GREAT NEWS this morning! The Democrats have finally taken back control of the House of Representatives after more than 10 years of Republican control.
I've been watching the returns on MSNBC since 9 this morning and am ecstatic to report that all of the people I voted for have won the election!
Since I originally registered to vote when I was a student at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, that's the state that I voted from here by absentee ballot. I voted for Bob Casey for the US Senate, and he won with 59% of the vote, or 2,303,284 votes counted so far, beating Rick Santorum who garnered only 41% of the vote.
The Democrat Ed Rendell easily won re-election as governor of Pennsylvania. I voted for him too. In the House race, my pick from my district, Joe Sestak, beat incumbent Curt Weldon with 57% of the vote to Weldon's 43% of the vote.
This midterm election has really been a referendum on President Bush's failed Iraq invasion and all of the corruption and sleaze scandals that hit Republican lawmakers just before the election. Bush is reportedly "disappointed" at his party losing control of the House of Representatives. I sure hope that this will mean a serious re-thinking of the idiotic Iraq policy that Bush undertook. I fully supported overthrowing the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, but there seems to have a total lack of planning of what the US would after that and how long it would stay in Iraq.
There are no easy answers for what the US should now do in Iraq, but I think that the Democrats controlling the House, and possibly the Senate, will greatly moderate US foreign policy and significantly break Bush's policy of the US going it alone overseas, be it in Iraq or North Korea.Nancy Pelosi is now poised to become, later today, the first female Speaker of the House in US history, which can only be a good thing. Sen. Hillary Clinton easily won re-election in New York and puts her ever closer to a likely run for the White House in 2008. Could she be the first female president of the US in 2009? Who knows, but it looks highly possible.
Click here for live updates and state by state results as they come in.
The Democrats have now also taken the Senate and Rumsfeld is gone!!! It's been a great week, I'd say!!! Yeay! Good job for sending in your absentee vote!