Milton Friedman died on Thursday.

Friedman was a staunch ... nay, ideological defender of the concept of the "free market." As in: Apply the freedom of capitalism to any project and, invariably, it will succeed.

I don't know everything about economics, but Friedman may have convinced me. He sure got Reagan's attention -- and that's no small feat. I wonder what the free market could provide for us today ...

1. Child labor

What's that sound? Oh, yes, that's the sound of little feet. Not at a pitter-patter, no, but certainly finding their way to the foot pedal of the industrial-strength sewing machine.

In the free market, any job that can be done by unskilled labor should be done by whomever the corporation can pay the least. As such, a little boy in Indonesia will not spend his days learning the ABC's. He has to stitch 400 more "Swoosh" logos on the Nike sneakers first. Don't feel bad for him, though. His brave work gives his family just enough money so his sister doesn't have to be a prostitute.

Also, Nike's stock just went up 8 percent. So that's good, if he owns any.

2. Fat

So you're telling me that given the option to eat whatever they'd like with no restrictions, without anyone saying otherwise (since that's what the free market believe in, thank-you-very-much-you-stupid-hippie), we're not going to choose to eat salads?

I wouldn't have believed it myself. But given the quasi-free market system we roll out in America, I see a hell of a lot more troughs than I do salad bars. And heck, even in salad bars, half of them offer many calorie-laden options, from mayo-heavy pasta salads to chocolate pudding.

I'm no paragon of healthy eating myself, I grant you. But when you need to eat on the go -- and we're always on the go these days -- and 9 out of 10 choices is junk or more junk... well. The free market, ladies and gentlemen.

Perhaps a Kentucky Steamed Spinach franchise is in my future?

3. Porn
Yes, when eventually you've tried everything in a relationship and the only thing that still steams your clams is that video of man-on-dog-on-horse-on-bus that you "accidentally" found while trying to look up a good rate quote for your car insurance, perhaps you won't mind a little garden-variety pornography.

Still, the right-wing morals crowd seems to be pretty much against it for all the obvious reasons. And they're, somewhat unsurprisingly, joined by the humorless left-wing feminist crowd, who argue that porn is unhealthy and bad for women and etc etc etc.

Not to say that either side is wrong on this one. But lo and behold, the free market is WAY ahead of the curve. You don't have to be an e-dork to know that there are a LOT of porn sites on the Internet. Nor do you have to be a globe-trotting superhero to know that if you stay at a hotel, there's ALWAYS at least one porn movie available to watch in your room. And you definitely don't have to be any sort of sociologist to know that pornography does a lot of weird things to many people.

And the, ahem, size of the porn industry is stunning. Estimates suggest the U.S. porn industry is raking in somewhere between $15 to $20 billion a year, and the worldwide market somewhere near $60 billion a year. (These are rough estimate and probably outdated. Most people just laugh when I ask earnest questions about the size of the porn industry.)

So yeah, the free market likes porn. Giggity.

4. Violence

Speaking of something the morals crowd doesn't care for: Sex's good buddy, Violence! What would every mid-summer blockbusting movie be without violence? I'll tell you what: Boring. Lame. And entirely unmarketable.

Yes, it's true, despite all those GOP lickspittles who go around telling angry stories about how they're going to clean up Hollywood, the free market long ago decided that violence sells, and, if studios were planning on making a profit, they ought to try selling it.

Indeed, you can't even go see a movie about a man who died in the name of peace and love without getting splattered with blood these days. "The Passion of the Christ" was as gory as anything Quentin Tarantino's ever done. Less cool, though.

Hollywood movies, in fact, are pretty much the essence of what the free market is looking for. Studios put up venture capital to back projects they like, which then are under pressure to perform. Love or hate the movies, so long as people keep going to gory epics, they'll keep making them. And they'll include as much violence as they can reasonably put in.

I mean, "Kill Bill" was pretty awesome, right?

5. A few rich people

Sort of speaks for itself, but in the free market, the rich get richer. The middle class falls apart because of all the kids taking the low paying jobs, so the poor can take the moderate paying jobs (which turn into low paying jobs quickly enough) and the middle class has to choose to wait for a better situation or starve.

