It is just starting to fully sink in now.
Over the course of this election I watched, read and absorbed everything I could. Watched polls come in. Read the bloggers and journalists from both sides. Listened to people when they talked. Heard the hate and the praise. The hope and the fear. I was afraid. I was excited.
From my seat at my desk my eyes were assaulted with everything from hope so pure it made my heart ache to hatred so vile it made be clench my teeth until it hurt.
At first it seemed unlikely but over time things started looking better, more hopeful, but even then I didn’t feel content. As the polls came in for the primary run I got excited but still I felt that this wasn’t a sure thing.
Then the primary was won. I couldn’t believe it.
And I still couldn’t relax.
People screamed that he couldn’t win Hillary supporters. He couldn’t win whites. He couldn’t win Hispanics. I bit my nails.
More polls and more panic. It looked too good. Pundits talked about the Bradley effect. I didn’t buy it.
It looked close. Could we squeak by? Obama picked Biden. I loved the pick. It was perfect. But there was no southerner on the ticket. Shit. Can he grab any southern voters at all?
McCain picked Palin. Everyone with a working brain saw that pick for what it was. McCain got a small bump from the pick at first then she started to talk. Every time she opened he mouth pure bullshit fell out. I couldn’t help but laugh at her. She personally lost McCain any chance at stealing a majority of independent votes and any of the so-called Reagan Democrats. She spit hate and anger, played to the fear. She hyped up the idiots with her moronic words. But she failed. She successfully solidified the extremist fools into the main McCain support base instead of leaving them out on the fringe.
It looked bad for McCain.

Election day was stressful for me. My polling place is very close to my house and I could have voted at anytime but I waited. My wife was at work and I wanted to go as a family. So I waited. I bit my nails. I watched the news. I saw the lines. I read the stories of people crying tears of joy on the way out of their polling place. I read stories of voter caging. I was still worried.
Finally we went and voted. No wait at all. Went in, pulled levers, went out. We stopped by the Obama office after voting and it was packed. It was loud. It was full of energy. I was still worried.
Back to my couch to have a few beers and try to relax as I prepared for what I thought would be a long long night.

The numbers started creeping in as I sat there drinking my beer and chewing my lip. I stepped outside to make a few phone calls and noticed something strange. Silence. I live in a college neighborhood within throwing distance from a main road. No voices. No traffic sounds. Nothing. I have never heard it this quiet here.
OH, PA, VA, IA went blue. I screamed. More results came in. Some red, some blue. Around 10:30PM eastern my brain clicked in. Math. If CA, WA, HI went blue it was over, that was 270. We had it. My wife warned me that it was still to early to celebrate. My phone lit up with texts. Kelly was analyzing, Phil was worried.

11:00PM
The left cost goes blue! Holy shit! It is over! I’m still a bit worried though. Is this really it? It is only 11PM. No shenanigans?
A very classy concession from McCain. No speech from Palin thankfully. That is when it his me. Relief. It is over.
Another trip outside. It is now a different place. I can hear the shouts from the Obama office all the way over here. I’m smiling. I’m laughing. I’m happy. I am actually happy.
I watch people show up for the victory speech in Chicago. A massive sea of people. I don’t ever think I have ever seen that many people in one place. All the faces happy. Many of them crying. All of them united no matter their race or creed. It was amazing. The camera panned over and I saw Jesse Jackson. He was crying. It nearly killed me.

After it was over, after everyone was gone or asleep, I cried.

We are finally here. It was a long and amusing process. There have been a lot of exciting moments and probably an equal amount of screaming-at-the-TV moments. All of those moments are inconsequential compared to the small moment you will have when you step inside that voting booth.
Now go. Vote. This post will still be here when you come back from doing your duty as a citizen of this great nation.

Back? Voted? Got your sticker and your free coffee from Starbucks?
Good.

Before I start spitting my anger and sarcasm I would like to take a moment out to thank Madelyn Payne Dunham, the grandmother of Barack Obama. Thank you for helping to shape Senator Obama into the man that will hopefully be our next president. She got the chance to vote for her grandson in the presidential election but she sadly will not have the chance to see him lead. My heart and wll wishes go out to her entire family. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86.

