i swore i’d never embed a youtube link on my site, but this one is just too good to pass up. it was made before the election, and with the exception of the ned lamont bit, it turned out to be remarkably prescient.

brilliantly assembled, set to an outstanding george michael classic, and guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

unless, of course, you are loyal to the minority party.

wow, it’s good to say that.

what’s missing from the nonstop election coverage today?

i’ll tell you what.

it’s a discussion of how far down the ticket the sweep went. this daily kos story is called “dems kick ass in state legislatures”.

it’s not just a victory on the national level. it’s in state houses, and i expect that it goes down to the county and city level as well.

people were just plain fed up.

news alert one just hit my email inbox: Tester defeats burns for the montana senate seat. great news, but not unexpected.

news alert two followed two minutes later: rumsfeld to resign.

damn! damn! finally we’re getting somewhere!

some random thoughts, blatantly stolen from various uncredited sources this morning:

karl rove was the mastermind of the largest electoral setback for republicans in quite some time. go karl. not such a wizard now, dude.

america’s message to george w. bush: shut the fuck up.

this is the first morning in the long march toward eliminating the evil influence of christian evangelicals in this country. christians like me are no longer going to stand for their nonsense.

the power has shifted from the south of america to the coasts, with a sprinkling of midwest for good measure.

not that i ever would have, but i’m glad i didn’t move to canada. if you actually did move to canada, shame on you. but you should come back now.

lost in the noise of this election: katrina. let’s not continue to forget it.

assuming that the democrats’ lead in virginia and montana senate races holds, the democratic party will have pitched a shutout. actually, make that a near-perfect game, except that they walked senator-elect bob corker from tennessee.

the country’s message to democrats: clean up the mess. be sensible. don’t overreach. you have a mandate for change, but it’s limited in scope.

there is so much to celebrate this morning. the house has returned to democratic control, and, much more improbably, there’s a good chance the senate will too.

but the news i’m cheering the most is from arizona. that very republican state became the first state in the country to reject a gay marriage ban.

the importance of this cannot be overstated. combined with much narrower majorities passing gay marriage bans in other states, and with the court decision in new jersey, it looks like we may have turned a corner in the battle for marriage equality.

my sense is that many arizonans possess that western conservatism, that libertarian-ish barry goldwater-like streak that says “stay outta my private life”. and those people combined with the social liberals to provide a majority to defeat the gay marriage ban.

there’s a road map there, and a great lesson for those in the marriage equality movement. that’s a winning argument that can be duplicated elsewhere. the dynamics of this victory will be, and should be, studied to an infinitesimal degree of precision. every nuance of meaning needs to be extracted.

and you combine the arizona victory with the defeat of the anti-abortion law in south dakota, and the passage of the stem-cell research proposal in missouri, and you have a formula for driving nutty evangelicals, well, nuttier.

it’s a good, good, morning in america.

two stories you may have missed:

andrew sullivan writes about the deliberate u.s. pullout from an area where a u.s. soldier is being held captive. does this not pretty much define “cut and run”? if this happened under the watch of a sitting democratic president, the hue and cry would drown everything else in the media. why is this not a bigger story?

from the story:

under this commander-in-chief, the U.S. military has both practised torture and abandoned a missing soldier in action. The commander-in-chief has ultimate responsibility for both decisions. he is directly responsible for betraying the honor of the armed services he is duty-bound to lead. So is Rumsfeld. So is Cheney.

and in today’s new york times (free registration required to view), a story about how the government put documents on a public website that comprise directions on building nuclear weapons.

from the story:

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”

gee, i thought the whole republican thing was that “the adults would now be back in charge”.

that may change, assuming we can all get our votes to count, which is certainly somewhat in doubt.