What an amazing thing it is to see, the great ship of state shifts its mighty rudder and the bow turns a few degrees in another direction. With the US House of Representatives under a Democratic majority, the whole calculus of power changes sign. The house that Gingrich built has found unruly new tenants. Congressional oversight of the executive branch will begin in earnest. The revolution will be televised. Subpoena’s will swarm up Pennsylvania Avenue like the swallows of San Juan Capistrano.
Verily, pity not the wretched and rejected Republicans, for they still own the Executive branch, the Senate, and the supreme court. And Lo! Malleable though the Senate may be, the smirking majority voting bloc of SCOTUS- Scalia, Roberts, Alito, and Thomas- are tenured unto their last breath.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
(*End Dream Sequence*)
Lamentations on Chemistry 
To any hardcore Republicans/conservatives who think this is the end of the world, it is not. It’s just a smooth transition step that has happened many times before and will happen many times again.
My mother-in-law was born in Lithuania in the 1930’s. She saw her government taken over by communist Russia in 1940, then by Nazi Germany in 1942, and again by communist Russia in 1944. That’s far worse than ANYTHING that happened yesterday, and even she doesn’t call those takovers the end of the world.
Dr J.- Thanks for sharing that. You are absolutely right. Life in contemporary America is very tame compared to what it could be. One only has to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” to figure that out.
-Th’ Gaussling
I haven’t read “Ivan Denisovitch”, but I did read the first volume of “The Gulag Archipelago”, which I imagine would have considerable overlap, although it is nonfiction. The only reason he survived was that he had read of nuclear physics in the Russian equivalent of “Nature” so that he was able to fake being a nuclear physicist and thereby avoid the cruelest parts of the gulag.