dangr-us thoughts election wrapup:
Okay, but it could be worse: a small handful of excellent things happened in my home state of California, and in San Diego specifically. My favorites, and the really big (and/or surprising) wins, are bolded below.

California:
Prop 59, Open Records in state government: passed by a landslide, 83% to 17%.
Prop 63, a 1% tax on incomes over $1,000,000, passed: 53% to 47%.
Prop 71, providing state funding for stem cell research, passed easily, 59% to 41%. (Take that, evangelicals!) Of course, the corporate monsters are going to profiteer from the patents on this, but better that it happen that way, than not at all.
State Assembly District 76: Lori Saldaña won by a virtual landslide, 55% to 41%! This after months of outrageously false mailers sent out by the republican corporate lobbying machine backing their patsy candidate, Corporate Lobbyist Tricia Hunter. They sent seemingly dozens of direct mailings, including such offensive nonsense as claiming that Saldaña, a longtime clean water activist and environmentalist, wanted people to drink toilet water. Confidential to Tricia Hunter: Crawl on back under your rock, oops, I mean to your corporate lobbying firm: maybe they need people on the Wal-Mart account.

San Diego, city and county:
Proposition D: Right of the people to have access to government information: passed by a landslide, 82% to 18%. While it might not mean much on paper, that it passed in conjuction with perhaps the single best thing to happen in this entire 2004 election in San Diego is notable:

Donna Frye, the only dem to run in the San Diego mayor's race, and who started her come-from-nowhere, write-in candidacy only about five weeks before the election, IS WINNING! She would essentially be the first progressive mayor in this notoriously corrupt and morally (and almost financially!) bankrupt city's history. (All y'all who want to talk about Golding being progressive can do in on your own blogs: we'd just disagree.)
Particularly ironic, even in Presumptive-Mayor-Elect Frye's own words, is that she is apparently going to win the race at at the same time as a "strong mayor" form of government change (from a City Manager form) passed:

Proposition F, the so-called "strong mayor" initiative, passed by about 51% to 49%. Ha, ha! Frye opposed the poorly and hastily drafted power grab, written by the business establishment that has long run San Diego's local politics, in order to regain some of their slipping power in local politics. Of course, they mostly backed incumbent mayor Dick Murphy (no play on words: he's really Dick!), and didn't in their worst Nightmares on C Street imagine that they would be empowering Donna Frye, long the only true voice on the side of the people on the City Council.

So, some really good things happened on what was otherwise a really dismal, disgusting, frightening day, November 2, 2004.