Someone had clearly either taped over or blackened out the McCain portion of this McCain/Palin bumper sticker. I am left wondering why? I mean the options are leave your stickers on, or remove them, but to go through the effort to modify them in this manner; it indicates a scary level of rage, misdirected at the wrong loser of the election, and a clueless person to support the worst candidate for the vice presidency I can recall.

My fear is that for 2012 some Republicans will try to nominate Palin to be their presidential candidate. This would make some of my Democratic friends happy, as she’d be pretty easy to beat; but wouldn’t it be better to face a serious candidate who can actually bring something to the table and spur meaningful discussion about the issues?

I am also concerned what sort of mentality goes into deliberately blackening McCain’s name on their bumper sticker. Does the person who did that have guns? Are they healthy? Are they so desperate as to try something foolish? Do they even measure foolishness by the same metrics as the rest of us? Are they more likely to go “postal” or am I (full disclosure: I have something like nine Democratic candidate bumper stickers on my car).

Oh, wait – there may be reason to suspect some other explanation:
Perhaps it was stolen?

This is scary stuff and all the more reason that the new government (or even the current one before it leaves office) should make it a priority to nationalize, rationalize and make more transparent and verifiable our entire election process.

A stolen election in Alaska does not impact who is President, this time; but it does impact who is Senator and who is Congressman from Alaska. Polling there was either way off by a uniform 14.4% for all three offices (it was not off by more than 4% anywhere but Alaska) or thousands of people spontaneously decided just to skip this one (but 11% lower turnout than 2004?!?!?!), or someone is pulling a fast one.

We need to collectively take steps to eliminate all doubts that our votes will be counted.

• no clear winner of the races for four (yes, 4) United States Senate seats:
  • Alaska where Senator “Tubes” leads by 3,353 votes out of 209,349 votes cast!
  • Georgia where total vote counts seem small for the huge early turnout reported, and Chambliss leads by a very small margin amongst a gigantic sea of votes (this one may go to Georgia’s runoff election rules)
  • Minnesota where less than 500 votes separate the two front runners and nearly three million voted!
  • Oregon where Merkley trails by less than less than 10,000 with over a million cast ballots and many precincts remain uncounted.
• no clear winner of races for at least four (yes, 4) United States Congress seats:
  • CA-04 where only 451 votes separate Brown v McClintock out of over 300,000 cast
  • MD-01 where Kratovil leads by only 915 votes out of over 300,000 cast
  • WA-08 where the fabulous Darcy Burner (who wears the coolest t-shirts in politics) trails Reichert by only 1500 votes and there are many precincts left to count.
  • VA-05 where Perriello is ahead by only 31 votes out of over 300,000 cast!!!! Thirty-One is such a tiny number, and I’ll wager the undervote (the number of voters who voted for President but left Congress choice blank) is greater than 31 several times over in that district.
• it remains unclear if California’s Proposition 8 has passed or not; though the Yes voters (who are voting against equal rights) have a clear lead on election day, there are many absentee ballots to be counted, many more than the margin remaining (though that is large). Thanks to Ben for pointing this one out.
• and though we know who the next President of the United States will be, we are still unable to call the electoral votes for two states (North Carolina and Missouri) and one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd district because the election for president was so close in all of them.

No one can use the excuse that their vote does not count anymore, and we have to do something about verifying our elections; making them more transparent, and easier to validate. We need to nationalize election procedures and rules.

I used information from pollster.com, fivethirtyeight.com, and cnn.com to put this post/diary together; did I miss any other really close races? If so – please let me know.

Line was entirely indoors by 7:15am, but the steady trickle of voters is still impressive in this very rural precinct. Beth Roemmelt and I are greeting voters as they come in to vote.

I was 78th in the N-Z group at 6:36, in and out in about 20 minutes. Held an electronic voter card for about 3 minutes. Largest number of election officers, volunteers outside, poll watchers, and voting machines I’ve yet seen out here. It’s cold, drizzly, and still the relentless trickle of voters comes in; we’ve sign up new volunteers for future elections as voters come in to vote. It is a tremendous feeling. Republicans for Wolf set up a rain fly in one of the few parking spaces; though that is no longer the issue it was for the first hour. Suspect it will be an issue again in the late afternoon.

