The New Era of Hope

One guilty pleasure of mine that I've written about here often is my penchant for listening to sports talk radio. I love it. Especially here in New York. The New York sports fan is a special breed, feeling utterly deserving of winning every single championship in every single sport every single year, accustomed to always having the very best talent in whatever league is under discussion, and yet at the same time tending towards the whiny and blinded type of fan that is so prevalent in the Northeast. It makes for a great mix of callers and topics for any sports station in New York City.

That said, as I got in my daily dose on the way back from the gym on Tuesday night, it was very interesting to hear the topics being discussed, which centered primarily, surprisingly enough, on Barack Obama and the state of the country, highly unusual for sports talk radio. Probably about 75% of the callers were optimistic, talking about the plane crash last week that many of us saw right from our offices here in Midtown and how it was a turning point for the country, with one guy even claiming that the Cardinals making the Superbowl was something we could all rally around as a country along with the presidential changeover and the miraculous plane crash a few days ago. The other 25% of callers were more pessimistic, expressing hope for the incoming administration but pointing out that of course the problems our country currently faces cannot possibly be cured overnight, and that when Obama wakes up on Wednesday morning, he will still be facing a horrible stock market, a completely destroyed banking system, a sagging economy and a very uncertain global outlook.

At this point, one caller said something I found very interesting. At the end of whatever point he was making, this caller says that it seems like right now Barack Obama could get 70% of the country to do pretty much whatever he says. Whatever he wants, anything, 70% of the American people would do right now, given the fragile state of things we have been left with from the Bush administration. Anyways he says that it reminds him of just after 9-11, when this caller estimates that 90% of Americans would have done whatever George Bush wanted, also due to uncertainty and the extreme fragility of the situation at that time.

That shit's fucked up isn't it?

Because I think he is right. 90% of us, myself very much included, were so dam scared, and I mean seriously fucked up immediately following 9-11 that we were basically willing to go along with whatever George Bush said. We allowed ourselves to buy in to his thing, to go along with what he said we needed to do to protect ourselves as a country. We trusted him, more or less blindly, to always serve our best interests as a country and as a planet, and in a nutshell, President Bush betrayed that trust. Bush's policies strained the bounds of human rights in many areas, most notably in wiretaps and other invasions of our personal freedoms, and in the torturing of POWs that went on as a rule in our terror detainee facility at Guantanamo. 90% of us put our trust in George W. Bush 7 1/2 years ago, and Bush told us he would take care of everything. He told us to put 9-11 behind us, and to party hard, economically speaking. Interest rates were literally at historic lows, banks were running amok handing out money to anybody, some of that actually mandated by Barney Frank in the House and Chris Dodd in the Senate's respective finance committees, but otherwise nobody was watching over interest rates, or over the quality of loans being made by banks in the U.S. and all around the world, in particular loans to purchase houses. Regulation on the Private Client businesses of the major investment banks, serving hedge funds and super-rich clients, had been decreased to long-time lows by the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act by the Clinton administration a few years earlier. As the Bush term wore on, those investment bank business came under increasing pressure to divert their wealthy clients' money into complex financial instruments, created by the investment banks themselves, and often backed by various types and ranges of mortgages and other loans. More client funds were diverted into hedge funds, which were also not being regulated by anyone even as they too exploded under the Bush administration (Bernie Madoff, anyone?). Many hedge funds actively invested in various types of public and private debt, including mortgages, student loans and other bank assets, in addition to other complex financial instruments like credit default swaps, another creation of the finance wizards on Wall Street that proliferated over just the past ten years or so, yet another entire part of the finance markets -- estimated to be a $4 trillion industry -- that was more or less entirely unregulated under the Bush Administration (AIG, anyone?).

