Hooray! (Cough Cough)

Sorry I haven't posted anything the last few days, I've been sick as a dog since about Tuesday. I'm still down for the count today, so this is just a quick "hip-hip hooray" note for the results from election night.

Man, before the election I really wasn't allowing myself to believe that it could go that well. Now of course I don't call myself a Democrat, but that is still the best we can hope for in the ridiculous two-party control over our government. I used an analogy on election night that it was like having tuberculosis for the last six years and then waking up Wednesday morning and now you only have the flu. Sure, having the flu sucks, but at least you're not in that iron lung anymore.

At least maybe now we won't have a Congress that gives Bushie carte blanche for his evil agenda.

Some other good news from Tuesday:

South Dakota, by a bigger margin than people thought, turned back an assault on women's reproductive rights by defeating the horrific wide-sweeping ban on abortion.

Arizona, of all places, said no to the bigotry of a proposed amendment to their state constitution to outlaw gay marriage. Granted, six other states voted for similar laws, but the margins were closer than similar bills in the last few elections, including only passing with 52% in South Dakota. So be patient, homosexual brothers and sisters, the wave is turning. These are sure signs that we are within a generation of full rights for our gay citizens. That may be of little comfort to the senior age couple that have been together for 40 years without having their relationship recognized, but it is something. Susan B. Anthony never got to vote, but her fight was eventually successful for future generations.

One pet peeve (among many, of course) about the media's coverage of the election:

These are supposed to be intelligent people, yet so often there are examples of reporters calling something by the wrong name. Using the word "troops" instead of "soldiers" is a big one. Someone needs to remind them that a troop is a group of soldiers, so one should never say that "ten troops were killed today" if they are talking about ten individual soldiers.

And the thing that a lot of them (though not all) kept doing on election night was using the wrong term for the House of Representatives. So many times I heard that night that the Democrats had taken control of "Congress" but that the "Senate" was too close to call. Attention reporters, the word "Congress" is the term for the branch of government that includes both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Please stop referring to the House alone as "Congress." It makes you sound stupid.

Though now that we know the rest of the results you can correctly say that Democrats have, in fact, taken control of Congress. Hee-hee.


Now back to our regularly scheduled program of me coughing, sneezing, sniffing, and shaking with my fever and chills.