Morning After Open Thread

For your venting pleasure, consider this your post-Election Day open thread. No big surprises in the congressional results, but at least two glimmers of hope are standing out this morning.

 Elizabeth Warren beat Scott Brown. The big question is how long she will last as an "independent voice of the people" in the Senate. My prediction: she will come out swinging, ease some of Bernie Sanders's lone voice lonesomeness, deliver many a rousing speech and write many an indignant letter railing against Wall Street. Then one day, sooner rather than later, her new bffs President Obama and Harry Reid will invite her to lunch. And, I fear, she'll gradually start toning down the rhetoric. She will discover the reality that congress critters have to spend an inordinate amount of time fund-raising and meeting lobbyists.

I hate to sound cynical, and I hope that I am wrong. But elected office and corporate dollars and peer pressure do have a funny way of corrupting people. Moreover,Warren has already gone to the dark side when it comes to wholeheartedly supporting the Homeland Security State, championing the permanence of Obamacare as opposed to eventual Medicare for All, even sabre-rattling for war in Iran. Can it be much longer until the submission is complete, and she crumbles completely to the financial forces that foot the bill for all these wonderful things?

Oh. and Florida Rep. Alan Grayson will be coming back to town after a two-year hiatus. You may remember him as the champion of the public option in the health reform debate, way back when. So I guess we can at least look forward to a few more moments of biting sarcasm on the House floor.

I shut off the TV last night when, despite the frantic, overblown, red-white-and-blue nail-biting theatrics on CNN, it became obvious that the president would easily be coasting to a second term. The suspense had been contrived and empty all along. But after two years and more than two billion dollars, I guess it's understandable that the pundit class just couldn't bear to see the lucrative, nasty and small-minded horsey race end.

I'll post more later, unless the coming Nor'easter knocks us off the grid for the second time in two weeks. Many locales in my immediate region are still powerless from the first storm. Just yesterday, an elderly couple in a nearby town were discovered dead in their heatless home, reportedly from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a gas-powered generator.