Election Review

So, I know no one comes to the Temple for their up-to-the-minute political coverage, but I wanted to summarize anyway, especially the local things.

As everyone knows, dems got the house, by a good 30 seats.  No big surprise here, even for the staunchest republican.  First female speaker of the house ever, 3rd in line to president.  Welcome, sort of, to Israel in 1969, England in 1979, Canada in 1993, Ireland in 1997, and all the others I'm sure I don't know about (after all, I had to look up the dates even for those 4).

Senate is much closer, but things are looking good.  We needed 6 seats, w/o losing NJ or Maryland, which we didn't (I was afraid those dirty gays would hurt us in NJ, but it was ok, if close).  Ohio, Penn (haha, buh bye rick santorum), and Rhode Island came fairly easily.  Missouri was called for McKaskill shortly before I fell asleep watching CNN last night.  Looks this morning like Montana will flip to blue, though it's pretty close.  Tennessee was a lost cause cuz they are a bunch of racist assholes.  Sooo, Virginia.  Sigh.  It looks like Webb won, there will be a recount, and it will take weeks.  Odds are on Webb coming out on top, but who knows.  So we are either tied or have a 1 vote majority.  Yikes.

Oh, also, Lieberman won.  No surprise, but god dammit, I hate him.

Okay, local stuff.  Pederson lost, of course.  All us liberals down in Pima tried to pretend he had a chance, much like we tried to pretend we might vote Kerry 2 years ago, but we were just faking it.  Grijalva won of course, and Giffords as well, our one contribution to the national scene.  Napolitano was reelected of course.

Props I find interesting:

107 - Define Marriage - No - Yikes, we barrrrely got that one, I didn't think it'd be so close from polls.

204 - Don't Mistreat Farm Animals - Yes - By quite a bit, yay.

205 - Vote By Mail - No - I wasn't totally for this, I don't like it being ONLY one option, but  I'm not so opposed either, those hippies up in oregon seem to like it.  Maybe a dual option will come along next time.

200 - $1mil lottery for voting - No - Phew, the whole country won't be laughing at us.

202 - Raise Minimum Wage to 6.50 - Yes - How great is this?

301 - No probation for meth heads - Yes - Sigh, gotta keep fighting that oh-so-effective war on drugs, apparently.

Unfortunately couple of the "we don't trust them fer'ners" props went through.  No bail , no public programs, no punitive damages.  I don't care so much about english as the main language, I'm sort of fine with that in theory, except for the anti-immigrant passion fueling the idea.

All in all, a good day, assuming this recount comes up blue.  What next?  I have no idea, my money is on bush redefining the senate as a 49 member body and he "randomly" picks who gets in. :)

Also, all these moderate dems, man, I dunno what we're gonna do w/ em.  This wasn't exactly a huge liberal progressive pelosi/dean/clinton-loving landslide.  We got anti-abortion folks, anti-civil union folks, heavily military and religious folks.  It's a somewhat different party we liberal-leaning independents are relying on today.