About last night

Spent the last couple of hours before the polls closed handing out Lamont information at my local polling site, actually feeling kind of hopeful he'd pull it out. The Lieberman volunteer seemed really agitated.

It was a strangely surreal night; this "winning" thing takes some getting used to. It was especially surreal in Connecticut watching Lieberman win (and Shays leading) while Nancy Johnson loses to Chris Murphy. Meanwhile, in Rhode Island Lincoln Chafee loses? Not sure what to make of it other than it seemed (even as I was handing out campaign literature to last-minute voters) that older voters and Republicans had decided good ol' Joe was the more comfortable fit. All that definitely took some of the wind out of my sails as the night wore on.

Still, it's a step back towards some sanity in this country. Santorum is finally gone, perhaps to open a kennel. In Montana, a greed head lunatic was finally defeated. And it looks like the good people of Virginia decided, barely, that Allen is probably dumber than a box of nails.

Perhaps the biggest stories of the night were these, though.

(AP) - In a triple setback for conservatives, South Dakota rejected a law that would have banned virtually all abortions, Arizona became the first state to defeat an amendment to ban gay marriage and Missouri approved a measure backing stem cell research.

It will be interesting if the pundits pay any attention to those results, which truly showed that the centrist position in this nation is not anti-choice, teh gay or blastocyst worship.

UDATE: Oh, I forgot the other reason the wind was not fully at my back last night -- the sight of Candy Crowley. Even with the teevee sound off, it was almost too much to bear. The appearance of her and Bill Bennett seemed designed to make liberals want to retch even as the good news kept coming in.