For the last month I have been fighting with the Seattle Housing Authority. Due to lax accounting practices they have been overcharging me for rent to the tune of almost $100 a month for the last 6 months. Last week I sent a large package to their office including proof of bad accounting and a request for a formal hearing.

Today I got a call from Seattle Housing and as soon as the guy announced who he I was I got terse and put on my “Don’t fuck with me” attitude. Then he let me know he was calling to see if I was interested in a position. Shit.

The job would put me firmly back in the tax paying middle class with a fat government benefits package.

He’s going to call to set up an interview early next week. There is a large part of me that would enjoy showing these people how to actually do accounting (mama was an accountant and I don’t play fast and loose with the numbers). Would you all still love me if I was even more of a government shill?

I’ve had a bad, really bad year when it comes to people dying. Last March, I lost 2 friends in the Capitol Hill shooting massacre. Two months later my grandfather suffered from a stroke and died slowly at home. Then yesterday was Veteran’s day. First thing yesterday morning I got a call that my Uncle Ed had died. He had served in Vietnam, but like most of the troops back then he wasn’t there by choice.

I’m not sure of the exact year or even of the truth of the story (my family being famous for the lack of truth in family stories), but the story I have been told is that my Uncle Ed ended up a paratrooper in Vietnam after he stole a 75 cent jacket from a thrift store and got caught. The judge gave him what was a pretty common choice back then- jail or the army. Had he gone to jail he just would have been sent to Vietnam when he got out, so he skipped the jail part and went to Vietnam.

He didn’t talk about the war to us kids, but I remember being 10 years old and sitting in the back seat of the car while we were getting ready to go somewhere. A car backfired and Uncle Ed lost it. This big grown man tried to climb under the steering wheel, pulling whoever was in the passenger seat with him for fear of what the backfire noise meant. “Flashback”, my mom whispered while I worried. “Let your uncle be”.

Most of my memories of my uncle involve a car. There were the “sailing trips” we used to take early on weekday mornings. This is where we all loaded up into a big van and went scoping out garage sales, but telling people we went “sailing” every weekend was Uncle Ed’s big joke. The last time I saw my uncle I drove him to a family reunion in North Carolina. This was the first time I had dealt with him as an adult (our family is not one for regular get togethers). I had my little red Toyota Corrolla, a car not known for power or speed, loaded up with 5 people and all their luggage. Ed didn’t think I could possibly have the car in the right gear because it was going too slow, uphill. He grabbed the gearshift while I was driving and dropped it into neutral. If it wasn’t for my mother I would have killed him. Shortly thereafter, he decided I was going to miss the exit and jerked the steering wheel hard to the right. I was pissed and had it been anyone besides my mother’s darling big brother, he would have been left walking on the roads of North Carolina with his luggage in tow. He found another ride home from the reunion, but that drive has tainted most of my relations with him since.

For the last few years, Uncle Ed has been fighting with the VA over his medical benefits. His kidneys were failing. He needed dialysis and a transplant. Like most government operations, the red tape to get assistance was meant to drive more people off than to actually help them. Uncle Ed, as you can tell by my driving story, was a guy who got what he wanted by charm and took it if he didn’t think someone was going to give it to him. I heard the frustration the few times I talked to him after he got sick. He went from being Ed the invincible, someone who really annoyed me but who I respected, to being broken by a system that was ungrateful for the services he had given.

We have a whole new slew of veterans coming home from another war that no wanted but the politicians and new stories about how poorly we treat them when they come home. Uncle Ed is gone, and nothing has improved since he came back from another war where the climate was unbearable and the terms of service were abhorable and no one could see the point in what they were fighting for. I don’t know if Ed meant for there to be symbolism in the date of his death or if at that point he was just to sick to care, but I know I am really tired of people dying who shouldn’t.

Welcome back to the party of pragmatism and reality based results. Let me be, if not the first, then one of the many to say thank you for restoring my faith in the general population. Turns out that our country has not been quite as over run with red state yahoos as I thought.

But before you get all big-headed about your role in this election, let me say one thing.

WHAT THE FUCK TOOK YOU ALL SO LONG?

Seriously, Iraq was a quagmire in 2004. Science has been shoved under the rug since 2000. The budget has been careening out of control since the start of the Iraq war. The No Child Left Behind act was failing kids before it was enacted. The scandals being reported on now have been going on for years. We all knew the Medicare Rx plan was going to blow chunks. Where the hell have you been?

Were you too dazzled by the latest season of reality TV shows for the last 6 years to pay attention to the news? Did your education suck so badly that you couldn’t understand the middle-school level of writing done in most major newspapers? Did you miss the “Don’t believe the hype” lesson most of us learned as teenagers upon discovering that plucky girls in glasses don’t actually win the quarterback and skinny boys with greasy hair don’t get the head cheerleader in the back seat with her skirt pulled up? (Slight disclaimer- I was that cheerleader with the skinny boy- but I am the exception that proves the social rule). Did you think that voting with the frat boy party and beating up on gays and immigrants was gonna make you popular?

