Election 2006 aftermath - Relief, kitchen lessons, and ethics

Updated Mon Nov 13.

Whew.

I wasn't expecting the Dems to take the House and Senate - felt sure the Republican 'false flag' robocall dirty tricks - and the press's late, false-balanced, or absent coverage of them - would let the dirty tricksters walk off with the preponderance of the races in this election too.

Not so. (but it apparently did tip the balance in some races)
Welcome [oops - Ed.], and thank you. There's a lot of work to do.

Another incident of Republican lying and cheating, and some appalling press 'coverage' of the smorgasbord of dirty tricks

Sauce for the gander?

I don't pay enough attention to political maneuverings to do anything more than pass this (from Markos of Daily Kos) along -

[during the Bush administration] Republicans in the Senate and House -- secure in their perpetual majorities -- instituted a long list of policies that dramatically discriminate against the minority party in both chambers. In the House, the minority is all but invisible. And in the Senate, the filibuster is all that's left keeping the minority party from utter irrelevance (and they tried to get rid of that).

Kos is - for the moment at least - relishing the idea of keeping these policies intact and giving the new minority party a taste of its own medicine. The commenters are all over the map* - some agree, some take the "Congressional Dems should do the Right Thing, shouldn't stoop to [existing Repub.] practice" high road.
A couple good points, e.g. this-

Political civility in the halls of Congress ... is self-executing. That means there's no judge to complain to. Good behavior is enforced by making sure that what goes around comes around. In this ['game'] the moral position is to make sure that someone who abuses the process gets punished by having done to them what they did to you. Otherwise they have absolutely no incentive ever to be civil to you because they know they'll pay no penalty if they're not.

and this -

what I really want... is for significant change, for positive things to get done, and that means removing a lot of the bad, bad legislation that has been foisted on the land under this Congress, as well as passing all those things that have been so needed and so brutally repressed.

And the fact is, those anti-minority rules the republicans put in place could make it easier to get things done off the bat - as well as teach the right a much needed lesson.

So...Serve them with a dose of their own medicine while getting the top things on the agenda DONE. Then think about magnanimously changing the rules back to the way that worked all those years. And think about it publicly, transparently, with plenty of examination of what went wrong. The American people could use a few civics lessons.

Sounds good, but all the same it makes me nervous. We've seen how one-party rule does corrupt*; so how, once the Dems had experienced the ease of 'getting things done' without effective Republican opposition, would they decide that it was time to give up that power?
it feels too much like Bush et al saying "we'll give you your civil liberties back a few decades from now, when the War on Terrorism is over".

On the other hand, the press could serve here; a press to whom Lewinsky was major news would likely pay much closer attention to anti-minority-party tactics if used by Dems, so would likely serve as a Fourth Estate check on the Dem majority much better than they did on the Republican one.
(yea press - better a good ump half the time than not at all.)