The New Road

Excellent 2004 vote fraud article

Here is an excellent article that lays the groundwork for serious concern in the validity of the 2004 election result. Here is a teaser snippet:

"Morris's reflections are backed up by Steven F. Freemen of the University of Pennsylvania, who, in a paper released to the public on November 10, [8] notes that the statistical likelihood of exit polls being as far off the mark as they were on election night in three of the battleground states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida - is 250 million to 1 (Freemen used polling data that were not adjusted by the networks to fit with the official tally [9])."

Republicans have laid the groundwork for this fraud by downplaying the validity of exit polls. I was bought in myself until I read more about how accurate these types of polls have been in the past.

DVD Excitement

The new Return Of The King four disc set is coming out in December. The previews for it look great. Sauroman is resolved. Sauron's voice has been added. In all 50 minutes of new material. Very exciting stuff there.

Also, Hero comes out on DVD today. I was blown away by that movie in the theatre and it is apparently an excellent DVD transfer with some good extras.

Pork, pork, pork, pork

There was some great funny pork this time around. So much for smaller government. This president never saw a spending bill he didn't like.

Diebold

James Taylor

Up in Walla Walla we spent a little time listening to some tunes. My brother-in-law put on some James Taylor and I got hooked on his Hourglass album again. I listened to it while I was making Cinnamon Roll dough the next morning. Anyway, I went checking to see if he used the word fuck on one of the songs on the album (turns out he did). One of the sites I found was the official site which says that James will be on the West Wing this week in a cameo. Nice.

Walla Walla

Walla Walla was great. More pictures later.

Great plane conversations

It seems that I invariably encounter good conversations on planes now. On the flight from Walla Walla to Portland I sat next to a Honda representative and talked to him about my troubles with my Civic Hybrid. He was very friendly and helpful. But ultimately his answer was unsatisfying.

The cooler conversation was on the way down to Oakland where I sat next to a Presbyterian pastor. She was very interesting and incredibly well educated. Surprisingly she had nothing good to say about Bush. She thought he was not genuine in his faith and though that he had co-opted Christianity with his brand of blind faith.

We talked at length about a story on NPR where the commentator described Bush's faith as unquestioning and undeveloped. She considered her faith as much more of a thinking and reasoning understanding of the core ideals of Christianity. Though it was clear that the outreach component played a central role in her faith.

Bush's "faith based initiatives" was another topic we covered. She said her church hadn't looked into that at all, but that she was convinced that if all of the faithful tithed $10 to the church that they could build services that would cover the social programs now provided by the government and do a better job. I said that I didn't like the strings that would be attached and talked with her about my reservations about Habitat For Humanity. I would love to volunteer but I refuse the prayer and religious aspects of it. Her response made it clear that this aspect of the program wasn't going anywhere so I had best look to channel my energies to something that was secular.

I was really impressed with this pastor. She was a Berkeley graduate who had done probation work in her first career. She was thoughtful and direct. She also pointed me to C. S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" as a book that described what it means to have a questioning faith, and explains the role that faith can play in someone's life without preaching.

What struck me most is how clear she was in separating her faith from that of George W. Bush. She couldn't have been any clearer. She doesn't believe at all in W's unthinking small minded view of faith and hates how he has wrapped up religion and politics. I'm sure it affects her personally when it sees people, like me, who are outside of the religion, linking her church with Bush's insane extremist policies.

Sadie is better

We got Sadie back from the Vet last night. She is feeling much better. I slept on the first floor with her last night so that I could manage an episode if it came up, but none did. I was startled at one point but it was because Sadie, who is a night walker, had bumped into the flag which was in the room and knocked it over.

Good news! We were really worried about Sadie.

The Vet bill was also a shocker. I was expecting around $1,000 for an overnight stay, monitoring and testing. But the bull was $270. We get so gouged in the city.

Sadie on the mend

After three seizures yesterday we took Sadie into the vet. Our peanut butter and Karo syrup treatment wasn't controlling here. This morning I got the call that Sadie is stable and doing a lot better. Hopefully she will be able to come home tonight.