I’m going to be kind of sad once this is all over. I’ve never yelled at my television this much when I wasn’t watching hockey. This has been an exciting time for me. Nerve wracking, but exciting. I really enjoyed watching the McCain campaign venture into the inane with their bullshit attacks and fear mongering. For all the shit they threw at Obama, after all the times they tried to link him to terrorists, extremists, socialism, after all that the make an ad that ended with saying Obama wasn’t ready to be president… yet.
Yet.
The yet implies he will be ready eventually. But at the same time they want you to believe he is evil. How the hell are we supposed to take these fucksticks seriously if they refute themselves?
All the slander, all the lies, the fear mongering, the bullshit, the general douchebaggery coming out of the Republican mouthpieces to me feels frantic. And judging by the current numbers over at Pollster the American populace is ignoring it. Pollster has Obama at 291 electoral votes (273 strong, 18 lean), McCain at 142 (129 strong, 13 lean). 105 in the tossup. With that math McCain could take all of his strong states, all of his lean states, all of the toss up and, get this, all of the Obama lean states and would still lose. It would be close but he would still lose.
All that and I am still nervous. I think after the last two elections no democratic voter should feel comfortable.

One thing that does make me smile is the final Senate Score Card from fivethirtyeight.com:

That looks like good news doesn’t it?

I hope when this is over we can finally tell the Republican party what they deserve to hear:

Get the fuck out.

This is just an idea I have been kicking around for some time so bear with me as I flesh it out.
Pollsters do not call cellphones at all. How many voters are they missing due to that? Exit polls in ‘04 showed that only 7% of voters lived in cell phone only households so the impact would be small. Especially when broken down state by state. How much has that number changed in 4 years?
According to Pew Research the percentage of Americans between 18-24 that can only be reached by cell phones is 30.6. while the percentage of all adults that fit that bill is 14.5.
I really need more data to really make any significant predictions based on this, preferably something broken down state by state, but just going by this one set of numbers you can form a basic idea.
If 30.6% of 18-24 yearolds cannot be polled there is a good chuck of data the normal polling methods are missing. Now, we know not all of them are voters but we do see a trend in that age group to lean heavily toward Obama and a huge spike in voter registrations.

What can we infer from this? Whatever conclusion you come to doesn’t look good for McCain.

Watch Sarah Palin get destroyed by Senator Joe Biden!

I have been looking forward to this debate since Palin was announced for the job. Who else is excited to watch what I am predicting will be a glorious crash and burn?
Palin gave McCain a giant bump when she was chosen but one she started opening her mouth the poll number went directly into the tank. Last Gallup poll shows Obama at +5 nationally. FiveThirtyEight.com currently has Obama at +6 nationally. Things look even better when broken up state-by-state. Obama leads McCain 250 to 163 electoral votes with 125 still in the toss-up column. Out of those toss up states Obama has a slight lead in most of them, including Ohio and Florida, for another possible 79 electoral votes.

I predict that the debate tonight will only make the McCain campaign sink even further into this electoral vortex that seems to be directly caused by Palin.

In an attempt to pull fence sitting Clinton supporters, Christian extremists and the three electoral votes from Alaska to his side McCain has announced that Sarah Palin (Gov. Alaska) is his pick for VP. I wonder if she knows how many houses she owns?

Well, this should kill McCain’s experience based attacks on Obama. She has been Governor for less than two years and before that a stint as the part-time mayor of a village of 6,000. Her education consists of a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a minor in polisci. Oh, and former Ms. Alaska runner up! McCain is trying to tell me that she is ready to lead this county when he shuffles off to the underground old folks home but Obama isn’t?
From her extraordinarily short record all I can tell about her is that she is anti-choice (member of the anti-choice group called Feminists for Life.), anti-gay rights and all for drilling in ANWR.
Remember when McCain was shitting his bed over Obama only visiting Iraq once? Well, Palin has never been there. Not once. Good work on undermining your own attacks.
I really would like to see how this effects the polls in Alaska, a normally red state that is currently in the toss-up column with Obama leading by 3 points according to Pollster.com.
Did I mention she is currently under ethics investigation for abuse of power? Alaska seems to be a hotbed of this sort of shit.

