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.
U.S. says Iraq agrees on a timeline to peace. 2 weeks before the elections. Funny how that happens:
Iraqi leaders have assured the United States they will stick to a timetable of measures over the next year to curb violence and allow U.S. troops to go home, Washington’s top officials in Iraq said on Tuesday.
Two weeks ahead of U.S. congressional elections that have put
President George W. Bush’s Republicans on the defensive over their Iraq strategy, the U.S. ambassador and military commander in Baghdad told voters directly via a rare joint news conference that success was still possible, and on a “realistic timetable.”Insisting sectarian bloodshed had not caused Washington to water down its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq, envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said he expected Iraqi leaders to make “significant progress in the coming 12 months” in meeting “benchmarks.”
There will be a reckoning and a price to pay for this. And it all could have been avoided.
“We estimate that as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655,000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation,” said Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States.
That means 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population have died because of the invasion and ensuing strife, he said.
The team’s study, published online by the medical journal The Lancet, estimated pre-war deaths in Iraq at 143,000 a year, and said Iraq’s death rate is now 2-1/2 times that of the pre-war period.
“Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century,” Burnham said.
A lot of people have suggested that Bob Woodward is nothing but a White House stooge, but according to the New York Times, his newest book isn’t quite as much a peaen to Bush as the last couple were.
I couldn’t finish “Bush At War” and ignored the next one, but this appears interesting:
Mr. Woodward