A Tiny Island of Blue Sanity

I could have written this on Wednesday but I wanted to digest the election news.

First the bad news.

Unless you've been living under a rock you know that the Republicans (or as I like to call them Satan's Little Helpers) took the House and made serious inroads into the Senate. Reid won in Nevada. Bennet won in Colorado. The solid blue states remained fairly blue-- California, Washington, Oregon. O'Donnell lost in Deleware-- a victory for the forces of right if there ever was one.

The "Enthusiasm Gap" (See here.) seemed to account for a lot of it. The Tea Party seemed to make the Republicans more enthusiastic about voting. Democrats, not so much. And, as one would expect, the groups that get out more votes tend to win elections.

My own opinions are well known. (See here.) So we gave to keys of the House car to the drunken teenager that ran it into the ditch in the first place. What's worse, given the rhetoric, we've found out the drunken teen's favorite idol is Lindsay Lohan. Here's an interesting blog entry about the election in a microcosm: the eighth Minnesota district.

Oooooooooooookay.

So: what's the good news?

It was a completely democratic sweep in Massachusetts.

The Scott Brown election earlier this year seemed to act as a wake up call for the state. By and large, the entire state said screw the Tea Party. We'll do what we think is best, thank you very much. If the Massachusetts GOP had fielded better candidates things might have been different. But if the Mass. Dems had fielded better candidates in the special election Scott Brown would never have won.

It was all local politics here (See this analysis.) and the national lunacy didn't quite penetrate.

Sometimes it's good to live in Massachusetts.

(PS: Addendum: One problem with the election are the Rasmussen polls. Check here.)