Yet Another Map
This one really illustrates the urban-rural split. Of America's major cities, only Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Denver went red; 32 of the top 50 (by my unofficial count) were blue. (A Tip o'the Hat to Social Tonic).

The Lighter Side of the Insurgency
Juan Cole, after discussing incidents all over Iraq yesterday:

On a lighter note, it is hard to avoid observing that al-Baghdadi castigated Bush's administration as "fundamentalist" and "right-wing." When even the Sunni Salafis of Mosul consider you too fundamentalist and right-wing, you have probably gone too far.

Sore Winners: The Winner
This loathsome, bile-spewing rant takes first prize. Money quote, as the avatars of the hate brigade like to say:

If anyone needs to work to “bring the country together” it’s those on the left who have divided it so badly. Those who sought to destroy this great man should get down upon their knees and beg the victors for mercy. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll let a few of them linger on for the simple reason that they amuse us. My life’s goal is to see the Democratic Party virtually obliterated and left as a rump of people like Stephanie Herseth who both mostly agree with us anyways and are easy on the eyes.

That’s the future of the Democratic Party: providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women.

Memo to the rest of us: It's ok - in fact it's a sign of a thinking adult - to loathe both Ann Coulter and Barbara Streisand, to dismiss both the Swift Boat liars and Michael Moore, to reject both Fox News and IndyMedia, and, especially, to condemn bigoted cretins like this creep.

Sore Winners, A Continuing Series...
Here's a two-for-one special. Courtesy of Matt Welch, who's convinced me to wear my coastal elitistism as a badge of honor.

The State of the Onion
The Onion tells it like it is. Again.

A Contrarian Viewpoint
Paul Graham has a very different take on what decided this election.

Maps
Electoral maps are all the rage these days. But the very best one (aesthetically speaking) can be found at one of truth and beauty's favorite rest stops, the always compelling 101-365.

Moral Fashion
The right-wing meme o'the week last week, coming from everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Instapundit, was that this election was not about gay-bashing. It was about morals and values, and the American people picked the candidate who embodies those morals and values - one of which just happens to be that gay marriage is a threat to the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family.

And the right's spin does indeed contain a grain of truth. A key differentiator in this election was the acceptance or rejection of a certain set of values. The exemplars of those values are right-wing Christian extremists, who've won a propaganda war that asserts that their values are morally superior and everyone else's are morally inferior. And propaganda is exactly the right word; the assertion of moral superiority has been sold, using all the techniques of large-scale public relations and advertising. And it has found a very receptive audience in a group of people looking for certitude in an era they find increasingly incomprehensible.

Paul Graham, in an essay entitled What You Can't Say, writes:

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary [as consumer fashions] and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions gets you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

Neither Graham nor I am suggesting that imprisonment or death is the consequence of the latest moral fashions. What this is really about is a struggle for power, as was the English Reformation or the Thirty Years War or our new, modern-day Islamic Reformation. Dressing it up as a struggle between God-fearing Christians and atheistic, homosexual-loving, liberal moral relativists is a more than convenient rationalization tailor-made for a segment of the elite that seeks to gain unencumbered political control.

I'm not trying to trivialize anyone's faith. I've a deep respect for the truly devout, who actually try to live their lives according to Christ's/Yahweh's/Mohammed's/Buddha's teachings. But, like Ken Layne, I've seen and known too many people whose trumpeting of their faith was a cover for the hypocrisy of their daily lives.

The cure for fashions that lack real aesthetic or moral values is to repudiate them. Hold them up to the light of day, examine them, criticize them, and (especially) mock them. If there is anything good and true hidden inside the ephermal mores of the moment, it will emerge all the stronger for the being challenged. And what is dishonest and false will be consigned to history's dustbin.

Sore Winners, cont.
Matt Welch, on the healing voices of the right.

Electronic Voting Glitches
A few isolated incidents? Or the beginning of a steady stream of reports? Note that in the third link, it's a county that heavily favored John Kerry. Not counting votes accurately is not counting votes accurately, regardless of who it helps.

There's no evidence of any kind of widespread fraud in the election and therefore no reason to give any credence to loony conspiracy theories. But we still have electronic voting machines that are insecure, unreliable, and wide open to fraud. And we have a number of non-technical problems that we're still failing to address - registration, polling place lines, and ballot design.

