US midterms

Well, it's certainly a victory for
* negativism over policy engagement:
the opposition can see that if they monkeywrench everything the people who will be blamed for things not getting done will be the government (the Age has an article this morning saying that Republicans can no longer carp from the sidelines but will have to propose meaningful policies; nonsense)
* short slogans over complicated arguments:
The Tea Party made it on misspelled signs
* enormous spending by rich bastards over normal political funding

And that's certainly going to be the takeaway over her in Australia, to the extent we hadn't already reached that point first.

But America has gone pretty toxic, a consequence of slowly realising in its bones that the American century is over, and the best that the rest of us can look for is that they keep their bombs in their holsters when they're blindly lashing out.