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.

It was wonderful to see people at the con; the best part, to me, was wandering around and chatting with con friends I hadn’t seen in a while and catching up with them.   Long chats with Kerri Ellen Kelly, Christa (Linda Sugar’s sister), Deb Kosiba (who was minding her store, so to speak, and I found her vinyl cutter system highly interesting!), Kathy (my cow-orker on the Windycon foodguide), Dale Cozort, the present OE of Point of Divergence, Michelle Solomon, Robert Alley, Dermot Dobson and many others.

Lots of people were curious or concerned or both about my condition, and I got tons of egoboo - both on the foodguide, and on my postings here.  One person who I’m always thought a great deal of from the standpoint of a Serious Brain in particular said something like - I may not comment much, but it’s obvious you think things through about current events and other material and do a fantastic job of putting it out there.

The other nice thing egoboo-wise, of a sort, was when I was congratulating someone on a particular major SMOF advancement, and he gave me a good deal of credit in the matter - that he’d adopted the attitude that you get into con running not because of a power trip, but as a matter of service and doing a good job.   Which has always been my central position.

Was greatly surprised to *finally* meet Craig Newmeier in person.  Wonderful writer when he was in POINT OF DIVERGENCE, and we got him a spec copy and a please-please-please to get him back in the Apa.

Mere was with me, and Xapno (on lj) and her 9-year-old daughter ran around with Mere for a while on Saturday.  Mere was very upset that one of her con friends didn’t show (an unexpected death in the family) and was trolling for Other Kids.  There was a certain young Mr. King that she said was cute and funny later…

Mere basically ran me into the ground, which is why I didn’t come back Sunday.  I was exhausted from a few spills on the carpet, especially at carpet-tile interfaces.  I learned long ago to roll well (very useful if you’re cursed from birth with crappy balance) and managed to avoid major damage to me.   Especially on Sautrday evening, Mere wanted to run around and Not Be Bored, and I simply was struggling to keep up.

The GT Suite was a lot of fun, and I wanted to spend more time there chatting,  but…

I broke loose and bought a few books at Larry Smith’s table…HALF A CROWN, THE DESTROYERMEN (found out later the one I picked up was #2 of a series), a technical book on Solar Sails, and a few other paperbacks.   First time I’d picked up much of anything at a con for a LONG time.

Liked the hotel.  Great improvement.   Loved seeing everyone.  Stirred up my creative juices a great deal.  Thank you all!

• 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?

So here’s my ideas, half-baked:

• Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario.  This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
• All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
• The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event.  Say goodbye to what’s left.
• The receivership corporation essentially will rehire management staff at their discretion.  Golden parachutes and stock options and excessive compensation just vanished.  Cap salaries at $250k.  We’ll talk about bonuses when you make things people want to buy.
• Immediately make interest from car loans deductible on taxes, and lean heavily on the nations banks to start making car loans again.  Offer a sizable tax rebate ($4000-5000) scaled towards more fuel-efficient cars made by the ‘corporation’ and its spinoffs.  You want a Hummer or a Corvette?  You’re on your own.
• Eliminate car financing by the manufacturers.
• The UAW and the auto makers were in the process of setting up trusts to handle retiree health costs - in 2010.  Have the government take over the gap of that trust and set it up to be self-maintaining.   This would eliminate the vast legacy costs for health care from the auto makers’ books now.
• Eliminate and standardize.  You don’t need all of the crap brands and submakes out there.  Bust out the better parts and make them their own company.    And eliminate the old dealer/line deals that mandate that you have to keep the obsolete car lines.
• Focus all R&D towards two things - serious materials / fuel efficient cars, and away from oil-based fueling systems towards electric cars / serious hybrids.

The hardest angle on this is about the union workers and where to set up the jobs that will remain, and that’s tough.  Here’s a union perspective on some of this.

I’m actively interested in your poisition on this matter.  Feel free to sound off inside *politely*.

My own struggles on this:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,”

- Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

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.

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

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.