Who could withstand the onslaught of warm air and occasional drizzle? But they should have known. The Washington state legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriage on February 8, and the day before that a court in California struck down laws against same-sex marriage. This punishment through horrible warmness and light rain is the natural outcome.

At least that’s what fundamentalist Christian leaders John Hagee and Pat Robertson and Stephen Bennett and John Piper and Graham Dow and Yehuda Levin say. They say that weather is God’s divine judgment against communities embracing sodomicious equal rights. So yea, people of Seattle, tho ye quaver and ye shake yon fisties at the heavens, know this is a Mighty Tepid Mist of DOOM! Los Angeles, you’re next! In a few weeks! Maybe!

Actually, two different GOP presidential candidates won the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, and events proved Americans Elect wrong just four days later when a third GOP candidate won the South Carolina primary, tossing the GOP race up for grabs.

That didn’t stop Americans Elect from trying the same line again. In a news release dated February 2, just two days after Mitt Romney won his second primary victory, Americans Elect seemed to be eager to declare him the GOP winner already so it could recast itself as the democratic alternative:

Only four states have had a chance to vote in the GOP primaries, but experts are saying the process is over. Are voters happy?

But actual democracy soon intervened again to counter the Americans Elect narrative. On February 7, voters in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri handed election victories to Rick Santorum, not Mitt Romney. Now Mitt Romney has won the majority of delegates, Rick Santorum has won the majority of states, while Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are continuing to campaign through the Super Tuesday primaries of March 6. By the end of that night Republican voters in 21 states will have cast their votes. In short, the GOP nomination looks to be an actual election involving large numbers of voters.

Whatever number of people have voted in the Republican presidential nomination process, it seems to not be enough to meet Americans Elect’s standards. Back in January, Americans Elect complained about “Only 369,448 Votes” in Iowa and New Hampshire. But with the addition of South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, there have now been 3,022,769 votes cast.

In contrast, Americans Elect has had its own online presidential nomination ballot qualification vote going on around the clock for nine full days now. How many cumulative votes has it attracted over those 9 days, and what has the cumulative vote count in the Republican race been? Results as of this morning:

Only 6,429 votes had been cast in the Americans Elect process, just two-tenths of one percent of the participation in the Republican process. If 369,448 votes are meager, what does that make 6,429 votes? The disparity is cast in starker terms when one realizes that in the Americans Elect process, one person can vote many times. The actual number of people participating in the Americans Elect process, despite media coverage in every major TV network and newspaper, is even smaller than the number of votes.

The vote totals for particular Americans Elect contenders tell an even bleaker picture: unless Americans Elect changes its voting procedure in the middle of the voting — a highly irregular move — it doesn’t look as though anyone will qualify for the Americans Elect ballot at all. According to the rules published during the first day of the ballot qualification vote, political insiders will have to obtain 10,000 votes of support and political outsiders will have to obtain 50,000 votes of support by May 15. By that standard, with 9 days gone and 96 days left to go, only Ron Paul (with 1,372 votes of support as of this morning) is on pace to obtain 10,000 votes by May 15.

But wait, there’s more. Even Ron Paul isn’t actually on pace to get on the Americans Elect ballot, because there’s a second standard he has to meet. For reasons that aren’t immediately clear, only the first thousand votes for a candidate in a state will be counted toward the 10,000 vote total, and only the ten states with the most votes will count have their votes counted toward that 10,000 vote total. The 10,000 votes have to consist of 1,000 votes in each of 10 and only 10 states. As of now, these are the top ten states from which Ron Paul has received support in the Americans Elect vote:

California: 144 votes
Texas: 107 votes
Florida: 97 votes
New York: 73 votes
Virginia: 58 votes
Pennsylvania: 54 votes
Ohio: 48 votes
Michigan: 44 votes
Washington: 43 votes
Illinois: 42 votes

Did you notice that these are the most populous states of the United States? That’s not a coincidence; for all its talk of democracy, the Americans Elect process effectively disenfranchises small states, which with smaller populations are unlikely to scrape together 1,000 votes for anybody. It’s the big states that will either qualify or not qualify a candidate for the Americans Elect nomination. At this rate, with 9 days gone and 96 left to go, Ron Paul will only get 1,000 votes in California, Texas and Florida by May 15.

And the other Americans Elect draft candidates? Insider or outsider, they aren’t on pace to get 1,000 votes of support in any state at all.

The bottom line is that while Americans Elect corporate leaders complain about lack of participation in the Republican nomination, the Americans Elect vote is far, far less popular. To deal with its lack of support, Americans Elect will have to mount a huge publicity campaign very soon, or it will have to change the rules of its voting in the middle of its vote, or it will have to benefit from a well-funded candidate who decides to invest significant funds, or it will have to leave its ballot empty in 2012.

Sarasota, Florida, June 16 2011: Mitt Romney appears at Sarasota Yacht Club private fundraiser.

Naples, Florida, November 28 2011: Mitt Romney appears at Naples Yacht Club private fundraiser.

Portland Maine, February 10 2012: Mitt Romney to make his sole campaign stop in the state, appearing at Portland Yacht Services and Marina. Don’t worry, transients are welcome there: “We offer both seasonal mooring/dockage as well as berthing for transient yachts.”

“Marriage is defined and has always been defined as ‘one man and one woman.’ We simply cannot allow 50 different definitions of marriage.”

We cannot allow 50 different definitions of marriage? Why not? For that matter, what choice do we really have?

Most people who have been married for any length of time understand that every married couple has its own definition of marriage. There are millions of different definitions of marriage in the America today. That’s life.

Rick Santorum does not live in the same world you and I inhabit. Santorum lives in a fantasy land where everyone has the same idea about what marriage is supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to work. It’s an outdated Leave It To Beaver model of marriage that wasn’t even accurate back in the 1950s.

