If the Scott Brown voting pattern is extended nationally, there are only 103 safe House seats for Democrats this year...

Three quarters of these seats are districts populated with the Democrats core voters--not union members, but gentry liberals.

Suddenly, some things I've been observing are making sense. A neighbor, a civil engineer, related to me that virtually everyone in his office was a Democrat.

It makes a strange kind of sense because the vast majority of engineers work in a kind of splendid, well-compensated isolation. Like university professors, you can pretty much believe whatever you want, because you never risk having to test your theories in the marketplace. How else to explain a persistent resistance to what should be commonsense?

While software engineers and university instructors were doing the fist pump over Obama's targeting bankers as the scapegoat for his own, obvious failures, the people who know--the people with money on the line, divested themselves of banking stocks and sent the Dow tumbling.

I don't begrudge people the choice to be Democrats (or Republicans). I just wish they did so for rational, well-founded reasons.