And where do you think Milton Friedman would fit into this scheme? Would he be sending his sons to work in factories at a young age? Would be be in danger of losing his job to a migrant -- or an 8-year-old Cambodian? Or, perhaps, from his exalted place in the ruling elite and the intellectual upper ring, would he be less inclined to worry about those below him?

At the end of the day, the free market DOES serve us, but it requires our servitude in return. And part of that servitude is the certainty that there will be a ruling class whose interests will come first because they control more of the market that others can.

The pushback to that is labor unions, which give the lower and middle classes a bigger share of the market. But as unions fall into disrepair, who looks out for the little guy in the free market? And how much can we expect someone like Friedman, or a Reagan or a Bush, to really look out for us?

Friedman studied economics, not sociology. Our ability to trust and work together are not necessarily covered as part of his study. Still, his dogged belief in the free market is turning out country into a nice, neat and shiny third-world model. I'm sure his descendents are quite proud. After all, I bet they CAN afford Nike stock. And the stitching, for them, is probably just right.

It's never happened before.

I hope, despite my feelings toward both Bush and Cheney, that it never happens.

But I hope it's not easy to swallow for the forces that have driven our country so wildly off-course. Two heartbeats to a liberal who's been described as the devil. A woman so out of touch with the voters of America that not a SINGLE incumbent of her party on the national level lost their seat in 2006. A woman who dares -- the horror! -- to hold the President accountable.

Yes, she's something all right. Sleep tight, conservatives.

It was that kind of night for the Democrats. Everywhere you looked, it was a wave of blue sweeping across the nation.

Everyone, everywhere is going to be trying to fling a little election post-mortem around. I'm not going to analyze everything, but here's five things I think everyone should have learned by now.

1. Decency does count, at least a little

In my own neck of the woods, petty thug John Sweeney (a Republican, but you probably could have guessed)got ... well. I'd like to say he was beaten life his wife, but that's unconfirmed -- and plenty mean, even for me.

No, this wasn't necessarily a defeat for Sweeney. And it wasn't necessarily a big win for Kirsten Gillibrand, who -- barely three months ago -- was polling nearly 20 points behind and looking outright dead.

For all intents and purposes, I look at this result that the 20th Congressional District basically told Sweeney to give them the keys after a night -- or many years -- of drinking.

Sweeney didn't do one thing that kept him off the board here. But he's got an ugly, brutish past. A drunk driving incident. The 911 call from his wife. His son nearly beating a chum to death in a bar fight. Abramhoff connections. His bizarre arrival at a fraternity party a few months ago. Lobbyists coming out every orifice of his body. Add them up as though they were so many shots of Jameson's, and you end up with the District gently grabbing his shoulder and taking the keys before he hurt himself and anyone else.

Indeed, you can do a lot as a Republican incumbent that you'll never be called to account for. But incorrectly playing the suspicion that you beat your wife during the last week of a campaign... No. Not even in the heart of redneck upstate New York. Decency demands better, and in the end, Sweeney couldn't cut it.

2. Your way -- and the highway

In a thinly-disguised veil, South Dakota's legislative and executive branches dropped what they thought would be a cluster-bomb on Roe v. Wade. By passing a law banning abortion in nearly every case, the state leaders thought it would trigger an immediate lawsuit -- and have the case end up in front of a Bush-stacked, anti-abortion Supreme Court.

Of course, this would mean that those cruel judicial activists who are ruining our society would have to, in fact, be judicial activists and "legislate from the bench" to overturn the ruling that makes conservatives grind their teeth at night. (Is it not judicial activism when pro-conservative judges do it? Someone ask Rush Limbaugh.)

So what happened? Planned Parenthood took a breath, and then took it to the voters by making the abortion ban a public referendum. In other words, after spending 30 years shrieking hysterically, the right was going to have their chance to do what they'd SAID they'd always wanted: Put abortion in front of voters. And not just any voters, either. South Dakota's a fairly certain red state, as colors go. Everything was in place -- provided the wider right actually meant what it said and said what it meant.

And as sure as Kirsten Gillibrand's hair is blond, the South Dakotans gave a curt "No, thanks" to a very restrictive abortion ban. It wasn't exactly close, either, split at about 55-45.

