This morning, Nicholas Kristoff chastises the media for writing so little about genocide and Sudan. He's right to do that, of course. But he also fails my Sudan Test: if a journalist writes an article about genocide in Sudan and mentions neither the word "oil" nor the word "China," he's either naive or being deliberately obtuse.

Sudan has oil. Lots of oil. How does Kristoff describe Rice's trip to Sudan:

Condi Rice finally showed up in Darfur a few days ago, and she went out of her way to talk to rape victims and spotlight the sexual violence used to terrorize civilians. Most American television networks and cable programs haven't done that much.

While I'm all for the world knowing more about the abundant use of sexual violence for political ends in Africa, does Kristoff believe that she was sent there to talk about rape?

Here's the problem: Sudan has all this oil. "We" (i. e. the Cheney energy commission) want it. But the local authorities have some very bad habits, one of which is genocide. When you do read about genocide in Sudan in the US media, it is usually framed in terms of Arab terror.  The reality is a lot more complex. I gather that the problem for a company doing business in Sudan is that the local authorities will slaughter people and raze villages for the convenience of oil companies. And there is no good way for squeamish companies to keep them from doing this. (See Madelaine Drohan's chapter "Talisman in Sudan" in her book Making a Killing: How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business.) So companies from countries that make decisions based on human rights have been forced away from the trough.

Luckily for the Sudanese oiligarchy, the Chinese government doesn't care much about the human rights of Africans, and the Chinese oil companies are happy to take up the slack.  My impression of Cheney's secret energy plan is that it allows the US to have an ever-rising need for petroleum and that our two Humvees in every driveway will partially fueled by African oil. And so there is a conflict between our goals and there goals. (China has a really large population: what must China's energy goals look like?)

This does not stop some enterprising individual Western entrepreneurs such as Mark Thatcher from horning in on the action. More recently, British businessman, Friedhelm Eronat bought oil rights in Sudan. What is Eronat's real nationality?

The Guardian reports:

Documents seen by the Guardian suggest that Mr Eronat, who lives in a £20m house in Chelsea, swapped his US passport for a British one shortly before the deal was signed with the Sudan regime in October 2003.

US citizens are barred from dealing with Sudan under sanctions dating from 1997.

(Do read the whole article, plus the Sudan Watch discussion of Eronat.)

A notable comment from someone else's comment section:

Republican Party sold out its far right wing reactionary libertarian base today by extending the USA PATRIOT Act in the house. So to defend our "way of life against terrorists", we just threw out the bill of rights.

I am now officially a Right Wing Gun Nut Democrat.

Nathan Newman makes some interesting points about Bush's Supreme Court nominee:

Don't Judge His Words, He Was a Partisan Hack

So why is he considered a blank slate?

Because we aren't supposed to judge what he said in those years, since he was working for other people.  Or so argues his defenders such as Juan at the Volokh Conspiracy, who says you can't ascribe any personal views to words Roberts wrote:
Attorneys have an ethical obligation to zealously advocate the position of their clients. An attorney in Roberts position had an express duty to advance his client’s – the federal government's – policy position as effectively as possible...The idea that the specific language used in a legal brief advancing his client’s position establishes Roberts' personal views is quite a stretch.

Of course, deciding to spend years working for this particular client, the Reagan administration, says a lot about Roberts' personal views, but Juan is right in one sense: Roberts has spent his career as a mind-for-hire on behalf of the rightwing Republican agenda.   Whatever he said was done to advance his career with no intellectual integrity, since according to his defenders, he didn't believe a word he said.
So if his career is one of years of political hack partisanship, sprinkled with a few years acting as a well-paid hack on behalf of corporate interests, why should we believe Roberts has the temperment to be an independent Justice?

He's been a hired gun for his whole adult career, save the last two years on the DC Circuit-- which now appears just to have been a chance to grease the wheels for his elevation to the Supreme Court as part of the Bush political team.

Also, I had some recollection of having seen Roberts' name while researching the Endangered Species Act opponents, the Pacific Legal Foundation. Sure enough. Here he is in a 1999 case (LLOYD A. GOOD, JR. v. UNITED STATES in the U.S. Fed Circuit Court of Appeals), concerning a proposed residential development in Lower Sugarloaf Key, Florida. If you've ever been to the Florida Keys, you know the area has a n extremely fragile ecosystem. As I understand it from a friend who lives there, the local governments  were so wholly in the thrall of local real estate developers that the Feds had to step in and severely restrict development. This case plays out against that background. The case seems to be about whether a landowner can dredge really a lot of salt marsh over the objection of the Federal Government.

