Sunday open thread—Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Well, I've been released from Twitter jail. Apparently, avidly looking forward to Donald Trump's eventual demise—and @ing him about it—gets you slapped down. Trump threatening and harassing myriad people with every tweet, however, is kosher. Oh, Twitter, you useless sack of shit.

Anyhoo, I was exhausted last night, and this morning as the fog of sleep clung to me, I had a hard time remembering what last night's good news was. Friends, I had to scroll through the comments to remind myself. This week has been a decade, let me tell you.

But the big news was, of course, that Blue Dog Democrat John Bel Edwards retained the governorship of Louisiana. Also, a House seat flipped red to blue, thus giving Gov. Edwards enough seats to sustain vetoes of Republican bills.

And the vote wasn't even close. Edwards won over his GOP challenger 51.3% to 48.7%, with a majority of 40,000 votes.

Now, of course, the thing which really makes this delicious is that Mauron went to Louisiana three separate times to stump for Eddie Rispone. At his final rally, hard on the heels of Kentucky's governor's race going to Democrat Andy Beshear, Trump begged Louisiana voters to give him a win. Maybe the electorate wasn't well-disposed towards him for going to the LSU/Bama game, in Alabama. A game which, again, Alabama lost.

Now, of course, the next goal is to turn statehouses blue, not just governor's mansions. But the fact that Louisiana remained in the Democratic column, and Kentucky flipped, are no mean things. And go back to the New York Times page up above, and look at all the blue on the map. That should give people like Mitch McConnell nightmares.

What Trump has done is accelerate a realignment which was slowly taking place. Remember, he lost the popular vote by three million votes, and is only in office due to the Electoral College. The realignment has continued in all the elections since then. Now, suburbs in the South and the heartland are following their cousins on the coasts, and turning blue. With that happening, there aren't enough proverbial old white guys in beat up pick-up trucks to keep the GOP as anything but a permanent minority party. And they know this, as evidenced by the raft of Republican representatives announcing their retirements.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have a lot of work to do. But the realignment I glimpsed with Barack Obama's two election victories is still occurring. And Trump gave it PEDs by his signal vileness, which shocks people of good conscience.

Happy Sunday, everyone!