Washington Whispers:

It's an ugly rumor, but it's spreading like wildfire: Karl Rove has lost his touch. In an amazing betrayal within a family where top political aide Rove is royalty, Bushies have been sneering at his pre-election happy talk that the gop would keep the Senate and take a slight hit in the House, both soon to be run by Democrats. And now we learn that President Bush really believed the GOP was safe, too. On the day before the elections, he asked embattled House gop leader Dennis Hastert to run for speaker again so he could guide the White House's agenda in Congress.

dkulju has a must-read diary on the stunning grassroots upset victories of Carol Shea-Porter in NH-1:

Our opponent had a 10-1 money advantage, multiple union endorsements, the big DCCC endorsement, paid DC staffers and some quiet support from the State party (which officially remained neutral). We had a wonderful candidate, an energized grass roots army, a great strategy, and the technical ability to target our efforts better than the professionals. We didn't just outwork them, we out smarted them as well.

And that would be a really great story of people powered politics...except we were about to write a better one.

Read the whole thing here.

The NYT has a good profile of Jon Tester and his hometown:

For all the talk about the new Democrats swept into office on Tuesday, the senator-elect from Montana truly is your grandfather’s Democrat — a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916.

It is a place with 105-degree summer days and winter chills of 30 below zero, where his grandparents are buried, where his two children learned to grow crops in a dry land entirely dependent on rainfall, and where, he says, he earned barely $20,000 a year farming over the last decade.

“It’s always been tight, trying to make a living on that farm,” said Mr. Tester, still looking dazed and bloodshot-eyed after defeating Senator Conrad Burns, a three-term incumbent, by fewer than 3,000 votes.

Chouteau County, where Mr. Tester lives on a homestead of 1,800 acres, lost 8.5 percent of its population in the last five years — typical of much of rural America that has been in decline since the Dust Bowl.

To make extra money, Mr. Tester taught music to schoolchildren, and still plays a decent trumpet despite having only seven fingers (he lost the rest to a meat grinder as a child). He got into politics just eight years ago in a sustained rage over what utility deregulation had done to small farmers and businesses in Montana.

“You think of the Senate as a millionaire’s club — well, Jon is going to be the blue-collar guy who brings an old-fashioned, Jeffersonian ideal about being tied to the land,” said Steve Doherty, a friend of Mr. Tester’s for 20 years. “He’s a small farmer from the homestead. That’s absolutely who he is. That place defines him.”

Reasons to be relieved #233:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Sen. Barbara Boxer on Thursday promised major policy shifts on global warming, air quality and toxic-waste cleanup as she prepares to head the U.S. Senate's environmental committee.

''Time is running out, and we need to move forward on this,'' Boxer said of global warming during a conference call with reporters. ''The states are beginning to take steps, and we need to take steps as well.''

Boxer's elevation to chairwoman of the Senate Environmental Public Works Committee comes as the Democrats return to power in the Senate. It also marks a dramatic shift in ideology for the panel.

The California Democrat is one of the Senate's most liberal members and replaces one of the most conservative senators, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe had blocked bills seeking to cut the greenhouse gases contributing to global warming, calling the issue ''the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people.''

Environmentalists were overjoyed at the change.

''That's like a tsunami hit the committee,'' said Karen Steuer, who heads government affairs at the National Environmental Trust, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. ''You can't find two members or people more ideologically different.'...

On global warming, Boxer said she would model federal legislation after a California law signed this summer by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. That law imposes the first statewide cap on greenhouse gases and seeks to cut California's emissions by 25 percent, dropping them to 1990 levels by 2020.

A top environmental aide at the White House signaled Thursday that the administration would work with Boxer.

It's a long way to go to pass a bill that is effective enough, of course. But at least now we can have a Congress that understands that the only great hoax that has been perpetrated on the American people in regards to global warming has been Inhofe himself.