« The World Series Of Getting Our Asses Out Of This Mess | Home | My Head Is Exploding With Flavor! »
11.07.06
Decapitulation
posted by Absinthe | 12:58 PM
I said I wasn’t going to live-blog today. I hope America can forgive me. I think I’m going to do it without time-stamps, though, because I am lazy. And mysterious.
To burn off a little steam I figured, what the hell, I’ll hijack one of Otis’ comment threads and encourage others to do likewise, which seemed a positively brilliant idea until things immediately got a little silly.
If ever I really understand gambling, the urge to risk, it’s on election days. I am invested emotionally in something that I have utterly no control over, something that may have minimal-to-extreme impact on my life. I don’t really get rolling the bones or “DE-FENSE!” or any social club or lifestyle that requires you to dress a certain way. But I get election returns, boy howdy.
I’m an infovore. Insatiable curiosity is my albatross. I waste way too much time skimming I-don’t-want-to-know-how-many blogs and news sites. If text is placed in front of my eyes I am incapable of ignoring it; if somebody ever started following me around with cue cards I’d be toast.
Election nights are, once you get past the prognostication and punditry, all about information. Every big election year there’s at least one point – usually several – where the newsdroids, swamped by the tides of numbers coming in (“in the weeds”, as a kitchen worker might say), stop spinning and interpreting and inflecting and actually do their jobs, or what their jobs ought to be – they read the news. The most important news of the day is a series of arbitrary but incredibly consequential numbers, and when the precincts start reporting en masse, the talking heads are forced to report hard facts: This many people voted to hire a new representative, that many states have posited a limit on property taxes. There are so many new facts coming in every minute that for once the beast is adequately fed.
Which is as true of me as it is of CNN.
Of course, it’ll be a couple of hours before any real results start coming in. So I’m going to start a stew. I’ve got carrots, onions, celery, leeks, potatoes, some stew beef, broth, dried herbs and spices, and a really goddamn sharp knife. It should keep me busy for a while, and the resulting product should be ready just about the time the floodgates open.
Oh, and in an hour or so I’m gonna go vote.
OK, maybe a little longer.
This is looking like a banner year for dirty tricks – deceitful robocalls, false-flag mailers, guys with guns at the polls (!). But this one at least strikes me as amusing. From MSNBC:
In New Jersey’s senatorial campaign, Republican candidate Tom Kean Jr.’s aides are charging that opponents “already have resorted to Election Day dirty tricks.”
Last night, vandals chained shut the Kean campaign’s headquarters in Mountainside, N.J., and broke keys off in the door locks to prevent entry, according to aides. “It’s Jersey … this is not surprising,” Kean spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker told us. “It’s the Menendez campaign, or their supporters,” she added, but without offering evidence.
I’m not saying some overzealous New Jerseyites might not have thrown a sabot or two into the gears, but here’s a little piece of historical perspective on the Karl Rove playbook:
In 1986, Rove helped Bill Clements become governor a second time. In a strategy memo Rove wrote for his client prior to the race, now among Clements’s papers in the Texas A&M University library, Rove quoted Napoleon: “The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.”
In 1986, just before a crucial debate in the campaign, Rove claimed that his office had been bugged by Democrats. The police and FBI investigated and discovered that the bug’s battery was so small that it needed to be changed every few hours, and the investigation was dropped. Critics suspected Rove had bugged his own office to garner sympathy votes in the close governor’s race.
Emphasis mine; conclusions are all yours.
It’s 1pm local time now, I’ve seared off all my stew meat and shortly I’ll be heading to the polls.
1:05pm: Flashback I didn’t sleep last night. Not a wink, not for a moment. I’m naturally a night owl and around 5am I realized I was going to have a chance to be a day owl. So I went downstairs, checked some blogs (the politicos are especially early risers on election day), played a video game for a while. When Kim got up I made pancakes for her, something I don’t often get to do since she’s usually out the door by the time I wake up. First indication that I might have been too tired to be cooking with gas: I only used a half a cup of batter mix where I should have used a cup, resulting in much head-scratching as I wondered why a previously serviceable pancake mix (Stonewall Kitchen) was producing some half-assed dollar-sized crepe-like substance rather than gloriously fluffy pancakes.
Eventually we got pancakes or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
(CJ and Otis are both liveblogging their election days in a much more eloquent, coherent fashion, presumably because they slept last night. I predict that Otis will maintain his lead in the burgeoning comment-thread war, only to lose in a squeaker in the wee hours as Blogger inevitably succumbs to election-day traffic collapse.)
(Those of you who might choose me as a write-in candidate, I guess I’d serve. Talk back. I promise swift and merciless comment approval.)
1:54pm: Back from voting. Wait was approximately zero minutes and zero seconds. Of course, there are no competitive races in California so it’s really a question of which ballot initiative supporters turned out the most people. I eschewed my usual method of voting for the umpteen yay-or-nay judicial offices (throwing out yays and nays, in equal measure, essentially at random) and gave everybody a pass. Voted for a few targeted tax increases (gas and cigarettes) because, well, I’m a tax-and-spender. Anyone who wants to throw the “but citizens spend their money more wisely than the gunmint” trope at me is welcome to examine contrary Exhibit Fucking A, the Beanie Baby.
