Memnison Journal

The AP and others are now declaring Mark Begich, the Mayor of Anchorage (D), has beaten Senator Stevens for the Alaska Senate seat.  The margin is too wide for a free recount, and it’s unlikely that the GOP will pay for it or Stevens can - or that it would make any significant difference.

The recount for the Minnesota Senate seat starts today, with the final before the recount starts - 200-odd vote difference of nearly 3 million votes.

• A sitting member of the house was a Democratic Congressman for five years *before* they changed their registration from Republican with the local Board of Elections.  Who is this person?
• Name the last President that absolutely refused to use a telephone while in office.
• Name the President that served in the Senate before and after his term in office.
• The newly elected president left the Senate to take up his new office, and two members of nationally powerful political families fought it out for the nomination of the President’s party for that seat.  The person the President supported for the office won the nomination and the special election.   Name all three of the people involved: the President, the Senator and the other guy.   For extra points, name the guy who lost the election (who was also from a nationally powerful political family).
• What year was the last time the Democratic convention went to more than one ballot?
• Name the prominent Democratic politician who lost part of his finger to a meat slicer at Arby’s Roast Beef. (libertango got this one)
  
• How many years between the first and second set of Presidential debates?
• When in doubt, vote for the left handed candidate.  When was the last Presidential campaign where this would not have been helpful, and the last one that the leftie didn’t win?

Excellent editorial in the NY Times on the auto bailout, along the lines of what I was talking about.

At the same time, Congressional Democrats and President-elect Barack Obama, who are pushing for many billions worth of emergency aid for the nation’s least-competent carmakers, must ensure that tough conditions are attached to any rescue package. If not, the money will surely be wasted.

This goes beyond firing top management, forbidding the payment of dividends to stockholders and putting limits on executive pay — all necessary steps. The government should insist on a complete restructuring of any company it pours billions of public funds into.

All three car companies have been hamstrung by the legacy costs of providing pensions and health care to hundreds of thousands of retirees. But Detroit’s problems are mostly of its own making.

The automakers hitched their fate to gas-guzzling trucks, and they obstinately refused to acknowledge that oil is a finite resource and that burning it limitlessly is harming the planet. They lobbied strenuously against tighter fuel-efficiency standards. That wrongheadedness did them in as gas prices spiked and consumers flocked to energy-efficient cars made by Toyota and Honda.

It makes no sense at all to give these companies billions just so they can struggle on for a few more months down this disastrous path.

Before it approves any bailout package, Congress must insist that any company receiving government money must commit to a specific plan to improve energy efficiency. The average fuel efficiency of the American auto fleet peaked at 25.9 miles per gallon in 1987 and then leveled off as gas prices fell and the automakers churned out more sport-utility vehicles and pickups.

Last year, Detroit managed to extract a promise of $25 billion in subsidized loans from Congress in exchange for a new target of 35 m.p.g. by 2020. But the industry can do better. If Detroit were willing to make smaller cars, as European companies do, it could probably achieve a fleet-wide average of 50 m.p.g. by 2020.

The companies also are struggling under a mountain of debt. And any restructuring would mean that creditors would have to swallow a loss or accept equity — as under a regular bankruptcy filing. Restructuring would likely require more plant closures and layoffs.

Rescued car companies would almost certainly have to re-open labor agreements on pay and benefits. These steps would be painful for many workers. But they also are necessary.

Even then, there is no guarantee that these companies will survive after years of failed management. We are sure they won’t if they don’t make sweeping changes in the way they do business. If Congress is going to take the risk and invest billions more of the taxpayers’ money in the companies, it must insist on those changes.

And this column in Businessweek:

Obama was elected not only because many Americans feel betrayed and abandoned by their government but because those feelings finally converged with their sense of betrayal at the hands of Corporate America. Their experiences as consumers and as citizens joined to create a wave of revolt against the status quo—as occurred in the American Revolution. Be wary of those who counsel business as usual. This post-election period is a turning point for the business community. It demands an attitude of sober reappraisal and a disposition toward fundamental reinvention. If you don’t do it, someone else will.

…

One solution eventually dominated all others: markets for corporate control. A new breed of activist investors led tender offers, often hostile, to take over companies whose share prices were regarded as underperforming. Most stockholders responded simply by choosing the highest offer. Leveraging up debt and driving new economies of scale by combining or reorganizing resources were seen as ways to impose discipline on teams of managers and limit their divergence from shareholder-wealth maximization. New compensation and incentive systems linked executive pay to the performance of the company’s stock price.

