Election Night getting closer

Last night, a classmate noted to our Statistics teacher that there’s a class on Election Night, and would he consider cancelling class. Unfortunately the teacher refused, so now I get to decide whether to cut class or be incommunicado from roughly 5PM to 11PM PST that night.

I think it’s very much up in the air whether we’ll know who wins on Election Night or not. Given the rumblings in Ohio, Florida, Nevada, and elsewhere, it may well be that the morning after Election Day we’ll see a tidal wave of lawsuits and accusations, and will not know who won for weeks. Again.

On the other hand, the poll numbers are starting to shift in Kerry’s favor. It could happen that a Kerry win will be of sufficent numbers to make it clear that despite any shenanigans, real or attempted, Kerry’s victory will be secure. I well remember how happy and relieved I felt in 1992 when Clinton won. If something similar happens again I want to be there for it in real time.

Or God forbid, the reverse could happen. In which case I will have to drink myself into oblivion for a while and then start trying to figure out how to survive the next 4 years.

Either way, I think I want to be at home, or with friends, watching the events unfold.

Sorry, Professor.

Welcome to Planet Republican

I try to avoid the tit-for-tat aspects of politics but this one is so indicative of the dreamland you have to be living in to believe the right-wing spin, and so personally offensive, I had to mention it:

Sinclair vice president Mark Hyman just said on CNN that Kerry and the Democrats are like “holocaust deniers” and that if the Sinclair stunt is an “in-kind donation to George Bush” then “every suicide bomb that goes off in Iraq is an in-kind donation to John Kerry.”

Presumably this was just down from on-air within the last hour. So I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the quotes. But a quite look at this morning’s Post shows that yesterday Hyman said “the networks are acting like Holocaust deniers” for not showing the POWs’ story. So I think there’s every reason to believe that the quotes are accurate.

Per a Kos diary and Josh Marshall.

RIP Christopher Reeve

I had the great pleasure of seeing Christopher Reeve on Broadway in 1986 at Circle in the Square, in a production of Beaumarchais’ “The Marriage of Figaro” — the play which Mozart used as the basis for his opera of the same name. Reeve played the Count and did it admirably. He was a much better actor than the “Superman” movie and its sequels ever let him show.

A few years later, I briefly worked at the Williamstown Summer Theater Festival while Reeve was rehearsing a production of “Undiscovered Country”. I never crossed paths with him, to my great disappointment, but word of mouth was that he was a cool guy.

It’s sad that a man who took a shattering personal tragedy and turned it into something positive did not live to see significant progress made towards a cure for spinal cord injuries. I hope something good comes from his passing.

Kos Gets Snarky

Kos doesn’t usually indulge in snarkiness (the Diaries do it for him most of the time) but he had a funny bit tonight:

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