always low prices. always -or- from china with love

I haven't mentioned my hatred of WalMart lately, have I? It's too bad...especially being that it's the Official Christmas Shopping Season™ (cue the Battle Hymn of the Republic)...

Well, the China Daily is reporting that WalMart procurement from China has increased 20% each year, two years in a row. This coming from a company that claims it's all about America...

Fucking bastards are going to pull the whole fucking world down yellow smiley face hole.

drama on live journal

Rachelle Waterman had a Live Journal...her last post read: "Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered"

Who murdered Rachelle's mom you might ask? Well, two ex-boyfriends of her...at her request. That was on Sunday, November 14th. Notice her entry of that day...the day her mother died and she knew she had died. She starts off "Well back from anchorage and it was an okay trip. I got kinda sick but oh well". Just nonchalant. Disgusting.

Looking back through older posts, there are haunting signals of her problems. In her February 24th post she wrote "I don't know weather to kill somebody, myself, or just curl up into a fetal position under my covers and lay there for a couple of days. Either way....I'm not good....." A wrong choice of words on her part to say the least.

I don't know. As the blogosphere becomes more and more inhabited, I can't help but feel that these sorts of stories might become more common...the troubled teenager about to shoot up his school, publishing his issues in his blog; an angry housewife fed-up with her husband's cheating ways announcing to the world that she has killed him. It becomes a sort of wire for all the sick personal press releases of the world.

As for Rachelle...she's not getting away with murder at least.

now that i'm done feeling sorry for myself...

I got paid a lot of money last week, so I did my Christmas shopping (as I've mentioned) and paid my bills through the middle of next month. I also bought some new clothes. "Some" is an understatement...I've doubled my wardrobe or will once I get some t-shirts sent here from T-shirtHell (I got this shirt as well another secret one for wearing to bars and parties and such). I'm almost surprised by my choice of clothes this time around. They are (aside from the t-shirt hell t-shirts) mostly dark and very plain...nothing colorful, nothing fancy. Just button up shirts and long-sleeve pull over type things...all solid-color. A change of pace from my usual stuff. I think I look more grown-up in them, or at least a little less slobbish...though that isn't saying too much. Most importantly, I bought all the clothes for pretty cheap at good ol' Meijer (which is a step up from my usual outfitter - Goodwill).

This is, of course, all superfluous nonsense for me to speak about except it applies to my more general attempts as of late to better myself.

more of the same

I hate this time of the year. As the perpetually lonely, there's always no one...and always others with others to make me jealous. It's not fair, I know that, but it's the way that it is. I'm not worthy of happiness.

Of course I don't mean that, well, I do but I don't. Blech.

You know, this sadness wouldn't overcome me so often if I had people in my life that understood me. Who were whole enough to realize that I have needs too...I'm stuck out in the middle of nowhere, all I hear all day is my stepmom's bitching, my dad's Homerness, and my brother's videogames. I want to hear the voice of a friend, I want to hear someone else's voice. Hell, I just want to be heard. But that's asking too much. I have spent today on the verge of tears because all I want is someone to care enough to call. But they don't. They don't give a fuck. Nobody gives a fuck.

That's exaggeration. That's frustration dripping from my fingertips. I don't mean that at all. Or only a little. Fact is, I know I'm cared for, I know I'm loved. I just want to be loved more than I am. For that I am selfish. For that I don't deserve to be happy.

i am depressed

It's not the sort of depression that I went through in the first months of this blog, just a sort of stuck sort of thing...I am so ready to kick my life in gear and yet I have to wait, for various reasons beyond my control. Patience I have in buckets, but sometimes buckets isn't enough to put out the fire.

I really want to talk and be around my friends, but I can't get a hold of any. I know that shouldn't bother me, but it does. Some friends more than others.

iraqis + elections = "let's wait awhile"

From Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Leading Iraqi political parties, including the two main Kurdish groups closely allied to the United States, called on Friday for elections scheduled for Jan. 30 to be delayed because of Iraq (news - web sites)'s widening violence.

Following a meeting at the Baghdad home of Adnan Pachachi, an influential, moderate Sunni leader and former presidential candidate, 15 political parties and groups signed a petition calling for the election to be put off for up to six months.

Who would have guessed that the Bush administration's drive for elections to still be held in January were unrealistic? How much does anyone want to bet that the Bush administration tries to deny these Iraqi politicians' request for another month so that Bush can come out in January when some "unforseen event" will require the elections to be pushed back?

happy belated thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving, I did. Then again, if you're one of the Canadians or other backwards, unAmerican foreigners :P who read this site, I hope you had a good Thursday.

Some people, I know, didn't so much: Dispute over turkey blamed for stabbings.

conservative hoopla de jur

The big story yesterday on Drudge and Rush was court filing made in California where a teacher was banned from handing out copies of the Declaration of the Independence for references to God made in it. The story is here and The Smoking Gun has it's say here.

The more I think about the story, the more I have a feeling that there's something fishy behind it. I read through the point by point offered in the court papers found on TSG and it just feels like there's more being not said than there is being said...as if this teacher has focused a little too much on Christianity in the past, and hovers over it a bit too much when teaching history. After all, the principal of the school hasn't taken this measure against any other teachers, even when those other teachers' materials reference God. I don't know, it sounds like there's more going on under the surface than we even know.

But that probably isn't what's important anyway...