Update: This is in Prince William County, Virginia. I voted in Evergreen Fire Station and worked outside until 2:00pm when my Gainesville Democratic District chair moved me over to Alvey School to finish the day. All the Northwestern Prince William County precincts had very high turnout (75-90%) and all had long lines from 05:30 through 7:15 (some lasted through 09:20). Once the lines died down; they never came back, but the steady trickle of voters never slacked off… and that was quite a surprise. The heavy turnout today, added to high early voting rates got us to 80% voter turnout in Evergreen and 85% at Alvey; simply stunning.

I could not sleep last night because I was so excited.

This is tantamount to a free will argument. The religious argument goes, why would God give mankind the power to chose unless that choice is an important one. By that argument Christians must choose to have Jesus in their life. Likewise, citizens should have the power to choose life for the right reasons, but they need to be free to make that choice for moral, ethical, social, and religious reasons.

Abortions can be stopped, if we eliminate unwanted pregnancies. We must stop rapes, incest, unsafe sex, and foolish abstinence-only sex education (abstinence has a place, amongst other choices, but relying on it alone is just silly). We must improve health care for young and poor mothers so having a child is not a career crippling event. That is the right way to prevent abortions, and I think Americans are waking up to that fact.

Like prohibition, making abortions illegal is an ineffective technique to achieve a worthy goal. People need to be free to choose to do the right thing, or the wrong one; and we need to make it possible to do the right thing by supporting them. The key word in “choose life” is the choice. Obama sees that, and will effectively prevent far more abortions than our stacked supreme court.

“I will open the doors to government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again.”

If you have not seen his ~28 minute spot yet, you should. Even if you don’t plan to vote for Obama, the spot points out the things our government should be focusing on. McCain, Bush, Clinton, and we all could learn a lot from Barack Obama’s ad and we should all take greater part in our own democracy.

For those who are not flash video enabled:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtREqAmLsoA

Update: Getting involved can positively effect your own life.

This is particularly ironic in that Governor Sarah Palin is governor of one of America’s most Socialist states: Alaska. Alaskan residents participate in not just socialism, but collectivism, as the natural mineral wealth of their state is collected and the money from the exploitation of that wealth is literally spread to all the residents making them not tax-payers, but beneficiaries of the state-owned enterprise. Of course, that is not the whole truth either, as private companies get to extract their profits first, enjoying state enforced monopolies for the contracts they hold.

Compounding that irony is the wholly separate irony that both Obama and McCain would like to raise taxes (which is a necessary thing, for we cannot continue to dump the debt from our greed on our children and their children), they only differ in who they want to tax. McCain would have us tax the poor and middle classes and give the wealth to the very wealthy and corporations in a Robin Hood in reverse pyramid scheme. The practical advantages to this are that millions and millions would pay a smaller raise, and relatively few would collect some rather staggering benefits. I think McCain hopes those wealthy people and corporate executives would use that money to jump start the economy; frankly I think he’s mistaken, and that those same people would simply take the money and run. Obama would have us tax the very wealthy and corporations a little more and cut taxes for the middle class and the poor. The practical advantages to that are that millions and millions would have a few extra dollars to spend, and that may cause economic recovery as the poor have a track record for spending everything they get. Both ideas are a redistribution of wealth, and it’s pretty clear that those voting purely for economic self-interest (a minority, but a sizable one) are voting where their interests lie. Obama is getting most of the middle and poorer classes, and McCain is getting most of the very wealthy classes. Confusing this trend is the notable crossover of wealthy voters being altruistic and poor voters living a fantasy life as wealthy folks who don’t want their wealthy fantasy selves to be taxed more.

It’s not entirely clear that either candidate, if elected president, would be very successful at changing current tax laws to conform to their stated plans. Our congress is not really controlled by any party, but is instead a bit of a mob that can be goaded into action occasionally, but is more often simply resistant to change. Of course, we have only ourselves to blame for that, we elected them with our flawed, but still awesome system of democracy.