President Bush told us to trust him after 9-11, while he ultimately oversaw the relaxation of regulation on the entire supply of money in this country, and the 90% of us that were willing to do whatever our leader told us to do in a time of historical national crisis partied hard at his behest. And now, we have a hangover. It's that simple, really. You can't party like we did with money over the past ten years or so, and not eventually run out of steam in a big way. It's like its own giant Ponzi scheme, where as a country we continued to "get" more and more money, taking out massive mortgages that many of us as a nation really could not afford, taking loans for more than we needed, refinancing again and again as interest rates dropped to multigenerational lows, taking out home equity lines of credit, borrowing directly against the equity we did have in our homes, and running up ever-increasingly historic credit card debt along the way. Eventually, when one part of the system finally caves in -- in this case it started as the sudden inability to continue accessing money in general at the rate we had been for the past few years, and that quickly turned into increasing defaults on the riskier side of the borrower spectrum where the supply of additional money was always going to be needed to pay off current debt levels -- that becomes the hangover that inevitably must follow since a hard session of partying down. That's just the way of the world, even with respect to the economy.

So there it is. Right now 70% of us would do whatever Barack Obama tells us to do. The last time we put our faith in our leader in a time of extreme crisis, we were taken advantage of, repeatedly lied to, and ultimately led down the path that directly created the economic and financial disaster of the past 18 months or so. Let's hope that Mr. Obama will act with more integrity with respect to the trust he has in his corner from an emotionally fragile base of citizens in our country today.

A Week of Change

Well, it's finally here. This is the week that everything begins anew. After what seems like decades, change is finally here. We finally get to move on to the next phase of our lives, to a series of new decisions that will take our story to new and surely uncharted paths.

That's right folks. Lost returns with new episodes this Wednesday evening.

It's been a long time coming, and to mark the occasion ABC will be taking over all of our television programming with three grueling hours of Lost from 8-11pm ET. First is a one-hour recap of what has happened in the first four seasons, for those who are fool enough to never have watched the greatest show of this millennium, and in particular to remind all of us what happened at the end of Season 4, which I believe was originally aired some time in the early 1970s. I got lucky and channel-surfed my way right into a four-hour Lost marathon on SciFi on Monday evening, and they were smart enough to be showing the final four episodes of Season 4, so I got myself all caught up, but I still will be watching that first hour of Lost programming on Wednesday just to catch any new tidbits they are sure to throw our way, based on previous years' recap episodes. Following that are the first two episodes of Season 5, billed as a two-hour season premiere, running from 9 to 11pm ET. Personally, I can't wait. Even though from interviews done by the show's co-producers during the offseason it does seem like Season 5 is likely to bring more questions than answers, and we will have to wait until the final season to really find out what the hike is really going on with the island, I am still looking forward to finding out the answers to some of our less central and more immediate questions. Questions like Why is it so important that everyone go back to the island? and Who are these people from the freighter, Dr. Faraday, Charlotte, Miles, etc.? Of course another season of Lost will mean another few months of weekly frustration and total confusion. But along with it will be without a doubt the most entertaining hour of every week, the most talked-about show at the virtual water cooler, and, of course, a weekly dose of Goat's fabulous Lost recaps. How's that for pressuring the guy to bring back one of my favorite parts of Lost every week?

Moving on to the other, lesser story of this week, Barack Obama takes office midday Tuesday, putting an end to the tenure of George W. Bush as the leader of the United States of America. As with most inauguration days since I have grown up, I find myself looking back today on the man's legacy after eight years at the helm of our country.