This doesn't necessarily tell me a lot about where this country stands on abortion. But perhaps we can dispense with some of the nonsense. Conservatives moaned that abortion was thrust upon them by an over-active judicary. So be it. They had their chance to beat abortion back with no judicial oversight, in a red state and in a mid-term election (lower turnout means more power to the base). And they STILL lost!

3. Eyes matter, but the brain is in control

George W. Bush's ultimate PR disaster will probably be remembered as Iraq, but having lived through his reign, I know that the wheels really came off his bus the moment the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.

Bush is the ultimate TV president. Clinton may be an incredible speaker, and Reagan may have been able to promote long-lasting imagery through his words, but Bush understood the game. Frank Rich, in his new book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" does a wonderful job of walking the reader through Bush's image-conscious -- indeed, image-ONLY -- style left a huge gap between what we saw him doing, and what he was actually doing. The "Mission Impossible" stunt, for instance, infuriated the sensible, but emboldened the rash. During Katrina, though, Bush said a lot of things. He was shown doing a lot of things. But Katrina was the first time he simply couldn't overpower the available images. Bush back-slapping and glad-handing lobbyists in California while families had to be rescued from their roofs in New Orleans was a disconnect too powerful to ignore.

I felt at the time as if the country was waking up from an uneasy dream. And even though he'd carried a low popularity rating before, it seemed like this time, it was final, and America wasn't going to settle for a simple apology this time. We were waking up and realizing that we weren't winning in Iraq. This country loves to fight wars, you know, and when we don't have a good enough one going on in real-time, we recast old ones with modern spins (see: Every WWII movie made in the past 10 years). Our soldiers are beloved to a fault, used and abused for political reasons because so many people are programmed to cheer for the troops, be their mission good or bad.

But God help you if we're not in a splendid little war. There are people in this country that would vote to stay in Iraq until the year 3000 if that was what it might take, but on Main Street, people don't think like that. We love our soldiers so much that many people actually want them home and in one piece eventually (really, the only good thing about our country's soldier-worship). And we're so fat and happy from winning, and being taught how exceptional America is, that we simply can't stomach a protracted war.

And that's not even getting into the idea that Iraq was a fallacy, unwinnable from the beginning, a mistake or a NeoCon wet dream. Why get into those things at all? They're complicated; it's much easier to see a losing situation and rebel against it. Bush promised an easy win and did not come through ... the rest is just pixels on a screen. What else is there to see?

4. There's evil, there's evil and then there's the liberals

Ned Lamont won my heart when he knocked off Holy Joe Lieberman during the Nutmeg State's Democratic Primary. So when he didn't win the Senate seat, being vanquished by Lieberman, it was not easy to swallow.

But a very long time ago, the Republicans decided that they weren't going to cover the spread in a reliably blue state. So they outright ditched their guy and pushed Lieberman in what, frankly, was desperation to block a more liberal persuasion into the Senate. And they won ... a conservative Democrat. Which I guess beats a liberal first-termer, but I know I'd rather have a Democrat sitting in the seat than a Republican.

But the Republicans, apparently, weren't quite as inspirational as they tried to rally their base with the terrifying specter of the American Communist Party's version of Tokyo Rose, Nancy Pelosi. Or, as I'll have to start calling her, SPEAKER PELOSI.

Again:

SPEAKER PELOSI

And yeah, it didn't work. I do not chalk this up to some sort of victory of liberalism, because it ain't. But maybe after all the scaremongering, if Pelosi doesn't turn out to have horns and a forked tail, and if Hillary continues her sprint toward the middle and Obama keeps talking about religion ... heck, maybe those durn liberals aren't so scary after all.

That said, the Democrats ran soft left candidates, and they obviously did the right thing. Bob Casey's hardly a fire-breathing liberal. Jim Webb used to work for Reagan. These guys aren't going to be the delight of the left-wing blog community in a big way for their radical beliefs. And in the short-term, this is fine. The hemorrhaging has to be stopped from six years of idiocy parading as policy. But in the long-term, if the Democrats can do anything with their small piece of the pie, maybe some of the moderate and liberal Republicans who are losing their homes (Sorry Lincoln Chafee; you voted your conscience and all it got you was my respect) can find a new place to roost.

