Let's start with Maine's No on 1 campaign. We lost. So sorry, Maine gays. You're still not quite human.

The problem with gay-marriage referendums is, it's about civil rights. Civil rights exist because your legal status shouldn't depend on popular opinion. If we'd had referendums in 1964 about the Civil Rights Act, it would still be illegal for Heidi Klum to marry Seal. Seems silly, right? That's because it is.

With 87 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday morning, 53 percent of voters had approved the repeal, ending an expensive and emotional fight that was closely watched around the country as a referendum on the national gay-marriage movement. Polls had suggested a much closer race.

Maine voters also decided to expand the state’s 10-year-old medical marijuana law, approving a ballot question to allow state-regulated dispensaries to grow the drug and sell it to patients. The vote comes weeks after the Obama administration announced it would not prosecute patients and distributors who are in "clear and unambiguous" compliance with state laws. Maine will be the third state, after New Mexico and Rhode Island, to allow tightly regulated, nonprofit marijuana dispensaries.

Yeah, polls suggested a much closer race because people are so reluctant to admit they're homophobic. But hey, how about those stoners? Closeted Maine Republicans can still get high, so you got that going for you.

In one bright spot, the law expanding gay rights to "everything but marriage" in Washington state looks like it might win.

CA-10

We won, with a strong progressive, too. How does this fit with bobblehead "Obama is dead" logic? Head. Must. Explode. Does. Not. Compute.

Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi will soon trade his state title for that of congressman after an expected victory Tuesday in the face of a surprisingly tough GOP challenger.

Garamendi easily beat Republican challenger David Harmer of Dougherty despite late cash infusions from the national party and an enthusiastic volunteer corps.

Outspent 2-to-1 in the heavily Democratic 10th district, the virtually unknown Republican David Harmer mustered just 39 percent of the vote, vowing to tap into public angst over an obdurate recession, federal spending and health care reform.

But Garamendi repeatedly touted his broad and deep political experience, and he never retreated from his support of progressive policies.

NEW YORK CITY

In New York, incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg won - but not by that much, considering polls showing an 18-point lead. And that was despite pouring what amounted to the GDP of a small nation into his campaign fund.

Unofficial returns showed Mr. Bloomberg with 51 percent and Mr. Thompson with 46 percent. The result will make Mr. Bloomberg only the fourth three-term mayor in the last century.

“Conventional wisdom says historically third terms haven’t been too successful,” the mayor told supporters at the Sheraton New York Hotel in Midtown Manhattan around midnight after a tense night of watching returns. “But we’ve spent the last eight years defying conventional wisdom.”

Still, the margin seemed to startle Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and the city’s political establishment, which had predicted a blowout. Published polls in the days leading up to the election suggested that the mayor would win by as many as 18 percentage points; four years ago, he cruised to re-election with a 20 percent margin.

The billionaire mayor had poured $90 million of his own fortune into the race, a sum without equal in the history of municipal politics that gave him a 14-to-1 advantage in campaign spending.

NY-23

And in the crazy NY-23 race, the one much fetishized by national bobbleheads, the Democrat beat the teabagger by three points:

SARANAC LAKE, N.Y. — Democrats won a special election in New York State’s northernmost Congressional district Tuesday, a setback for national conservatives who heavily promoted a third candidate in what became an intense debate over the direction of the Republican Party.

The Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, led with 49 percent of the vote, while the Conservative Party candidate, Douglas L. Hoffman, had 46 percent.

NEW JERSEY

In NJ, former Goldman Sachs CEO Gov. Jon Corzine got his butt kicked by the corrupt Chris Christie. Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but the Office of Public Integrity in D.C. should certainly investigate the odd lending practices of the soon-to-be governor:

In New Jersey, a former federal prosecutor, Christopher J. Christie, became the first Republican to win statewide in 12 years by vowing to attack the state’s fiscal problems with the same aggressiveness he used to lock up corrupt politicians.

He overcame a huge Democratic voter advantage and a relentless barrage of negative commercials to defeat Jon S. Corzine, an unpopular incumbent who outspent him by more than two to one and drew heavily on political help from the White House, including three visits to the state from President Obama.