With McCain answering every attack on him with his “Noun, verb, P.O.W.” bullshit I would like to see her follow suit and reply with “Noun, verb, beauty queen” because, lets be honest, they really both have the same weight when judging the ability to lead the country.

Stealth edit:
Larry Kudlow of CNBC’s “Kudlow & Co.” asked her about the possibility of becoming McCain ticket mate.
Palin replied: “[A]s for that V.P. talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the V.P. does every day? I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that V.P .slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here for the rest of the U.S., before I can even start addressing that question.”

Or at least it should but who knows if Clinton is even properly attached to reality anymore. She has been living the last few months in a land of unicorns and rainbows. Funnily enough that land of make believe is right next door to the “permanent war is good” land of make believe that McBush is living in.

This just in: Clinton to ride a candy coated unicorn to deliver a speech tonight where, according to her campaign, she will not concede but she will acknowledge that Obama has enough delegates to win the nomination. I am actually getting quite sick of Clinton moving the goalposts.
I don’t know how Clinton and her rabid supporters can overlook what has been obvious to the rest of the planet: It is over. It has been over for a long time now. Pack up, go home, the game is over.

One thing that you probably won’t hear all that much tonight is that there is a Republican primary in New Mexico too. Pay attention to that one and see what percentage of the vote John W. McBush actually gets. The Republican party is hardly unified behind him. Hell, even just today Cheney was criticizing McBush and his plan to cut the gas tax for the summer.

Obama has been playing this one well. While Clinton still takes shots at him while trying to stay relevant he has started acting like the Democratic nominee. He has been ignoring her and focusing his attacks directly at Old Man Warmonger.

A question I have to any McCain supporters that read this:
Why didn’t McCain support the new G.I. bill? Why didn’t he even bother to show up to vote on it?
As a veteran he should be appalled by the way this administration has treated the troops. Inadequate supplies of body armor, inadequate care when they come home. And that is just the tip of this bloody iceberg. How can you, John McCain, in good conscience say you support our troops when you are not willing to even give them better college benefits when they come home. If they come home.
Our soldiers fight and die every day, every minute of every god damned day for this bullshit war that you want so badly to inherit and you aren’t willing to even help them better their lives when they come home.
The act is, you don’t support our troops. The fact is, you are just using them for your own political gain.
I have two more words for you McCain:
Fuck You.

Widely ignored was the fact that Pennsylvania has two primaries. The Democratic one that everyone paid attention to and the fully ignored Republican one. Honestly the Republican primary shouldn’t even be news worthy because they have their nominee in John McCain but something strange is happening here.

Out of 791,205 Republican votes McCain only picked up 72.7%. Crazy assed Ron Paul picked up 15.9 and Mike “Change The Constitution for Jesus” Huckabee got 11.4. Huckabee dropped out a while ago and he still got double digits. I guess when your main selling point is being a term extension for the extraordinarily shitty Bush policies not everyone can get behind you. Not even your own party. Losing over a quarter of your vote when you are the nominee has to be embarrassing.

Even before McCain was the nominee voter turnout for the Republican primaries has been startlingly low while the Democratic side has been pulling in record numbers. A very bad sign for anyone with a hope for McCain.

Keep on yelling you old coot, nobody is really listening to you anymore. After the shit this country was put through by Bush we can not afford to have you at our helm.

It is really no secret that I support one Democrat over the other but if my pick doesn’t make it through to the general election you better damn well believe I will still step into that voting booth and pull the lever for Democrat. I know most of the Democratic supporters will do the same thing. Can you say the same for your team? Not currently.

The only tool he has that can pull his party together is the same tool Bush has been using to abuse his power. Fear. Lucky for America it seems that we have stopped falling for that bogyman. Don’t believe me? Check his ratings. 69% disapproval as of this month. That is lower then his father. Lower then Nixon. It is officially the lowest approval rating in recorded history beating out Truman’s 67% disapproval in January 1952.

Congratulations on that shit-stained landmark Mr. Bush! Now hurry the fuck off the stage, the grownups need to run the county now.

While the answer to that question should honestly be the retirement home for old crazy coots what I want to know is who he is going to choose as his V.P. Or more accurately, who the GOP will let him choose.

