It’s been a long night of vote-counting, and the numbers are still trickling in. Tentatively, TNFN believes that the Republicans will hold a bare majority in the Senate, the Democrats will keep the House, and Joe Biden will probably be our next president — after a long, painfully drawn out struggle over places like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and potentially Arizona and Nevada. Some states, it’ll take days to count the mail-in votes, and that’s the way it should be. It means the system is working.

And that’s the news, the morning after Election Day.

Now For The Opinion

Uncle Joe… well, he’s not actually terrible. The country can use some not terrible for a change. Like Trump or loathe him, you’ve got to admit he played hell on our adrenaline, and I for one have had enough. So I’m not complaining about the result, not in the slightest.

Come right down to it, I’m not happy either. Biden’s not the best possible candidate; he’s barely superior to Trump in terms of competence, intelligence, functionality, or for that matter being able to form a complete sentence. He’s far more human, and he’s got worse hair.

(Seriously. It’s like a two-foot comb-back.)

The thing about Biden — I’ll call him President-Elect Biden when he wins, and not until — is, he’ll be a rubber stamp for his party. And, with the Senate still containing independent-minded people like Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and “Coal Joe” Manchin, that means we’ll see some movement in legislation. It won’t necessarily be all that comprehensive, but it won’t be horrific either. There’s room for negotiation and discussion for the first time in years.

Given Joe’s memorable exhortation to “buy a shotgun”, I think we can stay confident he won’t be coming for our guns. SCOTUS is Originalist, Roe v. Wade is settled law, and the House is Democrat, so we won’t be seeing many challenges to abortion rights. Privacy, climate, and healthcare are all going to be big things, but perhaps too big; and there’s always the danger that, as a recently elected Democrat, Uncle Joe will follow tradition and invade someone just after he slashes Pentagon funding.

Oh — and our taxes are going up. That’s a gimmee.

All of which leaves me unimpressed and uncaring.

Because I’m tired, and donations for the past couple of months have been nonexistent. I’ve got a dozen The Not Fake News mugs left over — I’m drinking out of one of them now, in fact, though I don’t have any coffee — that I’d be delighted to mail out to any prospective donor with a hundred bucks to spare and (less likely even than that) free space in their mug cupboard. And I really don’t care.

Bottom line? I’m not inspired.

Maybe some decent sleep will help. It’s likely that I’ll wake up this afternoon to wild stories about how they’re mass-printing Biden votes in Pennsylvania (unlikely in the extreme) and sneak-suppressing Republicans in Arizona by invalidating bleed-through Sharpie ballots (not unlikely in the least, but not enough votes to matter). I suppose I could dig into those and find something resembling the truth, and it might be interesting.

But… no, there’s no surprises here. When it’s all settled, Republicans will be paranoid and Democrats will be intolerably smug, and I’ll be spending the next couple of years fighting nausea while nothing substantive continues to happen in Washington.

Happy election, everybody. TNFN Actual, signing off.