Archives November 2008

Reaction from Wingnuttia

Free Republic provided my morning chuckle with
this post:

The President of the United States is the most powerful political figure in the world, but as national executives go his powers are actually quite restricted. Obama will become President, but he won’t be dictator or king, let alone deity. He still has to work with the House and the Senate, and he still has to live within Constitutional restrictions

Does the phrase “unitary executive” mean anything to this person? How
about suspending Habeas Corpus? Signing statements?

I’m sure sites like Free Republic and Liberty News Forum will prove bountiful reservoirs of
schadenfreude
in the coming days. I lost the links in yesterday’s celebratory haze,
but I’ve seen people saying that McCain lost because he’s not a True
Conservative™, or because he was dragged down by Bush, who’s not
a True Conservative™. It’s all very reminiscent of the
argument
that “if you deconverted, that means you were never a True
Christian™ to begin with”. Evidently conservatism can never
fail, it can only be failed (I think put it
that way).

Also,
impeach-barack-obama.com
has already been set up.

In other election news, Sean Tevis has apparently
lost
by 4%.

Michelle Bachmann, the McCarthyite from Minnesota, has been reelected.
Boo.

Elizabeth Dole lost, apparently in part because of backlash against
her “godless” ad.

And the California amendment banning gay marriages has also passed,
also by a 4% margin. I wonder what this means for
existing gay marriages.
Will they now be retroactively annulled?

And Alaskans have elected a felon to the Senate. The speculation du
jour is that when Stevens is sent to prison, the governor will appoint
a replacement. That governor is, of course, Caribou Barbie herself,
Sarah Palin. and if she’s entertaining presidential ambitions, she
might appoint herself to the Senate. The obvious question that this
raises is, will she be able to provide Jon Stewart with
fodder
for The Daily Show?

Based on her interview with Katie Couric and her general performance
during the campaign, I think we can safely say yes.

Election Night Update

W00t!

More later.

More Election Blather

I plan on updating this post throughout the day with whichever inane tidbits I run across. This is what would be called liveblogging if it were more coherent. I’m putting this all in one post so you don’t have to delete a whole bunch of posts today.

Yeah, I voted. Got in line at 9:55. Got out around 10:45. The lines were shorter than I remember them being last time. I think there were more machines this time, and I saw them wheel another one in while I was waiting in line.

Places allegedly giving away free stuff to voters: Starbucks (“Coffee for people who don’t like coffee”). Krispy Kreme. Chick-Fil-A (but not the one where I just had lunch. Bastards.)

And toys in Babeland is offering a choice of either a Maverick sheath or a Silver Bullet vibrator, for free, to people who have voted. You have to get it today in either New York or Seattle, though.

The Comedy Central webmasters have set up www.{thedailyshow,colbertnation,indecision2008}.com with JavaScript links instead of ordinary ones. Why do they hate tabbed browsers?

It’s raining here right now. Don’t let it stop you frokm voting: remember, if you catch pneumonia while voting, Obama’s health care plan will pay for your treatment.

More free food: California Tortilla.

Now I remember the other reason I don’t listen to AM talk radio, aside from the prevalence of insane wingnuts: the ads.

Right now, the Sean Hannity show played four minutes of commercials, cut back to Sean long enough for him to say that the evil libruls are intimidating voters and his show was the best source of election coverage, then cut back to commercial.

The Dow is up 3.24% so far today. This means the economy is recovering. Since voters trust the Democrats more to fix the economy, this is good news for McCain. Expect California and Hawaii to vote overwhelmingly Republican once the implications sink in.

Daily Kos’s Electoral Scoreboard is showing an Obama landslide in New Hampshire. Presumably this represents the twelve and a half residents of Funny Name, NH who make a point of voting at midnight on election day, the better to harvest attention from the quadrennial media swarms.

I think I’m having the political-news equivalent of a sugar crash, so instead here’s a hardware project that Randall Munroe certainly won’t endorse.

Hey, Florida, can I ask a favor?

Election Day Playlist
  1. They’re Right I Am Wrong, Klute (because of the bit that quotes my favorite political slogan in recent memory)
  2. WWIII, KMFDM (because it quotes George Bush about the war in Iraq)
  3. Voting for President, Schoolhouse Rock
  4. Elected, Alice Cooper
  5. Winners & Losers, Iggy Pop
  6. Changes, David Bowie
  7. All Night Party, Anne Clark
  8. Won’t Get Fooled Again, The Who

And just in case the election goes the wrong way:

  1. What the Fuck Is Wrong With You People?, Combichrist

(Update, Tue Nov 4 09:23: Added Won’t Get Fooled Again.)

Theme Music Fail

From Dana Milbank’s
article
about the final days of the McCain campaign:

About 2,000 had come to a high school gym in Wallingford to hear from the candidate — a good crowd for high school basketball, if not quite the size a candidate hopes for in the final hours of a campaign. The audience stirred when McCain entered to the theme from “Rocky.” “Momentum is here,” he announced. “We’re going to win,” he went on. “I feel it. I know it.”

They do know that
Rocky
lost
in the first movie, right?

Genetics and Collectible Card Games

Let’s say I’ve started collecting cards, like Magic: the Gathering, or baseball cards. Yesterday, I bought a pack of 100 random cards. Today, I bought another pack of 100 random cards. 5 of them were duplicates of cards that I already had from yesterday.

Question: how many distinct cards are there in the game? I.e., if you wanted to collect the whole set of cards published by the game company, how big an album would you need? Read More

Tuberophilia?

From the Telegraph:
“Vicar went to hospital with potato stuck in bottom“.

A & E nurse Trudi Watson, of Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital, said: “He explained to me, quite sincerely, he had been hanging curtains naked in the kitchen when he fell backwards on to the kitchen table and on to a potato.

Look, if anal stimulation is your thing, at least invest in a quality
butt-plug from a reputable dealer. It might save you a trip to the
emergency room.

And while there are a lot of things that can be done in the nude, I
don’t think hanging curtains is one of them: there’s that whole
standing on a stepladder in front of an uncurtained window thing.