Yes, dear reader, we still reserve a small space for an Opinions and Ideas section even when my alma mater, the University of Kentucky, qualifies as one of March Madness' Final Four and the Herald-Leader devotes approximately 1.2 million, or more, of today's words to chronicling the exploits of our beloved Wildcats.
By the way, when the tourney flows over into the fourth month of the year, shouldn't it cease to be March Madness and become, say, April Anarchy, making the Final Four survivors the April Anarchists? It's been that kind of tournament, after all, with the supposed commoners of this year's college basketball season kicking the lauded kings of the court off said court at every opportunity.
It's been that kind of year in Kentucky politics, too. Particularly in Frankfort, where the man who would be king, Senate President David Williams, first gaveled the regular General Assembly session to an early close, then extended a special session for 13 days after the House left for home, spring break or a March Madness/April Anarchy game of choice.
Williams leaves when others want to stay; he stays when others leave. Sounds like anarchy to me. Or at least an inability to play well with other children.
But hey, he's been off his game a bit lately, throwing up an O-fer in this year's regulation political play and another O-fer in the overtime.
Now comes word that the Tea Party movement, the fan base he's been playing to the past few months, is in decline, at least on the national level. A CNN Opinion Research Corp. poll found Tea Partiers have a 47 percent unfavorable rating — almost exactly the same as the 48 percent unfavorable ratings for Democrats and Republicans — and just a 32 percent favorable rating.
Poll results putting all sides in a negative light reinforce my long-held belief that American voters rarely — never? — give a party, a political movement or a politician a mandate. They just apply the soles of their boots to the posteriors of the in crowd who ticked them off most recently, and the lucky beneficiaries mistake this anger at others as love for themselves.
When the latest Democratic surge crested a couple of years ago, national pundits started writing obituaries for the Republican Party. But congressional Democrats quickly forgot a political truism that became the mantra of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign: It's the economy, stupid.
Instead of focusing on the most basic of the nation's needs, putting Americans back to work after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, Democrats opted for some frills — nice frills, mind you, but still frills — such as health care and energy legislation.
Now, a number of them are paying for overreaching by soaking their sore behinds back home.
No doubt the Republicans who mistook voters' anger at Democrats for an endorsement of bashing public unions and slashing spending for programs people really like will find their own overreaching leads to their own warm soaks somewhere down the road.
What amazes me is that neither party learns from its own mistakes nor the mistakes of the opposition.
Meanwhile, back in Kentucky, those Tea Partiers Williams has been wooing so ardently for several months appear to be trending toward Phil Moffett, a Louisville businessman who is one of Williams' opponents in the Republican primary.
Since Moffett has little hope of winning, maybe the Tea Partiers are just opting for a little anarchist protest of politics as usual.
Oops! I knew what I wanted to say at the end of last Sunday's column. But some of what I wanted to say didn't finish the trip from an aging brain to aging fingers at the keyboard.
So, instead of typing "in the wake of Democrats losing their filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate" in a 2010 special election, these aging fingers typed "in the wake of Democrats losing their majority in the U.S. Senate."
Big difference. Big OOPS!
