The world is a somewhat more hopeful place today than it was yesterday, but let's get real.

Obama is a conservative/centrist Democrat who will at best implement a small shift in American policies — he hasn't promised any strong change in Iraq, and his health care plans are an incremental improvement over the existing situation. And the opposition is shrieking "socialist!" at every suggestion, so don't expect an easy road to accomplishing even the centrist plans of President Obama…especially since he's inheriting the wreckage of 8 years of Bush misrule.

He still has to work with a self-interested, triangulating congress made up of many of the same Democrats and Republicans who have collaborated with Bush in screwing over America for the last eight years.

We're still afflicted with the curse of religiosity as a political prerequisite, and Obama has strengthened it. That is a poison that will harm us over the long term; we may have made the more rational choice in this one election, but reinforcing the potency of irrationality will come back to bite us over and over again.

The media isn't helping. The news this morning was all a-babble over a "post-racial America". Nonsense. A significant minority still hates people over the color of their skin, and you know the skinheads are cleaning their rifles right now. This self-congratulatory nonsense distracts us from the real problems that still exist.

We still have the rot of ignorance and hatred in the American electorate. Proposition 8 won. Saxby Chambliss won. Michele Bachmann won. Norm Coleman might yet win.

I'm not dancing in the street yet. I'm anticipating many years of struggle ahead.

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For the first time in my life I am proud of the people of my country. Weird feeling.

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I'm still glowing from last night. Amazing.

I was in my friend's apartment, watching the news, and they let the word out. Everybody started cheering and screaming outside, so we decided to walk the streets in celebration. EVERY PERSON that we went up to screamed danced, cars were beeping as we walked by and people were screaming out their windows... then we got to a certain section of Myrtle ( a busy street in Brooklyn), where there was a swarm of hundreds and hundreds of people on this one block, crowding the streets and banging on the hoods and windows of cars who rolling by and beeping in celebration. I was in that swarm for a about an hour, just screaming and hugging random people. It really felt like a historical moment.

Fucking unbelievable. Good job, Americans.