either.
$80 million.
It’s an outrageous amount of money that for the past year and a half has been used to tell us largely four things:
Mitch McConnell has been in the Senate for too long and it’s time to bring him home. And he’s a bad person.
And:
Alison Lundergan Grimes is a whole lot like President Barack Obama. And she’s a bad person.
Now with all due respect to my friends in the television industry whose employers saw this election as a huge cash cow, it’s a ridiculous amount of money that could have been spent in much more noble pursuits than making voters think the worst of one’s opponent.
…
The Center for Responsive Politics reckons that $78 million had been spent by the middle of last week and that doesn’t count the millions of dollars in “issue” ads that are intended to influence the race but aren’t counted in the total because they don’t expressly advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate.
It will be among the most expensive U.S. Senate races in U.S. History and it will happen in one of the nation’s poorest states.
The $80 million being spent is more than the amount of money that every man, woman and child in Robertson County, Kentucky, combine to earn over a two-year period.
It’s $50 for every vote that is expected to be cast next week.

Shit-on-stick — you were talking serious money the micro-second you opened your mouth. Although it’s hard to predict voter turnout in midterms mainly due to so many individual-little races, most political writers I’ve read expect a low volume, but no one really knows for sure until the fat lady sings, or way-after the polls close.
From Pew Research last week:

Congress is even less popular this year than before.
In July, when we asked the question, 69 percent of Americans said they had an unfavorable opinion of Congress, compared with 65 percent in 2012 and 56 percent in 2010.
Nonetheless, close to half of registered voters (48 percent) said this month that they’d like to see their own representative win a new term — nearly unchanged from the last two election periods.
However, the share saying their representative shouldn’t be re-elected has steadily risen.

So people don’t know shit. Or think they do, which might be worse.
One big problem is the bullshit GOP — now overwhelmed by an self-remaining influence of the bat-shit crazy Tea Party, and if these clowns sweep the Senate tomorrow, and take extra seats in the House, the shit will stick to the fan forever. Although President Obama’s approval rating to down to about 42 percent, Congress is even worse, under 13.5 percent approval ratings — mainly people are just sick of it all.
So if you’re incompetent and an asshole (GOPer), fear and pre-1950 voting restrictions come in handy.
Rachel Maddow writing this weekend in the Washington Post pretty-much summed up America 2014:

For all the politicking on the threat posed by the Islamic State, Congress decided to neither debate nor vote on the U.S. military fight against the group in Iraq or Syria.
As the president announced expanded military deployments in the region, Congress canceled its remaining workdays in October and November, until after the election.
Congress thinks it’s more advantageous to run ads about how scary the Islamic State is than to face the real threat of actually taking a vote on what to do about that threat.

And coupled along in tandem is a true-horror the little, nasty-looking prick cartooned above, Ted Cruz, will go bat-shit bonkers in the Senate if Republicans do take control, and won’t stand for Mitch McConnell being in the way (via MarketWatch): ‘If the GOP takes control of the upper chamber, Cruz said the first order of business should be a series of hearings about President Barack Obama, “looking at the abuse of power, the executive abuse, the regulatory abuse, the lawlessness that sadly has pervaded this administration.”‘
Fuck everything else.
On the terrible subject of the most-terrible problem facing the planet, climate change, the little shit will lie willfully: “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that — that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened…”
Yet curls his hypocritical ass and hyperventilate/exacerbate the problem: “We ought to open up energy innovation across the board and – and remove the barriers to every form of energy.”
Cruz is one turd of a guy.
There’s a good, interesting read by Kim Messick at Salon this morning on the shit-eating history of the GOP being assholes, where governing is not primary.
Key point:

The party as it exists today combines the paranoia mined by McCarthy and Goldwater with Gingrich’s conception of politics as a theatre of apocalyptic cruelty. (Reagan’s crude redaction of an already crude Goldwaterism abides, but his sunny uplift, his sense of America as the future and of the future as untrammeled promise, has been rejected.)
The Clinton impeachment, Islamophobia, Sarah Palin, birtherism, death panels, economic-stimulus-as-socialism, “legitimate rape,” Second Amendment solutions, Benghazi!, ISIS fighters on the U.S. – Mexico border, Ebola! Ebola! Ebola! — this is the bitter harvest of the GOP’s 60-year declension into a party of white, rural Southern ressentiment.

Tomorrow should be a shiner, I guess.

And speaking of Republican assholes — two Sundays ago, I got out of bed thinking it was DST Fall Back Day. Instead, the end to DST was yesterday.
No wonder I thought wrong, old guy, force of habit — from 1966 to 2006, the event was the last Sunday in October, but George Jr. meddled in more than just crimes against humanity, but also displayed a kiss-ass to time (and big oil), okaying the Energy Policy Act of 2005, knocking Fall Back day further back a week to the first Sunday in November.
The boy really don’t got no sense at all and it ain’t just bad timing.
The Washington Post, from July 30, 2005, and the reality of that Energy Policy:

The provision was just one example of how the energy bill, touted as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil or moderate gasoline prices, has been turned into a piñata of perks for energy industries.
“Every industry gets their own little program,” said Myron Ebell of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“There’s pork in there for everybody.”

How so-way-quickly people forget.

(Illustration above found here).