First and foremost, no review of the Bush presidency can be started or finished without talking about 9-11. The worst terrorist attack on our nation's soil went down just nine months into Bush's first term in office, and it really ended up defining the first several years of his presidency, until the economic turmoil of the past couple of years found a way to even supplant that. To be honest, the Bush response to 9-11 has got to be the highlight of his time in office in my view. Maybe some of this has to do with being a New Yorker at the time that 9-11 happened (though I doubt that), but I don't know how one can not give Bush tremendous props for managing to help the country recover from those devastating attacks, and for preventing further violence within our borders. Honestly, if you had told me a few weeks after 9-11 that there would not be another terror attack on our soil for the next eight years, I am positive I would have signed up for that right then and there, regardless of whatever else happened. That was far and away the biggest and most pressing goal of the Bush presidency less than a year after it began, and it turns out that our president delivered on that goal with flying colors. Although there have been some alleged threats, they have all been thwarted and the result has been a totally terrorism-free America ever since the day the towers fell. Bush and his team deserve a massive amount of credit for that, and they surely get it from me. As much of an abject failure as the whole Iraq debacle has been, the mere presence of the war in that country has so successfully diverted the attention of Al-Qaeda and those who wish harm on the U.S. that there has been nary a mention of a serious threat to our security here at home. I'll never know if this was the actual planned strategy all along, but Al-Qaeda has spent their time over the past several years planning attacks on U.S. and U.S.-led forces over there, while having no time or inclination to plan more missives on U.S. soil. A tradeoff which has proven to be brilliant in its simplicity and in its results. As the new president looks to shrink our presence in Iraq, we may come back to this thought time and again as the years go by.

Unfortunately, Bush's stunning success in preventing further attacks in the U.S. stands alone in my eyes among his positive achievements over eight years in office. And things ended up getting so bad on the finance and economic front that it's enough to make me second-guess my feeling eight years ago that I would have signed up for no further terror attacks regardless of what else happened during these eight years. Iraq, other than its general effect of diverting the attention and violent efforts of terrorists away from the United States, has of course been a failure. Attacking a country surrounded by our bitter enemies and full of subversive, violent sects which hate us as well, with absolutely no exit plan or no way of even knowing if we've won or lost at all, was a disaster from the moment of its inception. Thousands of Americans and others have died in Iraq for, in my opinion, no good reason at all while we have insisted on remaining there to "keep the peace" and "promote democracy" in a country whose people seem to have little interest in either.

The worst part about the whole Iraq thing to me is not even the execution so much but how we got there to begin with. In what would prove to be just the beginning of a disturbing trend with George W. Bush, the man went before Congress and before the American people on prime time television and lied to us all. Lied through his fucking teeth about weapons of mass destruction being rampant all through Iraq, and how dire of an emergency it therefore was for us to send troops over there to die in the name of saving America from imminent disaster. In doing so, Bush lost much of his effectiveness with the Congress, while winning a feeling of betrayal from mostly every American. It's always hard to me, and I think for millions of my fellow Americans, to have our own president bald-faced lie to us, making things sound worse than they are just to advance his own personal agenda. I think back to that scumbag Bill Clinton looking right in the camera, proclaiming "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and then having the audacity to explain during his deposition that "it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is". What a bunch of lowlifes. And these presidents will never seem to realize how damaging it is when they tell bald-faced lies in front of 250 million Americans, 100 million or so of which are young, impressionable children and teenagers. How the F am I supposed to teach my children to tell the truth when our own president blatantly lies to everyone in the world just to get what he wants? How can people raise their sons not to be womanizing scumbags when our own president ten years ago was more concerned with chasing blowjobs than stamping out a rising Osama Bin Laden in the Sudan? From this perspective alone, I find George Bush's actions to be as unforgivable as those of his predecessor, and surely not befitting of someone worthy of leading this great country.