Tough night for Sadie

We took Sadie out on a long tough hike yesterday. When she got home she was very tired. We thought that was just the exercise. Turns out that her blood sugar was dangerously low. By 4AM she was in a hypoglycemic episode. She couldn't get up, had urinated where she was and when she did get up she staggered badly and ran into walls.

Luckily we are staying with two pediatricians. Tom understood what was happening right away so we gave her some corn syrup which helped her out very quickly. Within about an hour she was back to being about 80%. So she and I went upstairs and back to bed. Unfortunately about two hours later she had another attack so we had to repeat the process.

Very scary, but I think she is alright for the moment. We had seen the effects of hyperglycemia, where she has too much sugar, but never this scary hypoglycemic side.

Republicans on a roll

Not only did the Republicans add anti-abortion provisions to the latest bill to cover Bush's endless spending, they also added this:

"Hereinafter, notwithstanding any other provision of law governing the disclosure of income tax returns or return information, upon written request of the Chairman of the House or Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service shall allow agents designated by such Chairman access to Internal Revenue Service facilities and any tax returns or return information contained therein."

So that any of us can be audited at any time for any reason. Lovely.

How could this provision be anything other than evil? What purpose could this possibly serve except to be a political tool for the Republican party?

Please people, seriously, you have to see that you made a mistake now. This is only going to get worse and worse as what is left of our rights get taken away.

Brand Democrat

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I love every one of the t-shirts.

USO

Hey, look who is on the USO tour. It's Al Franken, noted liberal commentator. Interestingly enough, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are not listed. Nor will they ever will be as they don't support our troops.

I think anyone in the entertainment industry who cares about our troops should sign up with the USO and go over there to help out. Seriously, to support the troops and not to volunteer for the USO. That would be... hypocritical.

Votergate

You should watch this movie.

I think white Democrats are just starting to understand what black Democrats have experienced for years. The Republicans have extended their Dixiecrat election tactics, from their base of voter intimidation and suppression, into electronic vote tampering. This movie demonstrates how easy it is to change a vote count. It's almost as if Dieblod wanted Repbulican operatives to be able to change votes. I note, for example, that I got a receipt from the Diebold ATM I used this morning. If Diebold were serious about stopping election tampering wouldn't adding a receipt be the first thing they would do?

Of course, the Republicans took it too far this time. Some reports say that the Florida counts were about 1/4 million over what they should have been for Bush had the voting machines not been tampered with. In some counties where historical norms would have put Kerry at 80%, and exit polling put Kerry at 80%, the resulting vote was 80% for Bush. Whoops. I guess Rove added an extra zero. It's the brazenness the amazes me. It's as if they don't even care if we know that they tampered with the results of the election. It's Jesus' will I guess.

I was listening to NPR this morning and they had a story about the bad old days of Guatemala. It shook me up a little because it sounded so much like what is going on, and what could happen, right here.

Whoops

Whoops

Bus ride insights

When I was in New Orleans I took a bus back from the convention center with several other tourists. In back of me was a couple sitting across from each other talking about the election. The man was obviously excited that Bush had one. His first comment about Kerry was, "He should just shut up now." Followed by some conversation about how he should get kicked out of Congress.

That line has stuck with me. Republican hate discourse. Why? Because it rattles their cognitive dissonance. They have one flawed view of reality. They know it's flawed, and yet they believe the lies anyway. So it hurts when people talk about politics around them.

Actually I will refine that. They don't mind talk as long as it reinforces their cognitive dissonance. For example, if you watch Fox at all you will notice that they might say in the news portion that no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Which is true. But Fox follows that up quickly with an editorial section, by Hannity or O'Reilly or whomever, that say that there really were WMDs found, or whatever lies. And since nobody differentiates the news from the editorial it's all good. It just fits into their world view.

I think this is why Fox's ratings are going up. The 54M people that voted for Bush have to watch Fox or nothing at all. Because Fox is the only thing that reinforces their world of lies. Anything other than the facts. Everything that is not Fox is somehow left slanted. I could show a simple graph that shows how many soldiers have died each month in Iraq. Starting high then going down quickly, and up, up, up, ever since. And somehow that would be biased or left or whatever. When, in reality, it's just a graph showing undisputed factual data.

