Monthly Archives: November 2008

And now, all the news sources seem to be calling Proposition 8 as having passed.

I'm always suspicious of those day-after statements where the folks who lose declare some sort of circuitous victory. I'm sure there are Conservative sites and talk shows where, even as we speak, it's being explained that Obama's victory is the best thing that could have happened to the Republican party and that Democrats will rue this day. You always have to ask yourself if they would have said the opposite if the vote had gone the other way. Does anyone ever say, "We'll regret our victory!"?

Still, we all know that same-sex marriage ain't going away as an issue…just as the controversy wouldn't disappear completely if the vote had been 52-48 in the other direction. It lost again but incrementally, it seems to be losing by a smaller and smaller margin — and be backed by younger and younger voters — with each skirmish. So while I don't think this is a victory in any way, I also don't think it's a long-term victory. Just maybe until the next election or, at worst, the one after.

In other news: Some news outlets have awarded Indiana's 11 votes to Obama, putting him at 349. Still looks like he may get Missouri and/or North Carolina.

How things change overnight. When I went to bed, Obama was at 338 electoral votes with Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina still dangling…Al Franken was in a squeaker with Norm Coleman in Minnesota…and California's Proposition 8 was leading but still too close to call. And now here we are in the cold, clear morning and Obama is at 338 electoral votes with Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina still dangling…Al Franken is in a squeaker with Norm Coleman in Minnesota…and California's Proposition 8 is leading but still too close to call.

Obviously, Obama's exact electoral total doesn't matter a lot except to those of us who have predictions on the line. If he wins either Indiana or Missouri but not both and not North Carolina, he'd be at my number, 349. I think I'm going to be low here. We'll announce our winner-of-nothing when things settle down.

The last hour before I turned in, Franken and Coleman were truly neck and neck: Franken was up 600, then Coleman was up 1200, then it was Franken by 800, then Coleman. That was on the Talking Points Memo site. Sometimes, I'd peek over at cnn.com and I guess they were getting their numbers in a different order because when Franken was up on one site, Coleman was leading at the other…but both sites said they had identical percentages of precincts reporting. It must have been Roller Coaster Time at the candidates' respective headquarters.

Apparently, a resolution of that race will hinge on a recount. I've met Franken a few times and he seems like a smart, serious guy with a real determination to take on the sleazier conventions of Washington such as lobbyists and tainted money. Coleman's recent legal problems suggest he's typical of the kind of thing Franken stands against so I hope Al prevails. Then again, it might be fun to see Coleman win and then have to stand investigation and trial.

If Proposition 8 indeed passes here, it would be the one real negative of the election for me. I still think gay marriage is not an "if" but a "when"…and this is another example of how lives are harmed and resources are wasted while we postpone the inevitable. Same-sex couples are going to get their full marriage rights some day…why not now? It's not just the 16,000-18,000 couples who were wed and now must endure legal challenges and debates about their lives. It's that the state is still officially making all gays into second-class citizens.

Yesterday afternoon, I was over at Cedars-Sinai for a routine checkup. As I was leaving, I was stopped politely by two women…and I think they said their names were Lynn and Stef. They explained quickly and nervously that they were a married couple and they were approaching as many people as possible, urging them to make sure to vote against Proposition 8. They've been together for almost twenty years, love each other dearly and as one put it, "We aren't hurting anyone but discrimination is hurting us."

Analogies that compare gay rights to the struggles for racial and gender equality are not always fair. In this case though, the arguments that civil unions are "just as good" sure sound to me like that senator who once said that coloreds weren't getting discriminated against. After all, they have their own water fountains and the water's the same in them.

I understand that some people honestly fear that allowing gay marriage is a "loss" for their religion or that it's emblematic of some sort of moral degradation and they feel the need to push back. But I wish those who feel that way strongly enough to back things like Proposition 8 could meet a few more people like those two ladies outside the hospital yesterday. I think a lot of them would be hard-pressed to see same-sex unions as a threat; not if they had to explain that to Lynn and Stef.

If you have DirecTV, turn over to channel 102. You can watch ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and Comedy Central all at the same time. You can only hear the audio from one (while I've been watching, it's been ABC) but it's kind of an interesting way to look at it all. And I like the fact that they included Comedy Central. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are as much America's newsmen as the guys in the other boxes like Hume and Blitzer.

Also pretty good…and some of the rhetoric made a nice fit with Senator McCain's.

Well, let's see. All the networks have Obama at 338 electoral votes. If he wins Indiana or Missouri, either one could give him 11 more and he'd hit my prediction of 349. But he could win both and he's also leading in North Carolina, which I figured would go McCain on us. So maybe I underestimated the guy.

Can I just say that some of the networks spent way too much money on fancy computer graphics? Blitzer on CNN and Chuck Todd over on MSNBC looked like they were trapped in bad videogames.

