He was a good, even great Vegas entertainer, but he was not a modern Pavarotti. Pavarotti was an opera singer who performed leading roles in top opera singers without microphones. There are many opera singers who took Pavarotti’s place in opera today – Roberto Alagna, Rolando Villazon, Piotr Beczala, Jonas Kaufmann, Joseph Calleja, but I suspect you’ve never heard their names because you don’t know anything about opera.

Instead, Prince Pavarotti is a POP entertainer, kind of like Liberace was, who makes pop arrangements of opera arias and sings them with a microphone. His is a perfect Vegas act, but it’s not opera.

The problem is this. Tea Party candidates will win a number of these congressional races because local districts are often safely partisan in nature. They can make their wild, unfounded claims, crazy accusations, etc., and win. That means not only are we likely to see an increase in Republican seats in both houses, we’re likely to see more antics, more insanity, more stupidity. At the same time they’re going to do everything they can to derail Obama’s policies which will likely mean high unemployment, a moribund economy, and more compromises on policy positions that make no one happy.

That could literally mean that if the Republicans put up a legitimate candidate in 2012, they could win. Such a result is bad enough, but the likely response for the Democrats is to move further to the “middle” to placate voters. As we’ve seen over the last decade, the “middle” in American politics is basically on the verge of being an 80s Republican. Increasingly that means we’ll have a political landscape of a conservative party and ratfuck insane parties. The former, given it’s track record, slowly moving to the right, the latter, given it’s track record, loudly screaming “socialism, communism, fascism!!!”

If we continue on this course, privatization will be socialism.