I should be surprised by this, right? Thinking people should want to know facts. But then I think about Christianity, and how all of that is based on a belief in things that are demonstrably false or illogical. So the idea that you could take a bunch of people who reinforce their own fantasy reality every day and all day Sunday and ask them to add on some more fantasy isn't too much of a stretch. Makes me wonder what else we could pull over on church-goers?

Join with Kerry to protect every child

Join with Kerry to protect every child.

Merci Beaucoup

Gotta love the international web.

Bush's rewards

To reward our country for half of it's population voting in willful ignorance, Bush has now rolled out a bunch of election-delayed stuff. The most impressive of which is this, fiscally conservative president, boosting the nation's credit card limit by 500 billion dollars. The blame it on the wars, but fail to mention expenses like the multi-billion dollar corporate welfare bill they passed earlier this year.

Then there was Fallujah. Which was obviously delayed until after the election as it's sure to make this months American death toll the highest so far and rival even the entire major combat phase total.

Then there was the FDA loosening the testing regulations on the nation's beef supply. If you were eating beef before now, I would think twice about it now. In addition the EPA just de-listed chemicals from the harmful list. So if you were breathing air before now, I would think twice about that now.

One nice thing about all of this is that we can be absolutely sure of the blame for all of this. Unlike Vietnam which was shared between both parties. The blame for the failure of Iraq lies totally on the shoulders of president Bush. And believe me, it is already a failure. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction. The failure to even properly secure the weapons we did find. The failure to stop the looting. The failure to involve the Iraqis early on in the development of their government. The failure to build a meaningful or lasting coalition. The failures at Abu Ghraib.

This administration has been in complete control of the government since it's inception and look where it has gotten us. We are involved in a deepening quagmire of a useless unecessary war. While at the same time our real enemies are gaining in number because specifically because of our actions in that war. We failed to kill, or even capture, or even find the man who perpetrated the worst attack on American soil in our history.

And that's just the administration. The man himself is worse. Bush is arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent.

Unforunately I know how this could all get worse, and it's going to. Bush is running towards the destruction of this country and his willfully ignorant fan base couldn't be happier.

Fallujah in picture

Graphic and disturbing pictures from both sides of the Fallujah fight.

Triple stabbing

Just about six doors down from us was this polic scene:

To put that in perspective our house is the one with the yellow arrow, and the house where the incident took place is on the blue arrow:

From my brief talk with a cameraman it appears that there was a triple stabbing in the house. The 20-year old son aledgedly stabbed his mother, father and sister. They are all in critical condition at the hospital.

It all took place about 2AM this morning with some of the family members fleeing into the street and to neighboring houses. Apparently the police have been called to this residence several times before.

Bush meets Gary Busey

There is a hilarious flash cartoon where Bush meets Gary Busey. It's not for the easily offended. It's very offbeat.

Taters at the Alamo

I was pretty wrecked last night so I rented The Alamo hoping to get some reasonable entertainment value for my dollar. It was a mess. It needed editing for time and sense of space. What was worse was a scene will Billy Bob Thorton that involved indians, a hut, fire, and some 'taters'. It was so bad I stop the movie, got a glass of water and read some mail before I could come back to the movie. I've read Holocaust history. I visited Dachau. Lori majored in History, primarily around the Holocaust. I have heard, read and seen some very nasty stuff in my time, but I have never heard a nasty story like that in any movie. Just awful. Awful.

I wish they had non-taters versions of the movie. If you want to see the movie be sure to rent the wide screen non-taters version of that flick.

Good sign for Republicans

With Powell out of the way those pesky nay-sayers are gone and Bush can finally get on with the business of completely destroying and subverting our democracy. Maybe now they can finish the looting job they started four years ago.

Already the replacements have been great. Gonzales. What a winner that guy is. Says the Geneva Convention is quaint. And figured out the legal way to commit acts of torture in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Nice.

I wonder where he will get his next batch of replacements for these four more cabinet members. The seven levels of hell must be closed to tapped out by now. And you have to save a couple of the truly evil people for Supreme Court appointments.

Cricket

For months now I have been watching the Sunday Cricket team as I came back from getting bagels. I wanted to take pictures but I never had my camera, or I had Gee in the car and it would have been too tough. But today I had the chance, so I got my camera and went out to take a few snaps.

