shannon_a

For several years now, people have loudly (and I think, largely incorrectly) whined and bitched about electronic voting. They've decried the lack of a paper trail (though it would be easy to legislate a doubly-redundant one) and they've got out the tin-foil hats to talk about voting machines changing the results.

At the same time, they continue to ignore a larger problem that electronic voting machines somewhat resolve: the unreliability of paper vote counting.

If there's anything that Florida in 2000 and Minnesota in 2008 should have taught us, it's that there's a margin of error in vote counting, just like there is in polling. It's a small area in which you can't accurately determine the will of the people due to any number of human errors introduced either by voters or poll workers.

The infamous butterfly ballot of Florida 2000 probably cost Gore the election as much as the Supreme Court overstepping their role, and stopping votes from being counted. As a result, I think it's pretty easy to say that the 2000 Presidential election fell into the voting margin of error. Even aside from that, all the counting and recounting and the changing numbers as that occurred should have pretty clearly showed the margin of error.

And I have no doubt that the same is true in Minnesota. They've been counting and challenging votes for almost a month there now, and it's pretty impossible to say who's winning. The Franken camp currently puts their lead at 10 or 20 votes, which appears to involve dismissing some or all of the challenges (some or all of which will doubtless be challenged, since the Coleman camp has challenged, for example, votes for Franken where the voter also voted for McCain, claiming that a McCain vote showed the "intent" to vote for Coleman).

But today appears to be the cherry on Minnesota's crap cake. A Minneapolis precinct has lost 133 votes. And, it was a heavily Democratic precinct, thus those 133 votes translated to 46 net for Franken.

You watch, the final Minnesota numbers will be within 46 votes.

Every year lately, people have said that it's the most important election of our lifetime. It may well be correct this year, given how far we have fallen under the brutal and misguided depredations of the Bush administration.

Yes, We Can.

So, tomorrow is the election. If I were a good activist I'd go help GOTV tomorrow, but it's been a tough and tiring and sickly year and I don't have any sort of energy for that, so I'm just going to try and get the hell away from it all.

The plan is: vote; get a sandwich; ride down to Lake Merritt; have lunch; stop by EndGame; purchase Witch's Brew; go out to Alameda; ride the Bay Trail around the island; come home when it starts getting dark; go out to dinner; and only then look at election coverage (though it'll still be too early for local stuff).

Here's what I'm worried about for tomorrow:

Barack Obama. Unless every polling institute in the United States is wrong, even the ones with a Republican lean, I don't think Obama will lose. Or, to put it more clearly, I don't think McCain can win under any honest scenario. So, I'm less concerned here, but I do think it's a crying shame that Obama's grandmother, who raised him during his teenage years, died the day before his election.

Proposition 8. That this filthy piece of bigotry would be written into our state constitution is an affront against everything that the United States stands for. I also believe it's going to pass for reasons that I'm too tired to count. The question ultimately is going to be how long until it's overturned and how much it'll set equality rights back in the process. I hope I'm wrong.

Measure KK. This is a piece-of-shit Berkeley measure authored by the NIMBYs that unfortunately fill too many Berkeley homes. Because these idiots don't want Telegraph Avenue turned into a bus thoroughfare that would allow for real public transit alternatives between here and Oakland, they've put up a law that would make it illegal for Berkeley to redraw street lanes without voter approval. Yeah, really. I suspect it'll fuck the hell out of bike lanes just as much as it'll screw up AC Transit improvements. And people say Berkeley is progressive.

The Senate. I'm actually not too worried here, because I don't think the Democrats have a great chance of picking up their 60-vote majority, nor do I think it's a catastrophe if they don't. I would guess they'll end up with 56-58 seats. I think that in order to hit 60, Franken has to get lucky in Minnesota and there has to be a major upset in the Senatorial race in Georgia due to amazingly high African American turnout. So, it could happen, but it'd be a stretch.

But I do believe, whatever else happens, that tomorrow the end of our long, national nightmare will, at last, be in sight.

(A fun parody song.)



My favorite line:

Just Because I can see the moon,
Doesn't make me an astronaut, you loon.

If we lived in a country where there were two different points of view over how things should be done, and people made an honest choice between those options, I could live with it, even if my point of view were frequently ignored--as has indeed been the case these last 8 years (and longer when you consider stuff like NAFTA under Clinton).

But one of my biggest problems with today's politics is that there isn't a chance for honest discourse in this country right now, and that's largely because of lying politicians.

It was bad enough in bygone years when the Republican party ran on campaigns of lottery dreams. There were years when they talked about lowering taxes for the rich, and you could see that their underlying message was, "Hey, you might be rich some day, blue collar worker. So wouldn't you like to make sure that taxes are low for that glorious future?" I always felt like they were fooling people, like they were convincing the average American to vote against his best interest by holding out a carrot that they'd never get to eat.

But that's nothing to what the Republicans have done in this century.

I've heard Karl Rove's technique called The Big Lie several times, using the term that originated with Hitler. I think now we can look back and see that's how we got into the war with Iraq. According to Wikipedia:

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique. It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".