I was pissed when I read the original story. If, in fact, the Declaration of Independence was banned from a school for it's reference to God that would be going way too far. Monkeys at the Teh Soapbox can read my initial impression here. But now I'm starting to see it as a deception on the part of the right to divide America even more than it already is...pointing out how crazy far the left has gone with the PC thing. I think there's a campaign of misinformation here that's choosing to make this look like some poor teacher being unduly harrassed by The Secular Man™ (TSM) for his religious beliefs and in so doing TSM is taking sacred historical documents down with him. It's designed to have become news the day before Thanksgiving so that people can talk about it over Turkey Dinner and while standing outside in line at WalMart at 5am the day after Thanksgiving -- the hate digging in deep before the story can be debunked on Monday.

And I'm not the only one. Seeing the Forest has a much better and more thourough examination of the ideas and tactics seemingly at play here.

tomorrow is buy nothing day

I put a banner up above the first post a week or so ago without explaining it at all. The rules are pretty simple -- because we are a voraciously materialistic society, abstain from buying anything on the busiest shopping day of the year to silently portest.

Or be like me and do your Christmas shopping early (I just finished tonight with an order from Amazon...books and music make the best gifts). ...I also spent too much time looking around T-Shirt Hell (especially the gang bang elves paper).

there is a god and he hates me

I got home from work at 7 tonight...a full three hours after I got out at 4...a full two and a half hours after I usually get home...all for a lousy four inches of snow. I love the first snow of the year; I really, really do.

get 'im while he's...a...when he's a she

Some guy is selling his soon to be built by plastic surgery cherry on eBay to pay for the sex change operation he wants.

It's been up for two hours now, how long 'til it gets pulled by eBay? I'm taking bets.

Transexuals not your fancy? Maybe a third litre of breast milk'll do ya.

something

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. No, wait, not so much thinking as paying a lot of attention. Close attention. To the world, to movies, to my thoughts, and, most surprising, to my feelings.

I was watching Fight Club a week or so ago and something said during one of the bathroom bantor scenes between Norton and Pitt, something along the lines of living to the advice of non-fathers and Pitt calling himself a "30-year-old boy", has stuck with me. Then I read something about the movie The 40 Year-Old Virgin and it's tagline of a "middle-aged coming-of-age story" and it threw me into a thought about my generation...those of us now in our 30's and 20's...so many of us haven't yet come to age.

I'm still working at the hoochie bar on Friday nights, I see a lot of people on any given week acting fifteen years younger than they are. I see people that elevate sex and lust above all else in a way that only a 15-year-old would be expected to, and I see them being seen as "normal". And it isn't just about sex; at coffee shops and in my own slacker jobs I see people in their late twenties and early thirties that have absolutely no idea what they're going to be when they grow up. I listen to people my age cry and bitch and moan about how things aren't perfect as if they're still living in that adolescent wonderland where fairy tales still can come true.

And I do put myself (and most everyone I know) in this category.

What has happened to us? Why are we so misguided? Why can't we accept reality and move on with our lives?

Right now, all I have are questions...I have no answers. It's been awhile since I've written though, so I figured I should write -- and why not? They are questions that so many of us should be asking ourselves.

there's nothing to see here

But read this...no offense to anyone else, but it's probably the best blog/LJ entry I've ever read. So much said without saying it.

from the mouths of babes

Well, maybe not "babes" as I read this in one of the exams I'm scoring for work and it's a junior, so 16 or 17 year old which isn't exactly a "babe"...unless it was a girl in which case maybe it was, but still not in the sense of the way I meant it...

Anyway, a kid wrote: "If you don't date now you won't have any idea what to do when you get older and you'll screw it up with someone special".

Why in the hell was I not so wise when I was so young? Without making excuses for myself, it's true. So very, very true.

So if any high school kids out there read this blog or just stumble across it for whatever reason, remember that. I was too uptight and serious in high school, but there's no need to be...and fooling around and screwing up and even getting in trouble when you're in school is a much better alternative to being old and not having any experience to learn from.

oh my head

The Senate approved a plan to raise the debt ceiling by $800 billion today. This will allow the federal government to increase it's debt load to $8.18 TRILLION...or almost $30,000 per man, woman, and child living within our borders. This number is $2.23 TRILLION more than when Bush first stepped into the front door of the White House (and remember then that the debt was actually shrinking down from it's height at the time thanks to Clinton).

When I'm 54 and trying to put my kids through college, I'm going to be paying taxes that were raised just to pay the interest on this thing...leaving less for their education. God Bless George Bush for not leaving any kids behind, eh?

weirdest. googling. ever.

Someone found this blog via a search for "older big dick white men who loves fucking older black men personals. It's listed as the 2nd and the 3rd site.

This frightens me -- though I don't know whether that's because someone was searching for that...or that my blog showed up...TWICE.

boot up their ass

We're really going to go far in the world when we have soldiers shooting unarmed, near-death insurgents inside of mosques, you know? The Muslim world just loves that shit.

que pasa?

I'm noticing a lot of newish repeat visitors in my tracking and wanted to say hello and thanks for reading. If you wanna introduce yourself, I'd be interested to hear from you...you can e-mail, leave a comment to this post, or go over to the forum (which is so dreadfully underused). But, I guess if you just wanna read and not talk, that's your perogative.

masters of war

Boulder High School in Colorado had a talent show. Performing were a group of students calling themseleves "The Coalition of the Willing" doing Bob Dylan's anti-war song "Masters of War"...the secret service was called in to investigate.

