Church people
On my local cable access channel, there are probably about 10 different preachers that host their own shows. The shows' styles range from a taping of an actual service to the preacher alone in a cable studio talking to the camera. Conversely, there is one show hosted by a group of atheists.

Here's my point: Non-believers don't, for the most part, get offended if someone is a believer. They figure, hey, to each their own. The opposite isn't true. Believers are usually bothered by someone who is a non-believer.

Translate that to the election: most non-believing voters wouldn't withold their vote for Bush simply because of his overtly religious rhetoric. The flip side isn't true: most believers think of Kerry as less religious than Bush and aren't afraid to base their vote that way.

Also, spare me the "morals" BS in regards to the election. Just suppose 70,000 votes had gone the other way in Ohio. Would that mean voters had given the thumbs-up to the heathen agenda? The media, especially the big corporate media, loves following a spoon fed storyline. In this case, it's the Rove spin that the administration that has killed 100,000 innocents in Iraq and 1,200 American soldiers in pursuit of a wrongheaded agenda is moral. Yes, this the same "moral" administration that won largely because it was able to turn out voters against gays and executed a voter suppression effort against poor and minority voters.

Excuse me if I don't get too excited about their morals.

The numbers don't add up
As always, the media can't or won't cover real news. Word is that the major networks and newspapers withheld stories the week before the election on Bush's bulge during the debate, the forged Niger documents, and a scathing look at Saudi Arabia because they didn't want to prejudice the election against the President.

Looks like the CBS fake documents scandal, which probably had its roots with Rove or one of his surrogates, worked.

Think about some of the big stories during the campaign: the Swift Boat vets, Bush's AWOL status, Teresa Heinz Kerry telling a reporter to buzz off, the Cheney's lesbian daughter. Man, I can hardly think of a collection of stories that affect my life more than those.

And now, after the election, no one in the mainstream media will examine if the election was conducted fairly. It would upset their corporate masters and they might actually have to do some work. Copy and post these links for exit poll information and Dem. vs. Repub. registration in certain areas. The information is scary.

http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm

http://img103.exs.cx/img103/4526/exit_poll.gif

Jethro vs. Fraser
If you're reading this, you probably don't like country music. Not real country music like Johnny Cash or George Jones, but today's country like Brooks & Dunn or Toby Keith. You probably don't like NASCAR either. And you think those Jeff Foxworthy comedy specials are corny.

And you probably didn't vote for Bush either.

Well, guess what? There are millions of people who love those things. And they voted on Tuesday too.

One of the handicaps Kerry faced was his long windedness, his tendency to use 20 words where one would have done. Also, oddly, the indeptitude of the Bush team made it harder to craft a simple message why he shouldn't have been re-elected. There are so many egregious examples that it's hard to sum up.

How many times have you been arguing with a conservative and you knew what you wanted to say but it came out like this, "But he led us into an unjust war and 1,000 American troops died and 100,000 civilians, and the Patriot Act is taking away our rights, and Cheney's secret energy task force meetings, and Bush was AWOL, and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are nuts and Lynne Cheney wrote a book about lesbianism on the prairie and those guys had all those deferments..."

Not pretty right? Conservatives just say, "Kerry is a liberal who wants gays to marry and won't protect our country from terrorists."

It's nice to be concise. The slogan for Coke isn't "The excellent soft drink that is really tasty with bubbles that sometimes go up your nose and tickle..." You get the point.

To liberals, Bush was like Jethro Bodine, running around barefoot with a piece of hay in his mouth. To conservatives, Kerry was like Fraser Crane, long-winded, self important, and pompous.

Guess what? Jethro won.

Lots of questions
I'm listening to Kerry's concession speech. He's relaying his conversation with the President and how they agreed that the country needed to be healed. I wish he had told Bush to screw. The divisions in this country have been caused by this hideous Administration. Arrogance, needless war, disregard for the Constitution, and fiscal irresponsibility are the hallmarks of the Bush team.

I'm left with a lot of questions:

* Can a Democrat from the East Coast ever get elected again as President? In the last 40 years, the only Dems elected president have been LBJ, Carter, and Clinton. Are we nearing some sort of litmus test where East Coast Dems should be eliminated from consideration for President? I'm thinking so and that goes for Hillary too. Who will they put forward next time? Hopefully, someone with a drawl.

* How dumb can people get? Recent surveys indicate that almost 3/4 of Bush supporters think Saddam was behind 9/11 and that we had discovered WMDs. These people are the definition of gleefully ignorant. They like being lied to. Their children and grandchildren will thank them when there's no Social Security or Medicare. And the God of so many of these avowed Christians will hold them to account for supporting a man who has killed more than 100,000 innocent civilians in Iraq.

