Outcomes

[flexibeast]

So the US midterm elections seem to have gone more smoothly than i feared; apparently voting machine problems were more about failure rather than fraud, although i have read numerous accounts of 'oddities' (e.g. this). But people have commented that this election was not so much a victory for the Democrats as a loss for the Republicans:

[Democrat House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi has 34 percent approval ratings, slightly better than Bush's 31 percent . . . 85 percent of Americans said the “major reason” was disapproval of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, 71 percent said disapproval of Bush’s overall job performance, 67 percent cited dissatisfaction with how Republicans have handled government spending and the deficit, 63 percent said disapproval of the overall performance of Republicans in Congress, 61 percent said Democrats’ ideas and proposals for changing course in Iraq. Tellingly, just 27 percent said a major reason the Democrats won was because they had better candidates.

-- Poll: Bush hits new low

Nevertheless, with the Democrats in control of both the lower and upper houses, it will be interesting to see what happens. In an MSNBC poll, 87% of respondents thought that Bush should be impeached (which i agree with - if you can instigate impeachment of a president for having an affair and getting a blow job in the Oval Office, there are clearly a multitude of grounds on which Bush can be impeached); but i'm yet to hear of any such moves by the Democrats. There have, however, been suggestions that they will try to restore habeas corpus for enemy combatants. And Nancy Pelosi has proposed a long-overdue set of rules regarding the behaviour of House members. It would be nice if the basic salary for House members was restricted to the average salary of US workers, or, at a minimum, House members could not keep voting themselves pay raises; but somehow i don't think either of those things are going to happen. :-P

In any event, i hope that the changed makeup of Congress will curtail Bush's enthusiastic embracing of the Apocalypse.