The most delicious irony of all though is that McCain is basically right. Obama’s plan, which is unlikely to get approved by even a more Democratic congress, is a bit more Socialist in that we will all benefit from sharing greater health care and wealth a little more fairly. Companies freed from the huge burden of providing health care could afford more employees and to pay them more; taxes would be higher, but we’d no longer need to make co-payments (or taxes would be unchanged and co-payments would be higher, but more uniform); we’d be more like our other industrial democratic allies Germany, France, Denmark, Canada, Japan South Korea, England, Sweden, and Spain; making trade with them easier and more balanced. Of course McCain’s plan could also be called Socialism, specifically: nationalized socialism. It’s been tried before a few times; and for corporations and their favored leaders it was extraordinarily successful; but for most people in those societies it was a very painful process that caused a lot of damage. To be fair, the problems with those nationalized socialism experiments may have come from their dictatorial style of governments, and not from their economic systems; but the world has not seen a democratically elected nationalized socialism yet much has it has not really seen a very large democratically elected communism either.

My big question is why is Socialism such a bad term? We must reclaim the valid term Socialism for legitimate use as a legitimate and interesting style of government. There is nothing wrong with Socialism. Perhaps it is not the preferred system for the corporation, but last I checked, corporations don’t vote… they simply buy our votes if we let them. Just like there is nothing wrong with being Liberal, there is nothing wrong with being a Socialist either. We need to get out of the McCarthy era already.

Update: Wow, Daniel Eran Dilger had similar thoughts and wrote about them much more eloquently than I did!!

Here are my revised predictions for the outcome of the election:

Obama with 393 electoral votes and 57% of popular vote; surprise states include: GA, ND, NC, IN, MO, WV.
The battleground is provably changed because the dynamic is changed. I think if the election were pushed back a month that the popular vote would end up stabilizing around 62% for Obama; but some Americans just have not had time to get to know him yet.

Democrats end up with 61 seats, not counting Lieberman and Sanders; including freshmen Lunsford (KY), Franken (MN), Musgrove (MS), Shaheen (NH), Hagen (NC), Merkley (OR), Martin (GA), Begich (AK), both Udalls (CO and NM), and of course Warner (VA). Yes, I am predicting that all three competitive races in the south (MS, KY, GA) break for the Democrats in this landslide election, and we owe it all to fools like Michele Bachmann who pulled down the last veil hiding Republican indecency and revealed to American voters just how hateful one of the parties has become.

Democrats get 284 house seats to 151 Republicans, many of the races are surprises that suddenly tipped in favor of Democrats because of Bachmann’s comments after a whole season of McCain-Palin foolishness. Openly racist rhetoric and bellicose speeches by junior house members will no longer be tolerated, and voters will dump incumbents more readily in the new era if they say embarrassing things like Virgil Goode and Thelma Drake and Michele Bachmann have been doing. Congress will finally be held accountable for a while.

The hate proposition (Prop 8 ) loses big time in California – by more than 10%; this despite overwhelming funding by the LDS church in Utah. Which will bring into public discussion the tax-free status of religion in America. I do not predict any immediate change, but a period where so-called religious institutions have to be a little more circumspect and less overt in their political involvement so they do not stir up trouble and force the American public to change the tax rules on them.

Sadly, I also predict widespread voter suppression by the Republican party, continued doubts about the validity of our unverified voting process and huge dismay over the wide variances in election procedures from state to state; yet I doubt Americans will demand reform in large enough numbers to actually provide for a verified election, consistent voting rules coast to coast, and removal of the bi-partisan control of our government. They didn’t after the last three contested elections, why should they now?

Three things we should be talking about:

• Verified Voting
• Open Debates
• Instant Runoff Voting

Congressman Frank Wolf demonstrates how out of touch with reality he is.

It is also particularly annoying to me, as a veteran, that Wolf does not support our veterans nor our troops like he should. His voting record is all about exploiting the poor by making them serve their country for a pittance in salary and benefits; not in rewarding their service with generosity and opportunity.

Frank Wolf is wrong for America, wrong for Virginia, and wrong for the 10th district. Please join me in voting for Judy Feder this election.