Although I am a big fan of Bush's sticking to his promise (unlike his daddy) not to raise taxes during his time in office, and I especially favor his support in passing a bill to phase out the baseless and (in my view) unfair estate tax -- a phase-out which Mr. Obama is set to reverse as one of his first steps in office -- Bush also spent the next several years of his time as president focusing far too much on Iraq and far too little on issues threatening to wreak havoc right here in the U.S. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area, the response by federal emergency management personnel was far too slow and led to significant unnecessary damage, death and destruction, all while Bush refused to do the right thing and personally visit the area. When we took prisoners in our war against terror, America's historic focus on human rights went right out the window, along with the dignity of our leader, as we tortured our prisoners of war just like any other indecent, lowlife country would (and Bush lied about it, of course). When the last of the major oil companies wanted to merge, where was the Bush administration to stop it in the name of protection of U.S. consumers? What about releasing our strategic oil reserves as necessary in times of big crude shortages in the U.S.? Cue the record-high energy, oil and gasoline prices that occurred during Bush's second term, and which are sure to return as soon as the global economy rebounds. What about the fiscal responsibility that used to be such a lynchpin of the American Republican party platform? Even Ronald Reagan would be rolling over in his grave at the way the Bush administration has nearly tripled our national debt to over $ 8 trillion at last count. And when Bill Clinton's grand strategy to de-regulate the entire banking industry combined with the House and Senate finance committees' blind insistence on banks loaning far too much money to people unable to pay those debts to slowly but surely create a massive bubble in the finance and credit sector at large, where was our current president to step in, recognize the problem and start solving it before the whole house of cards came crashing down? Who knows.

And as I mentioned, this business about lying to the Congress and the public to get whatever he wants proved to be the norm, not an aberration, for Mr. Bush. As the economy worsened all through 2007, Bush was repeatedly one of those clowns who publicly stated that the economy was fine, its fundamentals were sound, and that it was just people talking about a recession all the time that actually created a recession. In reality, this is an abominably stupid position for anyone to take, as recessions are 100% real and 100% regular and in fact as American as apple pie, and yet the Bush camp spent the all of 2007 and the better part of early 2008 making just this argument, even as credit markets around the world seized up in the summer of 2007 amid what has now officially been defined as a recession starting more than 14 months ago. And it all came to a head for me when Bush went on tv last September, in the wake of the failure of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of insurance giant AIG, and told Americans that we needed to pass the TARP bill to bail out the banks of this country immediately, that the bailout would work to solve the banks' problems, and that if we didn't immediately pass this bill, our country would slip into an economic abyss. Well I got news for ya buddy, we did pass TARP, it ain't done shit for any bank, all of which are once again making new multi-year lows as I type this, and even despite TARP's passage and the expenditure of $750 billion of taxpayer funds to "save the economy", we are still totally, utterly and completely in the tank, economically speaking.

George Bush's legacy as president of the United States is I think very clear at this point. Despite his efforts late in his term to redefine his legacy through silly speeches and disingenuous claims, Bush will go down in history not only as an ineffective leader, but as a dishonest, untrustworthy man who allowed his one-track mind to focus too hard to his own personal agendas and could not see the forest for the trees, someone whose blatant and public dishonesty won him the disrespect of not only the American people at large, but of his partners in the legislative branch of government as well, including even his own party who by the end of his term could barely stand to listen to a word he had to say. As Bush leaves office with a record-low 22% approval rating (and who the F are those 22% btw?!), I find myself hoping that if nothing else, Barack Obama will prove to be true to his word as president. The sad truth is, it's been a looooong time since we've had anyone as president who anybody could call honest without a little bit of a chuckle. I know all politicians are scum when it comes right down to it, but let's get someone in here who can be trusted generally to do what he says he will do, and to always be on the lookout for the American people in all facets of our lives, instead of someone whose primary agenda is getting laid, or getting revenge on the people who tried to kill their daddy a generation earlier. It's time America got someone into office who really is governing "for the people" in every sense of the word.

Somebody Please Get Rid of These People!

The complete and total confusion, switcheroo, and just overall donkery of the Bush administration and this recockulous bailout plan continues. And lookie there, the market is tanking again as a result of all the back-and-forth....What a futher mucking shock! Six weeks ago, buying the troubled mortgage assets of our nation's financial institutions wasn't just an idea that was being kicked around by a few people. It was absolutely, positively, vital to keeping the U.S. out of the economic abyss. Now today: "Oh yeah, we changed our minds again!" Fucking fools. I wrote a month ago or so about the absolute, cold, hard fact that confusion and flim-flamming by market regulators and overseers creates panic and fear in the stock market. That wasn't an opinion then, and it still isn't an opinion now.