Condoleezza Rice: This is the person I’m betting on if the GOP really wants McCain to win this one. Selecting her isn’t about her politics. It isn’t about her qualifications. It isn’t about her experience.
It is about her race. It is about her gender. It would be an attempt to one-up the Democrats. The Dems have, on one side, a black man and on the other a white woman running for the nomination. If the GOP tossed about a black woman for the VP it would be an attempt to prove they are as, if not more, progressive then their Democratic opponents and pick them up some independent votes.

Mitt Romney: I have heard his name tossed around a lot but I don’t think he would want it. He spent so much cash aiming at the presidency I think he will be aiming for it again next round. Plus I don’t think it would get McCain many new votes as there are better choices to stroke the religious right. Unless you count the Mormon areas.

Mike Huckabee: This is the reason that Huckabee stayed in the race when he knew he was dead. He would grab the attention and votes of the Jesus crew. He would effectively kill off the chance of any independent votes swinging to McCain and would virtually guarantee McCain a loss. If the republican party wants to keep the Jesus crew happy and doesn’t mind throwing McCain to the wolves you might see this one.

Jeb Bush: “The Other White Bush”. If McCain really wants to run as the third term of Bush this will be his choice. It would also set up Jeb for his shot at the presidency. Fuck that is scary.

Hillary Clinton: Also one of the names buzzing around. People think that her attacks on Obama and her quasi-praise for McCain point to this end. Bad idea. The Clinton family has a position of power within the democratic party and I don’t think they want to lose it. Imagine if she switched then lost the race. You think the republicans would accept her into a power role? Not a chance.
She likes the power and that is why she is where she is.

There is also the choice of a retired high ranking military officer. Good choice for McCain if he wants to go all-in as “The War President V2.0″

It is no secret that I think McCain is a royal fuckstick that will happily suck any dick he can to get the presidency but now that he has the nomination and the backing of Bush some things are starting to look strange to me. To be honest, when this whole mad dash for the White House began I would have never picked McCain to be the nominee. The only ones I thought were less likely were Paul (A racist) and Keys (A guy who, after losing to Obama in the U.S. Senate election in Illinois, said that Senators should be appointed by state legislatures and no longer elected by the people).
So how did McCain get here? The people. They want him.
Here is the thing. He will lose. His party knows it and they are more then happy to let him take the hit. Why? The don’t like him much. His nomination is turning the party away from the religious right. If he gets killed in the general it will actually give more power to the religious right within the Republican party when the smoke clears. I can see the seeds backlash already forming within his party.
You know what? Fine by me.
Let them become more crazy. Let them move further from center. Further from power.
Here is the question:
Will this cause a split in the Republican party? Will the religious right split off and finally form their own party, removing their parasitic infection that has been sucking the life from the Republicans? Or will the Jesus-free conservatives have to find a new home?

What about a running mate for McCain? I know the religious right is pushing for one of their own, maybe even Huckabee, but there is a problem with that. McCain will lose all of his independent votes with Huckabee. Will adding the votes from the religious right give him a net gain after losing the independents? If not then there is no reason to pair with a religious running mate. Who could possibly give him a gain in votes and make him competitive against the Democrats?
The Republicans are currently looking at being the generic white guy in a historic election. Who could help them?
Condoleezza Rice.
I hate to break it down to race or gender but that is how a lot of people see it. I guess we will see how it goes.

This is the vote I was waiting for. The torture vote. This vote would require the intelligence community to follow the Army Field Manual in regards to torture. This would effectively make waterboarding illegal.
McCain, a former POW who was tortured, has spoken about waterboarding on several occasions saying waterboarding “is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.” and “very exquisite torture.” In fact McCain was one of the few Republicans that spoke out against torture. He even supported the Detainee Treatment Act back in ‘06, which would “bar cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of any detainee.”
So how did he vote? Did he stick to his guns even though they are unpopular with the idiots in his party or did he sell out?
The fucker sold out. Maybe McCain needs a refresher course on what it is like to be tortured.

On top of all this Daisy Cutter over at Daily Kos did a little bit of digging and found that McCain monetarily supported the Nicaraguan Contras.

McCain supporters, you have been fleeced. Now touch the monolith little monkeys and see the truth.