* Can the Democratic party come back? Maybe, if people stay organized or motivated. After Goldwater got pummelled in the sixties, the conservative dug in their heels until they cam back to power. It took decades but they did it. Left leaning types need to do the same.

* How crazy will the next four years be? Get ready for Bush Unchained. Hell, Bush might even start drinking publicly and snorting lines of cocaine off the Constitution. Get ready for more dead soldiers and civilians, more debt, fewer jobs and civil rights, and more arrogance. Get ready for Colin Powell to resign, thus taking the breaks off the wagon as it rolls down the hill. Party!

Something wicked this way comes...
I'm going to bed. The networks are edging towards calling it for Bush. There's something really weird going on. Go back to when Saxby Chambliss beat Max Cleland in Georgia, despite exit polls that showed the opposite. Of course, there was electronic voting there.

The sad thing is, we'll never know. Tens of millions of people vote and are left with nothing but questions. And we're stuck with four more years of incompetence, war, and secrecy.

I'm assuming there are going to be multiple legal challenges, but who knows if they'll go anywhere? If they're going to fight this, the Dems better have a legal and pr strategy they can unleash tomorrow morning.

Just past midnight
Looks to me that whoever wins Ohio wins the whole enchilada. And of course, Ohio is the place where the Republicans were screwing with people's right to vote.

What do they know?
At this point, Bush is leading Kerry 193-112 in electoral votes. Something weird has been happening all night. Many of the pundits -- including those on Fox News -- seem to think Kerry is in a good position. Bill Kristol just said he'd rather be in Kerry's shoes than Bush's. I'm wondering what he knows that we don't.

I think Bush is trying to give off the air of inevitability. Seems the exit polls were way off. You have to wonder about the electronic voting. None of us, sitting our homes, know what is really happening, but I feel like something screwy is going on. I hear many of the Democratic counties in Florida haven't been counted yet and might not be until Thursday. Also, something weird is going on in Ohio.

I guess I was way off on my 9 o'clock prediction.

Is Novak dead?
Holy Guacamole! I just saw Robert Novak on CNN and man, did he look terrible. He looks thin and his combover is getting blown around a little bit. Outing undercover CIA agents must be more exhausting than I thought.

It's about 8 p.m.
Earlier, I was musing about how a Bush loss wouldn't just mean the dismissal of the disinterested, lazy GW. It would mean we would never have to see Laura, Dick and Lynne Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. unless they're appearing on a Fox News panel.

I felt pretty confident going into the election today. Still, these hours are nerve wracking. I think by 9 p.m. we'll have a pretty clear idea of what's happening.

At least, I hope.

Compare
This is from Charles Pierce, posted on Erik Alterman's MSNBC website. Compare it to Bush's behavior when he had to be shamed into coming out to see members of the Congressional Black Caucus who had demanded to see him.

"It occurred to me over the weekend that I haven't given a good reason why I will vote for John Kerry, and why I would vote for him even if he were running against, say, John McCain. (And even if McCain still had a political soul, which I've come to doubt.) Once, in Iowa, Kerry dropped in on a group of Vietnam veterans. Some of them liked him. Some of them didn't, largely because of the whole VVAW thing. (And, trust me, this was my first beat at the Boston Phoenix, and I discovered that the politics within the various Vietnam veteran's groups were desperate and bloody.) Kerry dismissed the staff, locked the door, blew off the rest of the schedule, and sat there and talked and argued with these guys until they were all exhausted. He wanted to talk to the people who disliked him more than he wanted to talk to anyone else. He gave them the respect of open debate.

Imagine the incumbent doing that. Imagine him sitting down in a room where half the people truly loathe him and everything he stands for, him and his ticket-only rallies, and his coddling staff, and his use of the Secret Service as cheap sidewalk bouncers. Imagine him hearing them out, debating them, giving them the respect of his knowledgeable disagreement. It is inconceivable. One can more easily imagine C-Plus Augustus's flapping his arms and flying to the top of the Washington Monument. Imagine that "character" is even at issue between these two men.

Somebody who was there in Iowa told me that story, and told me I couldn't use it, but that's too damn bad today. I am voting for John Kerry because it is a time for serious people who are strong enough in their heart to listen to anger and slander and calumny and to respond to it, not with the tinny bombast of an unearned office, and not with the cheesy legerdemain of concocted eminence, but with the strength to stay long enough to try to redeem it."