dems in da house!

Excuse the painfully obvious title, but for the past six years I've been waking up on the second Wednesday of every other November with a pit in my stomach and coal in my stocking -- and now, finally, it's like Santa finally figured out what I really, really wanted.

And it's like the gifts keep on coming: Not only have the Democrats taken the House, but Rumsfield is out as Defense Secretary, and the Senate race is (as of right now) down to one seat. Just one! What did we do to deserve such riches?

Oh, that's right: paid more and more for healthcare each year (for fewer services), offered our own money and time when the citizens of New Orleans were left without coordinated disaster response for days, attended protests to show our support against a strange plan to invade another country without provocation, gasped as the government found a way to legally condone torture, promised everyone we met in every country we traveled to that the practice of secreting people away to clandestine prisons was not a policy that many people in the U.S. agreed with, donated more and more to non-governmental organizations with the hope that they would be able to do something to bridge the ever-widening gap between the poorest and the richest people in the country, shouted at the television when members of the White House confused Iraq with Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, voted against every measure that tried to prevent our friends and family from marrying whoever they want to (unfortunately to little avail), wrote editorials pointing out how the the Administration was suppressing important scientific findings in order to protect their own interests, watched helplessly as committees debated red herrings like flag burning and steroid use in baseball rather than issues like education and the environment and the increasing inability of two-income families to make any progress....