A super easy way to keep up with your old pal Katy is to subscribe to my newsletter!
VICTORY!
The Democrats are now the majority party in both the U.S. House and the Senate. As reported moments ago, Virginia, the last state to report, went Blue by a mere 7200 votes, thus confirming the Democratic majority in the Senate. The House went Democratic by a fairly wide margin, confirmed yesterday.
I’m so happy that, as Arushi said, Americans show up to the polls when it’s important.
And Rumsfeld resigned.
!!!!
(But will one evil supplant another? I don’t know much yet about his successor, Robert Gates.)
If I wasn’t feeling like I’d been hit by a truck full of phlegm, I’d be dancing in the streets.
Of course, here in the Giant Red State of Texas, it’s still vastly Republican/conservative. The closeted homo slick used car salesman Rick Perry won the governorship again — not that there’s anything wrong with that — the homo part, I mean — but it wasn’t by anything that you could call a “landslide.” And good old Kinky Friedman, bless his heart, took a full 13% of the vote. Not bad for a no-bullshit-taking Jewish cowboy poet.
For the record, I voted a straight Democratic ticket with the exception of a vote for Kinky, and in races where there was no Dem candidate I voted for the Libertarian candidate instead, and that’s only because they frighten me just slightly less than Republicans do. The funny part is, so many of the people I talked to, both liberal and conservative alike, voted exactly the same way I did.
Also for the record, I am not a member of the Democratic Party and am not of the mindset that Democrats = Good and Republicans = Evil. In fact, sometimes the shades of grey inbetween extend so far to each side that it’s hard to tell where one party ends and the other begins. I consider myself a very liberal Independent. My views often coincide with the Democrats, and when they do, I will vote for them.
The United States doesn’t really have a liberal party and a conservative party; we have two conservative parties, with one of them only slightly less conservative than the other.
It sounds like I voted almost exactly as you did, though for drastically different reasons of course. I felt the GOP had so terribly lost its way as to necessitate punishment. I’m as excited as you are though again for rather different reasons. I expect the Democrats to collapse under the weight of their success and the Republicans will learn a lesson that conservative values have nothing to do with a comatose, brain dead woman in Florida or nominating a family friend for a Supreme Court position.
Pelosi as Speaker excites me so much I can barely stand it. She’s already talking of nominating a disgraced, impeached judge for chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The Dems swept to power on the idea that the GOP was ethically challenged. Speaker Pelosi seems to be trying to undue that goodwill in one swoop.
Currently, I think we have two parties that are neither conservative nor liberal in a classical sense but instead are beholden to special interests and themselves. I have little hope (though I’d love to be proven wrong) that the Democrats can rule any more efficiently than the Republicans. My true hope is that we return to the GOP of Gingrich and Reagan, i.e. something sort of resembling true conservativism.
Regardless, I’m certainly happy that both Katy and I can do the happy dance on the same day for the same result. 😉
Brett
Joel: I basically agree with you that we have two conservative parties, with one of them only slightly less conservative than the other. That’s why I won’t officially identify myself as a Democrat; they can be as sneaky and snaky and unethical as Republicans. Someone once told me that Democrats are Republicans in sheep’s clothing, and that the only difference is that Democrats will try to cover up their wrongdoing while Republicans come right out in the open with it and do it anyway.
So really, it just seems to me like the lesser of two evils has just taken power. At this point, I’ll take what little I can get.
Brett: even though we have different reasons for being happy (you to punish the GOP, me because I want to believe that the Dems will make a difference), I’m glad that we’re both happy, too!!! I might add that the GOP *IS* ethically challenged. But then again, our entire policital system is ethically challenged; that’s not limited to just one party. I hope that the Dems will be less so.