Posts from — November 2006

As Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat puts it, for some people “better dead that Red.”

Via Ellroon at Rants from the Rookery we learn of the case similar to the Ashcroft – Carnahan Senate race in Missouri in 2000, in which incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft lost to deceased Governor Mel Carnahan.

According to the MSNBC article, Dead woman wins county commissioner’s race, voters in Jerauld County, South Dakota voted for a Democratic candidate who had died two months before the election rather than the incumbent Republican.

That is world-class backlash.

Happy third blogiversary™ to Bark Bark Woof Woof and Echidne of the Snakes.

Don’t miss their election posts. I was especially happy to learn that the attorney general of Kansas, Phill Kline, is a nasty footnote in the history of the state.

The determined digging of Cat Daddy & Dr. Squeeky produced Rove’s polling data on Sunday.

Maybe Karl and Ken can start their own campaign consulting firm: Delusional Concepts.

CNN is reporting that Rumsfeld will step down.

I’m not holding my breath.

There are 124,257 registered voters in Okaloosa County, 72,557 [58.4%] registered as Republicans.

[Note: it isn’t clear whether absentee ballots are included in the numbers, but early voting should be.]

Only 55,890 [45.0%] made it to the polls, and several hundred of those only voted for governor, based on the vote counts for the other races.

Cruella de Harris received 60.7% of the votes in this county, and the rest of the Republican statewide candidates received better than 70% of the vote.

That clown, Jeff Miller, is still in Congress.

The only good news statewide is that it looks like Alex Sink will be the Chief Financial Officer, even though she lost in Okaloosa County. She is not just a Democrat, she is actually qualified by real-world experience and education to be a CFO.

It looks like all of the ballot measures passed, and all of the upper level judges were retained.

No one is going to have to appear before a local judge named “Dixie Dan,” so we were spared one minor indignity.

Some of you probably thought I was kidding when I talked about this county being blood red.

Eric Alterman has fun with Richard Perle.

Richard Perle said:

“But it’s a house of cards. He rules by fear because he knows there is no underlying support. Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder. “

In Jingo, Terry Pratchett writes:

“Won’t last long. Lot of cowards, the Klatchians,” said Colon. “The moment they taste a bit of cold steel they’re legging it away over the sand.”

Sergeant Frederick Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is rather Falstaffian. No one should assume that Klatchians are Arabs, or that this novel, copyrighted in 1997, has anything to do with the Iraq War. That would be wrong. This is a fantasy novel. It is terrible of me to be comparing a neocon advisor to the Shrubbery to a character in a fantasy novel, and Donald Rumsfeld is not Lord Rust, really.

[Read more →]

Cris Regan of Mythstory on the debut of the elephant as the symbol of the Gee-Oops: November 7th, 1874: Never Forget The Elephant

New stickers this time, and they look pricey, but they are big enough to be noticed and they really stick.

Steady traffic at the polls, which is unusual, but then I usually vote mid-morning.

Tom Hilton is guest posting at No More Mister Nice Blog and points to a post by Deborah at If I Ran the Zoo, his primary blog, about Dirty Tricks. Deborah reports that someone hacked MoveOn.Org while she was making calls.

I know something was not right with MoveOn last night, because for the very first time since I installed it, Firefox 2.0 locked up solid after I clicked through from Duncan’s place. I had to manually kill the process to get back control. It looked like something was attempting to download onto my machine while Firefox, Norton, and my firewall were fending it off. All of my resources were pegged.

The Reptilicons are not going to obey the rules, so let’s just forget about any “bi-partisan initiatives”: they don’t believe in cooperation, only in co-opting.

CBS reports: Reports Of Problems Pepper Election Day

But voting equipment companies said they hadn’t seen anything beyond the norm and blamed the problems largely on human error.

Excuse me, but the high school kids at fast food restaurants generally get your order right with their computer terminals, so why isn’t your user interface simple enough for almost anyone to use?

