Being thankful for little things

I don't want my readers to get the impression that I woke up this morning, saw that the Democrats still didn't have a supermajority in the Senate and were still the minority party in the House and concluded that the election was mostly a waste of time.

There were a few things to warm my heart.

1) Two people I know personally won their elections last night.  Both quite easily.  Minnesota still has some serious nutjobs in our House delegation (Michelle Bachman, anyone?) but the teabaggers lost control of state government!  Yay!

2) A skinny little stats geek named Nate Silver may have permanently shamed the nation's pundit class.  They have had it coming for a long time.  I have known stats had this power since I took my classes in 1973-74.  So I am thrilled sabremetrics got such a fine demonstration last night.  Moneyball just crushed the old scouts.  Silver got 50 out of 50 state predictions right.  Boom!

3) The culture "wars" are almost over.  Gay marriage has gone from a wedge issue that the wrong-wing used to turn out their base to a clear loser for them.  Reproductive rights are now a "third rail" issue.  And it looks as though the boomers are going to get legal pot before they make it to the nursing homes.

4) Mitt Gekko lost.  Cleaning up on Wall Street by destroying the real economy is a loser.  Turns out that all you must do is hang the term "vulture capitalism" around the necks of the practitioners and they are destroyed.

5) No matter what the village tools say, the USA is NOT a "center-right" nation.  Turns out, a giant part of the electorate is considerably to the left of Obama.  And while they are happy he beat Mitt Gekko, they want the Wall Street criminals in jail, they want solutions for the crumbing infrastructure, they want the New Deal preserved, they want jobs for people who want to work, they want the wars to end—and this most emphatically includes the "war" on drugs.