Attorneys in the case arguing the side of the property owner are were: Richard R. Nageotte , Nageotte, Nageotte & Nageotte, of Stafford, Virginia, argued for plaintiff-appellant. Of counsel was John G. Roberts, Jr. , Hogan & Hartson, of Washington, DC,  and  James S. Burling , Pacific Legal Foundation, of Sacramento, California, for amicus curiae Pacific Legal Foundation. With him on the brief was Peter G. Gioia , Pacific Legal Foundation, of Stuart, Florida. (On the other side were the US Government, National Wildlife Federation, and the Florida Audubon Society.)

So there's our man, shoulder to shoulder with the most rabid opponents of the Endangered Species Act, presumably arguing that digging up the salt marshes is the right and only thing to do and that privileging the "rights" of species over property rights is unconstitutional. (That's the PLF's usual rap.)

I should add that this is not the kind of job you send a partisan hack for. This is a job for a true believer.

ANOTHER VIEW: The American Voter Project on Roberts:

The end of progress on environmental issues such as clean water and air, safe cars and safe food. All of these things are at risk if the laws that made them possible are struck down for economic reasons rather than moral common sense reasons. Judge John G. Roberts is the wrong person at this time for the court. He has already stated that the Roe decision was “wrong” and he has written opinions that question the validity of the Endangered Species Act. Judge Roberts sided with the District of Columbia on a law that was so distasteful it was changed. A 12 year old girl was arrested, had cuffed and taken away in a windowless police vehicle for eating a single French fry on the Metro which is the name of D.C. transit system including the subway. When the girls mother sued over the law on equal protection grounds that an adult would have been cited and not arrested, Judge Roberts held that arresting juveniles and not adults was rationally related to “the legitimate goal of promoting parental awareness and involvement with children who commit delinquent acts”.

The law raised such a furor it was changed yet this Judge felt it was ok. There will be other cases like this and if and when they make it to the Supreme Court with Judge Roberts as a member the nation will not be better off but less of a place of progress.

Certainly, Bush could have found a worse candidate, but Democrats should not let themselves be talked into the idea that the confirmation process is a remake of Sophie's Choice. Can Roberts be stopped?

With Edith Clement's name circulating as the rumored Bush nominee for Supreme Court, the question that occurs to me is whether the Rove scandal has cost Bush the opportunity to get through a rightwing ideologue, or whether she is just the kind of dystopian candidate we expected from the Bush administration.

Nathan Newman emailed his lowdown on Clement, which is up on his blog. Aparently, she's a known Endangered species act opponent. (Roe v. Wade is not the only t hing we need fear losing!) That puts her clearly into the dystopian realm for me.

UPDATE: ABC is reporting that Clement got a call saying she is NOT the one. We'll see.

This New York Times article on the Rove scandal appears to have been run over by several trucks. Apparently, it has gone through a couple of drafts online. It is so mangled in its current state that its first sentence seems to mean that Rove, not Novak, was working on an article:

Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said.

This piece would have gotten a failing grade in a freshman writing course. If the NYT is too entangled in the scandal to report clearly on the matter, why are they bothering?

Is there any good reason to believe their source isn't Rove himself?

(via Atrios.)

Picture these guys working for your HMO after their time in the military is up:

Military doctors provided advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears, according to interrogators' accounts.

So, um, what is that comparison the right thinks we should never make? Didn't you make it just now?

I thought about satirizing this, but I don't have time this morning and this here cake doesn't need icing anyway:

Form CNN: Bush: Better human intelligence needed

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush said Tuesday that the United States needs better intelligence gathering to further gains in the so-called global war on terrorism.

Intelligence agencies need to improve in one particular area, he said.

"Human intelligence, the ability to get inside somebody's mind, the ability to read somebody's mail, the ability to listen to somebody's phone call -- that somebody being the enemy," Bush said in an interview with CNN senior White House correspondent John King.