People in Boulder were supposedly upset by the lyrics which end with "You might say that I'm young. You might say I'm unlearned, but there's one thing I know, though I'm younger than you, even Jesus would never forgive what you do … And I hope that you die and your death'll come soon. I will follow your casket in the pale afternoon. And I'll watch while you're lowered down to your deathbed. And I'll stand o'er your grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead." Written in 1963 by Bob Dylan, it is pretty clear that these kids weren't threatening president Bush in 2004. To a rational person that would seem the case at least. But there's something else:

"These kids are being used to promote an extreme leftist point of view on the taxpayers' dime," Boulder resident James Lemons told KMGH.

Yes, that's it. Dissent and disagreement is a "extreme leftist point of view" and needs to be stopped. At all costs. The only view that should be paid for on the taxpayers' dime is the jingoistic "my country right or wrong" attitude taken up the ass with a smile.

Mr. Lemons, if you read this, you should be glad that there are kids out there thinking for their own damn self. Of course, that's so totally unamerican.

do you feel safer?

The United States government is currently tracking down 400,000 fugitives -- all of whom were to supposed to have left the country for one reason or another.

It's all under control though. Because of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terra, 80 agents are on the case. Eighty agents...that means that each one only has to track down 5000. That's a snap. We are so lucky we have a president that's really pushing for the shit that matters and not just creaming his shorts over the thought of bombing brown people back into the stone age.

filler

Nothing to write about today...nothing happening in my life or the world, really...but I figure that I've been doing so good with posting daily (the last day I haven't was October 29th) that I should do so before the day is up. PEACE OUT!!! :P

Oh yeah, homework...click on a google ad (but only one -- they won't pay me if they suspect people just click all of them) would ya? That way you can learn about something new! Yay!!!

i'm so glad ashcroft is leaving

According to the Tuscon Citizen:

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers' group.

Yes, Mr. Ashcroft, it is a "bad" thing for the judicial branch to perform their constitutional duty in acting as a check against the power of the executive branch. Perhaps he could uncrinkle the copy of it he's been using as toilet paper all these years and read it for his own damn self.

ACH! How the hell could people vote a president back in when he's surrounded by loonies like this piece of shit???

what is going on in this country?

I read a lot of weird news stories druing my couple hours a day surfing the web. I post a few of them when they really bother me, or I have something to say, but most of them just slip by. I just came across a story via Drudge Report today that sort of exemplifies my confusion and, to some extent, rage. As it turns out, an 11-year-old girl named Deirdre Faegre from West Covina, CA was suspended from school for doing the sorts of things that 11-year-old girls have always done: cartwheels and handstands. They're too dangerous, the officials at the school said, they asked her to stop, she didn't...so they suspended her.

Where has this idea come from where kids can't be kids at school anymore. There is always some story in the papers about a little boy being arrested for getting into a fight or some girl bringing a butter knife to the school lunchroom...the kind of stuff that just doesn't matter because they're damn kids. Why this sudden appeal to hold kids so accountable for the things kids do? What has happened to letting kids be kids and punishment like, I don't know, grounding or time outs or withholding of allowance or something? Or spanking? Ugh. And that doesn't even approach the innocent crap like playing on the playground which should be encouraged...but now suddenly is worthy of suspension.

Just one more weave in our handbasket to hell I guess.

another one of "those stories"

A woman by the name of Senorita Walker is a teacher, hooks up with a 15 year old student, gets two of his friends involved, and she ends up paying them $5000 for their, um, "services". The story is on The Smoking Gun.

There are just too many questions here...first off, the first sentence on the site was "Meet Senorita Walker", I thought she was a Spanish teacher. But no, Senorita is her real first name, it's in all the attached court papers -- she's actually a special ed teacher. What the hell were her parents thinking? What would have happened if she was a Spanish teacher or someday travels to Spain or Mexico? She's Senorita Senorita Walker. How dumb is that?

The second question is...where were these teachers that are willing to pay $5000 for sexual services from her students when I was in high school? I mean, what more can a 15 year old boy ask for than sex and $5000?

the new american values

Yassar Arafat died last night. I didn't post anything because we all knew it was gonna happen and he was, more or less, a douchebag so I didn't feel the need. He was, however, a head of state and tremendously important figure in the Middle East peace process so it was appropriate for the networks to cut in to announce it...as they have for the deaths of other important figures -- even those of not so important figures like JFK Jr. and Princess Diana.

But it seems that cutting in during CSI was stepping over the line. One station has issued an apology for doing so, taking a very Ashlee Simpson approach and blaiming "an overly aggressive CBS News producer" for daring to interupt entertainment with news of international importance. It's a fine statement of what we Americans value most.

the 11th day of the 11th month...

Today, the anniversary of the end of the Great War, we celebrate and remember those with the courage and strength to defend our country and our ideals against our enemies. My heart-felt thanks to all veterans out there...

Even if I don't agree with the justification of the battle or war, I appreciate all that you do for this great country.

five year plan

The last five years of my life have been tumultuous at best, a waste at worst. I have spent the years since I've graduated from college making excuses, making myself a scapegoat, waxing idealistic about the roll I should be playing in this world, and doing absolutely nothing about any of them. I have succeeded in backpeddling into immaturity while trying to move forward with my life and did so without even realizing what I was doing. I have lost all that which made me who I was, and gained little to replace it.

It all stops now.

