There was a City Council election on Saturday and, if you're like the vast majority of Dallas, you didn't notice. But whether you were paying attention or not, some important things were decided and some interesting trends emerged.

Here's what you need to know:

Angela Hunt's legacy: Saturday's most interesting race was the District 14 contest to replace Angela Hunt, who is term limited. The vacant seat drew a crowded field of seven challengers, but the race soon turned into a referendum of sorts on Hunt's term in office.

Hunt threw her weight behind attorney Philip Kingston. Her name and face were featured prominently in his mailings, on his website, and at his campaign appearances. His main challenger was Bobby Abtahi, a 31-year-old former community prosecutor and City Plan Commission member who has the backing of Hunt's opponents in the Dallas establishment.

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In her time in office, Councilwoman Pauline Medrano has established herself as a staunch ally of the LGBT community. That's more or less a requirement for election in District 2, which includes much of Oak Lawn and has a sizable, and politically active, gay population, and there's no reason to think her nephew, Adam Medrano, would do otherwise if he's elected to replace her.

But the junior Medrano is at the center of an interesting dynamic in the race. One of his opponents, Herschel Weisfeld, is openly gay. (Note: In the original post we wrote that another candidate, Vernon Franko, is also openly gay based on a report Friday in the Dallas Voice. He wrote to say that he's not openly gay and has never said he is. "I'm just 'Openly Vern,'" he writes. We really, really regret the error.) And the Dallas Voice has a rather lengthy piece today speculating that Medrano himself is gay.

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In 2006, Kinky Friedman -- singer, songwriter, satirist, head Jewboy in charge -- ran as an Independent for governor of Texas. Although he ultimately received less than 13 percent of the vote, it was still a memorable campaign, featuring slogans like, "Why the Hell Not?" and "How Hard Could It Be?" -- both excellent questions, and ones we've often had occasion to consider, watching Rick Perry run things.

He took another shot, equally unsuccessful and slightly less publicized, in 2009. Now, in between hawking his Man in Black tequila and chewing that cigar to a soggy stump, it looks like he's pondering making another run at the big seat next year. For serious this time.

On Saturday, Kinky stopped by Lakewood Medallion Discount Liquors to sign bottles of his tequila. While he was there, he told NBC-DFW that he's considering a possible run. His platform would consist of two main planks, both of them aimed at increasing tax revenue for the state: legalizing casino gambling and legalizing, regulating and taxing marijuana.

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Greg Abbott, sincerely hoping nobody reads this report.

In an exercise in states' rights fetishization, the Texas Legislature tasked Attorney General Greg Abbott with figuring out whether international organizations are usurping Lone Star sovereignty. If you'll recall, there was an ugly scene leading up to the 2012 presidential election, wherein Abbott, chest out-thrust in his best chickenhawk approximation, threatened to throw the book at international election observers, who, by the way, have witnessed U.S. elections for years. In fact, we send our own observers to elections in places like Russia and Ukraine.

Anyway, a little observing couldn't hurt, given the voter ID laws -- still tied up in court -- that were passed to fight the fraud mirage (or suppress turnout among certain voters).

So, at the behest of our august lawmaking body, Abbott did his diligence and discovered that, no, multinational groups are not, in fact, "[restricting] state law or [intruding] on the sovereignty of the states," according to his report. That there was any confusion here suggests elected reps might benefit from a few high school-level government classes. But we'll air out a few of Abbott's pertinent findings anyway.

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After a bitter and expensive showdown, Wendy Davis held onto her seat in the State Senate.

photo via WendyDavisforSenate.com

Now that our election night hangovers have been slept off, we can now cut through the chatter and attempt to forecast what last night's election results mean to you, Dear Reader.

Dallas County is really, really blue
Republicans had a strong showing in local legislative races, easily fending off challenges to their state and U.S. House seats, but county government was a different story. Democrats swept Dallas County, winning contested races for sheriff, tax assessor-collector, criminal and civil judgeships, and seats on the commissioners court.

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One will get to live in a sweet crib doing whatever he wants. The other will be president.

Here at Unfair Park, we thought long and hard about how to cover the election. Should we devote our vast resources to covering the polls, putting our fingers to the pulse of the electorate? Perhaps we could relay impressionistic dispatches as political watchers reacted to the incoming election results. Or maybe we'd sit back and offer reasoned, insightful commentary on the race and what it means for the future of the country. It's a uniquely consequential election, after all, one that offers a defining choice between two different visions for America.

