Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

By almost all accounts, the Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives. This means that they will control every house committee and Nancy Pelosi will be the first female Speaker of the House and the most powerful woman in the history of the United States.

Here are my sources:
Fox News' report.
CNN's report.

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Alright, hold up a sec. Let's wait until all the votes are in, m'kay? Remember 2000? Yeah, me too.

So until all the votes are in and accounted for, let's hold off on this, ok?

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Everyone is projecting a Democratic win in the House, they have gotten the 15 seats they needed(21 so far).

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I know, but I just want to stray on the side of caution. So can we please wait until tomorrow morning please before we get this started?

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Well, the house is definitely Democratic now. The Senate looks like it easily could be, since the Democrats are ahead in both of the last races by the smallest possible amounts, but with over 99% of precincts reporting here in VA (and those that haven't reported were mostly in Webb territory last I checked) Webb (D) will probably be declared the winner and Allen will ask for a recount. I still don't know how you recount computers, though, and I'm technically an election official. It'll be the same in Montana. Dem control of the senate is incredibly likely, since recounts don't usually reverse results, even when it's this close. In any case, we won't know for sure for days or weeks, so might as well get this discussion rolling.

I don't like either party. Both of them have such immoderate positions that if either are allowed complete control of the government for any extended period of time, we'd have completely different kinds of disasters. That's why I'm glad for this, and hope they get the Dems get the senate, too. We'll either have to move forward on the middle road or stagnate in gridlock. And even gridlock is better than the places we'd go with either party controlling everything.

So it's come to this: voting for people not based on their vision for the country, but so there's an opposing horrible vision in government to provide a check on the other horrible vision...

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One of the two undecided Senate races has been decided. Montana has elected Jon Tester to the US Senate. This leaves Virginia as the only Senate race still going, though that looks like it will go to the Democrats as well.

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That doesn't exactly add up... you want the democrats to get the senate, but you don't want one party to be in control of the government... which do you mean?

The Republicans still have the Supreme Court (in a kinda-sorta sense) and the Presidency. By control of the government, I mean all three branches of government. If you're from a parliamentary democracy, being in control of all houses of legislature would mean complete control of government, but in the US system there's much more to it than that. It just strikes me as better that both houses be under like control in our system so that the laws that get made have some coherence, but they'll still have to negotiate with the president to get something passed and have to make laws keeping the conservative court in mind.

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uh, since nobody bothered to update it, Allen conceeded to Webb, officially. so yeah, ramifications? bolton probably will not get confirmed. Rumsfeld is already gone. politics should get interesting, as a form of theatre for a while. it will be interesting to see how Bush plays to a republican minority congress for the first time.

and as for what inverse tiger said, i agree with ya. i like it when checks and balances actually check and balance each other, of course, not if people strike down each other's efforts out of pure malice (which could happen on both sides, but hopefully it won't). although i strongly dislike the idea of the supreme court being seen as a partisian branch. of course, i'm not going to pretend like each justics doesn't have their personal beliefs, but i'd like it if there was a way for all justices to be centrist, because that's how the supreme court was sort of designed. but that probablyy wont ever happen.

Well, John McCain's more moderate/centrist than virtually all Republicans, so if he is elected President and some of the Judges leave or die, then the Court may well shift to the center.

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The only thing is that McCain more than likely won't run on 08. He's in his 70's now.

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He'll be 72 in '08. That's only three years older than Reagan was when he was elected President.

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"They've taken Mr Rimmer! Sir, they've taken Mr Rimmer!"
"Quick, let's get outta here before they bring him back!"

despite my registered Democrat-ness, i would genuinely like to see McCain on the campagin trail. unfortunately, i doubt it. he's an excellent senator and i hope, at least that he doesn't stop doing what he's doing (for the most part).

as for the court taking a center-shift.. i would like to see it. unfortunately, the most conservative people there seem to be the youngest. scalia, alito, and roberts are all pretty conservative, although i give Roberts a lot of credit for defying my expectations fairly often.

Good win, Democrats. Convincing victory across the board.

So... any lawsuits filed by Republicans as of late? Any accusations of vote-rigging? Fraud?

