And we have done a wonderful job of voting for a president who is brilliant, an excellent thinker, very curious about the world, humble and an inspirational speaker.

We certainly need a leader of his quality, and the great team who will come with him. He will face enormous problems of such a frightening magnitude that I wonder if he will be glad that he won the opportunity to lead us. We must wish him all the best, so that he will do his best for us.

Now lets all participate - roll up your sleeves, write your congress persons, and bookmark change.gov, the web site which Obama has set up to network with all of us little people - both the ecstatic $50 contributors to his campaign and the grumpy, dittoheads who contributed their $50 to McCain.

As Thom Hartmann says every day at the end of his radio show "tag you're it!"

At the end of the Werner Herzog film “Rescue Dawn”, widely taken as an homage to the American spirit, American pilot Dieter Dengler is stumped, at a loss to access meaning and convey it to the Navy comrades who plucked him out of the jungle of southeast Asia, where he had napalmed and strafed peasants, barely survived captivity, and been betrayed by his fellow American POWs. All he knows and can transact is the personal, expressed by a will to survive, a “can-do” spirit, almost “pathologically upbeat” mood (as Andrew O’Hehir put it at Salon) and a compulsive need to fly military missions again – a need driven by childhood experiences that programmed him with a single-minded focus on individual self-preservation: to strategize, control, and elevate above (so to speak) personal vulnerability. Unaffected by potential gains in empathy, by moral development, integration of experiences, or reflection, he has gained nothing. His cunning, pluck and triumph are admired far and wide.

After an election stolen by thugs on their highest court, being duped into a criminal military action killing a million, after normalization of state torture and domestic spying, and steady creep toward a religious state, Americans, like Dieter, remained stumped, unsure, split about 50:50 on whether to keep the same faces in charge of things, or some different faces from the same incestuous family, seemingly opting for change only when their personal financial security started to unravel and a dangerously disordered girl stepped up within a stroke of confidently unleashing mayhem.

In this celebrated, rosy dawn, with the predictable cliquing-up by their New Leader with those who duped them into the moral debacle of Iraq, with apologists for the same corporate/militarist/religious state, the new faces they have trauma-bonded to look more and more like the old. But never mind. It’s a new dawn. All together now.

There’s no joy in sitting down with Billy and Sissy to explain why mommy went to rehab and daddy went away. Nor pleasure in affronting or startling those whose innocent gaze at pretty new window dressing elicits “new day” or “united” or “change”, when real change demands nothing less than burning down the house. But there is dharma, and there is adult responsibility.

when your idol has a glow. that'll last, oh, 3 months. then you'll still be a groupie, but the nation will be in the hands of politicians still. how has that worked out so far?

middle-aged groupies aren't likely to grow up, especially when there's a dollar to be made by saying 'my' guy made 'idol'. but the usa needs citizens more than it needs groupies. the politicians and easy-money sharpies are driving the country into the ground, and poisoning the planet for a pastime.

the dhs and nsa are looking more like the stasi than defenders of the nation, somehow, america needs to fight two wars and threaten a third, and the nation's automakers are crying to be nationalized(but only just the expenses, profits are sacred in a capitalist nation).

yeah, it's cool to be a groupie. saves thinking, saves having to actually do anything, and you feel like you are part of the greater north american co-prosperity sphere. ah, the glory!

why hellooooo troll!

and how is your bridge today?

I'm proud to be an American and those lines outside churches and schools of people waiting to vote only made me prouder. November is a very cool month.

From a European point of view, America has clearly done the right thing by electing, not just the best of a bad bunch, but a man who seems to have in spades all the necessary qualities for the job. Thank you America. (Especially when you think what could have happened: McCain/Palin - argh!)

Now he's just got one or two little things to fix - the economy, Iraq, global warming, etc. And he's up against the inertia of Congress, the industrial/military complex, a hostile media (in large part), a weight of expectation that cannot possibly be fulfilled, not to mention the Republicans and their many friends biting his legs every step of the way.

I wish him the very best of luck - he'll need it.

As an American who moved to Oslo, Norway, just MINUTES before the election, I want Oslo to be included with Copenhagen and Stockholm! We're cool here, too! Cool and OIL-RICH, Goddammit! I got my first Nordic hair-cut last Wednesday morning, and the lady asked if I had been at the Grand Hotel near the Palace the night before. There had been a big, official party for the local American community, and what fun it would have been to watch the election results roll in at 5:00 in the morning a few steps away from the royal palace! But - like Garrison says - it's fun now, and will continue to be fun, to confess to being an American.... something I had to brace myelf against in the recent past.

But then, the embarassing current American situation regarding Gay Marriage, and the death of Prop. 8, still make it better and easier for me and my same-sex spouse to live here, where our relationship is truly respected on a Federal level, and where we can both get excellent, quick health care, and where he gets 5 weeks paid vacation and is home shortly after 5:00 each night (sooo not like NYC), and where my immigration papers were completely finished and ready after just a few weeks (instead of YEARS, like his papers back in the USA), and, I guess, on balance, we're still better off here... as proud and delighted and thrilled as I am with Barack.