The company became a transaction machine designed to maximize profit, untethered from its community, society, and country. Jobs were outsourced, work was automated, assets were concentrated, costs were cut to the bone, and balance sheets depended on increasingly arcane financial engineering. Takeovers gave way to mergers. Industries consolidated, limiting consumer choice. The inward focus to which management had always been vulnerable became pathological, banishing the needs of customers and employees to a distant horizon. Job security became tenuous, and most families depended on two incomes. A large majority of employees wanted more flexibility at work than their employers allowed. Working parents, and especially mothers, foundered. Customers were treated as anonymous and expendable.

Yes, productivity rose. But the mechanisms once in place to share those benefits had been battered by years of trickle-down tax policy and successful corporate lobbying. Instead, executive compensation soared, along with the fortunes of a new class of financial specialists who identified and facilitated these deals.

Read it all.  Searing.

Begich (D) is up 814 votes over Senator Stevens (R), with another 38,000 votes to go - in strong Democratic districts in Alaska.

Alaska Senate: 221,173 votes were already counted; a new estimate shows that the uncounted votes there are around 90,600 - about 30% of the total!  (PDF with the details as to what sort of votes and from where)  And this isn’t complete; absentee votes are still trickling in in the mail.  They’ll start counting these in a few days.

And to settle a discussion on this: No,  Governor Palin does not have the power to select a new Senator in case Stevens is removed from office.  After her crooked predecessor put his daughter into office in similar circumstances, the legislature took that power away from the Governor’s office and gave it to a special election setup (with primaries).

Minnesota Senate: Still waiting for a final certitifaction from Hennepin County (Minneapolis).  The difference is now around 206.   Then they go into the hand recount for the whole state.

Panic in various circles over the mistaken notion that ‘Obama’s going to shut down gun shops and confiscate our guns‘.

Various people who were proclaiming Obama’s victory in  OMG terms now doing a ‘never mind’ response.

Dogs are adopting kittens in Jiangmen, Meredith’s home town in China, but you can’t adopt or foster children if you aren’t married in Arkansas.

And monks are beating the crap out of each other in the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Alaska: Still 81,000 uncounted ballots (absentee, some early ballots and the ‘provisional’ ballots) to go to be checked out in the next couple of weeks.  The gap is presently around 3,200 out of 210,000 cast.  (PDF of where the present votes came from)

Minnesota: With a 221 vote gap out of 2,500,000 ish voting, there’s a noted undervote for Senator in a bunch of very Blue districts in the state (apparently, Minnesota’s vote scanners are acting up).  The recount should make sure about all this…

Back when I was in high school, some of the kids thought I was half black, because of the curly hair.  Which was interesting, because the dark and curly part came from my father, who was *not* very *ah* progressive in his feelings about black people.

One of the things that struck me as the most recent campaign went to a close was some of the wilder OMG comments from friends of mine who were yellow-dog Republicans - that Obama would totally destroy America As It Is towards some kind of Black Panther / 60’s Radical fantasy.  So when I saw this animated video, where one guy is pulling the leg right off of another about ‘what’s coming next for you white people’, I was laughing my guts out. And the idea of all of us white people having to wear dashikis….maaaaan.

‘Impeach Obama’ t-shirts and accessories.  No, I’m not kidding.

The 2d Congressional District of Nebraska’s electoral vote goes to Barack Obama.

One area of the country was particularly resistant to the idea of an Obama Presidency, and to recent Democratic runs…  Graphics after the cut (from the NYT)

Here (Minnesota) and here (Pennsylvania) with a Keef cartoon about the latter.

…for a few things to be resolved, elections wise.

The Presidential vote in Missouri and the 2d Congressional district of Nebraska. The former leads a very narrowly for McCain and the latter for Obama.  This would be the first time that the kinky division of electoral votes by Congressional district (which only figures in Maine and Nebraska) comes around for a division from the rest of the state. 

Missouri (vote totals link) is separated by about 6000 votes out of 3 million cast.  My *guess* is that it will go to McCain, but it’s hard to say.

Also waiting on the Senate votes for Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia.  Minnesota (link to the actual count) is going to go for a recount (only 200+ votes out of 3 million cast separate the R and the D), and there’s been scanner problems and some other irregularities.  After being an election judge this year, I saw enough goofy people with ballot problems to realize that spoiled ballots are more common than you’d think.

Alaska and Georgia concern me.

