So last night Earl, Jamie and I sat down and watched the election results on CNN. They certainly love their touchscreens and other wizbang gadgetry on CNN. Maps were flying around, things were being touched, colors were pulsating and Wolf Blitzer even donned a pair of hipster glasses to bring a certain serious frivolity to the numbers that were streaming in. I mentioned on my Facebook stream that it’s not really an election result unless it’s accompanied by a couple of Orchestral Hits, preferably the first being in the key C and the second being in the key of D. I did notice that CNN did not try to make like Princess Leia this time around and skipped the whole hologram thing that they were doing the last Presidential election. I was a little surprised by that.
As we watched the results, I followed the Twitterverse as well, and I started seeing more and more mentions of ABC’s Diane Sawyer acting somewhat drunk. Unfortunately, every time we cut to ABC to take a look, they had cut to commercial. One can only assume they did this so that Diane could top of her glass of chardonnay. This morning I found some video and it appears that when Diane was touching base with the journalists in the field, they were struggling to maintain their composure on the air as she asked about important things such as exclamation points and the lack of music for their projection announcements (apparently CNN had used up all the orchestral hits).
Diane’s frivolity aside, it was good to see that the American people chose the better of the two candidates to lead us for the next four years. I’m interested to see how President Obama does now that he doesn’t have to worry about getting reelected. I’m hoping that he’ll be able to accomplish good things for the entire country.
Speaking of which, I was REALLY happy to see that Maryland and Maine approved same sex marriage via ballot last night (w00t!) and Minnesota struck down a referendum that would have narrowly defined marriage to a union between a man and a woman. As of this writing, we are still awaiting the results of the Washington State vote.
One thing that didn’t get a lot of mentions last night was that the people of Puerto Rico voted 65% in favor of becoming a full state of the United States. President Obama has said that he would respect that vote and ultimately it’s up to Congress to make the call, but historically Congress has never turned that sort of thing down. I think it would make for an interesting flag design.
I think the next four years are going to be very interesting and I’m hoping that we will see some forward progress on many fronts. I am delighted that it’s the end of campaign season for a week or two and am feeling pretty good about it all today. Better choices were made, and that’s what’s important.
Let’s keep moving Forward.
Here’s a compilation video of Diane’s apparent drunkenness last night.
