Things look pretty good electionwise, but there’s still a lot of time for shenanigans. Keep those fingers crossed.

Lieberman seems likely to be reelected even after being rejected in the primaries? Wow. Gotta give him props for that, I guess. Extraordinary.

Santorum‘s believed to be history. Good show. It’d be nice if he took his buddy Pete Hoekstra with him but I have no info on how that race is going. I don’t expect Holland, MI is angry enough to vote Democrat though.

Word is that Granholm’s keeping her seat, which is really too bad, I understand that under Dick “It’s Alticor Dammit Not Amway! We’re Not Called That Anymore” DeVos, we would start engaging in “multi-level politics,” where we’d all become “independent government owners”, and attempt to recruit citizens who would pay us taxes, and we’d provide to them governmental services (police protection, roads, etc) which we ourselves bought from our upstream government by paying them taxes. But the real money comes from recruiting people to become downstream independent government owners from yourself, buying government services from you.

Or something like that.

Sadly it looks like Michigan’s going to ban Affirmative Action. Probably but not for sure. If for no other reason, that should have died because of the massive fraud involved in getting it on the ballot in the first place.

Anyway, I am not going to write further about it because I am not going to believe any of this is real till it’s official — there’s a lot of time left to steal elections in the counting. The GOP is warning people not to believe in exit polls, which is splendid, it’s like a shoplifter telling people how notoriously unreliable surveillance cameras are, or a rapist (or Democratic President…) warning people how unreliable DNA evidence is. So let’s see how it all plays out.

Peace out.

I just took a few implicit preference tests and found that (according to the tests) I have a small but statistically measurable preference for whites over blacks, straights over gays, and thin people over fat.  Disappointing but not extremely surprising, I guess.  On the upside I have no detectable prejudice for or against Arab Muslims.

Tolerance.org: U.S. Map of Hate Groups

Find out how many freaks live in your neighborhood. Apparently there have been two incidents in recent years of neo-Nazi fliers being distributed around Grand Rapids, MI. (Oh, and suburb Caledonia has a chapter of the Council for Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the White Citizens Council) — you know, the genteel Southern white supremacist group that racist southern Republicans have to curry favor with while trying not to let anyone else notice).

25 hate groups is pretty extreme for a state Michigan’s size, but Michigan is a pretty diverse state — you’ve got the Ruby Ridge types hanging out in the Northern and Western woodlands, and on the flipside you’ve got Detroit with an ample selection of Black Separatist groups. From such a diverse cultural milieu we produce such prodigies as Ted Nugent, Pete “No Seriously, Iraq DID Have WMDs, REALLY REALLY, ask my buddy Santorum” Hoekstra (R-MI), Eminem, and Kid Rock. And that’s just the white guys.

If you don’t know Ars Technica, it’s a site of really good commentary on technical issues for computers of all kinds.  These people know their stuff in a serious way.  And they’ve got nothing but gloom to report with regards to the machinery of the 2006 elections, especially in “battleground” states.
Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm

No business in America would put someone with no computer expertise in charge of a multimillion dollar information technology (IT) purchase. However, this is precisely what we’ve done with our election officials. Good, well-meaning but technically naive bureaucrats all over the country have been sold huge, complex, untested computer systems that masquerade as simple “voting machines.” These officials have been put in charge of a massive IT procurement project, and they simply are not qualified.From what I understand, a typical scenario goes something like this: a vendor representative comes in with a demo unit that looks nice and has enough functionality to make it through a closed-door demonstration in front of a technically illiterate audience of county and state election officials, who’re wowed by high-tech glitz. In support of the purchase, the vendor produces “test results” and “evaluations” from so-called testing companies that are on the vendor’s payroll (see Lou Dobbs’ recent reporting on this issue).

What the county officials don’t know is that the individual voting machines are basically alpha test units (these officials probably don’t even know what an “alpha test” or “beta test” is), and these machines don’t really fit together into anything like a fully functional election system. Furthermore, the election officials have no clue how to evaluate a large IT purchase (again, they think they’re buying “voting machines” and not networked computers); and they don’t have a paid or volunteer staff with enough technical know-how to handle a large-scale IT deployment. What they do have, in the vast majority of cases, is a volunteer army of dedicated but untrained senior citizens, who’re given the impossible task of doing support and maintenance for machines that are fragile, finicky, and insecure.

This is what most of us face on November 7th, as we head to the polls in one of the most important mid-term elections in living memory. The stakes have never been higher, and the machinery of democracy has never been in such a state of broken-down chaos.

Via reddit.com.

COOL STORY.
The Mary Ellen Carter – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mary Ellen Carter is a song written and recorded by Stan Rogers, intended as an inspirational hymn about triumphing over great odds. It tells the story of a heroic effort to salvage a sunken ship, the Mary Ellen Carter, by members of her former crew. It is one of the most popular songs written by Rogers.So inspiring is the song that it is credited with saving at least one life. On February 12, 1983 the ship Marine Electric was carrying a load of coal from Norfolk, Virginia to a power station in Somerset, Massachusetts. The worst storm in forty years blew up that night and the ship sank at about four o’clock in the morning on the 13th. The ship’s Chief Mate, fifty-nine-year-old Robert (“Bob”) M. Cusick, was trapped under the deckhouse as the ship went down. His snorkeling experience helped him avoid panic and swim to the surface, but he had to spend the night alone, up to his neck in water, clinging to a partially deflated lifeboat, and in water barely above freezing and air much colder. Huge waves washed over him, and each time he wasn’t sure that he would ever reach the surface again to breathe. Battling hypothermia, he became tempted to allow himself to fall unconscious and let go of the lifeboat. Just then he remembered the words to the song “The Mary Ellen Carter.”

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Rise again, rise again – though your heart it be broken
And life about to end.
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,
Be like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

He started to sing it, and soon was alternating shouting out “Rise again, rise again” with holding his breath as the waves washed over him. At seven o’clock that morning a Coast Guard helicopter spotted him and pulled him to safety. Only two men of the other thirty-three that had been aboard survived the wreck. After his ordeal, Cusick wrote a letter to Stan Rogers telling him what had happened and how the song helped save his life. In response, Cusick was invited to attend what turned out the be the second-to-last concert Rogers ever performed.