The polls before the election in Alaska showed Stevens and Young going down, due to their legal problems, in a big way.  All of a sudden, they pulled it out at the last second and won?  I dunno.   There’s a lot of  discussion in the news / blogs on this, and they note the huge number of ‘provisional’ uncounted ballots, et cetera.  Basically, either all the pollsters were totally off, or the GOP in Alaska is corrupt (which we knew) and monkeyed with the votes.  If they did, I’d fry their asses.

Georgia - well, something similar to that.  I’m digging for details.  It’s going to go to a runoff in December, and I expect that the major parties will pull out all the stops for that one.

I had planned long ago to take off yesterday and work as an election judge (Democratic) in my home precinct, and Susan did as well - I think she really enjoyed herself at the polls.  My problem, of course, was that I was crippled up by the operation, and we weren’t sure what I could do aside of sit someplace and check signatures or something.

So I didn’t go to the setup on Monday night, and I didn’t do the breakdown on Tuesday night.  I was brought in on my scooterish thing, and set up as a signature checker.  And after a while, they moved me over to the ‘Ask Ed’ area where Mr. Law School and Poly Sci could make judgments and advice on situations where there were irregularities.

And there were several.  I also had an obnoxious-at-turns poll watcher who was obviously a-quiver to note efforts of the locals to force people into provisional ballots, and I was annoyed with her.  The more who-is-that-woman-anyway sorts on the judge panel were highly unhappy with her, and I said through gritted teeth that I’d rather have someone try and keep us on our toes than not.

The problems with the voters were almost all situations where the voter had moved to a new location, and never changed their registration, were motivated to vote yesterday but….

In one case, the gap between move and vote was twelve years!   More often, it was six months to three years.  They had gone to the driver’s license bureau for Illinois, and changed their licenses to show the new address, and been asked by the clerk about voter registration, and it just slipped their minds to say - why, yes, I need to be re-registered in the new location as well!  *sheesh*

Of course, I’m Mr. Public Citizen.  I registered to vote and for the draft on my 18th birthday.  I have moved all over the place, and I always take care to re-register wherever.  Not everyone has civics and political hooh-hah up my brain as much as I do, but dayum, people.

The one I felt terribly for was a guy who registered as a voter about two months before the election - plenty of time for the election-and even had a original receipt for the registration with him.  And he was *not* in the books as a voter. Nowhere.  Obviously a glitch in the system.  So I discussed this with the other judges…normally, he’d get a provisional ballot and have to check up to make sure it got counted later, but I was willing to give him a full ballot then and there.  I got outvoted.  The technical judge gave him a provisional ballot, and the guy submitted it, but he was seething.  I don’t blame him.  I would have been outraged.  But the real culprits on this was obviously the board of elections people who didn’t get his thing into the system.  (I mean, I was highly impressed that he hung on to the blinking receipt.  People don’t do that…)

Things were actually busiest for the first hour - 25 people were in line when we opened. The operation really went very snoothly, and we ran out of “I voted’ stickers around 500 voters.  We had one guy who wanted to be chatty with one of the judges who was next to the ballot box, and was going on about the Constitutional Convention and ’socialists’, and I pushed the technical judge on getting him to freakin’ move on already.

Few went for the touchscreen method - mostly younger people.  It was slow and clunky…you did a lot faster with a paper ballot.

I kept track of the numbers: 150 by 7:15, 208 by 8 am. There was a brief lull after the commuters left, and then 375 by 10:30, 462 by 11:30, 600 by 2:30 and nearly 900 at the end of the day.

The polling place had a record…of around 1885 voters in the two precincts, about 18% voted early (or by a scattering of absentees) and around 47% voted on election day.  It wasn’t as jammed as everyone expected - there was a solid stream almost all the time, but it was obvious that people were motivated to vote.  Only one older man needed assistance to vote - he was feeble and only spoke Spanish.

There were numerous glitches in the books on people’s names - Connie, my mother-in-law who lives with us, had her name misspelled ‘CCONSTANCE’ with an extra ‘C’.  If you’d have tried to look her up with the computers, you would have had problems…I had a long list of errors.

One precinct tied for Obama and McCain, the precinct with more older voters that I live in - and the other one with more younger families went for Obama by a good margin.  The county I live in as a whole went for Obama as well - 55 /45.

I also got interviewed by some school kids (about Mere’s age) as part of a project buring a lull. “Wow, you’ve been working on elections for over 30 years?”  Yeah, kids, and I hunted down wooly mammoths with your grandpa, too. 

They sent me home at 7, since I couldn’t do much in the tear-down; Connie picked me up, fed me and we waited to see the results with Susan.    More on that later.