A meaningless victory

Rand Paul's Kentucky win is being booted around the dumbisphere and Atlantic correspondent Joshua Green weighs in here with a decent but incomplete analysis. Green is an earnest sort, seems like your typical, bright, well-educated, liberal / progressive journalist. Ironic that this representative of the so-called elitist class, in explaining why Rand Paul signifies nothing, forgot that education is biggest reason why.

In Kentucky's case, lack thereof.

Kentucky is a poorly educated state. Kentucky has the highest ratio of people over 65 who didn't complete high school (42%) and big chunk of that group didn't make it past the ninth grade. Older, uneducated white people are the big, fat core of the Beck/Palin/Limbaugh/Coulter/name-your-dumbass demographic.

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How uneducated is Kentucky?
 
* Dropouts - Kentucky has the 3rd highest ratio of high school dropouts in the adult (18+) population. Only Texas and Mississippi are worse.

* College graduates - Kentucky has the 4th worst ratio of college graduates in the adult (18+) population. Only Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia are worse. (Ratio includes people whose educational attainment stops at an associates degree).

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This is not to say that Kentucky isn't making progress. In the 18-24 age group, Kentucky improves by 10 positions in higher education attainment and by 12 positions in the dropout ratio, vs. the all-adults averages.

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There's a similar picture 25-34 age group, as Kentucky improves by 5 positions in higher education attainment and by 16 positions in the dropout ratio.

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 The 35-44 age group is only slightly better than average for all Kentucky adults.

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Education attainment in older groups of working-age adults falls like a rock: almost 20% of Kentuckians aged 45-64 didn't graduate high school and only 27% have a college degree, vs. (for example) 40% in North Dakota.

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The data show that Kentucky adults are significantly less-educated than the national average. The difference between Kentucky and more developed states, typically in the northeast, is stark.

Therefore, a huge reason why tea bagger "success" will be hard to repeat outside of states where uneducated white people have undue influence is that they will not benefit from a preponderance of credulous adults, primed by lack of education to swallow Faux drivel.

(Analysis by TheRaven, Data source - U.S. Census Bureau)

Glenn Beck's Tea Party

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What kind of people follow a babbling high school graduate, an alcoholic Mormon convert with a penchant for illegal drugs, a man who washed out of morning zoo radio only to stumble into a talk-radio lottery ticket served up by rapacious corporate greed. Glenn Beck is a tool wielded by a thug named Roger Ailes, who is Rupert Murdock's lackey. What does that make the Beck faithful? People who either don't mind or aren't cognizant of their own exploitation.

What do you call such people?