This article says it best:

What worries voting reformers more is that Congress, the White House and the states will see the lack of a 2004 election meltdown as vindication of America's voting system and neglect the tools of democracy another four years.

"There's a huge danger," said Ted Selker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who co-directs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

"If you're an election official, it's going to be very hard to go to Congress and say we need more money," said Doug Chapin, executive director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan clearing house for voting reform information. "What they could say is we need to finish the job we started."

Now that election-year pressure is off, will a sharply divided nation forget about shoring up voting systems poorly suited for sharp divisions?

Voting reformists are crossing their fingers and hoping not.

"Is the testing of voting machines satisfactory?" asked Selker. "No. Are the design standards appropriate? No. Are they all improving? Yes. But do we have good mechanisms for improving them? No."

Beyond those issues, the Elections Assistance Commission needs to find the best way to count provisional ballots, develop reliable registration databases and verify electronic votes.

Not Red, Not Blue. Purple

This is fantastic. Edward Tufte would be proud.

What To Expect

There will be a smokescreen of uniter-not-divider rhetoric for a short time, but I think it will quickly be replaced by a mean-spirited triumphalism. One of the first manifestations will be an all-out attack on the mainstream media. Here's a clue - keep in mind that these guys are sore winners, too.

Now, the mainstream media deserves plenty of criticism for its faux-objectivity, laziness, and status quo elitism. But that's not what will be under attack. Instead, the objective is to neutralize any journalist and any story that departs from the well-established story lines of the Republican mainstream. If they can't be coerced into being Fox-lite, then they'll be battered into submission.

Jay Rosen has a fascinating, and more optimistic, take on this. And I think he's right. There's still 49% of us who want to hear the other side of the story. That means there's a real opportunity for anyone who can speak truth to power and do it well.

This Election, a Coda

Damn. Damn. Damn.

A few observations:

• Gay-bashing and fear-mongering is a winning electoral strategy


• Placing your hopes in voters aged 18-29 is a losing electoral strategy


• This election was a referendum on the Bush administration, and they won.


• 51% is sufficient to declare a mandate, especially if you cement your control of Congress.


• Karl Rove, not GWB or Dick Cheney, is now the most powerful man in America. This is his victory.

The last point, I think, deserves a little more explanation. I think it's safe to say that a lot of Republicans were worried they would lose this election. Lots of folks on the other side, like me, believed that they would. What seems to have put the GOP over the top was the, ahem, values thing. And as far as I know, that was Rove's strategy. So I think everyone who got elected, from Bush down, is feeling both grateful and indebted to Rove.

Four more years, indeed. Welcome to the new intolerance.

The Worst Possible Outcome...

The idea that North American society can exacerbate its drive to economic bimodality without serious fissuring, up to and including a constitutional crisis in the U.S., is not likely...

W.R. Clements, Quantum Jump, 1998

The VoteMaster Revealed
It turns out the guy behind www.electoral-vote.com is Andrew Tanenbaum, who geeks like me know as the author of the Minix operating system (a precursor of Linux). He's currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (he's American, his wife is Dutch).

There seems to be a lot of interesting stuff coming out of the Netherlands these days.

Keith Olbermann
I really like that Keith Olbermann now has his own blog and I certainly hope his intuitions in this post turn out to be correct tomorrow.

But doesn't his logo image remind you a little of Thomas Dolby in the Hyperactive video?

Osama's October Surprise
The Medium Lobster says it best:

...only George W. Bush has the pure, hard determination to stand up to terror. And only George W. Bush has the unswerving, unfailing incompetence to allow terror to spread so he can continue to stand up to it.

Listen to the words of the mass murderer, and re-elect the man who let him go. It's your duty.

This Election
I'm ashamed to admit that I was one of those people who, in 2000, said "Bush, Gore - what's the difference?". If I'd lived in a swing state I might have voted for Gore, but since I don't I voted for Nader; not because I really liked him, but more as a protest/attempt to help create a viable third party.

I found the 2000 election brouhaha amusing and appalling in equal parts, right up to the point when the Supreme Court destroyed its integrity by effectively awarding the election to Bush. What I heard about the nomination of someone named John Ashcroft to be Attorney General disturbed me a little, as did what appeared to be a senseless and counterproductive tax cut. But on the whole, I didn't pay too much attention and didn't think Bush 43 would be any worse than, say, Bush 41.

