Month: November 2004

There is a lot of self-examination and venting going on over on the left side of the blogosphere, and many of my right-leaning colleagues are a fine job of keeping an eye on it.
Me, not so much. I’m pretty much writing off anything written or said by lefties for the next few weeks.
Remember Jane’s Law:
Jane’s Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.
To which I think a corrollary is appropriate: “…doubly so in the weeks immediately following an election.”
Leave the poor lefties alone for a while. They’ll sort themselves out in a month or so, and then the serious discussions — and battles — will begin again…

Have you checked out the Daily News yet?
There are enhancements to it coming, but the core functionality seems to be humming along quite nicely. Feedback/comments are welcome…

Captain Ed has of the post-mortem on Election Day exit polls:
In other words, despite the rantings of conspiracy theorists on both sides, what we have here is another episode of incompetence in a process that never should be used for predictions on Election Day anyway. Perhaps the media will learn that lesson for 2006, but incompetence stretches far beyond the pollsters, and I doubt that the decisionmakers at the consortium are immune from its influence.
Update: Eugene Volokh has more.

Since I was a bit of an asshole to John Edwards yesterday, I feel somewhat obligated to say this clearly: his wife Elizabeth and his whole family have my best wishes and my sincere hope is for illness to bring a swift recovery.

So the biggest inside-baseball story of the election was that the exit polls proved to be and utter crap.
So today, what perennial feature is in all the MSM outlets? Why, demographic stories based on those very same exit polls, of course!
Could somebody explain to me why, when the exit polls couldn’t accurately predict a simple question like “will Kerry or Bush win”, we should believe them when they say “Although seven in 10 voters were worried about another major attack on U.S. soil, a majority nonetheless felt the nation was safer than four years ago”?

Note to self: Find out what stocks Kos has invested in. And them like there’s no tomorrow.
Because, well, damn.

Double hat tip: OTB and RedState

To:	John Kerry
From:	N.Z. Bear
Re:	Recommended plan for the morning

1. Tell Edwards to go fetch you some coffee. Suggested phrasing: “Since you couldn’t deliver any damned electoral votes, at least you can bring me my f****ng Starbucks.”
2. Enjoy leisurely breakfast with Teresa. Take her to Denny’s. Everybody loves Denny’s. And she enjoys a “morning with the commoners” every now and again.
3. Take a good hard look at the supposed battleground that is Ohio. You’re by 136,221. According to the Secretary of State, there are only 135,149 provisional ballots as of this morning. How does that math look to you? Even if the provisional list is incomplete and more come in, what do you think the chances of successfully chery-picking challenges to make up your gap? Go ask John E, he’s a lawyer. We’ll wait.
4. Have you noticed you lost Iowa, too?
5. Remember that little scandal in 2000 about the popular vote? Stare at these numbers for a few minutes and think about how much fun you’ll have with all your challenges given this as a backdrop:

Bush	58,241,287	51%
Kerry	54,691,010	48%

That’s a 3.5 million vote gap, friend. Do you really want to be a “selected-not-elected” President who sues himself to power — assuming for a second you’d win if you tried, which you won’t.
6. Take a deep breath. Give Teresa a kiss.
7. Call President Bush and do the right thing.

Around the ‘sphere:
Let’s mix things up a bit and start with the left side. First, DailyKos on Ohio: “I think even successful challenges are unlikely to change the ultimate outcome, which is not to say I don

I’m going to skip Ohio. I’m calling the election. It’s Bush: we’re done.
Update: But if you’re still paying attention, Bush just squeaked ahead of Kerry in Iowa.
10:12 pm: “Wizbang Calls Election For Bush”
11:00 pm: And I’m heading to bed. The Electoral College is a done deal; now the question is what Bush’s margin in the popular vote will be. It looks quite promising to be 51% or above, but there’s still a lot of votes to be counted here in California. So that’ll be what I check in the morning. But for now, I’m out. Have a good night, all!

CNN has Bush at EV.
New Mexico is 74% reported, and breaking 51% – 48% Bush. If it, and Ohio hold (83% reporting, Bush 51% – Kerry 48%), that’s 25 EVs to put Bush over the top — and that’s all she wrote.

If I’m reading it correctly, it appears that stock is crashing on the Iowa Electronic Market.
The REP04_L52 contract, denoting a Bush win with less than 52% of the vote, is now trading at 0.815, with REP04_G52 (a Bush win with greater than 52% of the vote) trading at 0.140.
Kerry’s DEM04_L52 is at 0.055, and DEM04_G52 is now a penny stock, at 0.006.

