BB's 2006 National Hockey League Update, Sort of

What about those Buffalo Sabres?!? And the performance of their Right Winger Maxim Afinogenov? It’s been an exciting first month of the thirteen month NHL season what with goal scorers like Marion Hossa & Ilya Kovalchuk lighting it up for the Atlanta Thrashers…

Okay, I can’t do it. I can’t leave things Election 2006 quite yet. Not on a day in which the Tower Card in the Bush Administration tarot deck is shuffled out like last week’s garbage, meant to take the stink away from a good ‘ol fashioned ass-whupping. Rumsfeld’s figurative head on a pike is good times, people, good times.

A figurative representation of how some of us possibly see Donald Rumsfeld

But back to the ass-whupping. It’s “final” in a way that doesn’t quite seem final, but it looks like Webb has semi-kinda-officially won Virginia and the Democrats have taken the Senate. That’s good news, but not nearly as good as: 1. the Republicans have lost control of the Senate; 2. Joe Lieberman can go ahead and complete his two-year Benedict Arnold program and become that rare bird, the Blue State Jewish Republican, and it won’t matter. Not that Joe ever really has mattered, not really.

Oh, there’s plenty of rough road ahead, plenty of tarot cards still left to wreck our fortunes, tons of Lame Duck blocking maneuvers to endure on the road to getting us out of the six year hole we’ve had dug for us.

But boy does it feel good to use the term “Lame Duck”….Quack tarot Hierophant card, quack!

Okay, it's not anywhere close to perfect,
but this card at least mutters G.W. Bush to me

Or maybe this card is closer...

More locally, everything turned out about the way we in the ultra-powerful bloggin’ community envisioned. Admittedly, that’s a jokey inside reference to a discussion on last night’s KNME Election Coverage about the influence of blogs on elections. It’s only remotely funny if you saw the “blog segment” last night, and if you did I apologize and feel like I owe you a quarter or something for the time you wasted.

Thanks, however, to Kevin at KNME for a well-done segment on our class debates over at Jefferson MS, as well as to moderator Gene Grant and the other panelists who refrained from laughing out loud and rolling their eyes at the preposterous things I said. You guys are good people.

But I digress.

More close to home, the Babble is overly proud of the fact that he correctly picked all the obvious winners, missing only the Auditor race, not realizing that the State of New Mexico is progressive enough at this point to accept a bald State Auditor. It’s not quite the same as the first female U.S. Speaker of the House, but it’s something worth noting.

Then there is the 600 lb. ballot box gorilla that is Madrid/Wilson. What more can be said about this race? Heck, what more could have been said about it a month ago? As loyal Babble readers know, your humble prognosticator picked Wilson from the get-go and it looks like both he and Wilson are gonna luck out into a win. With Wilson being slightly luckier than me, in that I didn’t want Wilson to win.

Oh well, maybe it’s better to win a few “entertainment purposes only” wagers than to be represented by a person in Congress you agree with more than 1% of the time. Or maybe it’s not. Yeah, it’s probably not. But at least the House itself turned bluer than a azure sky in deepest summer, and it won’t seem to matter quite as much that our local representative votes with her Lame Duck President 100% of the time.

Meanwhile, say hello to our fairly-soon-to-be-new Senator from New Mexico, Heather Wilson.

As for Patsy Madrid, we ‘Mericans are tough on losers, and while I don’t know her (I shook her hand once), I feel sorry for the woman on a number of levels. At the same time, in a district that has always been close to 50-50, the fact that Madrid couldn’t take out Wilson in a year like this is pretty damning. I mean, if you couldn’t do it in 2006, when the Hell could you have done it?

And while it looks like I wasn't wrong on Wilson v. Madrid, I was evidently very wrong about one thing: Debates sometimes do matter. But perhaps they only matter when the debater does as lousy a job as was unfortunately turned in by Patsy Madrid. I'm not a big schmoozer and can't say that I talk to tons of people about this stuff, but in my dinky world just about the entire universe has taken time to tell me how bad they thought Patsy was in that debate. Unusually bad. Shades of Vice-Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate in 1992, bad. Just not good at all. As in the word "cringe" is often employed in the retelling. That bad.

Again, oh well. Nevertheless, the NM-1 race is like the single fly buzzing around the six pieces of lemon chess pie I’m metaphorically savoring right now. And Jim Webb beating, semi-kinda-officially, George Allen in Virginia is the extra flaky crust that makes the lemon tang just that much more special. I know, I know, when a guy on the farther Left starts salivating profusely about a moderate-to-right politician who served proudly in the Reagan administration, times are weird indeed.

But six years of W will do that to ya. It’s been a long six years. So long I don't want to even think about it tonight. Hand me another piece of lemon chess pie, would ya Mr. President, and quack, baby, quack!

P.S.: FIVE FUNNIEST OUTCOMES THIS ELECTION

1. Rick Santorum getting absolutely pummeled in Pennsylvania
   
2. Mark Foley still almost winning Florida's 16th District
3. Donald Rumsfeld
4. Patsy pausing for an unnaturally long time before speaking at her 11:30 PM speech at the Election Night Party
   
5. (tie) J.D. Hayworth getting beat in AZ-5; Conrad Burns getting eeked by in Montana
6. Because five isn't enough....Mary Herrera going straight from oversight of a somewhat botched election as Bernco County Clerk to NM Secretary of State

Okay, enough already, on with the NHL season!