Frustrated by Jack Murtha's ethical skeletons and stand on choice and guns? Angry about Steny Hoyer's numerous ties to K Street corporate lobbyists?

Well, there should be a third option. Henry Waxman for House Majority Leader! The Los Angeles Congressman is one of the smartest and most progressive and reform-minded members of the House.

It's so very hard not to abuse my front-page posting privileges on MyDD (that are only mine until Jerome realizes I still have front-page access and takes it away) and to instead post a diary that will quickly get lost in the ever-growing pile of content over there. Still, that's just what I've done.

The idea is pretty simple. After Tuesday, Democrats are in position to become the party that stands up for representative democracy, by fighting for the idea that every vote should count. But election reform is hard work. Democrats can get an easy win on the board by letting the people of the District of Columbia vote for a member of Congress to represent them and their neighbors on Capitol Hill.

Was the role of technology in politics different in 2006 than in 2004? How did new technology most affect Election 2006, and do you see any lessons for 2008?

I think the subtle difference in 2006 is that we've reached a critical mass of people who are fluent in using technology to communicate, and not just young people or the super tech-savvy. There's a growing sense that all of the many things we now do using our tools and gadgets (blogging, IMing, text messaging, recording videos, building communities, posting photos, and on and on) are just different means to the same end. Some people are finding remarkably creative and poetic ways to do it -- my current favorite is friends who are using the tiny "status box" on Google Talk or Facebook to communicate in haiku-like form -- but I'd argue that in November 2006 some degree of fluency is almost part of the shared American experience. There are political implications. So many of us are discovering and polishing our voices that I don't even think it's crazy to suggest that one of the factors behind the sweeping change we saw on Tuesday is that there are just more of us now who are comfortable expressing who we are and want our leaders to be.

One of the losers (and yay! that it might be so) on Tuesday night was the idea that it's some measure of personal refinement to disdain the culture of communicating online. At this point, it takes willful ignorance to not see that there are some bloggers who add value to politics or that journalists with the some of the brightest futures are those willing to blog or otherwise engage their readers online.

As for 2008 -- while we're getting pretty good today at putting that fluency to work to shape electoral politics, I'm cautiously optimistic that by then we'll have started to figure out how to use it to better effect in movement politics.

Dear you know who,
We reject you. We reject your lying. We reject your politics of division, your hypocrisy, your abuse of power. We reject your taking this country and its people to a place that it and we should never be. We reject you.

Don't believe us? Oh, I think think this morning, maybe you do just a bit.

-Nancy

P.S. No surprise that Jane is the less high-and-mighty of the two of us this morning. She just emailed her list of the top ten highlights of all this (though she does manage to get a dig in at her favorite former Senator):

10. Going into the Senate recounts ahead!
9. High voter turnout -- possibly record-breaking in some states
8. Democratic gains in key state legislatures (Indiana House, New Hampshire House and Senate, Iowa House and Senate, the Minnesota House, the Michigan House, the Wisconsin Senate, and the Oregon House)
7. South losing influence (first time in 54 years that the party without a southern majority has the House majority )
6. Bernie, a socialist, in the Senate
5. Arizona rejects a ban on civil unions
4. Majority of governors are now Democrats
3. South Dakota rejects a ban on abortion
2. Rick "man on dog" Santorum is unemployed, but he thanks God
1. Taking back the People's House! (see Pelosi's 100-hour plan)

All any of us are interested in right now are cold hard results, I know, but I hope you won't mind me jumping in before things really heat up with the view from Pennsylvania. CNN, NPR and others have just called the Pennsylvania seat for Bob Casey over Rick Santorum. Senator Bob Casey. I certainly like the sound of that. (And Governor Rendell has kept his job -- no surprise there.)

I have to say after working for five years on a dysfunctional Capitol Hill, it is amazing for me to think about how dramatically the state of things has changed there in the last several months. For a long while, things felt a bit hopeless. As of this minute:

• There is no more Rep. Tom Delay to corrupt the soul of the U.S. House of Representatives;
• There's no more Rep. Bob Ney to obstruct much needed election reform;
• And thanks to the fine people of Pennsylvania, there's no more Senator Rick Santorum to exploit our worst weaknesses and fears.

And that list is only going to get longer as the night goes on.

As of this morning, I've embedded myself with Lois Murphy's campaign in Pennsylvania's Sixth District -- a race with a ton of rich aspects. We've got a county smack in the middle and making up about 40% of the district that was long written off as conservative but is now starting to flex Democratic muscle, as I wrote about two nights ago. And marvel at the absurdity of the boundaries of the PA-06, sometimes called the "Pterodactyl District" because of its shape. It was drawn up special for Murphy's opponent, Rep. Jim Gerlach. Man, some districts are so ridiculously gerrymandered that you just have to laugh.

It's also a district where it seems like one can get an education in political messaging. What I'm hearing about robocalls in PA-06 -- what Josh Marshall neatly sums up as "intentionally-harassing calls disguised to appear that they're from the opposite party" -- is really just disgraceful. While I'm strongly anti-death penalty, when it comes to ringing up folks repeatedly in the wee hours I'd need the help of Dick Cheney to think of a punishment severe enough.

I was moved today by what local organizers are accomplishing on the ground in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and see in it the seeds of the takeover:

After another day on the ground in Pennsylvania, this occurs to me: the 50 State Strategy should be abandoned in favor of a One Million County strategy. I picked "one million" as a ballpark figure only because Wikipedia won't tell me how many counties and parishes we have in these United States.

is driving three hours to Dushore, Pennsylvania, walking into Pam's Restaurant there and hearing candidate Chris Carney say, "...and if you do send me to Congress, I'll make you proud. Good night everyone!"

