1. Following a crucial midterm election that served as a referendum on the two land wars America is currently fighting in Asia, several races were too close to call, including the crucial racist moron vs sexist moron race in Virginia that will determine who controls the upper chamber of the legislature and whether the Vice President will cast deciding votes for a split senate. I've received as many email updates about this from CNN as I have about Britney splitting up with K-Fed. I only recently became aware of how ashamed I am to even know who that is, and by my total lack of surprise at which story CNN figures I'd be more interested in.
2. The Republican Whore vote has been seriously underestimated in Minnesota electoral politics. The DFL had a pretty solid sweep in the statewide elections except mysteriously for the top of the ticket, where Hatch managed to blow it against Governor Pawlenty. The immediate cause of his loss according to the media was his denigrating a reporter as a "Republican whore", which somehow shifted key undecided voters. As a result, I'm sure in 2008 Senator Coleman will be sure to line up the League of Republican Whore Voters early.
3. Mike Freeman is alive and well, and was just elected to be the next Hennepin County Attorney. Mike Freeman was last seen giving a real-world, practical demonstration of how unappealing a candidate Hubert Humphrey III was to anybody who ever heard him speak, by beating him for the DFL gubernatorial endorsement in 1998. Apparently everybody got the message but Humphrey, who went on to come in third in a two-party system.
4. I had no idea so many same sex marriage bans were being considered by states, but I really was surprised by a couple of results. South Dakota voters overturned the insanely restrictive, blatantly unconstitutional abortion law that the legislature passed to try and force the Supreme Court to review Roe v Wade. If a doctor saved a pregnant woman's life while terminating her pregnancy or aborted a fetus conceived through by a man sexually abusing his own child, they would have been charged with felony murder under this law just to create more test cases for the Supremes to consider, and apparently South Dakotan voters didn't feel like the legislature served their interests by offering those women up as sacrifices. Also, Arizona narrowly rejected a same-sex marriage ban, meaning this is the first time voters rather than judges have stood up for gay marriage. This could get interesting.
5. Michael Steele is a Republican. Who knew? Apparently he didn't, since he didn't mention the fact anywhere on his website and had bumper stickers that said "Steele Democrat". His loss to Democrat Ben Cardin in the Maryland senate race while trying to live down his support of the president was pretty symbolic of this election cycle.
6. Microsoft's MSN music store is incompatible with Microsoft's own music player, the Zune. I guess they figured out Apple's domination of the portable music player market with devices that seamlessly integrate with their music store was obviously just a fluke. I know this has nothing to do with the election, but my god is it stupid.
7. Donald Rumsfeld prefers softball questions. About five minutes after Democrats took over the House and had oversight over the Department of Defense, he was out the door. The party line before the election seemed to stand tough over Iraq and show no weakness by admitting anybody had screwed up, that any change of direction was called for, or show any regret in hindsight. Now we found out Rummy apparently had a cab waiting outside the Pentagon with the engine running, I wonder what else will turn out to be election year rhetoric. What's next, will Britney take back K-Fed?
8. It's not just me, other Minnesotans also want some new transit options. The constitutional amendment to commit automobile sales tax revenues to transit with a minimum of 40% going to public transportation passed, and if you remove all the dumbasses who voted but left that question blank because it didn't have a party endorsement (or Ryan Seacrest there to explain how to text message your vote to the Capitol), or just didn't flip the ballot over, it passed by a pretty big margin, since leaving the question blank counted as a no vote. With the passage of this amendment, transit projects in Minnesota will now only be underfunded by 1.2 billion dollars a year. So it will be awhile before we get that elevated train from Rosedale Mall to Randolph and Dunlap, boys.
9. Minneapolis is getting rid of costly non-partisan municipal primaries. Last year, for city offices such as mayor, an open primary in September reduced the field down to two candidates who appeared on the November ballot, a system also used for non-partisan county offices such as sheriff. Instead, now we'll have instant run-off voting, so the city doesn't need to hold a separate election in September practically nobody's aware of where many races may not even have two candidates, much less the 3 or more serious candidates required to make such a primary meaningful. Seriously, voting in a 2-candidate primary for city council where the incumbent got 93% really made me wonder why I got up that morning.
10. The Hennepin County Soil and Water Commission outspends its budget by a factor of 2 to 1. I only found this out because the board is publicly elected and puts up candidate statements on the strib's election website and have to be publicly accountable. One seat was contested by a guy who pointed that out as perhaps a reason not to reelect the board, while this geology student ran by saying he'd been researching the public and private partnership in the state environmental community composed of governments, private industry, and NGOs, and found that the only group not represented were the goofs at the soil and water commission who didn't talk to anybody else... he actually got elected. So it's nice to have some public accountability in the bureaucracy.
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