Here is a bowl from the bowlers perspective:

The bowler runs up towards the pitch and uses an overarm throw to send the ball hitting the ground about two yards ahead of the batsman. The batsman stands in front of three wickets. If the wickets get struck during the play the batsman is out. If he hits it then the two batsmen run between the two sets of wickets scoring runs until they stop or one is thrown out. Whoever is at the pitching wicket ends up taking the swing.

Here is the pitch for the batsman's perspective:

The idea here is to defend your wickets by slamming the ball out into the large circular field. If someone catches it you are out. So generally the idea is to keep it low and far. If the ball reaches the boundary of the field on the ground it's automatically four runs. If it flies over then it's six runs.

Here are two sequences of guys taking a swing at the ball:

In this second series the ball went high which makes the batsman swing in a way that looks a lot like baseball. Generally though the ball is very low and the swing is more akin to the golf style swing we see in this previous set.

These guys were really just out for some fun. It turns out that the league season (April-October) is over, so this was just a fun way to keep in shape. Though for just having fun these guys were taking it pretty seriously as you can see.

It's funny how Cricket is perceived in America as a kind of sissy game for ivy-leaguers. It's not that at all. In the rest of the world this is as down home as baseball, people play it with slabs of wood and tennis balls the way we play stickball.

I had a chat with one of the guys on the way out. He had been organizing and playing Cricket in the Bay Area for twenty-two years. I gave him my name and number and I'll probably try a few of these casual games just for an hour of weekend fun now and again. It would be good to get some air and to meet some nice people.

It's great to see Cricket again. I miss it from when we were in Australia especially, but there was also a big group in Miami in Kendall near my mom's place. Here it's mainly Indians. In Miami it was mainly Jamaicans. Both India and Jamaica field some of the best Cricket teams in the world. Australia is also world class. The other Cricket super-power is Britain, as you would expect, but they actually perennially lose to the Australians in a series called The Ashes.

According to the coordinator the league play is all one-dayers. In Cricket there are two types of official games. A 'one day' match, which has a set number of 'overs' (i.e. innings) which pretty much takes up a day. And a 'test match' which can last up to five days.

Anyway, more on this later as I actually try and get together with these guys to bat a few balls around the pitch.

Polar Express in 3D IMAX

I finally sat down to catch up on Ebert & Roper. They liked Polar Express so much that I had to see it. So I Fandango'd a ticket to the 9:15 IMAX 3D showing. It was a packed house.

The single trailer was for Cameron's new Aliens of the Deep, which is some sort of cross between his underwater epics and Aliens, and The Abyss in 3D. It was impressive.

Polar Express in 3D was a jaw dropper from the beginning all the way through to the end. The animation was amazing. The characters weren't as wooden or disembodied as the trailers make them seem. And the 3D part wasn't a gimmick. It was a continuous expansion of the visual field. This is the future of these graphics movies for sure, and frankly I would like to see it done in more live action films as well.

The story of the film was good. I've heard a lot of griping about how the musical numbers don't seem integrated into the plot. But, what plot? It's a story about a train to the North Pole. What is the plot? The whole thing is just a series of little vignettes on the way to the big payoff and the expression of the deeper meaning of Christmas. I thought it was fine. This is definitely the Christmas classic for Megan's generation, and it couldn't have come too soon, the little fuzzy Rudolf with his lightbulb nose was getting old. Though I will miss the gods of Winter and Summer. "I'm Mr. Heat Meister. I'm Mr. Sun. I'm Mr. Hundred Degree weather..."

Anyway, long story short, if you have the chance to see it in IMAX 3D, do it. Make the trip. Spend the money. You will be blown away.

Great hike

Mount Diablo is beautiful. Here are some pictures of us:

And of course the vistas were gorgeous as well:

It was cloudy on the peak as we hiked up. As we came back down the cloud cover lifted so we drove to the top again and took some pictures.