Facts are facts.

I am speechless. Yes, me. Totally and completely speechless. To think that this administration could still be getting markedly worse by the day, given the depths to which it has plunged already, is truly unthinkable.

Election

What a day in America.

Anyone looking for a measure of just how much the people despise what George W. Bush has done to this country, anyone wondering exactly how disappointed and let-down the American people feel, got their answer in a big way on Tuesday night in the form of Obama 349, McCain 161, and counting. It's pretty dam near a landslide.

Wanna know just how hated, how reviled our current President is? A black man (and eff this half-black stuff -- just look at the man, he is black!), a a 44-year-old black guy whose name rhymes with Osama and with somewhere between little and no experience whatsoever, a guy who the very people who voted for him actually know shockingly little about, a guy who openly plans to raise taxes on businesses and the rich in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in the world since the Great Depression, absolutely crushed in the U.S. election. 'Nuff said.

Barack. Hussein. Obama. Just repeat that name to yourself a few times. There's your next President. No, not of Kenya, and not of Saudi Arabia or Syria. Barack Hussein Obama is the next President of the United States of America.

What a condemnation of George W. Bush. I mean, what else can you possibly say about it? This was the people giving a major collective middle finger to the man who has led this country into the abyss by a web of lies, misinformation and just general stupidity and denial about the country's problems over the past eight years. It's not the first time the people have lashed out in the voting booths like this, of course. Look back to the 1970's, where republican Richard Nixon was caught in the Watergate scandal and forced to resign, embarrassing our country in front of the world while the American economy began its descent into one of its worst decades of the century. Sound familiar? The American people were so disgusted with that whole thing that, when the next elections rolled around in 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected President by a margin of close to 60 electoral votes, and the Democrats suddenly found themselves with 61 seats in the Senate and 292-143 in the House. Now that right there is what I call a supermajority.

The elections of 2008 will go down in the history books as a similar phenomenon. I mean, this is undeniably the closest America has come to electing a demagogue in any of our lifetimes. I don't pretend to know about the past history of guys who were elected 6o and 70 years ago or more, but the bottom line is, in modern U.S. history, we've never come out and elected a President with quite this balance of smooth talking and oratory on the one hand, combined with a general lack of understanding of his background, and a mix of actual policies that seem more or less incongruous with the situation the U.S. currently finds itself in on the other. And this doesn't mean that Obama won't do a fine job as President -- nobody knows that at this point -- but it is at least in my mind an unbelievable statement by the American people that they vote Obama in by this kind of margin given the circumstances surrounding him.

As I've written about here many times over the past month or two, this election was John McCain's to lose at some point in the fairly recent past, and lose it he sure did. The man tried his damnedest to run on a platform of change, of cutting the reckless and ridickulous overspending that has completely taken over Washington during the current administration, of ending the pork-barrelling and tacking on of bullshit provisions to unrelated bills, but when push came to shove, he showed the American people beyond a shadow of a doubt exactly what he is really about, which is, sadly, an extension of the George Bush mantra of overspending and throwing pork around like it's his job. The day that McCain voted in favor of the $750 Wall Street bailout, he was finished. Then when he started talking about spending another $300 billion of taxpayer money on bailing out troubled mortgage owners, you might as well have piled the dirt on his grave. We've already had eight years of a schmuck who thinks throwing hundreds of billions of Americans' money haphazardly and thoughtlessly at our problems is the solution to everything, and despite what McCain's mouth said, his actions with respect to that pork-laden bailout bill, with its tax breaks for wooden arrow makers as well as $150 billion for corporations, told us all everything we needed to know. This country absolutely, positively needed a stark change from the current administration, and boy did we show it on Tuesday night.