I used to be a man (or boy, as it were) of honor. My word was steadfast. If I said x, you could almost guarantee that x was or was going to be if I had anything to say or do about it. It was an admirable quality, if a bit arrogant and abrasive. What has happened to me? Today (and for years, really) my word has been so degraded by exaggerations and pie-in-the-sky prognostications that it is only slightly more reliable than that of a carnival barker. Of course, I have always known my intentions and known what is the truth and what is not, but no one else really has. No one knows my intentions, no one knows my feelings, no one knows my dreams...and this frightens me. No -- I lied just now, I haven't always known my feelings and intentions...at some point I began believing in my own lies too.

I lost myself somewhere along the way -- lost my footing, lost my self-confidence, lost my vision and perspective of the world. I allowed the world to change me and in so doing became something that I was not. I fell, in a biblical sense, as I seem to remember biblical passages stating that allowing the world to change you is a great sin. I am a huge sinner.

Well, no more. What I once was I shall be again...with the positive influences of a young man's life experience and wisdom gained to soften the edges and enervate the youthful pride of what I was before I came upon this slump. As such, I make the following pledges for myself, to bring myself to the place I would like to be at in five years:

No more excuses. I have become the servant of my own failures and yet have not come to grips with my own imperfections. I will no longer blame my misgivings on others, on fate, or on the world at large. If I fail, as I most certainly will from time to time, I will look to myself first for the reasons for my failure. I will adapt to my new circumstances, I will change what needs to be changed, I will accept responsibility for the positions that I put myself in.

Live for myself. I must do what I do to fulfill my own needs and wants, not to appease others. Taking into some consideration the needs, wants, and feelings of others is the mark of a gentleman nice-guy -- but when taken into too much account it becomes the mark of a fool. The ground is not covered with eggshells, I will not walk as though it is.

Express myself. For me, this goes along the same lines as living for myself, but it remains all together different. Rather than fearing expression of my feelings for fear of ridicule of myself or others, for fear of retribution, or for fear of making others uncomfortable, I will tell others what I think of them and otherwise not hold back my emotions.

The past is dead. I shall not dwell on my past. I have made mistakes, both in paths taken and opportunities not (mostly not), but they shall not dictate my future for me. Each moment is a new beginning and with it comes the chance to step away from whatever I was the moment prior. Nothing in life is intractable.

Remain patient, passionate, and strong. Although I have lost myself in some ways, I have never lost my patience, passion for life, and strength to stand up to adversity. Though I intend to bring myself to this new place, I will not allow myself to become impatient, dispassionate, or frail as the result.

Why am I writing this? Well, as I've written about sporadically over the past two months, I have been taking the opportunity that living at my folks' house (read: hitting and living at rock bottom) presents to re-examine my life, and believe that this opportunity is God's gift to me to restart what was a stalled life. In three weeks, I will be moving out on my own; in two months, I will start taking classes in an effort to obtain my masters. It is the perfect time for me to do this, as so much will be starting anew for me in the coming months, it only makes sense for me to start anew. It is an opportunity to regroup and change course away from the specious path I have found myself on to head, instead, in the direction I truly want to go.

Five years from now, I want to see myself working on a meaningful career, I want to own my own house, I want to be married (or close to it). These things will only come with a change -- for the way I'm living my life now, these things will never occur.

In other words, to paraphrase Ghandi, I must be the change I wish to see.

no news is bad news

Why is it that I have to visit the website of some hodunk television station in who knows where America to find out that 14 American soldiers have died in the last two days? All that's on the news networks is that the opposition in Falluja is "melting away" as the insurgents, predictably in my opinion, packed up and left for the most part once the fighting started. Only five have died thus far in the Falluja offensive...the other nine were in other battles sparked by Operation Phantom Fury (or whatever they're calling it).

I am fucking pissed that this shit isn't reported. Don't I, as a citizen of this country, have a fucking right to know when the shit's hitting the fan? Isn't it the role of the media to report the news? I mean, I don't like hearing that more American soldiers have died as the result of King Megalomaniac's Mesopotamian wet dream, but I do need to know that that's the case, and it's the medias purpose to report it. But I suppose the media's been letting us all down a little too much lately with it's inept coverage of everything from the war to questioning government policies to just about everything (except the Scott Pederson case, that grabs onto the headlines like nothing else...as if it matters).

...It's just one more force pulling our nation's handbasket into the firey depths of Hell.

I might add that today -- probably, at the rate that our soldiers are being killed, at this moment the number stands at 998 -- will mark the 1000th military death of an American since major combat ended (and the Mission was declared Accomplished by a flightsuited Bush) on May 1, 2003. Ain't it swell?

6 days later...

I've spent the last hour or so going through the pictures on Sorry Everybody and floating between bouts of teary-eyes. It really sucks that so many people in the world are so ashamed of this country, their own country, that they feel a need to apologize to the world. America isn't supposed to be like this.

A further problem is the fact that Bush and his Bushites don't seem to understand what we're going through. I have had Bush supporters openly mock me not, I should hope, realizing that they might as well be teasing me about some major failure that I am deeply ashamed of. I feel naked, I feel abused, I feel...raped. I really do, and it's not going away with time. I am ashamed to be an American with its political weather being as it is. I know I'm not along though as I flip through those photos. At least I have the 48% of Americans that voted for Kerry that feel my pain (and maybe gain up on those 83% of 18-year-olds that didn't vote and beat them bloody). And, it seems, the sympathies and support from many outside this country.

