2007 legislative session

Here is an incomplete list of the progress we made this year:

EDUCATION

• We strengthened our efforts to attract and retain the very best educators throughout our education system by providing a 5 percent salary increase for teachers as well as community college and university faculty.
• We ensured smaller class sizes to help give younger students the individualized attention they need.
• We funded scholarships for low to moderate income students to graduate from college debt-free.
  

Pundits and prognosticators are coming out of the woodwork today with all manner of revisionist history and self-indulgent back slapping. Having made their electoral predictions, they're all trying to prove how smart they might have been, as though anyone outside their tiny fan clubs actually cared what they had to say in the first place. It's a three-ring Puppetshow with ideologues sifting through their carefully constructed tea leaves to reach foregone, face-saving conclusions.

What's most disingenuous are the rationalizations that Tuesday's dramatic Democratic victories were about campaigning tactics. Art Pope's Stage Manager at the John Locke Foundation declares,

Their broad victory, however, was not a deep victory. It was not an earth-shattering, ideological transformation of the political landscape.

For those unfamiliar with the JLF Puppetshow, this is the kind of irrelevant, red-herring bullshit we've come to know and love. Who ever said it WAS an earth-shattering, ideological transformation of anything? Of course, the election was close ... this nation is sharply divided. And it sharply divided for one reason: right-wing extremists and free-market fundamentalists have spent the past two decades finding and exploiting wedge issues designed to erode our common ground.