My evening went quite nicely last night on the local front as well. The candidate that I've been working for not only won a seat, but came in first out of a field of ten. It wasn't even close. The only incumbent who was running took second and another progressive took the third seat. The next two candidates in the vote were also big-time progressives. All of the big money interests candidates did very very poorly. CW is that with campaign spending limits (catch this: a limit of $56,000 for a city council race) the field was leveled, thus the conservative developers couldn't compete (read, buy the election). Usually development interests may spend as much as $100,000 for a city council race.

We're looking for a movement by conservatives to repeal the voluntary spending limits.

Irony of the election.

One of the measures on our ballot was for a local rail system. The corridor between Santa Rosa and Marin County to the south is heavily commuted (it's a feeder route into San Francisco, which is about 40 miles south of Santa Rosa). By "heavily", I mean it can take you 35 minutes or 2 hours depending on the time of day, to go from Santa Rosa to Marin. The rail measure would have paid for a train to run through this area. Both Sonoma County and Marin County voters needed to approve the tax by a two-thirds majority.

The measure lost. It was overwhelmingly approved in Sonoma County and just barely passed in Marin, but not by enough votes to get the two-thirds.

Why?

Environmentalist in Marin County shot it down.

You might say, huh? Environmentalists stop a mass transit measure?

Yep. ENVIRONMENTALISTS! They used the same arguments they've used for years against any rapid transit .... too much environmental impact of the project and it would cause growth.

Right. Like growth isn't already happening anyway? Currently the main freeway is slowly being widened to accomodate the growth. But as soon as it's widened, it fills up with cars. These nutbars think they'll restrict growth by making movement impossible, but have already been proven wrong several times over.

I'm a liberal. And proud of it. But these tree huggers are beyond liberal and have moved to left-wing nutbarhood.

All in all, a very good night to be a Democrats and a liberal. Now let's sit back a watch the whinning ..........