2:07pm: And now, an entry from the He’s Just Doing What We All Know Needs To Be Done bureau, in which the first blows of the coming man-vs-machine war are struck.
2:20pm: Exit poll results are coming in! But the networks are being cagey and keeping that sweet, sweet hard data to themselves. The four issues that are driving voters: corruption, terrorism, the economy, and Iraq. I’m heartened to see neither “gay marriage” or “stem cell research” up there. And if you put those issues together, it reads like a laundry list for the mad-as-hell crowd. Which, oddly enough, has me feeling dandy!
2:26pm: Wolf Blitzer just took a few precious seconds of Election Day coverage to wish BritSpear and K-Fed the best as their life-paths diverge. He seemed a little annoyed at having to do that. I’d sympathize with him except that, after all these years, his name is still Wolf Blitzer.
4:43pm: Unable to sit still. Going to the kitchen to chop vegetables. Solemn vow: Anything less than a severed finger and I’ll be back within an hour.
5:07pm: All fingers intact. Central nervous system slightly less so. If it’s three hours before any of the close, meaningful races are called, my brain stem will be shredded.
5:27pm: Last components of stew into the pot. Little of this, little of that. Needed some acid and I don’t have any tomato paste so I went with a little OJ, we’ll see how that works.
Virginia Senate race is ridiculously close, within a couple hundred votes with 40% reporting. If it’s a squeaker either way get ready for a shitstorm.
6:43pm: Republican Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island has a 62% approval rating – as of today – and yet he still lost. Perhaps it’s because Blitzer just called him “Lincoln Cheney”.
7:44pm: Stew complete and served. OJ a good idea, giving it a little tang without having to resort to the nuclear option (raw horseradish). VA race currently within 12K votes, making it entirely possible that I will eat two helpings of stew without noticing again what it tastes like.
There’s peppermint-stick ice cream in the freezer for desert. Also vodka. Which will win?
8:14pm: The House goes Democratic. And I’ve pored over the district-by-district and locality-by-locality VA Senate results and I’m not ready to call it for anyone yet. The gap is presently hovering with Webb trailing by 12k or 13k votes, but based on outstanding precincts I think it’s very likely that will close. Control of the Senate might (depending on outstanding races) come down to 500 voters in Virginia. In related news, I now regret not cloning myself a few hundred times and setting up shop in Arlington.
8:53pm: My math skillz > CJ’s math skillz. I expect him to be calling me to concede any moment. (In VA, Webb is a hair ahead of Allen now, an outcome I expected after looking at the outstanding precincts and realizing that the 3:1 Webb advantage in heavily populated areas might just let Webb make up the gap.) Though, really, this thing is going to be recounted.
10:19pm: I have now been up for 36 hours or so. Crashing soon. If I wake up tomorrow and find out this was all a crazy dream I am going to be down.
11:14pm: McCaskill takes it in Missouri. Tester looks to be holding the lead in Montana, knock on wood. Webb is inching ahead and getting outside the margin of theft in Virginia. Democratic Senate, Democratic House. I’ll be damned.
And shortly enough I’ll be asleep.
Popularity: 25% [?]
Topics: Poker | 12 Comments »
November 8, 2006 at 11:44 PM
November 8, 2006 at 5:30 PM
November 8, 2006 at 11:30 AM
November 7, 2006 at 2:37 PM
Damn, but the stew sounds good. Crepes also woulda beenn fine with me. I’m thinking, if tonight goes badly, we and the wives could form a bit of a commune. Wait, that sounds a little crazy. Let’s just go for the win tonight.
November 7, 2006 at 2:45 PM
I am readying myself for the deluge of calls from people in Australia who want to know what the word is. They were all pretty disappointed in 2004. Sure hope they aren’t tonight.
November 7, 2006 at 2:53 PM
People in Australia have telephones? I thought it was all about the shortwave and the telegraph down yonder.
I’ve tried to get people excited about a communal kinda situation. It’s the only way you can afford a halfway decent house hereabouts. I can cook.
No, I mean, I can cook.
November 7, 2006 at 8:37 PM
If my math ain’t too bad… it’s about over for Webb.
November 7, 2006 at 8:41 PM
The outstanding votes are mostly from large, heavily-Webb districts (going for Webb by 2:1 or better). It will be a squeaker either way.
November 7, 2006 at 8:43 PM
http://sbe.vipnet.org/
is where I’ve been getting VA results. It’s down to a few thousand votes again.
November 8, 2006 at 12:48 AM
I think you’ve been vindicated:
Precincts Reporting: 2435 of 2443 (99.67%)
Candidates Party Vote Totals Percentage
J H Webb Jr Democratic 1,169,373 49.56%
G F Allen Republican 1,161,739 49.24%
November 8, 2006 at 9:32 AM
Did we really need more evidence of your superior math skillz???
Like I said over at my blog, I’m glad it all went one way. If the Republicans are going to be sent a message, make it a clear one. Go all the way. Don’t leave a slimmer of a suggestion that something this Congress did went well.
November 11, 2006 at 6:43 AM
Divided government is hawesome.
That way the Republicans can’t spend too much money and blow-up half the Middle East and the Demcrats can’t spend too much money and let half the Middle East blow us up.