New post on my Pennsylvania tour now up on MyDD:

I've come to the conclusion that the minimum wage debate nicely captures the absurdity of American life under Republican rule and what's a stake in this election. Consider this. The annual income at which the federal government says that a family of two is living below poverty is $13,200 -- but a single parent working 40 hours a week at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 makes less than $11,000 a year. If I didn't know us better, I'd swear that all we're doing as a nation is mocking those efforts.

The AFL-CIO has been kind enough to sponsor me this week to tool around Pennsylvania and write about the state's most-contested races and labor's 2006 election efforts on MyDD. My first attempt at a post is now up.

We make it much too difficult to vote in this country. I won't be in the New York area this election day, and it's taken me several days of false starts and research to figure out how to vote in-person absentee. I took a chance this morning and trekked down to the Brooklyn Board of Elections first thing. Once there, I had a bit of trouble understanding the logic of how the paper ballot was laid out. I finally voted, hallelujah. But let's make election day a national holiday so at least people aren't struggling to cast their ballot while at the same time worrying about getting back to work.

Today marked one first and one near-first experience for me. First the near-first. Since I've been a legal resident of Washington DC beginning in college and until last November, it's been about a decade since I've had the opportunity to vote for a United States Senator. To be honest, I'm not even sure if I ever have voted for one. It felt gooood to fill in the bubble for Senator Clinton. (About a half million Americans living in the nation's capitol aren't represented by a Senator or a voting Congressman. Learn more about DC voting rights.) And for the first -- I voted for a Republican. Though if you follow New York politics, you probably know which one and why.

Reason's blog Hit & Run has cracked the mystery of what Jim Cavezial is mumbling in Aramaic at the beginning of the Michael J. Fox response ad:

"You betray me with a kiss." So now we have actors responding to actors with biblical references that are both vaguely threatening and completely irrelevant, spoken in an obsure Middle Eastern language that a maximum of three people in all of Missouri understand. This is an election cycle like no other.

More seriously though, what the heck were they thinking? I'm guessing that we're dealing with some sort of code-talking here, but directed to whom? Unsettling.

Even if you're a New Yorker settled on casting a ballot for Spitzer or Clinton come Tuesday, you still have a choice to make -- whether you're gonna vote for them as Democrats. As the result of an interesting quirk of Empire State politics known as "fusion voting," candidates can appear on the ballot as a candidate from more than one party. Spitzer and Clinton are also running on the Working Families Party line.

Votes for them as candidates of either party count towards their final tallies, so there's no danger that of squandering your vote. In fact, since both Spitzer and Clinton are coasting towards victory, mindfully choosing which through which to vote for them is one meaningful voting-booth chance that progressives have to voice an opinion this election.

Though not so much on the blog, in person I tend to regularly bag on the goings-on on Capitol Hill. It's the lack of care that goes into the legislative process, the willful and rewarded ignorance of some members of Congress, the "expertists" who get ever bigger jobs by repeating the same tripe never validated by facts, or reality, or the outside world. While I'm actively trying to rid myself of that sort of cynicism, this sort of thing simply does not help. The national security editor of Congressional Quarterly regularly ends interviews by asking the subject -- legislator, national security-type, what have you -- if they can explain in broad strokes the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Here is a typical response:

Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.'s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was...dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

"Do I?" she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. "You know, I should." She took a stab at it: "It's a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it's the Sunnis who're more radical than the Shia."

Did she know which branch Al Qaeda's leaders follow?

"Al Qaeda is the one that's most radical, so I think they're Sunni,” she replied. "I may be wrong, but I think that's right."

Latest in the series of "why'd he do it?" is Ryan Lizza's New Republic piece. I'm going to ruin the ending for you:

Every governor or senator thinks about running for president. Most do so because they are ambitious and see the presidency as the next rung on America's political ladder. The big question they often ask is strategic. How can I make it through the process and get elected? In the end, that's not the question Warner asked. His advisers swear that the nuances of the primaries and the details of how to topple Hillary Clinton never came up in his final deliberations. Warner asked not whether he could be president, but whether he should be president. The irony of Warner's answer is that the kind of person who dwells on that question is the kind of person you want to be president.

Don't look to me to say much right now about Governor Warner's announcement today of his decision not run for the presidency in 2008, but I will say this -- from my perspective and in my experience, he handled this whole process and his final decision with dignity and a great deal of respect for those around him. So, god bless him.

Senator Barack Obama at a rally today in Old Town Alexandria, Viriginia, for Jim Webb, running for the U.S. Senate:

In Jim Webb, we have a candidate with the sophistication to write novels. That's a good thing. We want our warriors to be scholars and intellectuals, too.

Ah, I should mention that we're running a poll over on TechPresident, on the subject of "Does a Connected World Need a Connected POTUS?" (POTUS being shorthand for President of the United States). As I discuss in my introductory remarks to the poll, in my mind the question goes far beyond whether or not Candidate X carries his or her own Blackberry. Where once nation states were the organizing unit that presidents had to worry about, I think that you can fairly convincingly argue that we're today as much (if not more) organized around networks.

Now, does a politician really need to understand online social networks or wifi networks to understand how to handle a terrorist network like Al Qaeda? Dunno. Thank god we're running a poll. But consider that the response to 9/11 by some politicians was to storm into Iraq while the response of others was to focus on cutting off the global financial spiderweb that powers Al Qaeda. One, I'd argue, is a response rooted in a nation-state mindset, and the other is one that is at least informed by an understanding of the importance and power of networks.

Anyhoo, take the poll and let's get a discussion going in the comments.