After all, say what you'd like about liberalism, but it brought Social Security, Head Start, Medicare and plenty of other programs that have helped a lot of people over time. They're not perfect, but see if you can come up with something similar that conservatives have done that's lasted and been effective. It's a word and an idea that, perhaps, might see the pendulum swinging its way, even if it's just a little.

5. Goodbye, genius

The polls closed at 9 p.m. in New York state. With little fanfare, the Associated Press declared that Hillary Clinton had won a second term in the U.S. Senate by 9:03.

There is nobody more reviled for no apparent reason than Hillary Clinton in American politics, I think. George W. Bush is roundly disliked, but everyone has so many reasons, often starting with Iraq and ending with "Stop saying God is telling you stuff" or "Heck of a job, Brownie." Hillary just burns people up. She voted for the resolution that produced the Iraq war, which makes a lot of people on the left just despise her. She critiqued the Iraq war (albeit a fair amount of time after it was widely unpopular) and that just BURNED the right. She dared to say health care was a problem in 1994. (How dare she be 10 years ahead of the public?!) She stayed with Bill. She was a part of his administration. She's not a "conventional" mom... I mean, these are not exactly public gaffes. None of these things are Katrina. Or selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein in the '80s.

So you'd think that Hillary Clinton would be exactly the type of person that the Republicans would find a way -- ANY WAY -- to take down a peg or sixteen. In the new political lexicon, there would be *nothing* the Republican "base" would find more appealing than seeing Hillary Clinton humiliated, defeated and broken.

In 2000, the GOP posted up a pre-9/11 Giulani to fight Hillary. In the end, he wasn't well enough to run, so they were forced to use the backup, a little-known and ineffective state Senator, Rick Lazio. We can't change history of course, but I firmly believe (and did then) that Hillary would have defeated pre-heroic Giulani. But at least the Republicans were willing to throw a big name into the ring.

In 2006, the GOP did not even bother.

Say what you want about the blueness of New York (and it is), but token effort combined with showering the right message on the public is supposed to be Karl Rove's great speciality. And if Hillary is the ultimate red meat for the right, what is the message they can take from what became her coronation -- and springboard to the front of the 2008 presidential pack?

I'm well aware that Karl Rove is not the true leader of the Republican party, nor was he the grand overseer of all things Congressional for this cycle. But if his methods are so effective, his cues ripped from behind the camera for all other candidates to use, why then did his ultimate fighter take such a public beating?

I'll tell you why: Genius is fleeting, and Karl Rove was never even close to burning in its flame. His strategy never changed, which is either overconfidence (Bush whistling before the storm this week) or stubborness (Cheney and Rumsfeld just killing any chance of a moderate reach). There was no October Surprise that helped the GOP writ large. There was hardly a token message to reach out to moderates -- a fake suggestion of troop reductions in Iraq, for instance -- and there wasn't anything that was going to make a disaffected voter change his or her mind. Rove and the GOP ran a brilliant campaign to turn out the base, except they apparently missed the obvious fact that the base had shrunk.

Rove had lived by the sword for a long time, running diry commercials and dirtier campaigns. In the end, when the deck was not quite stacked in his favor, his swordhand slipped and his aim was untrue. Gillibrand ran a series of perfectly nasty attack ads against Sweeney in New York and nobody batted an eyelash that she went negative from Day 1. "Isn't that what they all do now?" was the cry. The "Come Over" ad in Tennessee was blatantly racist -- and while Corker defeated Ford in the Senate race there, don't think the media won't remember this the next time a Republican tries to make inroads with minorities.

And then there's George Allen, who was campaigning for 2008 as much as he was in '06, now sitting in the untenable position of probably losing. "Macaca" might have, another year, blown over eventually. But if you can turn a Vietnam War hero into a troop-hating monster in 2004, it surely isn't hard to hang Allen with his own racist noose today. Was the outrage over the top? You'd better believe it. But Karl Rove's strategy of out-outraging the opposition came home to roost.

And on this day, November 7, 2006, the opposition simply had more troops. But the genius never saw it coming. He wasn't the only one, but now we'll get a chance to see what his boy can do with a Congress that isn't on its back with legs wiiiide open.

Ought to be a fun time.