Then again, maybe I should just marry a Canadian.

speaking of history

The original contract that sold off Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees is up for sale at eBay. Right now the price is up to $1,000,000.

ahhhh...progress

WalMart opened a store in the buffer-zone between Aztec ruins and Mexico City recently. I think it's grand. Now people can visit the ruins of one of the great civilizations of the Americas, a world cultural site, then leave and buy a t-shirt crafted by the master hands of a 14-year-old Indonesian girl.

I don't know about you, but I look foward to the day when I can visit the Gettysburg Battlefield and when at the top of the Devil's Den, pull up to the McDonald's drive through (I'm sorry, I think the dictionary term is actually "drive-thru" but that is just too bloody illiterate) and order myself some fries. I look forward to visiting the Gap in the Forbidden City Mall™ in China. I look forward to ordering a Latte from the Starbuck's kiosk between the paws of the Sphinx. And who doesn't yearn for the opportunity to rent the next John Woo flick at the Blockbuster amongst the ruins of Machu Pichu?

All sarcasm aside, I guess it shouldn't surprise any of us. It almost makes sense that the heritage of yesteryear intermingle with the heritage of today. After all, these sites are what our ancestors are remembered for...I should be surprised to find out that we're ultimately known for anything more than corporate greed.

the sky is on fire

I went outside to talk on the phone (cell phones in the boonies can be a pain in the ass inside) earlier this evening (around 7:30) and saw some flickering green lights in the sky to the North. Yes, the northern lights have made there was south to where we below the 45th parallel can see them.

I have seen them before, but not like tonight. Usually, they are like lightly colored curtains, silently flapping in the breeze somewhere to the North, but tonight they fill up the northern three-quarters of the sky in a hauntingly pale show that resembles more of a fire burning white-hot than anything else. You can see the energy of the sun pulsating through the wisps as they come and go all around. It is more eerie than beautiful...like the sky is on fire.

It makes me wonder if God is not mad that we have done what we've done as a nation in the past few weeks. A horrible omen of future retribution, a preminition of our fate.

conspiracy theories

Dick Morris, the political hack, wrote in an article in The Hill that the exit polls last Tuesday which showed Kerry winning in a landslide (winning not only Florida and Ohio, but Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Nevada) must have been sabotaged to be so wrong. As he points out: "Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state." Given their reliability, "to screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

But Morris ignores the other possibility, that the exit polls were guaging the votes that people had made and that it was the voting tabulators -- the counting machines -- that were having problems.

In Florida, for example, there are some very iffy numbers. According to Common Dreams, there are several counties in Florida where heavily Democratic counties went to Bush=. For example: "In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush." That, my friends, is fishy at the very least. Polls from the beginning of this election cycle to the bitter end have suggested that 90%+ of Democrats were voting for Kerry, and 90%+ of Republicans were voting for Bush. In Florida, it seems, that trend was bucked in an incredible way.

Even more interesting, however, is the fact that this phenomena is most apparent in areas using optical scanners to tabulate as opposed to e-voting. This chart shows how in many counties using op-scan counting, Bush's numbers were as high as 4-times higher than one might suspect given history and party registrations while Kerry often received less than half that expected (no numbers were more than 50% off in those using e-voting). This graphic shows how off the exit polls were in several states -- paper ballots are only off a percent or two while e-voting results are off by several percent. Sketchy.

Top all this (and the counts of irregularities that I'm trying to keep track of below) with the fact that all this "stuff" seems to favor Republicans.

I don't mean to flash a tinfoil hat here because it really doesn't seem to me that any fraud which may or may not have occured this year will ever be proven (because it all seems to be happening with machines that conveniently leave no paper trail to diagnose a problem), but it definitely is something that we may need to be concerned about. If there are problems in the way that we count votes in this country, it is vital that we fix those problems. We can't very well call ourselves a democracy if we don't count the votes of the people...

false advertising

I can say from personal experience that reading books actually impedes on the likeliness of receiving oral sex, but that didn't stop Akademiks from making the claim on the sides of busses in New York and other large cities. The ads were pulled.

Okay, okay, maybe it wasn't for false advertising...actually, the ads which read "Read Books, Get Brain" and included a woman in hot pants bending over a pile of books were pulled after officials realized that "get brain" was the hip-hop dejour term for oral sex. Oops. I guess there was a lot of giggling in the hizzouse over this, but no one even called to complain.

"oops"...vote-counting mistakes

I'm reading too many stories of voting "irregularities" that occured on Tuesday. Most have been occuring with e-voting computers. A glitch here and there is understandable, but rampant and repeated mistakes suggests one of two things: either the mechanisms for recording votes are screwy, or there's fraud. Neither is acceptable in the biggest, oldest, strongest, proudest, and "securist" democracy in the world.

I am going to use this post to document those reports that I have come across. As I find more instances (if I find more) I am going to update this post. If I'm missing any, please e-mail me:

• 245 votes were left uncounted in the August primaries in the Tampa area of Florida.


• 40 votes were possibly lost when voting machines in Palm Beach County ran out of battery power


• 4500 votes when too many votes are cast in Carteret County, NC. Of the 7537 votes cast, only the first 3005 were recorded.


• Voters in New Orleans were not able to vote for the first several hours of election day, being turned away and told to come back because the voting machines wouldn't boot up.


• Bush receives 3893 extra votes in suburban Columbus. The problem was noticed when Bush beat Kerry 4,258 to 260.


• Backward counting tabulators were used in Broward County, FL. Odd as it may be for voting machines to ever be programmed to ever begin taking away votes, the machines did so once they reached 32,000.

an awesome site

Sorry Everybody...we didn't mean it, a lot of us at least.

a plea to the left

This is a post I just wrote for teh soapbox but I wanted to share it with the public at large with some minor changes to make it more free-standing.

