So many things to feel really, really good about

People love lists?  Here's a list:

1. Apparently a majority of American voters do NOT believe that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born, Muslim, socialist, terrorist, America-hating Nazi witch doctor, despite enormous efforts to convince us of those absurdities.
2. There's going to be a lovely black family in the White House for four more years.
3. Young people came through again.  The percentage of voters in the 18-29 age group was 19 percent this time, up from 18 percent in 2008 and 60 percent voted for Obama, as did more than half of the 17 percent of voters between the ages of 30 and 39.  The demographics are against you, Republicans.
4. Thank you Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert for the masterful job you did educating those young voters on how the American political system really works.  
5. Proposition 32 was defeated in California so maybe it won't be popping up all over the country in the next four years courtesy of ALEC.  Prop. 32, titled, in the fine old tradition of Orwellian Newspeak, "the Paycheck Protection" Act," would have emasculated California unions by forcing them to get written permission from each of their members every year to spend union dues on politicking.  Corporations would have to do that too if they deducted any money from their employees paychecks for political campaigns, but of course, corporations don't work that way, so only unions would have been suppressed. It's a damned shame that $133 million was spent on this bit of anti-democratic crap before California voters defeated it 55.4 percent to 44.6 percent.
6. Republicans so  frightened us women with their anti-abortion, anti-contraceptive, put them back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, war on women, we went out and elected four strong women to the U.S. Senate -- the first openly lesbian woman, Tammy Baldwin, in Wisconsin, the first Asian-American woman, Mazie Hirono, in Hawaii, Heidi Heitkamp, a real come from behind surprise in North Dakota and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusets, who will know more on Day 1 about how our economy works than most 20-year Senate veterans. 
7. We also re-elected a bunch of terrific Democratic women in California, Washington, Minnesota, New York and Michigan, and one who claims to be a Democrat, Claire McCaskill in Missouri.  She is, in any case, 100 times better than the"legitimate rape" troglodyte she was running against.  
8. There will be 20 women in the Senate and 61 women in the House of Representatives.  The House will also have 43 African-Americans, 27 Hispanics, 10 Asian Americans and five openly gay members.  Looks a little more like America, don't you think? 
9. The Republicans did not succeed in "taking back America."  What made them think they had lost it?  
10. The Republicans did not succeed in destroying the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, and it will go into full effect in the next year.  It's not single-payer, but it's a hell of a lot better than the collapsing healthcare system we had. 
11. The Republicans will not be able to make the Supreme Court more conservative than it already is. 
12. The Senate may be able to get rid of or limit the filibuster so it can get some real work done for a change. 
13. Piles and piles and piles of anonymous campaign funding only went so far to influence our vote.  And the Electoral College system ensured that only the swing states, and not all of us, were drowned in TV ads, though we were all drowned in emails and phone calls.  
14. But no matter which state we were in, it was important for us to go out and vote to fulfill the pollsters' predictions, and we did. 
15. Yay democracy!