It’s interesting the campaign sent out email before doing anything:

Peter —

I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.

We just made history.

And I don’t want you to forget how we did it.

You made history every single day during this campaign — every day you knocked
on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors
about why you believe it’s time for change.

I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this
campaign.

We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in
touch soon about what comes next.

But I want to be very clear about one thing…

All of this happened because of you.

Thank you,

Barack

From Obama Projected by TV Networks to Win Election – NYTimes.com

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on
Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as
the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

Here’s some more info (see an
earlier
post) about the SEC’s 2004 decision to allow five investment banks to
increase the leverage they were able to use. Guess which five companies? The
five that went belly up and/or merged with regular banks these past few months:
From The
Reckoning – Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt:

Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of
the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio, a measurement of how much
the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets, rose sharply, to 33 to
1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at
the other firms also rose significantly. ”

I think this concisely summarizes how I feel about the Republicans behavior over the past 10 years.
From Glenn Greenwald:

The Right in this country — meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years — long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they’re being treated. As their imminent defeat looks increasingly likely (potentially on a humiliating scale), these two impulses are in maximum overdrive, feeding off one another in endless self-perpetuation (the more they lose, the more victimized they feel, the more they rage against their enemies who oppress them, etc.). ”