Receipts

I gave Lori our CF card reader for her trip to Walla Walla. My 1GB CF card is oversized for a PCMCIA reader, so I went to Best Buy to get a new CF Card Reader and a ream of paper for the printer. For that I paid around $25 in cash, and I got back this:

(five dollar bill presented to show scale, and to demonstrate that the falling value of the dollar is making our currently so worthless that only five dollar bills are now meaningful)

This is a 21" monster receipt. Included is a unique bar code for the transaction, a list of all of the purchases, a list of qualifying rebates (there were none), legal information about the receipt, and then about 8" where they told me to take an online survey about my experience.

So here I spent $25 on a trivial purchase and I get a two foot long receipt. But when people vote for president of the United States, the most powerful individual position in the world, they don't get a receipt. Please explain that to me. We spend thousands of dollars on new machinery, and they don't even include a printer to get a receipt.

It's insane. It's ridiculous. It's fraudulent.

Is there any justification for this at all? Or is it just yet another Republican screw job on the voting population?

Mount Diablo

Joe and I are going to hike Mount Diablo this weekend. Should be fun and there will be great picture taking opportunities. Thankfully the weather has cleared up.

Lori is off to Walla Walla

Now it's just me, myself, and I. I've got a lot to do, but Lori reminded me that I work too hard when she is away.

Speaking of which, I reviewed about 60 books in the last two weeks, including three Slashdot reviews. Two of which are still pending. I have one more book to review to complete my current load, but I want to write a Slashdot review on Head First Design Patterns and I will probably get another case of books this week. One real problem is that I am physically running out of space in the office to store all of this stuff.

Since I've been below 1,000 for a couple of weeks now on the Amazon review list I'm starting to look around to see how I can get review copies of DVDs. It's not as easy as I thought it would be.

Fuck The South

Fuck The South

Polar Express in 3D

I don't know why we haven't heard about this before, but the Polar Express is coming out in IMAX in 3D! Here is a list of theatres.

From what I can see this wouldn't just be a 70mm film projected on the IMAX screen. It sounds like this would be the real 3D deal, IMAX size, releasing on November 10th.

Crazy.

Incredibles

Lori and I saw The Incredibles last night on our date. It was simply amazing. The premise of the story is great. The characters are surprisingly deep and not at all like he paper thin characters in other super hero films. And the comic bits are absolutely classic.

Of course the animation was amazing. Apparently the new elements were the hair and he flow of the fabric. These weren't distracting, but from a technical perspective they were very impressive. I found the number and the quality of the sets to be the most technically impressive aspect of the film. Each of these sets required an enormous amount of effort and Pixar just makes it all look so easy.

Book reviewing thoughts

I reviewed a bunch of books over the weekend. I came away with some pet peeves about technical books in general:

• Don't start out with introducing me to a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor in a book about advanced C++ templates.
• Don't put in pictures of your kids unless they are relevant to the topic. It won't mean much to your kids, or the reader. The fact is that almost anyone with a decent IQ and follow through can write a technical book nowadays. Having penned a book isn't as special as it was even twenty years ago. They aren't going to appreciate it like we would have. Leave the kid pictures to the wallet and desk.
• Give the readers a break. Some books are marketed as a beginners introduction that take you on a rocket ride to advanced topics in chapter two. It's like being on a roller coaster without seat belts. Most people will fall off. Give us a break. We need to have jobs in order to pay for your book. So pay us the respect of giving our tired eyes and brains a break.
• Use a decent type setting or word processing application that allows for real graphics. A picture is really worth a thousand words. Use them.
• But don't overuse them. A book of screen shots with half paragraphs in between each picture is a joke, just as much as a book that is all text is a joke.
• Organize for me, not you. I'm the buyer. I'm the reader. For any book there are a lot more readers then there are authors. So it doesn't make sense that the organization of the book should favor the writer. The author should always be thinking about what is best for the reader and organize the book accordingly.
• Blog the completely extraneous things. One book I read this weekend had a completely off-topic section of five pages dedicated to fooling people into thinking that you know something on mailing lists. It was funny, insightful, and completely inappropriate. Put it on the web, like this. No reason to waste trees to print that crap.

Return it

I got an interesting message this morning. It was from someone who purchased a book in a rush at a bookstore. Got it home, started to read it, and immediately hated it. He then looked online, found my negative review of the book, and asked me for a recommendation for a good book on the topic.