Lack of human intelligence has been blamed for the belief that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq before the war. Their presumed presence was the stated rationale for the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, but the U.S. government recently abandoned efforts to find them.

Bush noted that a group has been formed to determine what needs to be improved.

It really is too bad that his current hired help just doesn't have very much human intelligence. I hope to God that they're able to find some soon. Perhaps this group could also be tasked to look into the shortage of common sense among Bush administration officials.

The Green Party has raised the money necessary to pay the fee for a recount of the votes for president in Ohio:

RECOUNT IN OHIO A SURE THING:
Green Party Campaign Raises $150,000 in 4 days, Shifts Gears to Phase II.

On Thursday, David Cobb, the Green Party's 2004 presidential candidate, announced his intention to seek a recount of the vote in Ohio. Since the required fee for a statewide recount is $113,600, the only question was whether that money could be raised in time to meet the filing deadline. That question has been answered.

"Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio," said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign.

"The grassroots support for the recount has been astounding. The donations have come in fast and furiously, with the vast majority in the $10-$50 range, allowing us to meet our goal for the first phase of the recount effort in only four days," said Bobier.

Bobier said the campaign is still raising money for the next phase of the recount effort which will be recruiting, training and mobilizing volunteers to monitor the actual recount.

The Ohio presidential election was marred by numerous press and independent reports of mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines and the targeted disenfranchisement of African American voters. A number of citizens' groups and voting rights organizations are holding the second of two hearings today in Columbus, Ohio, to take testimony from voters, poll watchers and election experts about problems with the Ohio vote. The hearing, from 6-9 p.m., will be held at the Courthouse, meeting room A, 373 S. High St., in Columbus. The Cobb-LaMarche campaign will be represented at the hearing by campaign manager Lynne Serpe.

A demand for a recount in Ohio can only be filed by a presidential candidate who was either a certified write-in candidate or on the ballot in that state. Both Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik will be demanding a recount. No other candidate has stated an intention to seek a recount and no other citizen or organization would have legal standing to do so in Ohio. The Cobb-LaMarche campaign is still exploring the possibility of seeking recounts in other states but no decision has been made yet.

Cool!

There's an interview with David Cobb on Democracy Now in which he explains the timing of the demand for recount:

Well, we're not allowed under law to actually demand the recount until the republican Secretary of State, Blackwell, actually officially certifies the results. He has not done so. They're still counting, that we know of, over 153,000 provisional ballots. That high number of provisional ballots is actually part of the problem, by the way, where only he and his office has the final say on how and where and under what circumstances those ballots will be counted. But as soon as that certification takes place, we will be demanding and filing in every single count[y] in the state of Ohio for a full recount. Under Ohio state law, they must certify the results by December 3, but they might do it earlier, so we're prepared immediately to file that recount.

There is information on how you can help on Cobb's campaign site.

(I should say that for me what is most important about the Ohio recount effort is that the Ohio voting process was an international disgrace and it is essantial to the integrity of the US electoral process that people who run elections know that shoddy work will be checked.)

ALSO, there is a four minute NPR segment on the potential Ohio recount.

I've been waiting for the mainstream media to catch up with what I've been reading about probable voter fraud these past couple of days. And here it is: Keith Oberman on MSNBC.

Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.

I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.

Oops.

Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.

Vote early! Vote often!

Read the whole thing.

(Via the Yorkshire Ranter.)

To those so filled with anguish at the election results that you don't know where to turn, I point out that November is National Novel Writing Month. There is more than one way to change the world. Personally, I'm almost always a much better writer when deeply upset.

Write.

If life were fair, I would be in Nante, France enjoying Utopiales. I had plane tickets, train tickets and everything. But my child care arrangements fell apart. David and I were planning to travel with our good friends Jim & Kathy Morrow. This was going to be one of those really fun deductible junkets. David got to go with Jim & Kathy and I got to stay home with the kids.

Also, there is this social problem caused by my cold. I'm having a really hard time carrying on conversations because of chest congestion. Multi-sentence utterances send me into fits of uncontrollable coughing requiring albuterol. I feel sort of OK as long as I don't talk.  But I like to talk. (Yes, I know this means that I call the doctor first thing in the morning; his office is closed on Thursdays and I know better to go to the ER unless I can wheeze for them.)