OK, admonishment done. I promise that as long as you all continue to act like thinking, rational human beings I will never again mention the 6 years of hell we have all been facing. We’ll just say that you were “going through a phase” and put it to rest. But you do have to prove that you are going to continue to use your brain at the ballot box and not let the self-esteem challenged inner teenager punch your card.

As a reminder of some of the rational things that will hopefully come from your vote:

Science will once again trump magic fairy dust and faith healing in dealing with the environment.

Women’s bodies will go back to belonging to individual women and we will, hope upon hopes, start valuing already alive children more than we value clumps of dividing cells.

Budgets will be balanced, taxes will be fair, incomes will go up. This is what Democrats do, by the way. The “tax and spend” liberal idea is so outdated that Eisenhower would cringe to hear it used.

We will stop giving swirlies to the EU and the rest of the world when it comes to international relations. I know it seemed really hilarious to you when Bush was doing it before, but you know the people that get swirlies and wedgies and are otherwise tormented are always the ones that come back 10 years later as gazillionaires who can lay off your entire division out of spite. We are starting the process by not allowing John Bolton permanent title to embarrass us on the floor of the UN. (Thank Lincoln Chaffee for that one, ousted as he is he is showing that the needs of the country are worth more than his need to stick it to the winners).

This is just the beginning of rational behavior. Again, thank you for coming to your senses or for finally being bored with Dancing with the Stars or Survivor.

Sincerely,

The Red Queen who has been a rational blue voter since my first registration.

The AP is calling Virginia’s Senate race for Webb.

Welcome to the ruling party fellow Dems. It’s about fricken time.

But this time the advice is from me.

The states are currently responsible for voting practices. That needs to end. Election Boards are run by partisan appointees and elected officials who have a personal stake in the outcome.

There needs to be a federal level right to vote and an office not unlike the GAO (non-partisan general Accounting Office) to administer voting policy. If you want to require ID, then it should be provided free of charge at the time of registration. If you want to limit felons from voting, it should be explained how they can be punished twice for the same crime. Who can vote, and how they vote should be universal. Voting machines should have paper receipts, one for the voter and one for a recount. Voter intimidation should be treated as a serious offence with jail time, not unlike witness intimidation and clear rules for what constitutes intimidation should be established.

There should be specific guidelines for how many machines and poll workers are at each polling place based on population size. There should not be long lines discouraging voters in poor districts because of lack of machinery.

In other words, we should make voting universal and remove as many restrictions to individuals as possible because there really is no such thing as too much democracy.

For the new Democratic majority

These next two years are a test, not a mandate. We are not giving you a car, we’re letting you borrow it for your date. If you bring it home before curfew and there aren’t any scratches or dents on it, we might let you start driving it to school daily. You are not in charge here, you work for us. Do not forget that.

And suddenly, the government starts to look a little bit more like the people it is supposed to represent. The biggest gain is the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. For the first time ever, we have a woman third in line to the presidency. This is the closest we have come to the presidency so far. Previously, Secretary of State Madeline Allbright was fourth in line, but because she was born outside the country she was not eligible to take the president’s spot.

The future Madam Speaker shows us her scary side. This will come in handy during investigations into Republican wrong doing.

It’s nice to see women getting ahead in the Senate too. We now have 16 Senate seats, which is not nearly the 50 we would need to be truly represented, but it keep increasing.

Claire McCaskill from Missouri thanked Rush Limbaugh after Limbaugh’s vitriol on the Michael J. Fox ads drove stem cell supporters to donate mass cash to her campaign. Yay- a win for Dems, women, and science!

Deval Patrick, first African American Governor of Massachusetts who won after his opponent ran a really disgusting commercial to scare women out of voting for Patrick. Huhm, black man running for governor and his opponent tries to swing women voters by scaring them with the idea that Duval supports rapists.

Keith Ellison, the first ever Muslim representative elected to Minnesota’s fifth district. I’m sure the right wing nutbags are declaring this a win for “islamofacists” while completely ignoring the fact that the right wing nutbags have more in common with the Taliban than with the rest of America.

Gabrielle Giffords, the new Rep from Arizona’s 8th district

For more Women in the Senate, House, and Governorships check out Emily’s List.

For more on African American gains in the House check out this.

If I’ve missed someone (and I am sure I’ve missed plenty) let me know in comments.

In honor of our sweep of the House and our soon-to-be control of the Senate (Virginia rule requires a 10 day wait for election certification and then a mandatory recount if the difference is less than one half of one percent) I give you the happiest dance ever.

It’s no mistake that there is a massive Frank Herbert influence in this video either.

So I am an election geek. Here’s my prediction so far:

Montana: It’s a wrap for Tester. He’s been over 50% all night and exit polls give him a substantial lead.

Virginia: Maybe it’s optimism, but I’m giving this one to Webb. There are 6 counties that still have votes to report and Webb is trending ahead in 5 of them.

Missouri: Oh how I wish I could call this one for the Dems. This is the race that used the Michael J Fox stem cell add. But it’s an absolute toss up. Of the counties left to report, McCaskill is leading in 5, talent in 4 and 7 have no results in at all.

In other news- First Female Speaker EVER! And we haven’t even had the vote for 100 years yet.

Vermont elected a socialist to the Sentate to replace Jim Jeffords. I love Vermont. Gimme some maple syrup!