But nowadays Republicans seem to be taking it to the next level. They're not just lying about the big things, they're lying about everything. McCain gets out there and offers the Big Lie of being opposed to George Bush, which might have been true 8 years ago, but hasn't been true since he prostituted himself to win the nomination. His campaign has also constantly been lying about Obama, most consistently purposefully misrepresenting his tax policies.

Palin may be even worse, as she seems to have been lying across her whole political career. She's now saying she's against earmarks, though her earmarks were so bad when she was mayor of Wassila that she made the bad-earmarks list of a certain Senator in congress three times.

(The senator? John McCain.)

She's saying she was against the infamous Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere, though she campaigned on pushing it through when she was trying to become governor of Alaska. At the convention she even claimed that Obama has never authored major legislation, a fact that's outright false (unless, I suppose you have a pretty frickin' high bar for "major").

The problem isn't just these lying politicians (and I'm sure there are some Democrats too, though among the Republicans it seems entirely endemic, and I think the contrast is most obvious in the political race), but rather than our media isn't doing anything about it.

We've started to get a little lackluster fact-checking by some of the main media, but it's still only offered secondary or tertiary attention. And, much of the fact-checking is still being done by second or third-tier media who no ones pays attention to. What happened to the media being the watchdogs of our society? They've entirely abrogated that responsibility. They should be calling politicians out when they're serial liars. That should be the big headline ("McCain's Newest Ad Once More a Big Lie!"), but instead they repeat the lies in their main stories, then list the incorrect facts back on page 33.

That's crap and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Barrack Obama today put out an ad straight-up calling the McCain campaign liars for the bullshit they've been saying (using a rare media quote that actually used the word "lie"). Hopefully it'll bring some light to peoples' eyes, but it has the unfortunate potential to backfire if he's suddenly seen as the "angry black man." But, he shouldn't even have to stick his neck out like that in the first place. The media should be doing their job, and they haven't for a long time.

Here's what I said previously about Sarah Palin.

But wait, there's more (and more and more appearing every day).

• As part of her TrooperGate scandal, Palin has already hired an attorney to defend her. She apparently did so two weeks ago, but hid the fact until today.
  
• There's been open debate about whether Palin is a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, who believes that Alaska should secede from the United States (and, it appears, that the United States should be dissolved entirely). AIP's VP is among those who claims Sarah used to be a member of the political group. Whatever the case, however, she definitely taped a message for this year's annual conventions, welcoming people to the convention and telling them they play an "important role" in state politics.
  
• Not only is Palin a strong proponent of abstinence-only education, but she's a poster-girl for how well it works. Her 17-year-old daughter, you see, is pregnant. Now Obama says that family isn't anyone's business, and points out that his mom was 18 when he was born (as, indeed, was mine). However, that somewhat misses the point, which is what the policies of Palin and McCain would do to this country. First, it anecdotally points out how screwed up abstinence-only education is, something which actual studies have upheld. Second, it really goes to the heart of the "culture of life" that Palin stands for. Basically, she's decided that her teenage daughter will never have a fair shot at a life because she's going to be raising a child until her mid-30s. Perhaps she has that right within her family, but she'd like to make that choice for every 17-year-old girl in America.
  
• It's increasingly obvious that she's not just a member of Alaska's culture of corruption, but a founding member. Ted Stevens, who's gone one better than Palin, in that he's under indictment not just investigation, was one of the people that helped Palin win office. Quid pro quo, her name appears in the incorporation papers of Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc. (an oxymoron if I ever heard one).
  

I'm going to be somewhat surprised if Palin is actually nominated on Wednesday. I'm going to be even more surprised if she's still on the ballot on November*.

And I sincerely hope that this train wreck of a VP nomination, which by all reports McCain made on his own, with almost no research, is going to be remembered in November even when Palin has been replaced by Lieberman or someone else. This was McCain's first major presidential decision, an example of what we could expect if he took office next year, and he failed it, badly.

Heck of a job, Johnnie.

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* Though I could see there being some chance of it, given McCain's legendary stubbornness in the face of reality, yet another trait that he shares with his good friend, George W. Bush. However, I'd lay odds that his aides and campaign chairs are already asking for a timetable for VP widthdrawal.

I think I can never be surprised by the horrific things that Republicans say, but then I'm newly amazed.

Here's a new whopper from:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-Uninsured_27bus.ART.State.Edition2.4dce428.html

But the numbers [of uninsured Americans] are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

First, my God, how can it be any more clear that the Republicans are vastly out of touch with the needs of the average American? For any deep-pocketed bastard to think that a trip to the ER is the same thing as having a regular doctor, access to reasonably priced prescriptions, and the ability to visit specialists simply proves that his think tank is an oxymoron, with emphasis on the word moron.

Second, how can anyone argue that our health care system isn't entirely and utterly screwed? I've seen our health care premiums almost triple in the last eight years. I'm aware that it would be hard for me to ever turn to an entirely freelance career because of the difficulties of getting individual healthcare for anyone with any preexisting conditions. I can't even imagine how anyone can retire before they have access to Medicaid. And that's to say nothing of the people much, much worse off than I am. You'd have to be pretty filthy rich to not think that our healthcare system is about two inches from an utter breakdown.

And that's John McCain. Filthy, filthy rich.

(But it's OK. He earned it. By marrying the heiress that he was with when he was cheating on his crippled wife.)