I was happy to oblige but I also recommended that he return the original book. This is something people fail to do. They buy a crappy book and instead of returning it and buying a good book, they just let it rot in a corner. That makes no sense. Borders and Barnes and Noble charge huge markups (some say as much as 400%) for a bunch of reasons (staffing, physical store, stocking, etc.) which includes the ability to return what you don't like.

There is no reason that have a book on the shelf that you immediately didn't like.

Letter to Kerry

Pictures from New Orleans

This was the view from my hotel window of New Orleans. The Mississippi is behind me. Down on the right is the new casino:

Some Jazz players out in front of the church:

A view of the church in Jackson Square from the base of a civil war monument.

A quaint little court yard I found:

The view down Canal street:

A very old bookstore. The sign on top of the garage says, "kitchen witch".

The church from the monument in the middle of Jackson square:

Two steamers lined up on the dock next to the Riverwalk mall that was right below the hotel:

The world famous Cafe Dumonde. Home of the beignete.

Media fast

This media fast is tough, but it feels good. It's tough because I have a craving for news, no matter how bad it may be. And it's difficult to avoid the news. On my commute this morning I took the tack of going with our local all classical station and that seemed to do the trick. I came into work not feeling as tense and angry as I usually do after flipping between conservative and liberal radio. Lori's strategy has been to burn herself some custom music CDs so that she can sing along with Megan. I think I will do the same.

I have decided to go directly to the source with my complaints. When I feel angry about what happened or what is happening I will mail the president directly to complain. He won't ever respond, so it will be as effective as talking to a wall, but I think it will help me vent my frustration. If the messages are good enough I will cross post them to the blog.

I actually finished another book on the plane in from Denver last night. It was a book on Outsourcing that was highly critical of the practice for practical and intelligent reasons. The author had some remarkable facts about outsourcing, first he debunked the 3% maximum number that we have all heard, finding that the real number of lost jobs will be closer to 11%. One in ten workers in America will have their job outsourced in the years between 2000 and 2010. The few skill areas that remain that cannot be outsourced either pay considerably less or require college level retraining which is untenable for middle aged workers trying to pay mortgages and put their kids through school. The outlook is extremely bleak.

Books

I read a couple of books (but haven't reviewed them yet) on the trip. I ripped through Battle for Corrin on the plane flights out. The coverage of the beginnings of the Spacing Guild, House Corrino, the Bene Gesserit and the Mentats was interesting. But the pacing was inconsistent and I found that one central plot point in the book, the battle against the last AI on the planet Corrin, was just a thin veneer on top of a justification for our war in Iraq.

I then read Cube Farm which was excellent. It's the work experience of one engineer riding the tech bubble from interviewing through to the eventual layoff. There are great horror stories, quotes and sage advice along the way.

On the plane back I read Spam Kings which was longer than it should have been, and didn't explain some confusing interchanges very well. It's a book about spammers and the anti-spam people that hunt them. At times it was difficult to tell who was who in some of the dialogue, particularly when both individuals used abusive low-brow language. I didn't learn anything new about fighting spam. I personally found that the anti-spammers had conducted themselves poorly over the course of the five years. And the conclusion was depressing as it is clear that the spam situation only worsened over the period the book covered and continues to worsen.

My personal experience is that my spam level is once again on the rise, even with three spam filters. After all of the filters I still get about 50% spam on any given mail download. As I was writing this I got a spam advertising a training course for becoming a TSA agent. Haven't seen one of those before.

Coming home

I'm coming back to the Bay Area tonight. I'm in Denver at the moment. I got some fun stuff for Megan and lots of cool pictures. Most of them are panoramas and I left my PC at the house because it was just too heavy to take.

New Orleans has changed some since the last time I was there (almost ten years ago). There is a big new casino right downtown on Canal street. The French Quarter remains completely unchanged save the different names on the bars, restaurants and strip clubs. The convention center doubled in size since the last time I was there. Our hotel, the Hilton, was at one end of the convention center, and the conference was at the other end. People were taking busses to get between the two. I walked it a few times, now my feet hurt, a lot.

I really enjoyed the trip. Save the obvious extremely bad day.

Willfull ignorance

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." This sage advice cuts both ways. For me it means that I am impelled to return to political activity once I can ensure that it can play a healthy and balanced roll in my life.