There's a lot of anger out there amongst the progressive and the liberal and even the moderate antiBushites. People are bitching, people are moaning, people are complaining, and crying, and fearing. People don't see how the right could win. People don't see how so many could be so stupid. People don't see how so much anger amongst the left could not translate to huge victories for them on election day. It is simple though...

Look at the right. They have anger by the bucketful. They viciously oppose giving homosexuals the same rights as everyone because they're angry that they're "sinful". They see the Middle East as a vast empire of evil that needs to be bombed into submission without a tear for the hundreds of thousands of innocent people that perish firey deaths eerily similar to those suffered by Americans in September 2001. They see a man who dares be pro-choice as having no soul, as being some sort of advocate for the devil or maybe even the devil himself. They see a man who would dare tax those who have much and give health insurance to the poor as being somehow Stalin-like. It all makes them mad, anger, furious. As furious as all of you are in this thread...but with one difference. They focus their anger into energy.

That is how Bush was re-elected. Karl Rove was able to take all that hate and anger and fear (much of it generated in the campaign itself) and focus it on a single goal of re-electing a president that so many of us think is completely undeserving of re-election.

We as progressives and liberals have never been able to do that.

I was a founding member of my local Green Party back in 2000 because I wanted to focus my energies and ideas into something more useful than the drunken bar arguments and internet bickering that we all know all too well. I went to meetings and we talked the talk about changing the world. It felt great and I think we all felt empowered by the experience, believing in our hearts that we would actually change things. After deciding what we were going to do, we came to the point where we were to start. We chose local issues, among a few of them being the implementation of Instant Run-off Voting. I had ten people in the party excited, thirty people outside of the party involved, we had enough to do some decent lobbying of elected officials and the public -- we had enough people to actually accomplish something. We agreed that the best way to start was a letter writing campaign and so I did so...writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, writing state and local officials from my city commisioner to the governor. I was getting responses, I was being heard, I was getting somewhere and just as I turned around to see how everyone else was doing....I found that I was all alone.

This is a specific example of the problem that is pandemic among us. So many of us are so willing to bitch and moan and piss our pants, but when it comes time to do something it's too much of a inconvenience. While both Democrats and Republicans were riled up in the months before the election, it was only the Republicans that carried their anger through to the polls. They actually showed up...in record numbers. That supposed record number of youths that was going to show up? Yeah, they stayed home in the same embarrisngly huge numbers that they always do...too troubled by the sacrifice of an hour to stand in line to get off their asses.

This is our fate. We have so much energy but it is at this time entirely potential. We waste it sitting in place complaining about our fate and how shameful it is for others to dare point it out to us and shove it in our faces. We bitch and moan about policies which we despise, but we do absolutely nothing about it. Not en masse at least.

Sure, there are pockets of activity out there. There are large groups of people working towards the rights of homosexuals, there are large groups working on the protection of the environment, there are vast numbers out there doing what little they can to oppose an unjust war...but they are relatively small numbers given the enormity of the issues involved. If they joined up for a common cause, maybe being willing to take up arms for each others' fight on a systematic basis there would be enough, but we are just too damn fragmented at this time. We need to focus like a laser, not diffuse like a flood-light. Everybody feels their problem is the biggest problem in the world and, truth be told, it probably is. There are lots of things that are f-ed up in this world and need to change and it's completely unfair to rank them in some order of importance. They are all important, they all need to be fought for, they all need to succeed in the name of justice, right, and freedom. But to fight you need fighters...and fighters need to fight.

WE NEED TO FOCUS like the right has learned to do lest we remain the minority, lest we remain bitching and bickering, lest we never see change, lest we remain permanently stuck in the 1980s. The future can change, but it won't change as long as so many are unwilling to convert their passive anger into kinetic energy for change.

So please, people, stop all of this and do something productive instead. Please.

my hometown in the news

...and the Daily Rotten:

A City High School student earned two things for coming to a school Halloween party dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman: the prize for scariest costume -- and a five-day suspension.

It should be noted that City High School is "the smart kid" magnet school in Grand Rapids.

an open letter to george w. bush

President Bush,

It is obvious now that a majority of the country agrees with you as to where this country should go. Though I disagree wholeheartedly with most everything that you stand for, my love of country forces me to accept this and work with it. However, it does not force me to sit idly by as you make decisions that I feel all of us will regret in the not so distant future.

Much of what you have done in your first term has created a giant schism that divides us, polarizes us and you have much work to perform to heal that divide and make these states united again. You can do this if you want to, if you try to, if you moderate your administration some.

First, it is important that you reshape your cabinet. The news is abuzz with the impending resignation of Attorney General Ashcroft. This is an excellent place to start rebuilding unity. Please choose his replacement wisely, avoiding radical figures like Ashcroft and considering more moderate leaders like Rudolph Guilliani. Other contentious figures that need to go are Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in the Defense department. Taking a route similar to Clinton's appointment of Cohen would do much to heal some of these wounds. We as a people are not as radically right as your current adminstration reflects.

Second, could you please own up to your mistakes? You no longer need to worry about re-election, so could you please, please, please, be willing to state that mistakes have been made in the war and at home? Apologies can have such a huge impact in their humility. To be asked outright about your mistakes and not being willing to admit that you've made any polarizes people and creates distrust. Yes, the war in Iraq could have been fought better. Yes, it was wrong to throw people in prison without any rights. Please just say "we could have done things more smoothly..."

