Moment of Zen

Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA, via 2TravelDads.

Woke up sometime between 4:00 and 5:00, neither on purpose nor insomniac, just quietly listening to the brainchatter, when I suddenly realized I had forgotten all about the election—it had been absent from my mind for, I don't really know, the whole ten or fifteen minutes I'd been awake. That was kind of nice.

Fair enough--Democrats won the national popular vote by 9.4% and the House majority. We couldn't have done it without you! https://t.co/vfycSeX6zs

— Yas We Will. Vote! (@Yastreblyansky) November 7, 2018

And thanks for all the women! You did so much to make that happen.

— Yas We Will. Vote! (@Yastreblyansky) November 7, 2018

Obviously there are things we're all sad about—the wonderful new faces of Gillum and Abrams and O'Rourke who really should have won their races in a just world, the fates of McCaskill and Heitkamp after their brave votes on the Kavanaugh nomination—and enraged about too, beginning with the voter suppression that helped these things happen. It's outrageous that indicted criminal Duncan Hunter is keeping his seat, and Trump's secret agent in the House Devin Nunes, and I hate to think of  $1.7 billion Medicare fraud champion Rick Scott in the Senate (as seems inevitable, though the win was so narrow it's going to an automatic recount).

But away from specific personalities it really was a pretty good day. The taking of the House with a substantial majority is a big thing in practical terms—it means not only investigations of the criminal president but also the possibility of authentic progress on immigration, health care, infrastructure, where the majorities for decent solutions will now be findable in both houses if McConnell allows them on the floor, and if he doesn't then it's Republicans—and Trump—that are to blame.

The Democrats have roared back into those Rust Belt states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Republicans have been practically eliminated from politics in Maine, New Jersey, Virginia. And Connecticut (where the old blogger's favorite Ned Lamont will be governor) and Colorado and (almost) New Hampshire!

I'm very pleased with my own state of New York where Democrats have finally taken the state senate with a very big majority and Governor Cuomo is going to have to stop making excuses for everything from anti-corruption reform to funding the goddamned subway. Shoutout to two new House members, Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez in Queens and rapper–Rhodes scholar Antonio Delgado in my upstate hometown district! Goodbye fake Democrats of the IDC!

Chaos and lunacy aren't going away over the next two years, and the lame-duck session that's about to start is going to be very crazy indeed, I'm afraid. Everybody's forgotten about the migrant caravan already, and Trump's hallucination of a November 1 tax cut, and so on, but there will be more. There's always more. Nevertheless, we should allow ourselves to feel good about yesterday. More from Steve.