Wednesday Olio: Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry? Edition

• My morning penance was watching Morning Joe. Specifically with the panel of Chuck Todd, David Gregory, Michael Steele, and the withered Prairie husk of Tom Bwokaw. I'm not sure why Steele was there. I'm not sure why he's anywhere. (Okay, yes I am. He's the face of Republican diversity and reasonableness. To whom? )

Scratch Steele and despair! Is there a greater illustration of the depths of trouble this country is in that those three NBC political geniuses? There is nothing whatsoever that FOX News can do, nothing a roomful of Jonah Goldbergs could accomplish (if anything), which begins to approach the fluid-sucking toe fungus which is the NBC News operation. Todd and Gregory, both, are to political discourse what Lester Holt is to diversity.

Lord, the blather! Romney "would have won if he'd just gotten McCain's percentage of the Hispanic vote" (Todd). This of course is simpleton's math--these guys really don't want to learn anything from Matt Silver--but the real point is that it's at the service of the Beltway insider idea that Republicans are the natural rulers of this country, if they can just somehow manage to jettison their voters. 

• John Boehner is still alive! Who knew?

• Best election news I've ever gotten in Indiana: Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Tony Bennett, Ed.D, takes it in the shorts! 

Two things, here: first, Bennett had the job because his predecessor, Suellen Reed, a well-liked Republican, was run out of town by the Daniels machine, the better to put the "reform" movement in place to sluice the juice.  And, two, this one's gonna be a lot tougher to explain than the Mourdock loss. Bennett lost because he's a bully and an asshole. And a transparent one, at that. 

• Bennett had all kinds of money, most of it from Charter School Ponzi Schemes, Inc. He was all over the teevee, in ads that touted his experience (the same experience which had taught him, somehow, that teacher's don't need education degrees, or much else in the way of qualifications). Two days ago I heard some teleprompter reader mention his opponent, Glenda Ritz. I happened to be in the room with my Poor Wife.

Me: Y'know, I knew he was running against a woman, but I didn't even know her name.

PW:  Teachers know it.

• Ritz:  “As I traveled across the state, it was clear that Hoosiers don’t want their tax dollars going toward the privatization of our schools,” she said. “And they don’t want their teaching and learning environments to be about teaching to the test, resulting in grading of our schools with a flawed A to F accountability model.”

• I do hope that someone's going to publish the collective campaign musings of David Weigel. Is he now exposed as Ross Douthat without the religious mania? If I buy you a sword, Dave, will you fall on it?  Just kiddin'. Cheer up. Maybe Michele will run again.

• Ed Henry, on FOX, reporting from Obama headquarters: "The crowd is near pandemonium now, despite the fact that employment is hovering near 8 percent."

• I went to bed early, got up in the middle of the night, watched a bit of the teevee (enough to see and hear the enormous crash behind Tom Bwokaw, who'd been speaking about Jack Welch's twitterings, because what else is there, which caused Brian Williams to suggest that it might have been Welch shooting himself), then got up for good at 5. So I'm not quite clear about it, but the "The people have clearly spoken for the sort of bipartisanship over-paid Beltway punditasters prefer" started early. Would that have been the storyline if Romney had won? Or does it just apply to Democrats? The people have been saying very clearly for years that they don't care much for the punditocracy, either. When does that take effect?