On Tuesday night, the voters of Massachusetts voted to replace the late Sen. Teddy Kennedy, a longtime liberal stalwart and ardent health care reformer, with a conservative upstart cheered on by the Tea Party movement, a candidate who has vowed to vote against health care reform in the Congress. His nay vote could destroy the Democrats' plans for reform and lay waste to Kennedy's signature issue by breaking the party's filibuster proof 60-seat majority.

Why did the people of Massachusetts, which is a long-time liberal stronghold, suddenly decide to go with Republican candidate Scott Brown?

--*Brown has done everything he can to give the people of Massachusetts universal health care, and he even loves them so much he's going to go one step further and deny it to everybody else.

--*He promised them change, any kind of change. Waterboarding kind of change.

--*Massachusetts is home to a large number of independent voters who hate politics, lies and game playing. Most of all, they hate the game of "Got yer nose." They always fall for that. Not this time. They will not fall for that again ... d'oh!

--*Independents pride themselves on their skepticism. Which is why they have believed everything Glenn Beck has told them all year about communist infiltration of our bodily fluids. And you can take that to the bank.

--*The people of Massachusetts are fed up with high unemployment and rightly blame the Obama administration for causing the recession when he took office eight years ago or something like that.

--*The people of Massachusetts understand that it is not the government's job to interfere with the free market. "And by the way," they ask, "why hasn't the government given me a job yet when communist renegade leader Pol Pot already would have by now?"

--*The people of Massachusetts understand that employment is a lagging indicator and usually starts to increase at the tail end of a recession, after market rebounds like the one we're seeing now. No wait. They don't understand that. Never mind. Throw the bums out! Faster, Pussycat! Kill, kill!

--*There were many reports of light snow in Massachusetts on election night. Only a crazy jackass would drive in the snow.

--*The Democratic candidate, a supposed shoo-in named Martha Coakley, was widely thought to have run a lackluster campaign and pundits complained that her message was little more than "I'm a Democrat." Coakley's defenders were obviously too hopeful that, weak as her message was, it stood a good chance against the whole "I want to waterboard Arabs again" message.

--*Massachusetts is a hotbed of political independents and they want to take a chance on Brown, hoping that he, like them, has their rugged iconoclastic streak: after all, he is against cap and trade; he believes in cutting taxes during a huge budget crisis; he opposes amnesty for immigrants; he opposes gay marriage; he opposes a tax on banks that have recorded huge profits after taking government stimulus money to stay afloat; and he has the Tea Party seal of approval. In fact, he's so independent he doesn't hold any of the beliefs of the people he's representing.

--*Bay Staters are all sure that the first thing a young Republican Senator with no friends in Congress is going to do is start playing by his own rules and burning bridges with Republican leaders just to show everybody how politically open minded he is. Yeah, <em>that's</em> really going to happen.

--*They were drunk?

What were some of the highlights of President Barack Obama's address to Congress Wednesday night?

8:15 p.m. Obama thanks the health insurance industry for making the 111th Congress possible.

8:20 p.m. Obama name checks a distinguished pantheon of Americans who have so far totally failed to bring you decent health care, including Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Kennedy, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, George Bush and Alan Alda.

8:25 p.m. Obama stops and smokes a cigarette.

8:30 p.m. Obama excoriates those who have tried to kill reform altogether by spreading lies about the health care bill. Though he doesn't name them personally, those people pretty much admit their guilt by sitting down and not clapping for this statement. We thank those people for telling us who they are.

8:40 p.m. Obama stops briefly while the field crew sweeps the floor and dances to "YMCA"

8:45 p.m. Obama stops to remind people that the Bratz dolls still dress like sluts

8:50 p.m. Obama suddenly inserts orders for American children to kill their parents according to plans laid out in his Tuesday speech to classrooms. "You know where the forks are. Like we talked about. On three!"

9:00 p.m. Obama is heckled by South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson for the "take her home like a six pack" joke.

9:01 p.m. Wilson yells "You lie!" after Obama says that illegal immigrants are not covered by the health care bill, after Obama says Teddy Roosevelt was president, and after Obama reads the list of specials in the Congressional cafeteria

9:10 p.m. Joe Biden still has something in his eye

9:15 p.m. Obama says that amid the health care debate, America has seen Congress at its worst (when it does nothing) and at its best (when it does nothing).

9:16 p.m. Rahm Emanuel eats a severed human hand.

9:18 p.m. Wow, after three beers ... Nancy Pelosi man ... I'm just sayin'.

9:20 p.m. Obama thanks the pharmaceutical companies for making Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh possible.

9:25 p.m. Obama wonders aloud why such strident political ideology is hindering progress. He just can't imagine why influential Republican swing voter Sen. Charles Grassley, for example, would be so ideological about this health care bill.

9:30 p.m. Obama makes some controversial statements about how much his health care plan would cost, saying a lot of it was money already being spent anyway. This rankles Republicans who insist that only they be allowed to run up crippling deficits, because they do it for good reasons, after all.

9:31 p.m. Katie Couric says Obama shouldn't kiss so many people what with swine flu running rampant.

9:31 p.m. Actually, kissing up to pigs happens a lot in this business.

9:32 p.m. Republicans several times fail to get up to clap, showing that, as an abrasive and loud minority, they are not afraid to use their thumb-sucking petulance as a weapon.

9:35 p.m. In response to Obama's remarks, several Republicans hold up copies of a booklet which, given their complete lack of interest in reforming health care, is probably a copy of the new "Harry Potter."

What factors led to the end of our marriage and/or the end of health care reform legislation in Congress?

--*We failed to articulate our goals to each other.

--*We kept fighting over money.

--*There was a lot of mutual suspicion about what the other side wanted.

--*We turned to outsiders for help and they turned out to have their own selfish interests.

--*One side didn't know how to think for him or herself unless Glenn Beck told him or her first.

--*...or Oprah.

--*We weren't sure how to handle the necessary abortion issue.

--*Every time we tried to talk about things reasonably it deteriorated into shouting matches.

--*Each of us accused the other of patronizing and sabotaging the other in public.

--*There was a lot of increasingly nonsensical, paranoid and loony right-wing talk coming from one side.

--*"I don't need another mother."

--*"I don't need another father."

--*Turns out one of us was a racist.