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.

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.

It is obvious to me the political stance and/or the political record of a candidate should be the core foundation on which arguments, for or against, are made.
Are we in agreement here?

It seems that when you have no issues to attack the image becomes the target.
Take Barack Obama for example. I have not heard or read one single single attack on him that was based on his work in politics. Everything that is slung at this guy from the opposition has to do with things that, in an intelligent debate, would be non-issues.
Things like his name. His full name is Barack Hussein Obama. Some of the mud-slingers have taken to calling him by his full a name and adding emphasis the the Hussein part. Does it really matter? Do they think American people are so stupid that we will think of some other Hussein now? I have even heard it pointed out that Obama sounds like Osama.
Talk about avoiding any real argument.
One blogger even tried to say that an anonymous source inside Hillary Clinton’s camp informed her that they had “dug up” information that Obama went to a Muslim school when he lived in Indonesia. A magazine that is owned and operated by the same company as the Washington Post (Liberal bias my ass) printed almost the same thing a short time later. Again with an anonymous source. The story then made it onto FauxNews.
Again they try to blind us with fear.
A spokesperson for Clinton’s camp denied that this story was true and went on to say it was an “an obvious right-wing hit job.”
The articles made it sound like this school was a training camp for future suicide bombers. The truth?

“This is a public school. We don’t focus on religion,” Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told CNN Senior International Correspondent John Vause. “In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don’t give preferential treatment.”

Obama in his two books, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope,” wrote about spending two years in a Muslim school and two years in a Christian school while in Indonesia. One thing that these “news” reports failed to mention was that Obama was in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10. Even if it was a school that taught hatred he has had a long time to step away from it. Look at it this way, how many things did you believe in at that age? How many do you still believe?

So where does that leave us?
Right back where we started.
So if you want to form your own opinion on Barack Obama and not let anyone else tell you what you should think you need look no further then the Congresspedia page on him.

Do the world a favor and think for yourself.