Wednesday link dump: The center didn't hold

• Unnamed senior Democrats blame conservative Democrats for yesterday's debacle. Which sounds right to me. If the magnitude of the Republican pickup is due to a nationwide employment crisis and lack of economic security, it's pretty clear that while the President is partly to blame for not staffing the Fed, "moderate" Democrats -- mostly in the Senate -- are primarily to blame for forcing a watered-down stimulus and then rejecting further stimulus. People would've hated the stimulus less if it had been effective -- and if it hadn't been conflated in the popular imagination with TARP (which no politician should defend, "success" or no). If aggressive government action had led to less unemployment, people would currently be much less pretend-worried about "the deficit," which is the sort of thing voters worry about when only one party presents a serious-sounding explanation for what's going wrong and how to fix it.
• This is a link to a news website article about the 2012 election.
• Just to remind everyone about the hilarious illegitimacy of the United States Senate, here are various Senators and Senator-elects who received fewer votes than Alvin Greene yesterday.
• Meanwhile, Antonin Scalia is fighting for your right to torture people -- in video games.
• Jon Chait explains why the House will remain Republican for a long time. If that's true (and it's a convincing case) then the big-picture, long-term problems -- the destruction of the climate, the continued concentration of wealth in the hands of an increasingly powerful and tiny elite, the death of our industrial sector and its replacement with a service economy offering no economic security for the vast majority of Americans, and even the damn national debt -- will all get worse. If the short-term things get better as a result of the business cycle and actions taken by Democrats over the last two years (or if the Republican-led Fed finally manages to engineer some sort of turnaround), then newly elected Republicans will reap some of the benefits, thus exacerbating those long-term problems.
• Politico threw the worst party ever last night.

By Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

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