I cried. I did. The tears just poured down my face, the Main Distractor and I were instant messaging, and even though I was alone (with the dogs) in my Vancouver living room, not in a crowd of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands, it was great.

There are some races that didn’t go the way I would have preferred, personally (Darcy Burner in WA for one, Michelle Bachmann in MN for another, for opposite reasons), and holy SHIT the religious people need to keep their self-righteous motherfucking noses out of the politics, because taking away people’s civil rights is just not done in a democracy. It’s just not done! Why would they think that they could? and I mean come down to it, how does a proposition like that even get on a ballot? what the fuck is going on down there in California?

Anyway, I’m terribly pleased that the right man won the election. I’m very interested to see what happens in the next 12 months.

I was going to write this more than a week ago, a sort of a note about which websites and people helped feed my insatiable newscraving in the run up. Then other people started doing that, and I didn’t want to appear like a bandwagoner. But anyway. In the unlikely event that anyone who bothers to read what I write isn’t aware, I give kudos to the following:

• FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver
• DailyKos (take with a grain of salt, sometimes, but great for breaking political news and some good analysis)
• Rachel Maddow (I think the favourite new (to me) voice of the campaign)

And the news/opinion sites listed as distractions on the right.

I had hoped that, with the failure of McCain-Palin to put the nail in the coffin of the media elite, we would be able to stop hearing from the Governor of Alaska. And because I’ve been watching nothing on my television of late except The West Wing DVDs (I’m on Season 3), I have managed to not actually hear her. However, I’ve been reading of a few of her recent forays into interviews (she’s already had like twenty times as many interviews/press conferences as during the campaign, it’s quite astonishing), and today I found the transcript of a particularly egregious example of her shitty shitty grammar. So shitty that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

Did you know that the word “progress” is a noun? We’re making progress, for example, or there was progress in the bla bla bla. The Governor of Alaska (who has probably gone back to saying nuke-ular now that the RNC isn’t trying to make her palatable to the public any longer) has a new talking point, it seems, and she is just DYING to progress the country. Using progress as a verb. She’s not the first, but I wish to fuck she’d be the last. I give you an excerpt from her Wolf Blitzer interview earlier this week.

PALIN: … Now is the time to move on and to, again, make sure that all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation.

Keep us secure, get the economy back on the right track, and many of us do have some ideas on how to do that and hopefully we’ll be able to put all of that wisdom and experience to good use together.

BLITZER: So looking back, you don’t regret that tough language during the campaign?

PALIN: No, and I do not think that it is off-base nor mean-spirited, nor negative campaigning to call someone out on their associations and on their record. And that’s why I did it.

BLITZER: I just want to sort of footnote, was that your idea or did somebody write those lines for you?

PALIN: It was a collaborative effort there in deciding how do we start bringing up some of the associations that perhaps would be impacting on an administration, on the future of America. But again, though, Wolf, knowing that it really — at this point, I don’t want to point fingers backwards and play the blame game, certainly, on anything that took place in terms of strategy or messaging in the campaign.

Now is the time to move forward together, start progressing America.

Do you suppose she thinks she can use military (non)grammar since she’s the head of the Alaska National Guard?

And just to relive the dropped-jaw reactions to her meandering non-answers from the campaign:

BLITZER: Let’s talk about some of the current issues on the agenda right now. And I speak to you as someone who is a emerging as a potential leader, not only in the Republican Party, but maybe if you want to run again for president or vice president down the road.

Right now a big issue, should the U.S. government, the federal government bail out the Detroit — the big three automakers?

PALIN: Oh, that is the discussion of the day. And there is going to come a point here where absolutely the federal government must play an appropriate role in shoring up some of these industries that are hurting and will ultimately hurt our entire economy and the world’s economy if there aren’t some better decisions being made.

But we also have to start shifting some debate here in our country and start talking about personal responsibility and responsibility of management in some of these corporations and companies so that from henceforth it’s not assumed that the federal government is going to be bailing out everybody who is going to soon line up, Wolf, for more taxpayer assistance.

And I’m talking about personal responsibility too in terms of homeowners and in terms of folks who maybe have extended their own credit. Sure, predatory lenders are to blame in all of this also, but we have got to make sure, for instance, we’re not talked into buying a $300,000 house, because really we know we can only afford a $100,000 house.

And we’ve got to start living those lessons that we try to teach our children in terms of not living beyond our means and extending our own personal credit to the point of not being able to pay our monthly bills and then expecting government to grow and be the answer.

BLITZER: So, sorry, I’m still waiting for the answer, should the government bail out the big three automakers?

PALIN: Well, that — it’s in debate right now and I’m listening closely to the debate and there is a lot of information that even you and I certainly aren’t privy to, to understand all of the ramifications if federal government were going to step in and bail out.

But we do know that the auto industry is that important that certainly it needs to be considered. But, you know, I’m not going to ignore the debate again that I think needs to lead to the personal responsibility, the management decisions that have been made in some of these companies and corporations that have also led us to where we are.

BLITZER: So I hear you saying you need more information right now.

PALIN: Yes, I do. Yes.

Sigh.