Random post-election rants

• That the Democrats won back control of both the House and Senate doesn't mean that the Repugs didn't steal the election. For one thing, it wasn't one election, but hundreds of them. And given the black boxes, robo-calling, voter purging, and other dirty tricks that clearly went on, it seems certain that several of these elections were stolen, most likely in the Republican's favor. There should probably be another ten to twenty Democrats in the House, and maybe one or two more senators as well. That second item is particularly important, since as many columnists and bloggers have now pointed out,
• Holy Joe Lieberman is now the most powerful person in the Senate. He holds the entire Democratic "majority" hostage, since should they attempt to do something he doesn't like, such as block some horrible Bush nominee, he can simply threaten to take his ball to the other side of the aisle. All of a sudden, the Dems don't have all of those juicy committee chairmanships. Knowing the relative commitments of the Dems to the good of the country and the good of the party, I can't imagine there's any issue whatsoever that the Dems would be willing to fight to the end for if it meant it would cost them their majority status. So Bush may have lost Bill Frist controlling 55 senators, but now he's got Lieberman agreeing with 49 Repug senators and having the remaining 50 by the short hairs. One more Senate seat would have been nice--then they could have just kicked Holy Joe out of the party for good.
• This charade that Baker, Gates & Co. are the good, "grownup" Republicans come to clean up Junior's mess has got to stop. Replacing obvious criminals with the more subtle variety is hardly an improvement.