Third, listen. Pick up a newspaper now and then and reader some letters to the editor. Pick up a foreign magazine and read what people outside this nation think. Surf the web and read some blogs. It matters. You are the highest representative in a representative democracy and as such, you need to listen. To some, this shows a softness in shaping your actions to the most popular denominator, but it is not. It is responsibility, the responsibility that belongs to you in your office.

Fourth, speak softly more often and put away the big stick. It's not just the nation that has been cut and scarred by the last four years...but the world. I honestly believe that there is a desire for peace out there in the world, and that will never happen while we fling threats and missles here and hither. Violence begets violence and it needs to stop. Someone needs to be the bigger person here, let us be the bigger person that I know we are.

I write this in the hope of hopes that maybe by some cosmic mistake you actually read this. We need to heal and I feel as hurt as anyone...these are the things you need to do to start making me feel better.

Sincerely,
kyle.

i'm scared

Bush is going to be around another four years. As are Ashcroft and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz. They are all going to remain around to continue us on the course we've been on for the last four years...one where fear is used to control, one where civil liberties become the currency to pay for "security", one where the rich get richer as the poor get poorer, one where natural resources are seen as means to profit and little else, one where the idea that we even think about what the rest of the world thinks about our actions is scoffed at.

Before this election, those of us with our heads out of the sand could at least brush off the leadership of this country as having resulted in some fluke as the result of an antiquated voting system and some voter fraud...we could say "hey, he didn't even receive half the vote". We can't do that anymore. Outside our borders, our friends, allies, enemies, and everyone could say the same thing..."give them the chance to undo their mistake," they've said. We had our chance to change, we failed.

The rest of the world now has the right to give up on us and abandon us. We have chosen to flip them all off, and we shouldn't expect any of them to care when whatever comes our way, comes our way. And it will. Bush is a lightning rod of hate around the world and our explicit approval of him now makes us just as condusive. The day will come when we wish we would have considered the global test that the Republicans mocked so readily. I honestly believe we have set in motion terrorist attacks which will make 9/11 a pin prick.

I am also scared of the implications that this election has for how Americans think. I am pissed and sad that anti-gay marriage measures passed in all of the 11 states that they were voted on. It shows how small-minded so many Americans are. It shows how self-centered a country we are. I have yet to hear a single argument for these bans that doesn't come down to "I don't think homosexuality is moral" which is little excuse to pass any legislation. It doesn't affect them in any way, but because they think it's a sin, well, it just shouldn't be.

I need to stop now. I keep tearing up because this is just so...bad. I can't believe that we have fallen this far, that we have become this stupid. It's almost got a surreal feel to it...like soon I'll wake up and everything will be the way it should be -- with people caring about other people, with peace being preferable to war, with liberty being a foundation to democracy again, where fear isn't something mongered by the government. I guess I have to wait four years for that.

i was all wrong

As of this moment, it is highly unlikely that Kerry will win enough electoral votes to win the election. Doing so would require a miracle in Ohio. However, it is clear that Bush has won the popular vote and little can happen that would effect that.

Now, I've been saying for weeks now that I believed Kerry would win the popular vote by 4-6% based on certain irregularities in the pollsters' methods and a higher than expected turnout, especially amongst the youth. Where did I go wrong?

Well, obviously I put too much faith in my generation to get out there and vote as it seems in early exit polls that the youth vote was no larger than it has been during the last few elections. I am very disappointed in this. 18-29 year olds are completely overlooked by our elected officials, in large part because only somewhere around 40% of us show up at the polls. They don't have to care about us. I was hoping that enough would go out and do their civic duty so that maybe we would be listened to for once. But no. That was just a dream. If you didn't vote: shame on you.

As for the pollsters' methods...I really have no excuse. I'm coming up blank. They were crazily accurate this year even though I haven't been trusting them for much of the last month or so.

Anyway...oops. Oh well. I was looking forward to being right, I have to admit, so that I could stand on some sort of under-read blogish soapbox and admonish the pundits and the pollsters for calling an obviously one-sided election as being too close to call. Instead of owning them, they have owned me. I'm their bitch.

you shouldn't be reading this

You should be VOTING!!! Go! Now! Go vote! Git!!!

If you've already done so, good for you. Why don't you comment on who you voted for or something.

As for me, I have to wait for my brother to get home so I can use his car to drive down to my old precinct.

a post decidedly unrelated to election day

I've just spent some time going back and re-reading some of my past posts after a day, rather depressing day, of introspection and the like. It is clear to me now that many of the broken dreams, miserable failings, and loneliness that has plagued my life here on this Earth are of my own doing even though I have more than often blamed anyone but myself for these disappointments.

It should be no surprise to me that I have remained significantly underemployed since graduating from school given my inability to go out and convince employers to hire me. Being a philosophy and political science major, I should realize that I've dug a hole for myself with two rather unmarketable skill-sets and accept that, rather than blaming human resource people for being unimaginative as I have. If nothing else, my degree has taught me the tools of thought and persuasion and I should be utilizing those tools in convincing those with jobs to hire me, rather than just sending in resumes and applications and sitting passively by.

