I MEANT TO POST THIS BEFORE BUT WE HAD DINNER GUESTS: Thank you, Glenn for the opportunity to trade my little blogging tricycle for a share in the Ferrari of blogs for a little while.  And thank you to all my co-bloggers who made this so interesting.

As to the results, I don’t now.  I don’t think we’ve crossed the point of no-return, but last night’s work won’t be fully undone by the time my life is over.  And that’s if we’re very lucky.  However, we go on.  We go on because we must go on and because we’re Americans and if Americans don’t do it, who will? And the very first thing we must straight up is the voting process.  If people who shouldn’t vote, they steal your vote as surely as if you’re denied the right to vote.

If anyone has any interest in visiting, I normally blog at According To Hoyt.  And if you look up my name on Amazon (use Glenn’s search on the side of the blog), you’ll find I write a few things, in Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery and Historical Mystery.  Who knows?  Some of it might appeal to you.  Also, till the end of the year, I’m going to try to keep a short  story free at all times.  I don’t have one right now, due to the election, but one will go up this weekend.  A painless way to try my stuff.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “I can see only one good outcome from yesterday’s election: the fact that Barack Obama will be the president who inherits the mess left by Barack Obama.”

ANN ALTHOUSE: Do Not Take Counsel of Your Fears.

MOE LANE is done with the gloom.

READER MICHAEL MILLER offers another suggestion to Speaker Boehner for increasing revenue:

Want to change the direction of the debate? Let’s talk about actually taxing the wealthy. You want to see Dem’s scream and argue about that. Tax people on their assets, not their income. Pelosi’s wealthy on income, nope.

The conversation MUST change. There are dozens of potential revenue sources within the wealthy that would easily triple the income to the US over penalizing hard workers. And then, we’d see the true colors of the Dems, the Streisands, Spielbergs, the Soros.

Hundreds of billions can be generated, by taxing a very small portion of muni bond income. Yes, other items can be looked at, tax breaks, but they are miniscule, to the total WEALTH, (NOT INCOME) that is out there. And it wouldn’t change their desirability since even after a SMALL tax, it beats everything out there. Guess who owns muni’s? Feinstein, Spielberg…

In essence, this is the only way out of the punitive tax brackets we find ourselves in. And even if it makes little economic sense, just hearing these jerks whine about a tax on THEM, just for a bit, would be hilarious.

Meanwhile, Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

Why not call Obama and Reid’s bluff.

Quid: Bush era tax rates expire for everyone and a one-time only extension of the debt ceiling limit to get us into the New Year and a new Congress.

Quo: An agreement by all parties to a vastly simplified tax system that is flatter and has no exemptions other than that for dependents, and no deductions – none for anyone or anything.

I thought about including spending cuts; but no, perhaps not, in keeping with the KISS principle. If the people want their government to spend money in a manner that would make a drunken sailor blush, then they should have to pay for it – every single one of them. It is not a coincidence that as the tax system has become more progressive we’ve become such public spendthrifts.

Only when people see that the revenue obtained doesn’t come close to covering the government’s outlays will anyone begin to believe that the cupboard is bare. Does it hurt the economy? Perhaps, but therein lies a lesson too.

I’m all for education.

UPDATE: Andrew Hofer emails:

OTAL “tax expenditure” on exempting muncipal bond interest is $200 Billion. Reader Michael Miller is off.

Second, you have to think about who really pays. This exemption is effectively a subsidy from the federal government to states and localities. Muni bond rates are lower (in the long run), by almost as much as the exemption tax savings. So you remove the exemption and the bond yields increase, raising the interest costs to states and municipalities over time. Removing it is a transfer back from high-tax (generally blue) states to the federal government. That, of course, may be a reason to do it….but in the entire tax system there really aren’t a lot of savings.

See this graphic, which was compiled by Standish.

Well, I don’t think there are enough potential revenues out there to close the deficit, which is part of the point. But spreading the pain is also part of the point.

IN OTHER NEWS: “The first day of the ‘next 4 years’ is starting in a very auspicious fashion. First, the market crashes. Then, a major blue chip company, Boeing, just announced it would cut 30% of management jobs from 2010 levels. And finally, the US Treasury just added $24 billion in debt, or enough to fund Greece for over one year, sending the total debt load (the US is now at 103% debt/GDP) ever closer to the debt ceiling breaching $16.4 trillion.”