We need a President of the United States who can deal with the world as it is, not the world as he wishes it could be. In the real world, several states recognize that the scope of marriage is bigger than what’s imagined in Rick Santorum’s small vision.

Marriage is not and has not always been defined as only between one man and one woman. That’s a fact. If Rick Santorum still doesn’t feel ready to learn the facts, that’s his business. Let’s just not allow him to bring his ignorance into the White House.

Rick Santorum: 55.2%
Mitt Romney: 25.3%
Ron Paul: 12.2f%
Rick Perry: 1.0%
Herman Cain: 0.9%
Michele Bachmann: 0.7%
Jon Huntsman: 0.4%

Yes, Virginia, there are about 1,045 Jon Huntsman supporters in Missouri. And where’s Newt Gingrich? His campaign was so disorganized that he didn’t get around to qualifying for ballot access in the state. $1,000 and a signature would have been all it took. Oops.

We could stop here and marvel at the significant victory for that scrappy campaigner, but why stop here? Missouri is not just one place. St. Louis is different from Branson, which is not exactly Hannibal. So let’s look at who won where across the state with the following map of Republican Primary results for every county in the state of Missouri. Where Newt Gingrich won, you’ll see an Open sign (except that, of course, he didn’t file his papers, did he? Oops again). Where Mitt Romney won, you’ll see a shiny plastic duck. And where Rick Santorum won, you’ll be treated to the sight of a creamy brownish frothy mixture.

In Missouri, they’re all about the creamy brownish froth.

Rick Santorum is a longtime resident of the land of make believe. Consider the fruity headline now at the top of Rick Santorum’s official campaign web page: “Santorum Over Obama in a Landslide Among Financial Advisors”

The article attached to that headline begins, “Rick Santorum might face a challenging nomination battle in the real world, but…”

Okay. Stop right there. That’s enough for me. You see, I live in the real world. I want a President who lives in the real world, too.

Rick Santorum’s latest argument for why he should be President of the United States of America is that, while he may be a totally inappropriate choice in the real world, he has the support of the majority of voters… in his very special fantasy land.

And what kind of place is this fantasy land? It’s an America that isn’t populated by working Americans who produce real wealth. In Rick Santorum’s Fantasy America, everybody is an “independent financial advisor”… a broker who sells stocks and derivatives and other investment schemes for the big companies on Wall Street.

These are the people who were selling credit default swaps right before the recession hit. These are the people who knowingly sold Americans investments that were sure to fail, just to make a quick buck for themselves.

Guess what? The Rick Santorum for President campaign did a poll of these snake oil salesmen of Wall Street, and found that, if everyone in America was like them, Santorum would defeat Barack Obama in the general election.

This morning, I find myself thinking how lucky we are that the real world USA is nothing like the fantasy land that Rick Santorum believes in.

I’m also realistic enough to remember, though, that luck sometimes runs out. I also am keeping in mind that I never thought that a far-out candidate like Rick Santorum could win even a single state, much less four. That’s why, overnight, we’ve added some new designs to our collection of anti-Santorum campaign buttons.

Included in this collection is the pin you see here: Rick Santorum for President of the Land of Make Believe. Maybe, if we work hard enough, we can get Santorum to go off to the political equivalent of Never Never Land.

But it’s also true that right now, the Committee to Draft Donald Trump for President has exactly two supporters.

Money won’t get buy you everything.

It’s been an abnormally warm winter this year, not just in Minnesota, but across almost all of the United States. Of course, that’s just one year’s weather. However, the long-term climate appears to have warmed as well. Climate data show that there hasn’t been an abnormally cold winter in a very long time.

What’s more, the scientific evidence that human beings are to blame for global warming has continued to grow in size and scope. A new study of the relationship of energy output from the sun to atmospheric absorption of energy shows that the sun cannot be to blame for global warming, as some pollution industry advocates suggest. Even a scientific review funded by the Republican Koch brothers, with the purpose of debunking the anthropogenic hypothesis of global warming, determined that the anthropogenic hypothesis is valid, and that there has not been any global scientific conspiracy to distort scientific data in order to create the false appearance of a global warming crisis.

Scientific research has delivered a thoroughly substantiated, double-triple-quadruple checked, explanation for the reality of global warming: Human activities are to blame for it. The facts behind this analysis apply in Minnesota as much as anywhere else on Earth.

Yet, the current political platform of the Minnesota Republican Party pretends that these facts simply don’t exist. The Minnesota GOP platform currently includes the following statement: “We oppose policies, legislation and mandates that are based on the theory that humans are responsible for global climate change including the Theory of Man-Made Global Warming.” Minnesota Republicans seem to be saying that they don’t care what scientific information is available. They just don’t want to deal with the issue.

Today, the Minnesota Republicans has the opportunity to correct this irresponsible position of willful ignorance and inaction. In local meetings across Minnesota, Republican voters can do much more than just vote for the Republican presidential candidate of their choice. Voters in local caucuses will also have the power to propose changes to the political platform of the Minnesota Republican Party.

In Rochester, in St. Paul, in Duluth, in Grand Forks… somewhere in Minnesota, one decent Republican voter can propose today that the GOP in Minnesota stop its opposition to solutions to the immense and growing problem of climate change. That voter’s caucus can then do the right thing, and approve that platform change for consideration by the statewide Republican Party.

Will that voter step forward today? Will the Minnesota Republican Party step forward and deal with reality?

Had Rick Santorum won in any territory, he’d have been represented by a brown frothy substance, but the brown froth wasn’t as nearly popular with Nevada Republicans as fake money, hoax money, or dreams of shooting the Moon.