All of this having been said, I'm in a pretty good mood. I've read a whole lot about bleak depression following the election. I just don't feel it. I keep finding reasons to be cheerful, not out of sheer determination but quite spontaneously. My kids are a delight.

If life were really fair, we would all have gone to Nante and somehow childcare arrangements would magically appear in France, allowing me to attend the fine Utopiales program. I like to travel with my kids. And in my utopia, the school district would praise my decision to broaden my son's horizons by taking him along to France; but while we have one of the best public school districts in the country, that is not one of their virtues. They're really determined to keep us from accumulating "illgeal absences."

And if life were really really fair, I would currently be sipping good French wine instead of Pleasantville Red, and the French would be congratulating us on our choice of a new president.

But life isn't fair. I'm not sure whether I'm feeling cheerful because of these obstacles or in spite of them. Certainly, there are things I'd like to change about my life and the world. But it's just not getting me down.

Even without the election, under these stressful circumstances I have plenty of reasons to feel miserable. (Mommy duty, even with David home, runs more than 90 hours a week.) I guess what I'm finding out is that my basic life choices are leading me in a good direction, providing biochemical reasons to be cheerful. So I'm taking my reasons to be cheerful where I can find them really quite effortlessly.

I leave you with a quote from Winnie the Pooh (as quoted in Winnie-the-Pooh's Little Book of Wisdom):

When your house doesn't look like a house and looks like a tree that has been blown down, it's time you tried to find another one.

PS: It amuses me to tell you that the top search words for my blog at the moment are: bush and hitler, large penis, how to fix a tv, male lactation, and bush is the anti-christ. I enjoy the emergent narrative: a voter trying to adjust his TV set to escape the images of a hermaphroditic Bush/Hilter/Anti-Christ coming in through the set; a form of found poetry, I guess.

I was just checking out the results of local elections on the Journal New site -- The New York Journal News is a paper that covers Westchester, Rockland, & Putnam counties -- and discovered that they have the New York State Presidential Election results broken down by county and, for NYC, by borough.

Remember the tiresome wingnut refrain that those of use who oppose Bush just don't remember September 11th? How would we expect those who best remember 9/11 to vote in the presidential election? On the one hand, New Yorkers tend to be liberals; on the other hand NYC elects Republican mayors with some frequency. And on that all-important third hand 9/11 is supposed to have changed everything and also Manhattan was the site of the Republican convention.

So what would you guess Bush was able to draw in Manhattan? 50% of the vote? 40%? 30%? 20%? Nope. With all precincts reporting, Bush drew just 95,362 votes in Manhattan -- 16.61%. Manhattan told him to fuck off.

I would be curious to know if there is any other metropolitan area anywhere in which Bush did so poorly.

MEANWHILE, Fafblog is full of fun:

The election results have come in and they have surprised no one... no one on the side of Giblets that is! It is Giblets in a landslide! Giblets by a whopping three percentage points! Only 49% of the population rejected Giblets! VICTORY! AMERICA HAS SPOKEN!

With this broad mandate, it is time to push aside the mealy-mouthed timid campaign rhetoric Giblets has toyed with before! Giblets will not be "conciliatory" after this historic moment! Tariffs on reading! A flat tax on gay sex! Mandatory prayer before monuments to the Ten Commandments in every class room! A war in every garage, a tortured Arab civilian in every pot! The streets will run with the blood of liberals!

But do not think Giblets will continue to divide the country. Oh no. The days of the bitterly partisan "pro-Giblets" and "anti-Giblets" Americas are over. Giblets is a uniter, not a divider. And he will unite America... UNDER THE CRUSHING FORCE OF HIS IRON HEEL!

Much as I'm interested in anatomizing what went wrong in the 2004 voting, I'm with Arianna Huffington on this one:

This election was not stolen. It was lost by the Kerry campaign.

The reason it's so important to make this crystal clear — even as Kerry's concession speech is still ringing in our ears — is that to the victors go not only the spoils but the explanations. And the Republicans are framing their victory as the triumph of conservative moral values and the wedge cultural issues they exploited throughout the campaign.

But it wasn't gay marriage that did the Democrats in; it was the fatal decision to make the pursuit of undecided voters the overarching strategy of the Kerry campaign.

