Well, well, well. There may be cause for hope in our benighted Republic after all.

Yesterday Bibleburg voters roundly rejected a so-called “Reform Team” slate full of tinfoil-beanie neotards, fuckwits and assclowns, among them Ed Birnham and Doug Bruce. The mayoral race between real estate pimp Steve Bach and pragmatic lefty businessman Richard Skorman was too close to call and will go to a runoff in May.

Said at-large council candidate Tim Leigh: “I think the citizens have spoken very loudly that they don’t want to go back 20 years.” Word. Y’all think this place is fucked up now, you should’ve seen it 20 years ago. Or 40. We had a John Birch Society bookstore downtown — right across Tejon from where Skorman’s Poor Richard’s complex is now, if memory serves — and in the late Seventies we enjoyed a Ku Klux Klan revival (the button-down David Duke version). Good times.

The news on the national scene is less reassuring, alas. The visionaries in the GOP are itching to shut down the nasty ol’ socialist gummint — however will they redistribute what remains of our wealth to their rich pals without a gummint to act as middleman? — and proposing a seriously unserious budget that Paul Krugman has called “a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.” Thanks to Steve Benen for the word.

• Late update: Also by way of Steve B. comes the word that if the feddle gummint shuts down, the troops won’t get paid. As he notes, it sort of gives new meaning to the phrase “all-volunteer force.”

Well, the Repugs in Cheddarland bent over backwards to admit that union-busting has nothing to do with money and everything to do with power and croaked collective bargaining for public workers’ unions. Lovely.

The working stiffs in Wisconsin have shown tremendous courage and staying power so far — it will be interesting to see how they respond to this latest shameless attack on labor. I’ll cast around a bit for more information and if I unearth any means of showing support that doesn’t involve jetting to Madison and giving Scott Walker a kick in the nuts, I’ll pass it along.

Speaking of people who need a swift shot to the ball bag, IRA supporter Peter King (R-Car Bomb) got one from Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) as the insane Islamophobe King began his despicable hearings into whether all Muslims are killer robots. Good for Ellison, and shame on King, as if the dizzy sonofabitch would even recognize the state.

However you spell him, Col. Moammar Gadhafi appears to have a serious case of the brain cramp going on. Long thought to be as crazy as the proverbial shithouse rat, he’s backed into a corner in Tripoli and vowing to fight to the end, whatever that may be.

McClatchy offers an interesting capsule glimpse of “The King of Kings,” and it seems that if he were just a teensy bit loonier and a skosh dumber, why, he could be a House Republican from Colorado or perhaps a candidate for the presidency of the United States.