Greetings from Blue Indiana

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Final tally according to MSNBC this morning:


President-elect Obama: 1,352,356

Senator McCain: 1,329,370


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President-elect Barack Hussein Obama

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They just called it!

I can't see properly....the room's all blurry and shit. Something in the air...

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Update at 1.42 am:

I have to call it a night now. It doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things but, as I turn in, these are the numbers for Indiana:

99% of precincts reporting;

Obama: 1,348,276

McCain: 1,325,513

It bothers me that they haven't called it yet. But I am hopeful that I will wake up tomorrow to a 'Blue' Indiana.

Regardless, I am very happy that I will wake up to an America that just voted in President-elect Obama.

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Obama takes the lead in Indiana!

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With 94% of the precincts reporting,

Obama: 1248932

McCain: 1238955

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Now we wait.

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Polls are closed in my neck of the woods. We went door-to-door to get out the vote all day.
All I can say, from my experiences over the past few days, is that the support for Obama/Biden in these parts is far more than I would have imagined. Question is, is my microscopic sampling representative enough of the state as a whole? The polling over the past week has shown an incredibly close race----Will Indiana go to Obama/Biden?
We'll know soon.
Either way, I think that the Obama campaign has fundamentally changed the political landscape in Indiana. Yeah I know there are huge factors such as the economy responsible for the support that Obama has here. But regardless, Democrats are a force in Indiana again. The challenge is to now maintain the network and gameplan that the Obama campaign has put, and helped bring, together.

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Hey Mike Greenberg, Piss Off!

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So I'm driving into work and flip into 'Mike and Mike in the Morning' for a few minutes and hear Greenie say something like"...so-and-so just handed me this---I find it interesting, they didn't sing the national anthem last night before the baseball game..."

So far no harm done, but he continues with something like.....

"because of Barack Obama's commercial they abbreviated the pre-game and so didn't sing the national anthem..."

Really? Good job Greenie. Lay that at the feet of Unamerican Obama. I guess if they really wanted to sing the anthem the extra 50-60 seconds would have killed the whole affair, huh?

Or maybe it could have been because it was a continuation of a game that was halted mid-way, albeit two days ago? What's the rule on anthems? Is it at the beginning of a game? Or at the beginning of every new day's play? So if a game is stopped for rain at 11 pm and resumes 75 minutes later at 12.15 am, do they sing the anthem again? Any of this possible?

Or do you get an extra dog treat for kissing some major Disney executive ass by throwing Obama under the bus? Like you probably did earlier this summer when you guys couldn't stop kissing Dubi-ya's ass about the fiddling while rome bur....errr..... Tee-ball game at the White House..... that you were invited to?

I guess I've been pissed off at Mike and Mike for a while now---maybe if I listened all day, every day, I'd find out that I was mistaken---maybe I just catch them for the wrong 10 mins on the wrong couple of days every week---but in the glimpses that I get of them each week, they have begun to suck and pander worse and worse. Greenie seems exceptionally annoying, with an undercurrent of ever-growing pomposity (made only more annoying by his fake self-effacing shit).

It used to be a good, funny, entertaining show. It was a brilliant concept, you know. A dumb-jock act and a nerd-geek act! A truly brilliant concept when it was first done decades ago as the "Odd Couple". Heck, decades ago? It was probably done millenia ago! If we spelunked hard enough we'd probably find cave drawings advertising "Burp-farter and Wheel-inventor in the Morning!".

But the Odd Couple formula gets revived successfully every generation. And every good iteration of the Odd Couple is funny. For a while.

I'm thinking that that while has now elapsed for Mike and Mike.

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More Republican Socialism

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The $700 billion bailout was supposed to unfreeze the credit markets. The idea, in part, was that the Govt would give banks large amounts of money so that the banks would once again start lending money to those who need it.

Well, first we learned that Wall Street's top banks were going to use about $70 billion of that money for employee compensation (a substantial amount reportedly for BONUSES).

Now we learn that "U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years".

Gee, handouts are A-OK with the "fiscally conservative" Republicans as long as it is to their thieving buddies.

But just in case I am getting this thing totally wrong, I looked up Dictionary.com for some definitions.

Bonus: "Something given or paid over and above what is due".

Dividend (in the context of shareholders): "A sum of money paid to shareholders of a corporation out of earnings". (emphasis mine)

Hmm. Neither of those words imply any guarantees. As I understand it, if performance is poor, or if the company is having bad times with regard to earnings, one is guaranteed neither a bonus nor a dividend.

Where does the concept if guaranteed benefits come from?

Entitlement: "The right to guaranteed benefits under a government program, as Social Security or unemployment compensation".

Then again, I keep forgetting that all these definitions, these words of a language that I am so mentally shackled to, are all now OldSpeak.

I keep forgetting that for years now we have been using Newspeak. Silly me.

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A viewpoint from overseas

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An excellent article by George Monbiot in the Guardian titled "How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington" (h/t Onegoodmove)

Excerpts:

"How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance?....

....It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?"

Read the rest here. It is well worth the time.

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