This meant that at every turn the campaign chose caution over boldness so as not to offend the undecideds who, as a group, long to be soothed and reassured rather than challenged and inspired.

The fixation on undecided voters turned a campaign that should have been about big ideas, big decisions, and the very, very big differences between the worldviews of John Kerry and George Bush — both on national security and domestic priorities — into a narrow trench war fought over ludicrous non-issues like whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant a Purple Heart.

This timid, spineless, walking-on-eggshells strategy — with no central theme or moral vision — played right into the hands of the Bush-Cheney team's portrayal of Kerry as an unprincipled, equivocating flip-flopper who, in a time of war and national unease, stood for nothing other than his desire to become president.

Yes, sure it was really close, if things had gone a little differently, or if Diebold's machines weren't in use, Kerry might have won by 15 votes. But given the nature of the Bush presidency -- the man is a flaming incompetent -- it shouldn't have been close. Kerry blew it over the summer. True, Bush has the incumbent advantage and the advantage of being the wartime president he dreamed of becoming. But Kerry spent much of the summer on really pointless things.

(Via The Gamer's Nook.)

AND FURTHER TO THE SUBJECT OF ELECTION INFRASTRUCTURE, The Onion has this to offer: U.S. Inspires World With Attempt At Democratic Election. (Via Glen Engel-Cox.)

From the comments section at Ohio Voter Suppression News:

I was in Youngstown on Election Day and I visited a number of polling places with Election Protection. The Dep't of Elections was woefully unprepared for this election. Long lines caused waits which were at least 2 hours long during the midday period, traditionally the slowest period. They simply did not have enough machines. The ones they had often went down or mis-registered votes. People pressed Kerry and the confirmation screen showed Bush. Many people didn't realize there was a confirmation screen so who knows how many votes were lost that way. The polls were understaffed with workers (mostly older folk) who had little or no familiarity with computers or the election rules. There were Reupublican challengers at many polling places but they did not challenge many voters - they didn't need to. The voters were suppressed by the voting infrastructure which made it a great chore to vote.

While this election had the heaviest voter turnout since 1968, nationwide, we are really only talking about a 60% turnout instead of the 54% turnout in 2000, an increase of only 11% above the rate of growth of the population. Now admittedly, this increase was probably not uniformly distributed.

But consider this: the wait times for voting have got to figure into existing computer models of voting behavior. What these long wait times mean is not that vast legions of new voters came out of the woodwork, say, doubling the number of voters, but rather mostly that those voters who turned out in places where the infrastrucure is poor were much more reluctant to be discouraged from voting: they refused to leave. That a moderate increase in voter turnout can produce wait-times measured in hours means that there are some areas where voting is habitually discouraged.

This has got to figure into partisan strategies for influencing election infrastructure. The math is just too easy for it not to. X number of minutes to vote times Y number of voters times Z voting machines produces the total time necessary for a given numberof people to vote at a polling place. From there, you can calculate wait times. And from there, it's not too hard to plug in factors like how long the average voter is willing to wait. If no voter is willing to wait more than, say, 15 minutes, you can have relatively short lines. If the voter is willing to wait an hour, the lines get longer. If a significant percentage of voters are unwilling to leave without voting, you get the kind of catastrophic waits seen in Ohio. All of this depends on a willingness to exclude voters from participation. What I see from the wait times in this election is a process that relies on it.

Also, there was an awareness the age of the poll workers combined with th increasing complexity of the voting process would pose a problem. See this USA Today article from August:

Panel cites poll workers' age as problem

The biggest threat to November's presidential election is not balky voting machines or a terrorist attack, but the potential for confusion and mistakes by the nation's aging corps of 1.5 million precinct poll workers, federal election officials say.

The current corps of poll workers is well short of the 2 million needed for a national election. The average age of a U.S. poll worker is 72, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

"If they don't get it right, someone could be denied their opportunity to vote," says Paul DeGregorio, one of four members of the commission. The panel was created by Congress in 2002 to make sure federal elections run smoothly. Already this year, problems have cropped up during primary elections, he notes.

In addition, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 has imposed new procedures for elections, including ID requirements for first-time voters who registered by mail and provisional ballots for voters not immediately found on voter rolls.

"There's a growing complexity at the polling place," says DeForest Soaries, the commission chairman. "If all we do in November is what we did in 2000, that's going to be a problem."

