Month: November 2006

It’s so very, very nice to actually feel good the day after Election Day! I didn’t get a heck of a lot of work done today, but I’m smiling a lot. I wonder if I’ll feel this happy in 2008?

Glenn Greenwald has a lengthy “day after” piece that is worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:

The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists — well-intentioned though they may be — need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one’s beliefs in light of conflicting evidence is a defining attribute of the Bush movement that shouldn’t be replicated).

Karl Rove isn’t all-powerful; today, he is a rejected loser. Republicans don’t possess the power to dictate the outcome of elections with secret Diebold software. They can’t magically produce Osama bin Laden the day before the election. They don’t have the power to snap their fingers and hypnotize zombified Americans by exploiting a New Jersey court ruling on civil unions, or a John Kerry comment, or moronic buzzphrases and slogans designed to hide the truth (Americans heard all about how Democrats would bring their “San Francisco values” and their love of The Terrorists to Washington, and that moved nobody).

All of the hurdles and problems that are unquestionably present and serious — a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising games — can all be overcome. They just were.

Indeed.

Now, onward and upward!

MovableType’s internal post count says that this will be entry #1000 into my blog. A rolling over of the counter, as it were.

How fitting. Because this is all I have to say to you tonight:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:
the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, the honorable Nancy Pelosi!

YEE EFFING HA!!!!!

WOOO HOOO!!!!!!

It’s nice to actually win one for a change.

Our local polling place was doing steady business but no long lines.

Interstingly, there was only one electronic machine per precinct, and most people were opting for paper ballots. I asked one of the poll workers why only one machine was available, and he said, “There were supposed to be five, but they had some problems, so we only got one.”

Anyhow, our votes are cast. I hope the polling place doesn’t run out of paper ballots!

We got a phone call a couple of hours ago from a real live person, reminding us to go vote tomorrow and making sure we knew where to go. I forgot to ask if the caller was from MoveOn or not, though. My bad.

And yes, we’re all set for tomorrow. We’re walking distance from the polling place, which is a plus. Coming from NYC, driving to go vote feels a little unnatural to me. (So does driving to synagogue, but that’s a different issue).

San Mateo uses electronic voting machines, apparently. This will be my first experience with them, and I can’t say I’m happy about it. I don’t think this deep-Blue county is likely to be subject to Republican shenanigans, but I may ask for a paper ballot anyway.

One of the many tasks I dealt with this weekend was going over the various state and county propositions on the ballot. When we first moved to California, I would approach each one with an open mind and weigh them carefully to decide whether each was an idea worth my approval or not, but in the ensuing years, I’ve come to believe that the whole proposition system is deeply flawed. These days, I approach all ballot propositions from a default position of “No” unless I think that there’s a damn good reason to vote otherwise.

Four propositions made the cut this year — 1E, 86, 87, and 89 — although in two cases (87 and 89) my support is pretty soft. I still might switch to “No” when in the voting booth. The rest of the ballot goes straight Democratic, although I’ll be holding my nose when I get to Bustamante’s name.

I do not know what the House and Senate will look like this time tomorrow. I’m reasonably confident we’ll finally have Speaker Pelosi, but only barely. I do not think the Dems will take the Senate. We most definitely will not have the veto-proof majorities in both houses necessary to push through much of what we want to accomplish. But so long as we can at least take one chamber of the Congress, we’ll be in a position to put the brakes on some of the worst impulses of this administration and start implementing some oversight onto past excesses.

That’s a good start.

And 2008 is not all that far off anymore. I just hope that the Hillary juggernaut doesn’t suck the life out of the process. We need more debate, more voices, and more options, not less.