let me see if I got this straight...

we have horrendous national debt and the budget deficit is expected to increase due to military war-on-terror expenditures, so we'll introduce even more tax cuts???

we love our national parks and wildlife refuges and understand how important the diversity is to the ecology of the planet, so we'll give corporations unrestricted access to development and reduce pollution controls to nothing???

we are educated people, aware of the needs to have scientific thinking and mathematics be priority features of our children's development, so we'll cut back even more on schools, switch to standardized tests that only increase rote memorization, and introduce creationism into biology classes as if it was science???

we hate prejudice and discrimination in any form it comes in, so we'll ban even the possibility of same-sex marriages thereby reducing between 7 and 10 percent of the population to second-class citizenship???

we're proud of the work done by the American hard-working family, so we'll do nothing as the job that supports them and their community gets outsourced overseas???

did I get all that right?

just checking.

courtesy of my brother...

wise words from a friend

and my final post on the subject, for at least a few months...or days...or minutes (i can't shut up as most people know)

There exist good Republicans. Honest, honourable, smart. But I do not trust the Republican Party. That I and others may have failed to convince enough people not to vote for Bush is an immediate -- well, past, really -- issue.

[...]

In the meantime there are: wondering how to have a voice, limit the damage done in the next four years, and -- since the country is still split nearly 50/50 in so many ways -- make the disagreements and division less poisonous.

-- dglenn (i recommend you read the whole thing, mostly concerning voter disenfranchisement)

ok, i wasn't going to say more

but this was hilarious.  on the possibility of Kerry winning Ohio anyways in which case he would be well within his rights to retract his upcoming formal concession:

"It'd be perversely charming for John Kerry to flip flop on his concession. :-)" -- dfilove

today's doonesbury...prophetic or just influential?

is the ohio count still important?

(the question's come up in a number of threads)

actually yes it is.

the constitution makes no provisions for votes to someone who's dropped out of the race.  One becomes president by either 1) achieving more than half the electorial college, or 2) a vote in the House should no single person achieve half.

So it comes down to Ohio (and kinda the other two states still open, but thier votes collectively won't make up enough for Ohio to not be the decider), and the specifics of the law that controls its election board.

Update: If Ohio law allows the board to recognize the concession, then they can likely declare Bush the winner of the state (and by extension, the country) immediately. -- This is appearantly unlikely, according to one reader, so the second case applies: the vote in 11 days continues as required by Ohio law.

If Ohio law requires that "all votes declared legitimate be counted" (mind you, "legitimate" is a word that the Ohio Sec of State couldn't seem to actually say, nor could he say "valid"), then the provisional count must go on in 11 days as described in Ohio's law, according to the Sec of State last night (on both CNN and CBS, the two networks that didn't declare Ohio for Bush last night).

So, Ohio has to make a decision according to its laws, and no army of lawyers should be allowed to make a difference in that decision.