Turns out that we (and by "we", I mean the rest of the ScruHoo gang, as well as the rest of the 54% of the people in the 11th Congressional District who voted on Election Day, not to mention pretty much everyone who reads BlueNC) aren't the only ones happy to see Rep. Charles "Lumpy" Taylor go back to the tree farm. Below the jump there's a tidbit from today's op-ed piece by the Washington Post's Colbert I. King

Grace was also flowing back east in North Carolina on election night. Republican Rep. Charles Taylor lost his job to Democratic challenger Heath Shuler, who once labored for our hometown National Football League team -- a fact better left undiscussed.

Taylor was defeated for reasons having little to do with his former service as chairman of the House D.C. appropriations subcommittee. But, again, we in the District had reason to follow the North Carolina vote count as closely as we watched the D.C. returns.

I'd like to believe that Taylor's loss was retributive justice for the dastardly way he treated the District when he was the chief House overseer of the city's budget.

Who can forget his Jan. 9, 1998, "Dear Colleague" letter to members of the House of Representatives? Emblazoned in large, bold type near the top of the page was this announcement: "The average D.C. student can't read this letter."

It was a Taylor taunt hurled at our public school system and at students' math and reading test scores.

This was the same barbed-tongued Charles Taylor who:

--Directed the city to immediately close the University of the District of Columbia's law school and send the students to other schools. (He didn't succeed.)

--Used to tell us how many cops should patrol the streets and how pay raises should be awarded.

--Had his meat-ax approach to the District's budget, which then-financial control board chairman Andrew Brimmer said tore at the "very fundamental operations of government," overruled by his own House Republican leadership.

Greetings from Blowing Rock...