In a surprise ambush yesterday, liberal House Democrats unseated longtime chairman Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) from his position on the Energy and Commerce Committee and replaced him with Rep. Harry Waxman (D-Calif.). Waxman’s coup is alarming to many Democrats, who see the move as a rebuff to the seniority system and an indication that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is veering their party ‘off the cliff.’

Now, this sort of mealy-mouthed lecturing from the far right was already removed from reality pre-11/4/08, but it’s downright delusional now. When Democrats and liberals were in the minority, we sought to figure out our own problems and how to communicate our ideas better - but this behavior of lecturing from the mount on high even when you’ve just been rebuked by a historic amount of voters seems to be part and parcel of the conservative ideology.

Rep. Waxman defeated Rep. Dingell because a majority of Democrats are following the voters intent to move a new direction on vital policies affecting the American people. In this case the people want to move away from the disastrous ideas and policies that groups like the FRC have help infect our government with because they don’t work.

The good thing for people like me is that FRC could be whittled down to just Tony Perkins and he would still be lecturing us on how superior he and his knuckle dragging cohorts are. So prattle on, caveman.

I experienced this myself in conversation with one of my regular conservative readers who argued with me that Barack Obama running ads attacking Sarah Palin over abortion was a sign of weakness… for Obama. The problem is that the Democratic position on abortion - access with restrictions - is far closer to the mainstream of American thought than Sarah Palin’s - the outright banning of abortion. But if you watched Fox News and listened to talk radio you would think just the opposite.

I also noticed it on con blogs and Free Republic when the polls all indicated that Sen. Obama was headed for a significant victory over McCain. It wasn’t that the campaign was being run poorly or that Obama was doing well. Nope, the polls showing Obama in the lead were clearly a sinister plot by the liberal mainstream media to convince the American people to vote for Obama (or, because the pollsters were in blue states their results couldn’t possibly be accurate). That’s crazy talk, and yet it was a mainstream point of view for the right - reinforced by their media. It’s a lot like people in a cult who simply can’t step out of their cult-world and review things objectively.

The upside of this is maybe they’ll go live in their alternate reality where George Bush has a 90% approval rating and John McCain won the election and leave us alone while we clean up their mess.

But I still have hope. They could pick the minority candidate who’s never done anything besides dancing for the cameras…

The Republican Party’s image has gone from bad to worse over the past month, as only 34% of Americans in a Nov. 13-16 Gallup Poll say they have a favorable view of the party, down from 40% in mid-October. The 61% now holding an unfavorable view of the GOP is the highest Gallup has recorded for that party since the measure was established in 1992.

By contrast, the public’s views of the Democratic Party remain as positive after the election as they were just prior to it. More than half of Americans, 55%, currently hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party and only 39% an unfavorable view, highly typical of views toward the Democrats all year.

So, let’s say you’ve gone through a rigorous hiring process and now you’re the CEO of one of the Big 3 automotive companies. What, in a rational world, do you do? You look at the finances, you match that up with market research and listen to what I assume is a bunch of supposedly smart guys and gals who are the best and brightest our big business schools have to offer.

Then there’s an economic slowdown and now you can’t make payroll in a month or so?

That’s the hallmark of a poorly run business, and no matter how big a part of our economy, one we simply cannot keep propping up. Its amazing that these guys, who pray at the altar of the free market and pump billions in to the RNC and the Chamber Of Commerce are now among the most socialist in the country. They want a handout that dwarfs almost everyone else.

It is far past time we allow the American auto industry to commit suicide, and ditto for other government-subsidized industries like airline travel. We’ll pick up the repercussions on the other end of this mess, and cut off their supply of addictive handouts.

You know, one of the things I like about being a liberal is that if you come into an issue with pre-assumptions and then the evidence contradictions your initial assumptions, well then you throw out your initial thesis or at least modify it (ask a scientist sometime about that). Conservatives, on the other hand, just make stuff up to support their assertion. Facts be damned.

Thank goodness.

ALSO, you should check out this profile of Ziegler by David Foster Wallace from a few years ago in The Atlantic.

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has lost his bid for a seventh term. The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 3,724 votes after Tuesday’s count. That’s an insurmountable lead with only about 2,500 overseas ballots left to be counted.

Stan Lee, who helped create hundreds of comic book superheroes, including ‘Spider-Man,’ and Olivia de Havilland, 92, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1939 for her portrayal of Melanie Hamilton in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ were among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal at the White House yesterday.

‘I wonder what took so long,’ said Lee, 85, in an interview Sunday. ‘Say ‘He said it with a laugh’ or I’ll shoot you.’

Obama’s election represents a challenge to comedians who deal in racial humor. With a confident, eloquent black man in the White House, along with a beautiful, accomplished wife and two impossibly adorable children, can any young black comic possibly still do jokes about bitches and ‘hos?

Won’t the very audiences they’re trying to reach rebel and say, ‘Wait a minute — we’re past that now. It’s not how we are going to be represented any more’?

The same is true about exaggerated black speech that is a staple of so many acts, the kind of ‘yo mama’ shtick that has its roots in Amos and Andy. If the rappers want to continue dealing in it, that’s one thing, but as a way to get automatic laughs? How long will it continue to work?

We’re entering an era in which racial comedy will have to deal with creative thought rather than relying on the casual repeated use of the F word, the N word and the rest of the slackers’ alphabet. In this changing frontier, how will we construct the new bases for racial humor?

I’m hoping that David Alan Grier’s “Chocolate News”, which is the latest incarnation of “black people do this, but white people do THIS” is a lagging indicator of this kind of lazy comedy on its last legs.