So that's my take on the 2008 Presidential election -- it's a vote for change, more than anything else. And one thing I have heard about 85 times since last night, ranging from every talking head on tv to the President-elect himself, that I flat out do not agree with, is that this election is some kind of a victory for race relations in this country. I am not seeing that one. Obviously, the election of a black man as President is a hugely meaningful moment in the history of this country, and in the history of the world, and it shows how far we have come as a nation over the past 150 years, and even just the past 50 years. And that is undeniably a great thing. But any suggestion that the rampant racism that is still out there is somehow going to get better from the election of Barack Obama completely puzzles me. In my opinion and from talking to some of the people who oppose Obama's election, I think it will get worse.

Number one, this country is in dire straits right now economically. That's a fact, and it's going to get worse, probably much worse. Right now the unemployment rate stands at 6.1%, and by all accounts that figure is likely to raise significantly, perhaps as much as 50% higher than current levels, over the next couple of years as the Obama presidency begins. And that is going to be a very, very ugly development for millions of Americans, and for the millions of Americans who depend on those newly-unemployed people for the funds they need for food, for shelter, for life. Odds are several of you reading this right now, including the person writing this very post, will find yourselves out of a job over the next few years, and frankly, the few of Barack Obama's policies he has made us aware of are not going to be helpful to corporations and to small business at all in their attempts to survive and/or to stave off the effects of the siginicant recession facing the country right now. Now of course, when all this happens, the Obama machine will naturally repeatedly and consistently blame the previous administration for 100% of the problems the country experiences during his term in office (simultaneously taking 100% of the credit for all the good things, like any good politician), but the bottom line is that things in this country are likely to get a whole lot worse economically for a ton of people before they get better, and that is only going to fan the flames of racism that unfortunately still burn brightly in many parts of America.

More than that, though, looking at Obama's electoral victory this morning, I can't help but notice something in many of the states thought of as the key "swing states" that Obama ended up mostly winning on Tuesday, and it's something that can't in my view be termed as anything but anti race relations, not pro race relations. In most of these key swing states, Obama won the electoral votes for the state and won the popular vote by a decent margin, and yet when you look at the distribution of the votes in those states, the vast majority of counties and distrcits voted in favor of McCain, while it is the urban districts that voted en masse for Obama and carried him to victory. Let me show you what I mean.

Take a look for example at the key swing state of Pennsylvania map. Obama took this state overall with a pretty whopping 55-44 margin in the overall voting. But look at that electoral map. That small blue area in the southeast is Philadelphia and the surrounding areas, the smaller blue area in the northeast is Scranton / Allentown, and the little blue blip in the west is of course Pittsburgh. Basically, you had the working class, heavily-minority areas turning out huge numbers of voters and electing Barack Obama for the entire state, despite the fact that McCain won more than two-thirds of the districts in the state overall.

Now let's look at Iggy's home state of Ohio. This state went to Obama, 51-47. That's Cleveland in the northeast, Toledo in the northwest, Columbus in the middle and Cincinatti in the southwest. Basically everything else, again more than two-thirds of the state's districts, went to John McCain.

This here is Florida, a state that went to Obama by a 50-48 margin. Again, nearly three-quarters of the distrcits voting for McCain, and yet Tallahassee in the north, Tampa on the west side and of course the Miami area in the southeast carried the state overall for Obama.

Here is Indiana, another swing state often mentioned by the pollsters and talking heads. Obama ends up winning the state's 11 electoral votes, despite losing in nearly 80% of the state's districts. But Gary, Indiana in the north and Indianapolis in the middle were enough to carry the state and keep it blue.

Check out Missouri, which as of Wednesday morning is split 49-49 and still being tallied. Any doubt where St. Louis is on that map? That one is about 90% of districts voting for McCain, and still might end up going to Obama.