If you can’t devise a system to make selections from a menu and record those selections without an IT tech standing by, you really need to find another market.

When dozens of the systems fail in the same way, you have obviously not produced a competent product.

For human error you can look to CNN: “I sure hope my vote counts,” says OH congresswoman, Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt.

The main reason those scanners reject a ballot is over-voting, marking too many candidates in the same race.

The new voter ID laws lead to this: Don’t Leave Home Without It – South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had to go to an election office and get a replacement voter registration card, because he arrived at the polls without his, and they wouldn’t let him vote. There’s no room for common sense in the rules.

The MSM don’t seem interested in the robo-calling by the Reptilicons, but they are all atwitter with Charlie Crist’s decision not to come to Pensacola to be with the Shrubbery.

The CNN version from the Associated Press: White House irked after GOP candidate snubs Bush

PENSACOLA, Florida (AP) — The White House did not hide its irritation Monday at Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist for ducking President Bush at a campaign rally in the Republican-friendly Panhandle.

Crist said he considered the Pensacola area so firmly in his camp that it made more sense to campaign elsewhere in the state as the race to replace outgoing Gov. Jeb Bush tightened.

On a tarmac in Texas where the president boarded Air Force One for the trip east, Bush political strategist Karl Rove mockingly questioned what kind of alternate rally Crist could put together that would rival the expected 10,000-person crowd that Bush was expected to draw at the Pensacola Civic Center.

The White House already had distributed schedules saying Crist would introduce Bush at the rally.

Crist’s opponent, Democratic Rep. Jim Davis, seized on the news.

“Now that the president is so unpopular, Charlie refuses to stand side by side with him,” Davis said. “It says when the going gets tough, Charlie won’t stand up.”

Mustang Bobby’s post from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel puts the actual crowd at about 7,000, which isn’t very good for a Republican President in a blood red area. The Civic Center can easily hold 10,000 people.

While Karl is having his conniption about Crist, they managed to leave poor deluded Katherine Harris, the only statewide candidate at the event, in the cheap seats. Katherine is about the only candidate in the state that wanted to be seen with the Shrubbery, and they had her standing next to the kitchen with the volunteers.

According to Jack at the Grumpy Forester it’s time to find it in the bottom of your laundry bag and wear to vote: Cheney’s goin’ huntin’.

Update: via Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat in comments, that golden oldie: Cheney’s Gotta Gun.

TPM Muckraker has the list fo the 20 Congressional districts that are receiving annoying telephone calls from the NRCC. One of them is the home of the “George W. Bush Stare Into Space 9/11 Reading Room”, Bradenton, Florida and local people are not amused.

According to the Bradenton Herald, Campaign phone calls anger voters:

The calls are being made by Conquest Communications Group, a telemarketer that boasts on its Web site that it can make millions of calls a day using 1,200 lines at its headquarters and another 5,000 at affiliates across the country.

Dic Gresham, a partner in Conquest, referred all questions to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which has paid the Richmond, Va.-based company more than $22,000 since Oct. 23 to make the calls.

The phone calls are targeting registered Republicans and independents and stressing Jennings’ positions on key issues, said Alex Burgos, the committee’s spokesman. They are being made without any coordination or consultation with the Buchanan campaign, he said.

“The more you hammer home the point that Christine Jennings is liberal on taxes and immigration, the more likely voters will go out and vote for Vern Buchanan,” Burgos said.

Oh, don’t bother to attempt to contact Conquest Communications Group via the Internet. Their web site currently consists of a single front page, and if you try to use what looks like a “mail to” icon you will find that it merely accepts your address [don’t call us; we’ll call you]. No doubt they want to avoid a flood of flaming e-mails from angry people.

Now, I know that the candidates say they have no control over ads and other actions by the NRCC, but that’s pure bovine excrement. Tell them that if they don’t stop, you might not be available for the vote for Speaker, and these things will be gone.