“We are in a crisis; the times are extraordinarily difficult, but I stand here tonight full of hope for the future,” said Mr. Christie, 47, who will become New Jersey’s 55th governor. “Tomorrow begins the task of fixing a broken state.”

One of Corzine's biggest problems is that, like Barack Obama, his office was fiscally broken when he got there. Christine Todd Whitman left a series of landmines that didn't explode until years later - things like counting part of the teachers pension fund to "balance" the budget.

VIRGINIA

The bobbleheads are lovin' this one.

Virginians elected Republican Robert F. McDonnell the commonwealth's 71st governor Tuesday, sweeping the GOP to power and emphatically halting a decade of Democratic advances in the critical swing state.

The exclamation point on the former state attorney general's trouncing of Democratic state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds was a victory in Fairfax County, the state's most populous jurisdiction, which had delivered powerful Democratic majorities to President Obama and Govs. Timothy M. Kaine and Mark Warner. McDonnell also reversed the political order in the Washington region's outer suburbs, winning Loudoun and Prince William counties, which went for Kaine four years ago.

The bold headline on today's Washington Post? "A warning to Democrats: It's not 2008 anymore."

Yawn. Honestly, when was the last time the Washington Post was right about anything?

The manufacturing sector lost 63K, the financial sector 28K and Construction lost 65. Health care added 47.4 thousand jobs.

One of the more interesting findings is that up till April government jobs were increasing, since April they have declined. The decline isn’t huge, but it exists at all levels of government. For some reason the postal service in particular seems to be shedding jobs.

Though the job loss is less than we’ve seen in the past it’s surprisingly uniform: except for health care and social assistance everything else is either down, or just barely increasing. Fundamentally, every industry without pricing power is taking it on the chin, but if you’re sick, you’re sick, so the medical industry retains the ability to hire. I suspect that the manufacturing numbers would be much worse if defense related manufacturing was removed.

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Not looking so good, is it?

The prospects for an economic recovery by year's end dimmed yesterday, as government data showed that the economy contracted at the end of 2008 by the fastest pace in a quarter-century. The worse-than-expected data fueled doubts about whether the Obama administration had adequately sized up the challenges it faces in trying to pull the country out of recession.

Gross domestic product, a measure of the goods and services produced across the nation, shrank at an annualized rate of 6.2 percent in the last quarter of 2008, according to the Commerce Department, far worse than the initial estimate of 3.8 percent and the 5 percent most analysts were expecting. The downward revision means the economy began the year from an even weaker position than previously thought.

"The economy really doesn't have any momentum going into the first quarter," Wachovia economist John Silvia said. "To the extent the economy may have been weaker, then the impact of the stimulus would be more muted."

Which was the argument Krugman and others were making for a much larger stimulus package.

On Friday, the New York Times provided a jaw-dropping analysis of the dismal state of the economy under George W. Bush. Just days after the Washington Post documented that Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the Times charted his historic failure in expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth. As it turns out, Bush is just the latest Republican to confirm the maxim that Wall Street and the economy overall almost always do better under Democratic presidents.

As the Times revealed (article here, charts here), the only bright spot for the first MBA president's economic mismanagement was the low inflation rate during his tenure:

During his administration, the country grew at the slowest overall pace of any recent president, whether measured in gross domestic product or employment. The last president to preside while the stock market did worse was Herbert Hoover...

...President Bush's administration was marked by a recession that began two months after he took office and another downturn in his final year of office. In the end, the economy during his term added enough jobs to employ only 14 percent of the added number of working-age Americans, the lowest proportion of any postwar administration. Employment grew at a compound annual rate of only 0.3 percent, half the 0.6 percent rate that his father had recorded in what had previously been the worst post-World War II performance.

For the investor class so fond of perpetuating the myth of Republicans' superior economic stewardship, the collapse of the stock marketing during the Bush recession must be particularly galling. The Standard & Poor's 500 spiraled down at annual rate of 5.6% during Bush's time in the Oval Office, a disaster even worse than Richard Nixon's abysmal 4.0% yearly decline. (Only Herbert Hoover's cataclysmic 31% plunge makes Bush look good in comparison.)

As it turns out, as the New York Times also showed in October, the Democratic Party "has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole."

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