Once again, I’m back after a long hiatus. I seem to be falling into a pattern of regular posting and regular breaks in about two week cycles. I’m not sure why I do this, but I will offer the (lame) excuse that I started teaching a three hour World Music course on Tuesday nights and the first class coincided with my last post. The new workload disrupted the nice pattern that I had established and it has taken me a bit of time to adjust. I will try to be more consistent in the future.

What better time to return to the blog than in the afterglow (-math?) of Tuesday’s election? As a die-hard Democrat, these are happy days for me and I hope that maybe, just maybe, this might be the first step towards restoring the American values that I find important. I might be fooling myself, but after 3 frustrating elections, to finally have this victory for the party I support feels amazingly refreshing. It seemed so bleak for the Democrats just two years ago, so please forgive my brief gloating paragraph.

Two items have emerged in the wake of the election, one big and one small. The big one, of course, is the resignation of Rumsfeld. I tend towards cynicism, so I’ll let you guess my feelings about the timing of this move. The minor news I is major to me: Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, has filed his documents with the Federal Election Committee and announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination for President. This is important to me because I’ve been talking him up for two years to anyone who would listen. As a dark horse candidate and a populist governor from a “swing” state, I like him strategically and also feel that he might be the tonic for the “elitist” label that has dogged other Democrats. I’ll be very interested to see if he turns out to be the real deal or if he fades in the early days.