FRIDAY short TAKES.

Let's not be stupid.  "I think Donald Trump would lose."  Indeed, he's his own worst enemy. "A red wave turned into a purple puddle, thanks to an orange man."  Yes, we would have had gridlock but for the former president injecting himself into the 2020 Georgia runoff.

How hard is it to reject the false binary?  "They both suck and nobody likes them but you gotta pick one."  Still too hard?  "[Voters] looked at all of that, (meaning inflation and empty shelves and crime -- Ed.) and looked at Republican alternative and said no thanks."  And why does information technology get in the way of learning who we picked?  "It is ridiculous that we are still waiting for results, even if we were told to expect it."

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  A blue check is cheaper than a private railway car.  "There is a growing appetite among some social users to pay for features that add value to their experiences."

2.  Pritzker, and Illinois, too.  "Kathy Hochul and Gretchen Whitmer have won in their states, and New York and Michigan get to reap the consequences of that."

3.  Internal migration matters.  "Yesterday’s Midterms were not a victory for conservative or progressive ideology, but an assertion of the growing power of geography in American politics."

4.  The sorting is in the returns.  "Americans went to vote and kept nearly all the bums in place."

5. That's how separation of powers works.  "If Republicans are able to attain a supermajority, they would be able to overrule a governor's vetoes, essentially stripping the power away from that position."  The outcome: one or two seats short in the Legislature.  Gridlock wins.

6.  The Victory Dividend was squandered long ago.  "America won the Cold War and government became effectively a bipartisan enterprise operated for the benefit of the upper-middle-class and the wealthy."  Gridlock, not some Trumpian reprise, wins.

7.  Brakes, applied?  "Biden handed over policy wholly to the progressives who are hollowing out the Democratic Party."

8.  How hollow?  "Democrats are carrying the beautiful people but losing the dutiful people."

9.  Sic semper technocratis: "I think we made the system too complicated to run smoothly."

10.  Republican voters are furious.  "Nerves were already on edge as they always are Election Day, and the breakdown [of that overly complicated system] put a torch on them."

11.  What would we ever do without experts?  "A wise ruling class would have said Houston We Have a Problem when Trump won in 2016 rather than treat him as a fascist freak.

12.  Unglamorous, repetitive, and necessary.  "The most important role of economics is to constantly refute as many [utopian and technocratic] fallacies as possible."

13.  Thomas Sowell.  “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

14.  Antidote, or symptom?  "The antidote to extremism is broad participation."

15.  Not the way of careerists.  "I’d really love to think that when people flip that switch and decide to move into an administrative track, they do it out of a sense of responsible and in some fashion humble stewardship, that they’re the people who want to protect and nurture the professional practices and values most of us try to live within."

16.  Let’s get this straight – bad things happen when you raise a generation of men disproportionately without fathers?

17.  That's the way the infrastructure crumbles.  “It’s MoDOT’s job to figure out what the transportation needs are and how much those cost. It’s really up to the legislature and the people to figure out how to pay for it.”