The largest source for my own misery though is my loneliness (as if I have to tell that to any regular readers). For too long, I've blamed others for it. In my teen years I blamed my parents' divorce, later I blamed my inexperience, and more recently I have taken to blame girls themselves for being too naive/immature/physical to see that I would be a good boyfriend/husband. I have come to realize that I am the one that is naive and immature. Very much so. The revelation is, of course, yet another gift of my reprieve up here at my folk's house. I whine, I bitch and moan, I ruffle my feathers like a high schooler, and I put on this faux-arrogant attitude to mask my deficiences and insecurities. I realize now that I wouldn't date me myself...and realize now why no girl has been willing to give me a chance. A lot of anger has dissapated with that admission...but it's replaced with a lot of regrets for chances lost to my own bullshit.

In any case, it's a good thing. A thing of liberation. If it does have me down somewhat in the short term.

...as fantastic as this "vacation" has been, I am sooo anxious to get back to living my real life again, armed with what I have learned about myself. I feel as though things will start truly coming around for me once I do...I just hope that others see it too.

another past halloween

Okay, I ended up going to my Halloween party on Saturday wearing jeans and a plain black t-shirt and when people asked, saying I was "Canadian". It got a couple laughs...but I think they were more sympathy than anything. Then again, maybe people thought it was funny, given it was me at Halloween. I mean, last year I went to a "famous death" Halloween party wearing a Soviet military hat on my head and a toy submarine "Kursk" on a string around my neck. Lame, right? The year before I took a plain white t-shirt and wrote "Halloween Costume" on the front of it with a magic marker. Lamer.

This year I was going to go completely tasteless and political...dressing up as an Abu Ghraib prisoner with a Bush campaign button on to solidify my point. I decided that it was just too mean, disrespectful, and tasteless...even for me. Then I saw this.

I'm evil because I chuckled.

an interesting endorsement

The Economist, of all publications, has endorsed Kerry...rather reluctantly. Bush has just screwed up way too many times for this bastion of capitalism and the free market:

Many readers, feeling that Mr Bush has the right vision in foreign policy even if he has made many mistakes, will conclude that the safest option is to leave him in office to finish the job he has started. If Mr Bush is re-elected, and uses a new team and a new approach to achieve that goal, and shakes off his fealty to an extreme minority, the religious right, then The Economist will wish him well. But our confidence in him has been shattered. We agree that his broad vision is the right one but we doubt whether Mr Bush is able to change or has sufficient credibility to succeed, especially in the Islamic world. Iraq's fledgling democracy, if it gets the chance to be born at all, will need support from its neighbours—or at least non-interference—if it is to survive. So will other efforts in the Middle East, particularly concerning Israel and Iran.

John Kerry says the war was a mistake, which is unfortunate if he is to be commander-in-chief of the soldiers charged with fighting it. But his plan for the next phase in Iraq is identical to Mr Bush's, which speaks well of his judgment. He has been forthright about the need to win in Iraq, rather than simply to get out, and will stand a chance of making a fresh start in the Israel-Palestine conflict and (though with even greater difficulty) with Iran. After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America's moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him, given a viable alternative. John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would be in a better position to carry on with America's great tasks.

an interesting poll

Zogby and MTV's Rock the Vote have performed a rather unique Mobile SMS survey and got some interesting results. Of the 6039 registered young voters (between the ages of 18-29), 55% are supporting Kerry and 40% are supporting Bush (this with a +/-1.2 MOE). This goes to show just how important it is for Kerry that younger voters vote...it also goes to show again how the lack of reach that pollsters have to mobile-only users may be way off (these numbers are significant enough to lead to a two or three point pro-Kerry shift).

More importantly however, the poll found that only 2.3% of those polled plan on not voting and 0.5% are not sure. In other words, 97.2% of those polled plan on voting. Granted, this is run through Rock the Vote and those polled were those that opted into RTV's update system, so they have already expressed some political activity, so that number may be high, but...

The highest turnout numbers in recent years is slightly above 40%. I doubt the turnout will even approach 97.2%, but wouldn't it be cool if it did get up there to like 60%?

(the answer is yes)

the final gallup polls

Now, I have gone on and on about a couple of things when it comes to polling in this election: the republican skew of most of the polling companies (especially Gallup) and the opinion that Kerry will ultimately win the popular vote by about 5% (which almost must translate to an electoral win given the closeness of most states). I would like to point out that Gallup has released it's final pre-election polling numbers. The registered voter numbers (I will not use Gallup's "likely voter" numbers because they're wrong...though they tend to lead to a one-point gain on any of these numbers for Bush) look very good for Kerry:

Kerry is winning in Florida by 4%,
Bush winning in Iowa by 1%*,
Kerry winning in Minnesote by 8%,
Kerry winning in Ohio by 7%,
Kerry winning in Pennsylvania by 2%*, and
Bush winning in Wisconsin by 3%*.
* within the 3% +/- margin of error

This would suggest that Kerry will win the red states of Florida and Ohio and may only lose the blue states of Iowa and Wisconsin. That's a huge net gain in electoral votes for him, big enough to win the electoral vote easily.

As for the overall results:

Using voting behavior data from previous elections, the Gallup organization attempted to estimate how the undecideds would vote Tuesday.

The result was a tie of 49 percent each for Bush and Kerry, with 1 percent for Nader and 1 percent for other candidates.

In the history of polling, Gallup has never come out with a tied race in its final pre-election estimate -- just one more footnote for the history books in a history-making campaign.

And for reference, Gallup's last poll in 2000 had Bush leading by 7%...which was a whole 7.5% off come election day.

If I am at all right about how off these polls are, election night will be over by 11 o'clock and I'll be able to get to bed at a decent hour, knowing that Bush is getting the hell out of Washington soon.