We Don't Have Time for This

I managed to stay distracted until close to 9:00 p.m. central time last night, but then I was glued to MSNBC while talking to Daughter Number Three-Point-One on the phone for hours as she refreshed 538 and the New York Times. I outlasted her some time around 1:00 a.m., and then I was alone with Rachel Maddow et al.

I made it past Joe Biden's short speech and then saw Mafia Mulligan's outrageous lie-fest while it was delivered live. At some point, I started doing some work along the way and ended up staying awake until about 2:45 a.m. I got up at around 7:30.

I don't have anything brilliant to say about it all. When I went to bed, I thought it looked pretty likely Biden would win, and it seems even more likely now. 

But the Democrats not taking the U.S. Senate, and also not taking the Minnesota Senate, are both weighing on me. And of course the fact that so many other white people and wannabe-white people in this country think that Mulligan deserves another term, or that the Republican party deserves anything except being burned to the ground...

I heard on NPR this afternoon that the stock market went up about 400 points. The on-air analyst interpreted that as big business being happy that Biden had won and that the Senate was not going to be controlled by Democrats, which means nothing will happen. No meaningful change on things that matter (like climate change) but that are "bad for business" in the most narrow sense.

Kind of like this:

Obviously, the outcome could be much, much worse. (I shouldn't be saying that, because it still could be much, much worse if Republicans get their way in their lawsuits.) But it shouldn't be even this much worse.

 We don't have time for this. We don't have time for this.