The Day After

I got up yesterday at 4 AM for a little websurfing. At 5:30, I headed over to the polling place, where I was third in line. That was the beginning of a day that didn't end until about 12:30 AM; I stayed up long enough for Romney's concession speech and the calling of the Senate races in Wisconsin and New Mexico. At that point, it was clear that the remaining Senate races - Montana, Nevada, North Dakota - would not be decided for some time, and so I went to bed. Don't think I'll be good for much today....

A few notes on, perhaps, less-noted results:

1) The number of women in the Senate will apparently rise from 17 to 20. (I'm assuming Heidi Heitkamp will hold on in ND and Dean Heller in NV.) The partisan balance shifts from 12-5 D to 16-4 D.

2) The Democratic caucus in the next Senate will be considerably further to the left; Heitkamp and Donnelly (Indiana) are fairly conservative, but less so than the retiring Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. Meanwhile, strong liberals won in MA (Warren), WI (Baldwin), HI (Hirono), NM (Heinrich), and CT (Murphy) - in each case, the winner being to the left of the incumbent. Angus King, assuming he caucuses (as expected) with the Democrats, will be a wild card.

3) Of the round dozen new Senators, only three (Flake, Fischer, Cruz) will be Republicans; the other nine (the eight mentioned in #2, plus Tim Kaine of Virginia) are Democrats or their allies.

4) For the first time, the people of Puerto Rico appear to have voted for statehood. (The final tallies aren't in, but the figures as they stand show decent majorities.) Obama pledged to abide by their decision; dunno if that will fly with the House, though. If PR is admitted, they'll probably get five Representatives, plus the usual two Senators.

Interesting times ahead. The song is apropos, even if the singer is Canadian.

Letdown

One of the few highlights of last season for the Padres was the performance of catcher Yasmani Grandal (and isn't that a fine name?), who came over in the Mat Latos trade and displayed a decent glove and a fine bat; he was their cleanup batter by the end of the season.

Today, Grandal was hit with a fifty-game suspension for using a banned substance - testosterone, in this case.

He's young enough that I'm open to accepting this as a youthful blunder, probably in response to an early-season injury. (Open to, I say; I'm not saying I will accept it as such....) A lot of Padres fans are very upset, though. Me, I'm just angry, but not in a zero-tolerance way. (I still remember the sad case of Alan Wiggins, back in the '80s.) It is at least some consolation, in the worst-case scenario, that the Padres do have another prime prospect at catcher in Austin Hedges, but he's still a couple of years away, I think.

Stupid kid.