Kevin thinks its time to call Ohio. I’m not quite there yet….
Update: Whoops. With 74% reporting, the Bush lead in Ohio has closed to 51% – 49%. Stop that.

Florida now has of precincts reporting, Bush is up 52% to 47%. And still nobody has the guts to call it.
‘Cept me and Jeff, that is!
Update: 96%! They really are going to wait until 100% have reported, aren’t they?
Update again: And Kevin!
Finally: OK, now ABC and CBS are calling it for Bush…

I’ve suddenly figured out something of vital importance to blogosphere’s ongoing struggle against the evil forces of Big Media. It occurs to me that the MSM has finally discovered a strategy to get troublesome bloggers to stop blogging: invite them to appear on TV and then stash them in the studio, from their comfy blogging environments.
Glenn seems to be soldiering bravely on, but from listening to his appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s election coverage tonight, I’m afraid John Hinderaker may have been effectively neutralized by MSNBC, who apparently have had him stashed in a studio since 3pm for only a few minutes of airtime.
On the plus side, NBC also got Wonkette. Every cloud, silver lining, etc…
Update: I told you so!

I’ll second call on Florida. TTLB calls it for Bush.
CNN shows Bush up 52 – 47 with 85% of precincts reporting, including the majority of Kerry-leaning Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Any state which hadn’t done its best Bolivia impression in 2000 would have been called by the networks an hour ago.

You know, all this waiting is actually kind of boring. Anybody got a deck of cards?

Vanessa Kerry, on MSNBC, describing how character attacks drive young people away from politics: “It’s sort of a bummer, if you’ll take a colloquialism.”
I love it when the elite “get down” verbally with us….

I hereby take Jarvis’s Post-Election Peace Pledge:
After the election results are in, I promise to:
: Support the President, even if I didn’t vote for him.
: Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
: Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
: Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.
…with my only qualification being that I pledge to uphold my standards of civilized discourse, not anybody else’s. For a man who loves Howard Stern, sometimes Jeff’s standards can be a bit lofty for a humble bear such as I…

Folks: I’ve collecting as many election-day web resources as I can find and listed them below. Please add additional resources to the comments / via TrackBacks, and I’ll continue to update this page throughout the day.
Results Tracking: Blogs & LittleMedia
Results 2004 Page: A nice clean single-page listing of all state’s results.
Electoral-Vote.com: “I will stay up all night election night and update the site in real time. I am NOT promising to stay up until we know who the president is. I would definitely like to go to bed sometime during the month of November…”
RealClearPolitics
ElectionAtlas.org
TownHall.com
Results Tracking: Big Media
MSNBC
CNN
FoxNews
The New York Times
The Washington Post
USA Today
Note: Some of the BigMedia pages are their generic election pages; I’ll update them to point to their results pages when they post them.
Blog Coverage
The Command Post: Detailed group-blog coverage including bloggers from every state.
ElectionHell.com: More voting fraud coverage than you can possibly tolerate.
The Horserace Blog
FraudWatch at Backcountry Conservative
Note: I’m not listing individual bloggers unless the blog’s explicit focus is the election (i.e. ElectionHell), as I’m assuming pretty much everybody is blogging today.
UPDATE: I am also maintaining a simplified version of this listing suitable for use as a Mozilla or IE sidebar: electionsidebar.html.
For Mozilla, you can make this into a sidebar by:
1) Bookmarking it
2) Opening your Bookmarks folder by selecting Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks
3) Highlight the bookmark you just created by left-clicking once.
4) Right-click for the menu and select Properties
5) Check the box which says ‘Load this Bookmark in the Sidebar’
For Internet Explorer, bookmark the following link: TTLB Election Tracker
For Opera: I have no clue! I don’t use Opera. Can anybody who does offer suggestions / instructions?

Last Thursday, The New York Times published weblog story which included the following statement:
“A recent posting on DailyKos, a liberal Web site visited by more than 500,000 people daily, according to blog rankings posted on a site called The Truth Laid Bear…”
Friday, I contacted the Times requesting a correction, as the quote misrepresents what the SiteMeter “daily visits” tracked on my listing really means. But as the exchange I posted showed, I was unable to convince Bill Borders of the Times that a correction was needed.
After Glenn, Jeff, and Bill posted on the matter, I forwarded their comments to Bill and to the NYT’s Public Editor, Daniel Okrent.
And finally, yesterday: results! Bill Borders replied once again, and said: “I finally got an explanation that I understand, from the research director of the New York Times Web site, and now — belatedly — I see the point you were making. So I think now that we probably DO need a correction. Thanks for your patience. ”
So keep an eye on the Corrections page, and credit the Times for being willing to learn; albeit a bit slowly.
Update: The correction has been published.