And for you Las Vegas lovers out there, here is Nevada's map. Obviously, that's Vegas there at the bottom, and capital Carson City and Reno there on the West and NW. There's five more electoral votes all going to Obama, despite winning less than 20% of the districts in that state.

Here's Maryland, with its 10 electoral votes. In case you're wondering, that blue strip starts right in Baltimore up there in the north, and makes a beeline straight to Washington, DC. Everything else solidly in the red.

Now don't misunderstand me here. I am not saying this is unfair, that Obama didn't "really" win the election, or anything that in any way cheapens Obama's victory here. This is the way elections have always been run, and just because this kind of split is more pronounced in the Obama election doesn't have anything to do with changing the fact that the electoral college system is based on overall state votes, it has been for over 230 years, and it's the best system we have, one which I support 100%. Obama won this election, and won it big time, and he did so fair and square by any possible measure. But, to call this election a victory for race relations in this country is to me stretching the truth qutie a bit. To me it seems that we are going to have tens of millions of voters in America, covering about 80% of the surface area of this country, who are staunchly against Obama, and who know beyond dispute that it was the urban areas that came out in force and en masse and voted Barack Obama into office. Personally, I don't see how this is going to be good for race relations at all in America.

One interesting thing I found while I was looking through that cool state-by-state electoral application on the foxnews site is that exactly one county among all of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut voted for John McCain. New England, once considered the home of the traditional, the Puritanical conservatives among the country, is long gone, replaced now as the greatest bastion of unfettered liberalism this country has to offer. Which is amazing in a way if you live there, because the people of the area -- Massachusetts especially, as I lived there for six years of my life not too long ago, were and continue to be the most provincial, most race-biased group I have ever lived among, to the point that after six years in Boston I could not wait to get the hell out of there and to a more accepting, open-minded city full of people more like me. But you can't find a McCain voter in Massachusetts anywhere, check it out for yourself.

So that's my take on the election. Personally, although I clearly have my doubts about Barack Obama's plans to deal with the economy and just in general the policies he plans to put in place since he's been so opaque about them in general during this election, I am excited -- make that thrilled, even -- for the idea of change coming to this country. What we have gone through with the current President is so redonkulous, especially during the past couple of years but really throughout the entire two terms, that I love seeing the people tell him and his entire party to fuck the hell off and regroup, and I love the thought of a completely new set of people coming in and taking over. A new President, a new Vice President, a new Secretary of State, a new Treasury Secretary, a new SEC chairman, all of that stuff sounds real fuckin good to me right now, and obviously to millions upon millions of other Americans as well. It is official -- George Bush has ruined not just his own legacy but the constitution of his entire political party right now, much as Richard Nixon did in 1974. The republicans will be back of course, but right now the people have spoken and their words are telling the Bush lovers to Get Lost, a chorus in which I willingly chime in.

And for those of you all worried about the Democratic fillbuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, don't worry, it does not look like the people were qutie ready for that yet, which IMO is a very good thing. Based on projections of the still-open races, it appears that the number of Senate Democrats will go from 49 to what right now looks like 56 versus 42 republicans, and in the House, the number of Democrats will increase from from 235 to what looks like 251, versus 173 republicans. Interestingly, these figures are far from what most conservatives viewed as the "nightmare scenario" of the fillibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate -- requiring at least 60 seats controlled by the Democrats -- as well as the more optimistic projections for the House, which had the Democrats picking up as many as 25 or 26 seats instead of the 16 they appear to have won. Still, much like in the mid-1970s, it is a great example of what a truly, sickeningly horrible president can do to an entire political party, and what he can do to the political mindset of an entire nation.

Starting in late January of 2009, this country will embark down a road of liberalism not seen in more than 30 years. It's going to be an interesting ride to say the least. Congratulations to Barack Hussein Obama (no matter how many times I say it , I just cannot get over that a guy with that name is going to be the President of the United States!) and to all those who supported his historic run for office this year.