But for the 51% of America it means something very different. At the time when Hitler rose to power in Germany there were, on average, six newspapers in every German city. The people had an extraordinary level of information about what was happening in their government, and yet, they could not stop it. Today, with the Internet, TV, newspapers, radio, wireless news on our PDAs and everywhere you look, the information is there. But study after study showed that the country decided to be willfully ignorant of the acknowledged facts of the day. The bi-partisan 9/11 report, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the incompetence of the Bush administration to provide for our safety, was roundly ignored. People who voted for reasons of safety simply ignored proven evidence of the incompetence of those they had chosen to protect them.

I know that I voted the right way. I know history will prove that to be the case. I know I did that because I remained informed even when it was difficult to face the truth. That is the responsibility that the founding fathers gave us. A Democracy depends on an informed electorate.

For health reasons I will be going on a news fast of sorts, but it is only temporary. I'm stuck in a rut where anytime I meet anyone Republican I now feel as if they are personally responsibly for the tragedy of Iraq and having squandered our one opportunity to nip the flower of fascism before it had come to a full bloom. That's fine for someone in college, but for a man with a job and responsibilities it's too discordant.

All I have left now is hope. I no longer have faith in more than half of my fellow American voters.

Stunned

The mood here is just stunned silence. We took a poll of the first day and the result was Kerry 53% Bush 42%. As you can imagine the place is just a morgue. For whatever reason the young vote we were hoping on just didn't show up at all.

I'm kinda sick of thinking or talking about it. This is like a body blow. I have a sinking feeling in the put of my stomach like I just lost my job. It's awful. I really thought we had a good chance and then it fell to pieces. I can't imagine what people in the campaign are feeling.

I'm now worried about everything. I'm worried about my daughter, my family, my job, my country, the war, the continuing wars, everything. This is just a nightmare. An awful, awful nightmare.

Recount

After surfing around this morning I've moved towards the camp of doing a complete recount in Ohio. There was some serious hanky-panky there, and the use of electronic voting machines means that the results are in doubt. The problem is that the numbers don't line up. There were unprecedented waits and lines at the polling places, but there was very little movement in the number of voters in comparison to those who came out in 2000.

So while one reason for the exits not matching the ballots could be the security issue, another could be that there was vote fraud.

Election update

Obviously shock, awe, and amazement. Here is why. The morning exit polling was showing a substantial lead for Kerry in a number of states. These numbers even made it to the president and he was concerned. By the evening though, things had changed. Which means that people went in, voted for Bush, and then lied and said they voted for Kerry to the exit pollers.

Why? I think it's because people thought for whatever reason that Kerry was the right choice in the eyes of their peers and community, but wasn't for whatever reason, the right choice for them in their gut. One of the right wing pundits called this phenomenon early on and he was right (it wasn't Hannity or Limbaugh). My guess is that it is the security issue. The numbers coming out for undecideds who were honest said they were voting on security.

That was the genius of Rove in this election. He knew that security was a gut issue and that they owned it, and he defended it tooth and nail. Not only did we have pundits constantly saying that Bush was the security guy, you had the Swift Vet stuff which was aimed directly at hitting him on the security front. While they had a feint going with the flip-flop stuff. If Bush wins, Roves place as an historic political strategist is secure.

Obviously there was election fraud, rampant on the Republican side, but not 3.5M votes. As to the recount, I think it's a good thing for the healing of the country. We don't have the time pressure we did last time because we had no incumbent, so let the recount go. It will still go for Bush and at least the 49% of Americans that thought we were cheated the last time around will be reasonably confident that we haven't been cheated this time. And that would heal the nation. Of course, I think the Republicans will fight it because the leadership are soulless evil bastards who think that Democrats are morally inferior and have no right to exist.

Where to go from here?

