I don't even get out of bed for less than 140 seats...

So Harper scored a "big win" last night, which I suppose on November 28th I would have agreed with. However, the election wasn't on November 28th, and the early-January swell of Conservative support leaves this result a little empty. There are some pros and cons I would like to discuss:

Pros:

• My night of avoiding the election entirely went extremely well. My ex-girlfriend's fiancee works for a slightly scuzzy financial outfit that I shouldn't speak too ill of seeing how I might just end up either being a customer and/or an employee of them. Not too likely though. Damn these get-rich-quick (or at all) schemes.
• The Conservatives have swept Alberta. Ann McLellan is gone. Rahim Jaffer (take that, anonymous poster from 5 days ago!) is still firmly in place. The Liberals and their ilk can no longer claim to be a "national party". If the Conservatives can be faulted for not being present in PEI then the Liberals should be acknowledged as the party that nobody in Alberta is willing to tolerate.
• Ed Schreyer and Svend Robinson both lost. The pedophile and the guy-too-creeped-out-by-pedophiles-for-the-dippers both lose out on the same night.
  
• Actually, that's pretty much the only good news. Now onto the....

Cons:

• Belinda Stronach, Michael Ignatiff (how can he be Prime Minister when his name is so freaking hard to spell? The actual spelling is "Ignatieff"!), Fudge-packing Scott Brison, Hedy Fry (I don't subscribe to the Gunter school that a Fry win is preferable to a Robinson win, but rather that both of them should have been killed in some mid-campaign plane crash -- hey, I never said I was going to say nice things here), Ralph Goodale, and Olivia Chow all re-won their seats. That's depressing.
• Peter McKay won too, so now he'll want a cabinet post or another "Conservative split" will occur. Hey, Peter, Stephen won big out west and in Ontario and especially in Quebec. You only had to deliver a bunch of dole-supported fishermen, and you blew it.
• The Edmonton Journal did a bad typesetting job on the front page today. I go to the front door, grab the paper without looking at it, bring it in, lay it open face up on my bed, close my eyes, lie down so my face is right there, open my eyes, and see this headline: HARPER HUMBLES GRITS. So naturally, of course, I'm thinking a huge win. It takes a good 30 seconds of searching to find the seat totals above the headline. So then I see 124 Conservative seats, rather than say 158 or some such thing, and its automatically a disappointment.
• Paul Martin is stepping down as Liberal leader. That's a shame. I was hoping he would develop a case of John Kerry syndrome. Instead he's going to become Al Gore. Except instead of leaving to bum around the house writing books about global warming, he'll end up back in charge of a steamship company with billion-dollar assets.
• The Oilers lost to the Flames in the Battle of Alberta last night too. And Mario Lemieux announces his retirement. Hey Mario, get a sense of timing!
  
• Angry While Males still hasn't updated the site since before the election. Way to drop the ball: that alone must have cost Harper 15 seats...
• Ezra Levant last night apparently bragged to the east about how Alberta seperatism has been stopped with a Harper win. Only he didn't win. And I'll guarantee you that next election he'll lose. Ignatieff will run his own flawless campaign, the media jackals will turn on Harper, and we'll be back where we started. Watered down proposals, promising to back off on all the legislation that needs to be passed, forgoing important democratic and economic reforms, and for what? For 16 months in a cushy house with a shitty lawn in a god-forsaken useless city on the banks of a dirty river. No thanks, just give me my own country.
• The NDP made big gains in B.C. and Manitoba. Why did we disband the Reform Party again?
• Toronta and Mount Royal duck the big blue wave. This is bad, really really bad, and yet I'm not entirely sure why. But mark my words, some political hay will be made by Harper's failure to make a dent in Canada's two most pretentious cities.
• Harper's possible coalition partners: economically illiterate sodomy-loving assholes from out east, economically illiterate sodomy-loving assholes from out east, or, er, hey, economically illiterate sodomy-loving assholes who I'm pretty sure happen to be from out east...
• Neal Boortz's election observation is overly simplistic and sadly not entirely true.
• My hockey pool team: "LiberalsAlwaysGetIn" fell from 9th place (out of 11) to 10th place with a 1/2 point loss and a +2 gain from the guy below me. The good run I had with that team name is evaporated now (I was 11/11 when I changed it). So now I have a more accurate name: "TheLiberalsGotIn". I'm sure that's going to confuse more than a few people.
• "Alberta would be a better place if Todd Babiak was premier and Ralph Klein, you know, wasn't." said a venter in today's Journal. Goddammit, the federal election is barely over and now you socialist idiots are trying to ruin provincial politics too??

So there you have it, my election rundown. And now I leave you with a couple of jokes.

Paul Martin, Jack Layton, and Stephen Harper are all riding on a plane, when Martin notes "you know, I could throw a $1000 bill out of the window and make one person very happy." Harper retorts "well I could throw ten $100 bills out of the window and make 10 people really happy." Layton chimes in "if I threw 100 $10 bills out the window I'd make 100 people pretty happy." The pilot comes on over the intercom and says "you ignorant pricks, I could throw all three of you out the window and make 32 million people happy."

"Elections are too important to leave them in the hands of Newfies who see a ballot and think they get to play a game of 'Connect the Dots'." My friend J____ takes credit for that one.