The day after

A few things:

• The John McCain we all thought we knew returned for the concession speech last night. Unfortunately, his thuggish supporters showed up too. Was that disgust on McCain's face as he tried to quiet the boos from a crowd it had been obvious for weeks that he didn't like? I honestly can't say -- I'm a terrible judge of expressions. But let's hope this is a rebirth of the post-Keating McCain of 2000, where even Democrats were impressed with him. He was a better man then, and he can be again.
  
• I'm done with Caribou Barbie. If we're lucky she'll go back to sportscasting. Unfortunately, I fear she'll replace Ann Coulter as the figurehead of the anti-feminist female Right. Fortunately, with the generational shift away from religious fanaticism, it may be a few years until we have to take the extreme Right seriously again.
  
• President Obama will have a long, long laundry list of things to deal with. Let's hope community issues like effective affordable health care (preferably to both the people and the government, nothing like that enormous hematoma that is Medicaid), veteran's benefits, labor rights, and discrimination issues get a chance to take center stage. (If he can do all this and do it on the post-Wall Street bailout shoestring he'll be stuck with, he will be the greatest president ever. That might be aiming a little high.) After that, there's a massive amount of other things that need to be done. But that's where he ought to start.
  
• Obama is one skinny bastard under that suit. Just sayin'.
  
• I mentioned community issues above. In practice, community often means urban, and we've placed far too much focus on a nonexistent ideal of small town America. That needs to go away -- our cities are in dire need of help, and I'm tired of people from the sticks saying that the cities aren't worth saving. But that goes both ways -- methamphetamine, for example, is the public health scourge of small town America, so while we're putting money into the cities, we can't forget how much poverty, violence, and drug use our countrysides see as well.
  
• President Medvedev delivered a scorching address attacking US foreign policy today. While some of the decay of US-Russian relations has to do with Vladimir Putin's rolling back of the clock on Russian democracy, the bulk of it is George Bush's fault. That's a relationship that both Obama and Medvedev are going to have to work hard on repairing.
  

Well, time to get this show on the road. It's not over; it's just beginning.