I QUESTION THE TIMING: A reader who works at Yale emails:

I found it interesting that this email came out today from Yale benefits:

Dear Colleagues:

We would like to make you aware of a significant federally mandated change which will impact Yale’s healthcare flexible spending account benefit. Effective January 1, 2013, as a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the annual contribution limit will be capped at $2,500. Currently, the maximum amount of pre-tax dollars you can set aside in a healthcare flexible spending account is $12,000.

As a participant who contributed $2,500 or more in 2012, we encourage you to keep this in mind as you begin to plan for your 2013 out-of-pocket medical, dental and vision expenses. You will soon have an opportunity to re-enroll in the flexible spending account benefit plan during Annual Benefits Enrollment (December 3-17). As a reminder, you have until March 15, 2013 to incur expenses against your 2012 contributions, and until April 30, 2013 to submit claims those for reimbursement. We hope that this grace period is helpful for maximizing your flexible spending benefit for 2012.

If you have any further questions, please contact an Employee Services representative.

What interesting timing! I did know about this, as a former CPA/tax accountant, but how many did?
Today my husband came home and told me that his boss informed him today that a layoff is planned. Small aerospace/manufacturing plant.
We are worried. We were worried before the election that if the direction didn’t change, we’d face an ugly economic future. It may already becoming true for our family.

I think a lot of stuff will be coming out over the next few weeks and months that was carefully kept off the radar before Election Day.

UPDATE: Including this? Anthony Weiner returns to Twitter.

THANKS TO GLENN for inviting a set of us intruders onto his blog. It’s always fun to get a chance to be here on the big stage, though I felt a little out of place this time, because I was an Obama voter in 2008, and though I didn’t vote for him this time, I do have at least mixed feelings, and I do think life will go on along the path my fellow citizens have chosen. We’ll never find out what would have happened on that other path. There would have been assorted troubles and set-backs. We must take the path of our beautiful democracy, within which Barack Obama will be President for 4 more years. There is much to life beyond politics, especially the crazy politics of minutely monitoring all the polls, the gaffes, and the rhetoric. Liberation lies everywhere, waiting to be discovered, in love, in art, and in all the details of the short life we’ve been granted. Look up. Look around. Pay attention. Life is beautiful and life in America is a fabulous blessing. And if you want to talk about it all, there’s always the Althouse blog, where the comments threads will spiral out, I hope, for a long long time. Come hang out with us there, if you like. And thanks, as ever, to Glenn, for his brilliant, endlessly inspirational blog.

DEREK LOWE EMAILS:

I get the impression, from reader notes you’ve published and from other sources, that the Republican party is going to be doing some re-evaluating after the Romney loss. As it should. But I worry about a couple of ways that this might play out. Every time an organized group takes a defeat like this, there are two factions that spring up – one that says “We Clearly Have to Change Something Fundamental”, and the other saying “We’re On the Right Track; We Just Didn’t Do It Hard Enough”. I think we’re already seeing this split in action.

And it doesn’t have to break up the party; this sort of thing goes on all the time without creating permanent factions. But it could. I’ve been concerned for some time about the direction the Republicans have been trending. Is it controversial to say that this season’s crop of primary candidates was a deeply unimpressive bunch? The likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are totally unappealing to me – I suppose my problem is that I’ve never been much of a social conservative. I believe in personal responsibility, fiscal prudence, a strong defense, and economic growth. I think America is a great country. But I’m not religious, and my political beliefs don’t rest on a religious foundation. Gay marriage (to pick one example) doesn’t bother me much. I did, though, find the various bizarre comments about rape from Republican candidates to be stupid and offensive, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they helped to cost enough potential Republican votes to sway the election.

So where does someone like me turn? I find a lot to dislike in Obama’s policies, on both the practical and philosophical level, and I can’t picture myself voting for him. But I can’t picture myself voting for someone like Rick Santorum, either, or a Sarah Palin, or a Mike Huckabee, just to pick some well-known types. I’m sure that there are people out there who think that if we could just get some more candidates like these, that enough people would flock to their banner. I don’t see it happening; too many voters find something “off” about them. The streak of anti-intellectualism in the Republican party is in danger of making it a caricature of itself, and such a party would leave a lot of potential voters shaking their heads in the polling booth. I’d be one of them.

