Okay, the election wasn’t all we had hoped for.  I’ll admit I got caught up in the Red Wave hysteria, and perhaps our expectations were a bit too lofty for this day and age.  Instead of the Red Wave, we got more of a Purple Haze.  Tuesday night into Wednesday, I was a bit depressed, but now I’m beginning to put things into perspective.  You will recall that the predictions for House pickups by Republicans ranged from 20 to 50, and it looks like the result will be closer to 20.  I have to say “it looks like” because a number of States have turned Election Day into Election Season, where the voting starts in October, and the vote counting goes on nearly to December.  Maybe we should rename Autumn to correspond to election season.  Instead of Autumn, how about Chaos?  Corruption might be a better name.  More about that later.  In any case, although 20 seats is not what we wanted or expected, let’s look at the big picture.  Going into the election, Republicans held 212 seats.  As this is written, 14 seats have been added.  Of the remaining seats, 15 are considered likely or leaning Republican and 10 more are considered toss ups.  This puts the eventual total somewhere in the range of 230 Republican seats, or a 25 seat majority.  We all wanted more, but consider two things.  First, when the Republicans took control of the House for the first time in 40 years in 1995, they held 232 seats, which was considered a major triumph.  Secondly, remember that our goal was to take the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hands, and it looks like that’s been accomplished.  The Senate elections are something else again.  When I saw the predictions about New Hampshire possibly going Republican, my heart overruled my head, and I bought into them.  In almost every election, they tell us “New Hampshire is in play,” and invariably the Democrat wins, so that one didn’t bother me.  Pennsylvania, however, is a different story.  Pennsylvanians had to choose between a thoughtful, moderate heart surgeon and a man who has never held a real job, and whose only known accomplishments were that he once stuck a shotgun in the face of an innocent black man, and he later released murderers from prison.  How anyone could knowingly choose a brain damaged, skin-headed, dirty hoodie wearing gargoyle, with a nasty lump on his neck that looks like it’s going into business for itself, over Dr. Oz, is beyond me.  I think we must chalk Fetterman’s win up to two factors.  The first is the new Democrat recipe for electoral success.  Keep your candidate in the basement.  Don’t agree to any debates, or if you must debate, do it after half your base has already voted.  And rely on media corruption to hide your candidate’s flaws, and to amplify your campaign’s lies about your opponent.  Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden proved that the recipe works.  The second factor involves the Democrats’ transition from Election Day to Election Season.  Herein lies yet another example of Democrat hypocrisy.  The Constitution provides, in no uncertain terms, that the State legislatures shall prescribe “the times, places, and manner” of House elections.  It is this provision that empowers the Blue States to permit weeks of early voting, and the counting of mail ballots without proper signatures or dates, and to count ballots mailed days or weeks after election day.  Democrats like this aspect of federalism.  “Our State legislature approved it, so butt out.”  On the other hand, Democrats are simultaneously opposing the use of the same Constitutional provision for the principle that the State legislatures, and not the courts, are the sole arbiters of how Congressional districts are to be redrawn after each census.  That case will be heard by the Supreme Court in this term.  As this is written, control of the Senate is still in doubt, and in all likelihood will remain in doubt until a runoff election in Georgia on December 6 tells us if Herschel Walker or Rafael Warnock will win that seat.  Right now, Pennsylvania went Democrat, and it looks like Adam Laxalt will flip Nevada Republican.  That puts us at 49-49, with Arizona and Georgia still outstanding.  There were massive voting problems in Arizona, where many ballots in Maricopa County could not be read by the tabulating machines, and some voters were told they could not cast a new ballot because “they already voted” the ballots that could not be read.  Right now, Arizona, two days after election day, has counted 76% of the vote.  Republican Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is about 13,000 votes behind Katie Hobbs, the Arizona official in charge of her own election.  If the votes actually get counted, Lake is confident she will win.  Senatorial candidate Blake Masters is further behind, and looks like a long shot.  If Democrats hold onto the Arizona Senate seat, and Laxalt wins in Nevada, then we will stand at 50 Republican and 49 Democrat, and all eyes turn to Georgia on December 6.  But wait, Clark County Nevada (that’s Las Vegas) just found 57,000 more ballots, yet to be counted.  Adam Laxalt says that, even if they go 63% for his opponent, he still will win.  Previously counted ballots in Clark County give the Democrat just over 51% of the votes in that county, but stay tuned.  This is one Hell of a way to conduct an election, and don’t even get me started on California, where the counting continues for weeks.  If the Blue States actually were interested in conducting fully transparent and fair elections, they could easily do so.  Take the example of Florida.  The weeks of chad counting and lawsuits in 2000, and the massive screwups in Palm Beach and Broward Counties four years ago have been fixed.  Florida counted 7.7 million ballots, including early votes and mailed votes, in five hours Tuesday night.  No losing candidate has complained that the system was unfair, and I’ve heard of no reports that voters claim they were denied the right to vote.  So it can be done.  The only reason it’s not done is that the Blue States don’t want to fix it.  They subscribe to Joseph Stalin’s electoral philosophy.  “Those who vote decide nothing.  Those who count the vote decide everything.”  Surely, we deserve better.