People like me - or like I was, at least - are dangerous to democracy in times like these. All it takes to ensure the triumph of evil, as Edmund Burke once said, is for men of good will to do nothing. And not paying attention is the surest guarantee of inaction.

Until recently I believed that the three strikes of the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the economic malaise of the mid-to-late 70's ("stagflation", as we called it back then) would be the lowest point that I would see my country sink to in my lifetime. I no longer believe that. And I believe that the reelection of George Bush would guarantee that things will continue to go downhill.

Is this shrill? Well, you could say that I have slowly and steadily become radicalized. I still hold essentially the same beliefs I've always held; in fact, I've become a little bit more conservative. But I now also believe that the principles this country were founded on - in fact, the Constitution itself - are in grave danger of being swept aside.

My wakeup call was not 9-11. I was as shocked and stunned as anyone, but I'd read books like Alvin Toffler's Powershift and knew who Osama Bin Laden was, so I had suspected that someday terrorists would stage a successful attack somewhere on American soil. I wasn't prepared for the reality of what actually happened, but neither was anyone else.

The buildup to the invasion of Iraq woke me up. I told a co-worker on 9/11 that we'd find ourselves in a war to destroy terrorism, and that it would be comparable in duration to the Cold War. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and thought the use of the Northern Alliance as the primary fighting force supported by US airpower and Special Forces was an effective way to fight this kind of war - although I couldn't understand why the 82nd and 101st Airborne hadn't been dropped in Eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border in order to cut off the Taliban/Al Qaeda retreat.

I soon figured it out, once the Bush administration started talking about invading Iraq. In retrospect, the passage of the Patriot Act should have been my real wakeup call. Once the drumbeats sounded about invading Iraq, though, I finally started to comprehend what Paul Krugman and others had seen as far back as the run-up to the 2000 election.

What we've witnessed in the past 4 years - if we've paid serious attention - is an attempt by a powerful and ruthless faction of the Republican party to establish what amounts to an oligarchy. The Founders crafted a system of government, with the Constitution as its main instrument, that was designed expressly to prevent this. The purpose of all of those checks and balances is to prevent any group or faction from wielding too much power.

Any group that seeks to guarantee an unencumbered ability to rule this country must, by definition, undercut the Constitution.And so it is with this administration. The Patriot Act is only the first wave of the assault on the Bill of Rights. The creation of a security state that is constantly on alert and at war is another means to upset the balance between the branches of government.So is the promotion and sanctification of an authoritarian strain of religious belief - one that is dedicated to eradicating the barrier between Church and State that the Founding Fathers erected.

We are perversely fortunate, then, that this administration's incompetence exposes its mendacity and malevolence as well as its ineptitude. From the budget deficits to pork-spewing Medicare and corporate tax bills, from failing to capture Osama Bin Laden to Abu Ghraib, from damaging our alliances and strengthening the terrorists to the failure of the occupation, from taking our eyes off Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs to the failure to secure explosives and other war material in Iraq, they have made a mess of everything they have touched.

Their one area of competence is the ability to successfully manipulate all the levers of large-scale public relations and mass media. There are still a large number of people in this country that are either unable or unwilling to recognize that they've been manipulated and deceived by this administration. There is a small group of people dedicated to ensuring that they never come to this realization. This election isn't a horse race; it's a race to see how many people have the scales fall from their eyes before November 2.

And it still appears to be a very close thing. If you give Pennsylvania to Kerry and Florida to Bush, it looks like the election comes down to Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and (maybe) Arkansas and Colorado.

All we can hope for is that enough of our fellow citizens wake up to the realization that George Bush's presidency has been an unmitigated disaster because it has both divorced itself from the principles that made this nation great as well as divorcing itself from reality.

Defending America requires defending it from the enemy within - those who would destroy our liberty under the guise of protecting us - as well as defending it from the enemy without.

Brad DeLong puts it best:
There is no excuse for anyone to support George W. Bush. None. None at all..

Let's hope at least 51% of the voters agree.

The Curse
It's over.

Now, what about the Cubs? And does this mean the the Vikings might win a Super Bowl someday?

The Curse, cont.
Three more outs. Admit it - you're still nervous. You're playing out various scenarios of disaster in your mind. Nobody's ever been up 3-0 and then lost the final four games of the World Series. Could the Red Sox be the first? (They just showed the Buckner play).