Then we realized the election would be on a Tuesday. Tuesdays are bad for us. And since you guys never listen to us anyway, we'll just open the line so you can parse out the election results and tell us what they mean. Full libtards, certified teabaggers and everyone in the alleged middle are welcome.

We'll jump in from time to time with links and updates about races, both local and national, and to spell out exactly why you're wrong. For now, feel free to air your thoughts and make your prediction: Will Romney win, or is this the end of civilization? OR IS IT BOTH?

The Fannin County Leader

Ralph Hall, in the Texas-flag shirt, astride an elephant, because of course.

On this Election Day, I pause to consider Representative Ralph Hall, the man from Fate, Texas. Not long after he is re-elected -- and he will be re-elected -- he will turn 90.

Why am I so confident? Because Hall is, if nothing else, a survivor after more than 30 years spent inside the cage of howler monkeys that is the U.S. House of Representatives. When the Blue Dog Democrat saw his district gerrymandered into an unadulterated red in 2004, he switched parties. When the tea-party wave crashed over the country in 2010, the newly minted Republican, who is about as establishment as they come, hung on. And when Houston construction magnate Leo Linbeck III bankrolled a $167,000 ad campaign against Hall during the primary, according to numbers from the Center for Responsive Politics, he failed to bump him from the GOP ticket.

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Photos by Eric Gruneisen and Brandon Marshall, courtesy of Denver Westword.

Turns out or resident English guy, Gavin Cleaver, who drenches himself in barbecue sauce and smoke for us over on City of Ate, is actually like a doctor. In politics. University trained and the author of a forthcoming book on political ethics. We did not know that ... both that he was a Ph.D. or that there is such thing as "political ethics." Anyway, he not only likes 'Merica's smoked slabs of beef, he likes our elections too. There's gotta be a connection there. (If you want to read more of his political stuff, check this out.

That's right America. I can't even vote in your country. I hail from a land where we're still upset that you wasted all that perfectly good tea, where American elections dominate the media the same way they do here, where when elections are tied we muddle through it and create a Franken-party out of many different opposing parties because A) we recognize there are more than two options on the political spectrum and B) we don't like courts as much as you guys. A place where politics is frankly so boring that nobody cares about it. This is the land in which I completed my eight years studying politics at college, and now I am briefly going to talk to you about how the rest of the world feels.

When was the last time you heard about European elections? Exactly. Why are American elections such big news around the world? Two reasons. First, if any country is going to stick a pin in a map and then invade that country, it's America. Your military budget is larger than those of China, Russia, the UK, France and Japan put together. Frankly, we're all terrified (except Putin. Putin doesn't scare). I can see how that policy is working for you.
Second, American election season is political fireworks popping left, right, and center (the pun there is intended). There's nothing outside the U.S. that can compare. It's such theater, such drama, and it is so ridiculous that I can't look away. It's like the Honey Boo-Boo of elections, if you will. Some elections have almost toxic levels of comedy gold (Mugabe's re-election campaign in Zimbabwe, with his killer slogan "Vote For The Fist" and a greater than 100 percent voter turnout), some elections are a complete farce (Belgium recently snatching the record for "Most Time Without Actual Government" from that center of democracy, Cambodia), but your election is like a car-crash of extremism, patriotism, abstract nouns and empty rhetoric.

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Greg Abbott

On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, in a bit of international chest-pounding, sent a strongly worded letter to the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe threatening criminal charges if the group carried out a hinted-at plan to show up in Texas come November 6.

Today, apparently worried that he didn't make his point sufficiently clear, Abbott delivered sent a lengthy missive to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warning her against allowing some snooty Europeans to meddle in Texas' elections.

Clinton, it seems, received a letter yesterday from the OCSE asking her to ensure election observers are not "restrained in their activities" while in the state. But Abbott contends that he has every right to restrain their activities, per provisions set out in Texas law.

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Via.

There's been a lot of talk this election season about the specter of voter fraud, the idea that the polls will be flooded by illegal immigrants, household pets and dead people (all left-leaning constituencies), thereby cheapening real Americans' votes. There has been relatively little concern expressed about the accuracy of voting machines, which has been a hot button issue in the past.

Enter the North Texas Tea Party, which emailed supporters this morning with a somewhat breathless warning of problems with area voting machines during early voting. The group said it has received four "specific, reliable reports" in which voters attempted to cast a straight-Republican ticket but instead found themselves selecting all Democrats.

The reports came from Irving, Grapevine, Dallas, and the Hurst-Euless-Bedford area, but "(t)his problem COULD be limited to Dallas County (who replaced the longtime elections administrator with a Democrat lackey), but one cannot be sure."

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