• Keep up the pressure to get the hell out of Iraq
• Oppose any more ridiculous unfounded wars
• Continue to build the democratic infrastructure to create the solid north and solid west to counter the solid south
• Develop real answers to the abortion issue
• Refine the democratic message around religion to be more inclusive
• Continue to create and enhance brand around open mindedness, thoughtfulness, and inclusiveness
• Build the real liberal media
• Fight hard against the draconian bills and court appointments Bush is sure to make
• Take the gains we have made in turning out the votes and turn those supporters into political activists

The fight isn't over by a long shot. Bush lacks the capacity to understand that he has not achieved a mandate, and in fact he has shown remarkable instability in the popular support for a sitting war time president. But we understand what winning by a narrow margin in this climate means, and we see how weak his position is.

On a personal note, it was a mistake for me to come out to New Orleans over the election. I wish I were home with Lori and Megan.

Louisiana kids for Kerry

In the few minutes I had between sessions I walked around and took a couple of snaps. The first thing I found were some kids passionately showing their support for Kerry:

It's nice to see some southern support for our next president!

Full Test of OBL's talk

The full text of Osama bin Laden's speech is an interesting read.

Best picture of the day so far

From Ohio:

Stephen Baldwin

I was up late last night watching MSNBC's election coverage. They were out on the street with two guests, some Democrat dude who was reasonably sane, and Stephen Baldwin. The Democrat dude did the usual spiel, and then the commentator turned it over to Stephen Baldwin, who started out with talking about Jesus' plan, and Jesus having a plan for the commentator. It was really weird. The guy asked Stephen if Jesus would suppress votes. Stephen said that Jesus was clear about wanting us to vote. It was surreal.

Nerves

I'm in New Orleans. It's tough to think about working or partying. I'm just very nervous about the election. If Bush wins it will signal the beginning of a very dark time for American. Particularly if he picks up even more of a majority in the House and Senate. He will continue on his no-mandate mandated style of politics, we will invade more countries, there will most certainly be a draft, and they will continue and expand their strategy of curtailing civil and human rights here and around the globe.

How an understanding of this threat eludes half of the populace is beyond me. Not only do they fail to see it, they wish to jump further head long into the abyss.

Pictures from Halloween

Megan was so cute in her dog suit:

More pictures later when I can get some stable connectivity. Great pictures from Halloween Fairyland in Oakland as well.

Red vs. Blue state attacks

Cheney couldn't have said it better himself. According to the New York Post (ever reliable source), Osama has stated that states that go red have decided to continue their war with him, and states that go blue are stating their peaceful intentions:

November 1, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden warned in his October Surprise video that he will be closely monitoring the state-by-state election returns in tomorrow's presidential race — and will spare any state that votes against President Bush from being attacked, according to a new analysis of his statement.

The respected Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors and translates Arabic media and Internet sites, said initial translations of a key portion of bin Laden's video rant to the American people Friday night missed an ostentatious bid by the Saudi-born terror master to divide American voters and tilt the election towards Democratic challenger John Kerry.

MEMRI said radical Islamist commentators monitored over the Internet this past weekend also interpreted the key passage of bin Laden's diatribe to mean that any U.S. state that votes to elect Bush on Tuesday will be considered an "enemy" and any state that votes for Kerry has "chosen to make peace with us."

The statement in question is when bin Laden said on the tape: "Your security is up to you, and any state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

That sentence followed a lengthy passage in the video in which bin Laden launches personal attacks on the president.

Yigal Carmon, president of MEMRI, said bin Laden used the Arabic term "ay-wilaya" to refer to a "state" in that sentence.

That term "specifically refers to an American state, like Tennessee," Carmon said, adding that if bin Laden were referring to a "country" he would have used the Arabic word "dawla."

MEMRI also translated an analysis of bin Laden's statement from the Islamist Web site al-Qal'a, well known for posting al-Qaeda messages, which agreed that bin Laden's use of the word "ay-wilaya" was meant as a "warning to every U.S state separately."

"It means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president, it means that it chose to fight us and we will consider it an enemy to us, and any state that will vote against Bush, it means that it chose to make peace with us and we will not characterize it as an enemy," the Web site said, according to MEMRI's translation.

This election rhetoric is just off the hook. What's apparent at this point is just how few outlets will put out the Republican message unfiltered. Obviously the New York Post and Fox News are on the list. Washington Times as well. And, of course, the right wing shills like Novak, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. They will crawl all over this, but they only have access to a subsection of the country. Limbaughs listening audience is only 10,000,000 if you take his word for it.