Here is the Election Assistance Commission's Best Practices Tool Kit.

In July, the Caltech-MIT voting Technology Project issued a report, Immediate Steps to Avoid Lost Votes in the 2004 Presidential Election: Recommendations for the Election Assistance Commission (pdf; html), which contains this interesting sentence:

According to the U.S. Census in 2000, approximately one million registered voters said that they did not vote because the polling place lines were too long or the hours for voting were too short.

I like this item from the Democracy for America blog. This is Howard Dean this afternoon:

Montana, one of the reddest states, has a new Democratic governor.

First-time candidates for state legislatures from Hawaii to Connecticut beat incumbent Republicans.

And a record number of us voted to change course—more Americans voted against George Bush than any sitting president in history.

Today is not an ending.

Regardless of the outcome yesterday, we have begun to revive our democracy. While we did not get the result we wanted in the presidential race, we laid the groundwork for a new generation of Democratic leaders.

Democracy for America trained thousands of organizers and brought new leadership into the political process. And down the ballot, in state after state, we elected Dean Dozen candidates who will be the rising stars of the Democratic Party in years ahead.

Tens of millions of us are disappointed today because we put so much of ourselves into this election. We donated money, we talked to friends, we knocked on doors. We invested ourselves in the political process.

That process does not end today. These are not short-term investments. We will only create lasting change if that sense of obligation and responsibility becomes a permanent part of our lives.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

We will not be silent.

Thank you for everything you did for our cause in this election. But we are not stopping here.

Governor Howard Dean, M.D.

I was just on BBC Africa Live talking about the presidential election. I think I had a good soundbite ready. Having blogged earlier in the day was great preparation. I used my line about Ohio not being a fledgling democracy; going on to say that Ohio election officials should have been much better at equipping the polls. I did not try to talk about Nash equalibria.

What I found most interesting about the program was listening to election observers from Africa expressing concern about American electoral process. The flyer I blogged yesterday, instructing Kerry voters to vote Nov. 3rd, was raised by an election observer from Ghana who was appalled that election officials in Ohio's Franklin County laughed off the flyer instead of treating it with the seriousness he thought was appropriate.

My daughter's preschool is about two blocks from the Clinton's house on Old House Lane in Chappaqua. This morning when I dropped off Elizabeth, I saw this home-made sign at the intersection of Orchard Ridge and Rt. 117. I stopped to take a picture. (I saw the back of the sign when taking the picture. On the back it says Proud to be an American with a picture of an American flag.) The same house had a home-made sign that said Welcome Home, Mr. President. when Bill Clinton was released from the hospital after heart surgery not long ago.

MEANWHILE, computers have been giving me a really hard time this morning. Movable Type has been running even more slowly than usual, making it extremely difficult and time consuming to fix typos on my previous post. And it was like pulling teeth to get the Hillary picture out of Sprint's PictureMail service. My brain is running slowly because I have a bad cold and a sinus headache. But computers don't have this excuse. Anyway, I'm glad to finally get this picture up.

Also, the BBC has an appointment to interview me by phone about the election at 1PM my time. I'm not sure how they picked me. They may have called because of my blog or my books, but for all I know they could also have picked me out of the phone book.

From Kevin Drum in the wee hours comes this insightful post:

A COUNTRY IN AMBER....Based on how the final few states are looking at the moment, the most remarkable thing about this presidential election is how nearly identical it is to 2000. Right now, it looks like no more than two or three states will flip from red to blue or vice versa.

As I said the other day, a difference of one or two percentage points makes a big objective difference, since one guy wins and the other doesn't, but it means almost nothing about the direction of the country. We're almost exactly where we were four years ago.

Which, really, is an amazing thing. You'd think an event like 9/11 would act as a catalyst that blows apart existing political dynamics and realigns the electorate, but instead it seems to have cemented it into place. Not only are we at the same place we were four years ago, but the divisions are actually more entrenched than ever.

It hardly seems possible that this can last forever, but if 9/11 didn't realign the electorate, what will?