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You know, Ive never lived in a democrat-run society. Maybee this will be for the better. But if not, you can guess who's gonna be bunking with who in the Uk.

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Yeah you have. 1994.

yeah, but i was like... 3 or something then, so politics was only a 4 letter word back then.

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I seriously doubt that. I don't think she likes you nearly as much as you think she does.

And as someone who has lived under a democratically-dominated government, I sincerely doubt that they'll really accomplish very much except to alienate conservatives.

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I was talking about my friend Markus Von Marhen the Third. He saved my life in the 1990 tour of Europe when we were hit with mortar fire from all sides. I owe him a leg.

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I don't think they will do that. That won't bode well for them in '08.

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And he's launching an exploratory committee.

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How does this sound: Obama vs McCain?

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"They've taken Mr Rimmer! Sir, they've taken Mr Rimmer!"
"Quick, let's get outta here before they bring him back!"

Heavenly. Though I don't think Obama will run in 08. He hasn't even served one full Senate term yet.

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heavenly, agreed. it would probably be more centrist and more civil than any election i've experienced, except for maybe town councilships.
obama said he wasn't running in 08, and now he isn't ruling it out anyway. i think he may be pondering it because the political climate is good for him right now and if he waits until 2012 or even 2016 (boy that sounds far away...) it will probably be an entirely different world. so i wouldn't blame him if he fires it up and tries, imagine if he didn't try and never got another good chance.

thik of it this way, too. neither major party has any favorite candidates yet. sure its early, but there is no real heir apparent for either the republicans or the democrats. rumor santorum and allen were thinking about it, but the got their answers. and people talk about hillary, but the party isn't exactly rallying around the idea of her running, either. thoughts?

For some reason, I think that if a political party gets too much power, it throws the entire country into some sort of crisis and makes the populous think why they even voted that Party, switches over, the new party fixes (or allieviates) problems but starts new ones, and the whole thing starts over again. So I'd rather have it split down the middle than with a side having too much power.

Besides, when I heard the news, I felt like the Democrats were too stuck up on beating the "enemy" and "finally going to set things right".

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According to yesterday's USA Today, 61% of those asked prefer the Democratic party, not Bush, to chart the course. So right now, the weight of the world is on the Dems to straighten out the country. The pressure's on.

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And they probably won't. They didn't in 1992 or 1994.

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The Dems aren't going to be able to fix anything, I mean, Osama Bin Laden said the best thing for us to do to help the terrorists was vote Democrat. The Dems think that discouraging spending money (for citizens) will help the government make more money, which has been proven not to work, whereas tax cuts have been proven, during Reagan, and now during Bush.

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OK, so we're going by what Bin Laden says now?

Tax cuts have been proven: if they reach the middle and lower classes, which these did not. The economy's doing OK, but it's still riding the line and could go either toward good or bad from here, so that doesn't prove anything about Bush's tax cuts. Whether they work or not remains to be seen.

We need to start making some hard choices, though. We have stuff to pay for. If we want these things, we need to raise taxes to do so. Otherwise, we should stop doing them. Do we want to be the world's police, or do we want social security? Life's tough, let's start picking (fat chance, admittedly).

(To bring it back on topic:) The Democrats say they won't start any new spending programs without the money to pay for them, and I hope they stick to that. I also hope they won't push through any program people don't really want, and it's not like they'll really be able to with an opposing president and an ultra-slim majority. They got cocky between 92 and 94. Maybe they'll show some restraint this time.

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They did get there, but it makes sense to me that the people that pay the most get the most back, I mean, the top %10 of rich people in this country pay more than %70 of the tax bill, even after Bush's tax cuts.

When you get more money, what do you want to do with it? Spend it, right? So when you stop taking quite so much money from people, they have more than they did before, which means that they have more to spend, and they normally do spend it, which creates tax money from sales tax.

With Dems in power you can expect across the board tax increases, or in this case, they will let the current tax cuts go away. Some may have said they won't increase taxes, but even more say they will let every single one of Bush's tax cuts expire in 2010, which will mean a tax increase.

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