I like that the victory seems to be unquestioned. For all the fears about stolen votes and malfunctioning voting machines, those concerns seem to have gone away once the returns began coming in. There'll be a few charges of vote theft (or simple ineptness) and they oughta be investigated and rectified even though they won't be numerous enough to change the outcome.

I'll think of more stuff to write in a little while. I just realized I haven't eaten.

It has a nice ring to it.

The remote software that runs this weblog decided to go rogue on me shortly after the previous posting. I wrote some pithy things that might have been funny if they'd been posted at the time but they wouldn't post. Here's what's on my mind at the moment…

In the ten minutes before polls closed in the west and CNN called the race for Obama, Wolf Blitzer kept "hinting" (with all the subtlety of a Gallagher finale) that something big would happen shortly. During this time, he also kept talking about how many people were watching CNN around the world, showing us crowd shots in Kenya and other locales. At first, I thought he was pushing too hard the idea that the whole planet is watching CNN.

And then I realized: It's not that they're watching CNN. It's that they're watching America change its government. That does not happen in every country, at least not without bloodshed. It's one of our strengths as a nation. Every so often, the citizens can get together and change the government. It reminds you that that "We, the People…" thing isn't just for show.

McCain's concession speech — obviously written, probably written some time ago — was generally classy, even if (understandably) some in his audience were not. It may be the first time I've had any respect for John McCain since he began running for President. I'm sorry we seem to live in a country where you can't talk like that until after you lose.

One of my Conservative friends is near suicidal at this moment, lamenting that America is now going to go Communist and surrender to terrorists and I think he also believes that flowers will no longer bloom in the meadow. I have suggested to him that he's suffering the pangs of believing his own bull; that one of the reasons Obama won is that most of America didn't buy all that crap about him being a Socialist or a co-conspirator with mad bombers and such, perhaps because it wasn't true.

Whoops. Obama's about to speak. I want to pay attention to this.

It's not over. McCain could still carry all the houses he owns.

There are many places on the 'net where you can follow election returns tonight but Talking Points Memo has set up an interactive map that looks — to use the most overused word in the English language during the last decade — awesome.

Since there are eight million other places on the Internet where you can read observations about the election, I feel like I should blog about old sitcoms or places to get great pizza today. How about great pizza? A couple weeks ago when Len Wein and I flew back to Columbus for Mid-Ohio Con, we had a stopover in the Phoenix airport and we shared one of those Pizza Hut pizzas-for-one. Pizza Hut usually proves the rule that franchised pizza can never be great and can at best be just (barely) adequate. But they had this new four-cheese something-or-other — some kind of deluxe thing that cost a buck or two more — and it was darned delicious. If you're stuck in an airport, be on the lookout.

Well, that's about as much as I can write without discussing the election. News reports of long lines make me glad I voted early by mail…but because I did, I feel oddly non-participatory in what looks to be a historic, nation-changing day for this nation and maybe the world. Being in California, my vote for President is largely ceremonial but there's something stirring about going into a polling place, interacting with the precinct workers and your fellow voters. I almost think I'd enjoy standing in one of those long lines today. Note the "almost."

I sure hope the election is relatively clean. As disappointing as Gore's loss in 2000 was to some of us, I think it was even more disappointing that legitimate reports of voting irregularities were trampled and ignored and in some cases, treated like after-the-fact cheating attempts. No one whose guy won seemed to have the slightest concern that some citizens who had a right to vote (and a right to have those votes honestly counted) were denied their rights. It was like, "We won so quit your whining." It's tempting to wish that Republicans would experience the victimized side of that situation but it wouldn't lead to meaningful reform. It would just escalate the slap fight.

This is not something we can or should "get over." It's something we should fix. People should not be going to the polls today, as so many are, half-convinced their ballot will be stolen or that they'll vote for Obama and the machine will decide that one black guy's like another and tally another for Alan Keyes. We'd holler Bloody Murder and it would shut down our economy if ATMs counted our money as recklessly as votes are counted in this country. And the problem seems so fixable…if only we could get past the idea that the system is only broken when it doesn't deliver for you.

I've got to get some work done today so I can devote a lot of attention this evening to the election coverage. Enjoy whatever you can of all this…and if you haven't voted yet, today might be a good day to get it over with.

Well, one way or another, tomorrow's going to be a very interesting day…

Have the networks called the election yet?

I'm sorry…I mistyped or misphrased or mis-somethinged. I said Jeannine Riley, who was in that 1967 Li'l Abner pilot, had appeared on the (then) recently-cancelled Petticoat Junction. But Petticoat Junction wasn't cancelled until 1970. Ms. Riley left the series in 1965, which is why she was available to play Daisy Mae.