Back when the Bell System existed, they produced all sorts of interesting things. One was a science kit that allowed you to build a simple audio oscillator. In the accompanying booklet, there were charts that mentioned things like the "threshold of hearing" and the "threshold of pain", with regard to sound waves.
Tonight, we have seen the exitence of what I call the threshold of annoyance, and I think it may be the upper limit of the power through the Citizens United ruling of our Supreme Court of the United States. Follow me past the scroll for what I think the Wisconsin recall primaries may be showing us.
You experience it all the time. Annoyance. From a boorish boss, to a bad commute, to finding Faux Noise on the television in your auto mechanic's waiting room. We all have differing levels of annoyance, relative to what is annoying us, and how we can avoid or control the situation.
Take that television, for example. If it is always on Faux, you can ask someone at the counter if you can change it, or you can change your choice of mechanics. I'm lucky in that the place I go to has a remote sitting right there on the table, but YMMV.
Now, some roadblocks were attempted in Wisconsin. You may have heard about the robocalls from an anti-choice group that attempted to confuse primary voters. And then some signs were put up on the paths into polling places. A bit of money was probably spent by the Koch brothers and their ilk to try and derail these elections, becuase come August 9th, a Democratic win in at least 3 of the 6 recall races could derail Scott Walker's little gravy train. The news tonight on Rachel Maddow's and Ed Schultz's shows pointed to Wisconsinites threshold of annoyance having been exceeded enough that they voted for the real Democrats.
Of course, the threshold may have been exceeded already when Walker displayed his autocratic style of state government for the past year, stripping state union workers of their collective bargaining rights and ramrodding spending cuts where they weren't necessary to give businesses big tax breaks. His bait-and-switch went over as well as the Quizno's Sponge Monkey commercials. You remember them? Maybe not, though, as they were pretty annoying, and probably did more to turn people off to eating at Quizno's than anything else (and no, I am not going to link to any videos of that!). A qualitative threshold, to be sure, but it seems to be there.
The voters in Wisconsin were rightly PO'd about things, and no amount of outside money seems to have derailed that anger, and that is my point. We all have that threshold, and when it is exceeded, no amount of BS from the Republicans and their monied masters may deter us from throwing the bums out. Oh, they may try to change their tune, or keep trying to fake out the voters, but in the end they may just waste a lot of money (imagine the Koch boys trying so hard, they actually get no results, except a big hole in their checking accounts!).
Well, that's my thought on tonight's news. What do you think?