Feel free to quote as much or as little of this as you wish; I don’t mind having my name attached, either.

Well, I think Sarah Palin gets a bum rap — she was pretty libertarian, and gay-friendly for that matter, as governor — but I agree both that the crop of candidates wasn’t that impressive, and that the social-conservative stuff turns a lot of people off, especially because they’ve been conditioned to think of social-cons as the preacher from Footloose. I think that’s a bit unfair; I used to have the same icky reaction to social-cons, but since then I’ve gotten to, you know, actually know some and now I don’t find them so scary even though I disagree with them on lots of stuff. But that sort of one-on-one interaction doesn’t scale well.

I think that a more libertarian message sells better — and nobody thinks libertarians are like the preacher from Footloose — but, then, I’m a libertarian.

UPDATE: Related: Operation Deep Blue. Plus, some thoughts from Bill Quick.

CHANGE: More complex circuits for synthetic biology lead toward engineered cells.

RIGHT NOW, VLADIMIR PUTIN IS SNICKERING: Calif. man behind anti-Muslim film gets one year in prison.

Sure, it’s just for a probation violation — like the Pussy Riot sentence was just for disturbing the peace.

MOSTLY BAD ONES: Megaupload Case Has Far-Reaching Implications for Cloud-Data Ownership Rights.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Home & Garden Holiday Gift Guide.

FOUR MORE YEARS.

MICHAEL WALSH: Nice Guys Finish Second.

DIAGNOSTIC CLUE: Looking Old May Be A Sign Of Heart Trouble.

The older you look, the worse shape your heart is in, the authors of the ongoing Copenhagen Heart Study concluded.

The study, which began in 1976, followed 11,000 men and women for 35 years to find the connection between physical appearance and heart health.

Originally, the investigators paid attention to seven telltale signs of aging. They eventually found that wrinkles, gray hair and cholesterol deposits on the cornea of the eye were all part of the inevitable wear and tear on the body rather than predictors of bad health.

“These are signs of physical aging, not necessarily biological aging,” said the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Anne Tybaerg-Hansen.

That left four physical traits – a receding hairline, baldness on top of the head, earlobe creases and yellow, fatty deposits around the eyelid – as visible evidence of heart disease. People with at least three of these markers for aging had a 57 percent increased risk for heart attack and a 39 percent increased risk for heart disease.

When the researchers considered gender separately, they found that hair loss in women was not linked with an increased risk of heart disease. However, the men with receding hairlines showed a 40 percent higher risk in men with hair loss than those without.

But who wants to admit to looking old?

PARTY OF THE RICH: Obama Wins 8 of 10 Wealthiest Counties in US.

THAT’S A CRUEL SLUR ON DRUNKEN SAILORS: In September Uncle Sam Continued To Hand Out Car And Student Loans Like A Drunken Sailor.

But, then, drunken sailors don’t have to buy votes.

DAN MITCHELL: California’s Economic Suicide and other News from Yesterday’s Ballot Measures.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Baby Outlet Sale. Actual babies not for sale.

NEW YORK SUN: Off To War.

ANDREW KLAVAN: The Long Game: Three areas the Right should address, financially and intellectually. He’s right.

UPDATE: Related Thoughts From Bill Whittle.

JENNIFER RUBIN: A bigger tent.

AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Beauty Supplies.

Also, today only: Stuhrling Original Men’s Winchester Swiss Quartz Watch Sets, $49.99.

DO NOT TAKE COUNSEL OF YOUR FEARS: A worthwhile Canadian comment.

Can I offer you folks some perspective from a Canadian viewpoint?

Up here in Canuckistan we had virtually unrivaled Liberal rule for decades, and conservatives could see no hope of any end to it. The public, we feared, would always vote for more free goodies and handouts. Yet today we have a Conservative government, while the all-powerful Liberals have been reduced to a pitiful rump.

As Mark Steyn says, Progressives are fond of telling you that the “tide has turned”, but they never take into account that the tide that comes in goes out again. Food for thought.

Don’t be discouraged. Be Breitbart.