And indeed, I can name four or five things that seem as if they've changed everything, but perhaps they've changed nothing. Perhaps US politics is locked into a Nash Equlilbrium, a concept in game theory originated by John Nash. Wikipedia has a good description of the Nash Equilibrium. Here is the most crucial bit:

A Nash equilibrium for a mixed strategy game is stable if a small change (specifically a infinitesimal change) in probabilities for one player leads to a situation where two conditions hold:

1. the player who did not change has no better strategy in the new circumstance

2. the player who did change is now playing with a strictly worse strategy

If these cases are both met, then a player with the small change in their mixed-strategy will return immediately to the Nash equilibrium. The equilibrium is said to be stable. If condition one does not hold then the equilibrium is unstable. If only condition one holds then there are likely to be an infinite number of optimal strategies for the player who changed. John Nash showed that the latter situation could not arise in a range of well-defined games.

Regardless of how Ohio comes out, neither political party got what they wanted from this election. That much is obvious.

(And it isn't pretty to have the election decided by a state where the wait to vote could be up to eight hours. Presumably, local government knows how many registered voters live in each precinct. There is no good excuse for this I can think of. Is Ohio some kind of fledgling democracy? Surely they've held elections before and have the know-how to apportion voting machines. Yes? For places that had really long waits someone must have set a maximum figure for acceptable voter turnout that is significantly below 100%.)

One somewhat creepy aspect of this election was the extent to which the candidates were similar. The New York Time remarks:

Since World War II, no two candidates have had such strikingly similar backgrounds of class and privilege, with so many points of overlap. These two not only attended Yale University two years apart, but were also members of the same secret society there, Skull and Bones.

There is a certain uncanniness to a political evolutionary process that would produce such similar candidates. This was not a Coke vs. Pepsi election in which the candidates were marketed as being as similar as possible like Bush vs. Gore. But in the fundamental things that we think or as molding human character, they are more similar than Bush and Gore.

Regardless of how Ohio turns out, it seems to me the biggest question is how we're going to get out of this box. If in fact we are looking at a Nash equilibrium, the only way out is to think outside the box; WAY outside the box.

UPDATE: I see that Jordan Ellenberg (Princeton mathematician and novelist) was exploring this idea on a more limitied scale in Slate on October 25th.

A FURTHER THOUGHT: A couple of people who know something about math have suggested that I'm oversimplifying. Well, of course I'm oversimplifying. The presidential election is way too complicated a system to make detailed mathematical arguments regarding Nash equilibria. But like the concept of fractals, where the existence of the concept gives you a feeling of recognition when you look at (say) a piece of cauliflower, I find the Nash equilibrium concept very suggestive of the current shape of US electoral politics.

I'm up briefly at 2AM because my cough medicine wore off. An hour ago, Kevin Drum wrote:

CNN just reported that there are 200,000 provisional ballots in Ohio. So if anyone wins by less than 100,000 or so, we won't know the winner until the provisionals are counted. And who knows how long that could take?

UPDATE: Apparently the answer is 10-11 days.

What a mess. And I see that even though the networks have calld Florda for Bush, even Florida is going to take a while: Florida official: Tally of absentee ballots may stretch into Thursday

I'm back from the airport. David, who is flying to France, wanted to listen radio most of the way to the airport. We were listening to 1010 WINS News's really inane coverage. While we were driving the polls in various places on the East Coast were closing. When polls would close they would begin calling states for one or another candidtate but with no information about the margins or what percentage of the vote had been tallied. Coming back, I listened to music instead.

I've got a really bad cold, so I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to last this evening. When I was driving, I was really eager to get back to my computer and find out what is going on. But now that I'm here, my bed is looking awfully inviting. Also, now that I'm home and not on the highway, I can take cold medicine, which will probably make me drowsy.

Also, it seems to me that the media is going to be a lot more cautious about calling the race, given what foolish mistakes were made four years ago. (Never mind that people are still voting and will be for a while.) I feel lucky not to have TV reception. If radio was that bad, I can only imagine what the TV coverage is like.

Looking around, I think I would be best off going to bed now and then checking on things at about 3AM. There's too little conclusive data available and I know too muh about numbers to think that 10PM's data is that much superior to the 2PM exit poll numbers. It's not soup yet.

This is the satirical story in The Onion from earlier this week: Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3

The Onion Staff must have gotten a sneak peak at the Republican play book, because look at this from Ohio Voter Suppression News today, election day:

My boss was canvassing this morning for ACT, putting out GOTV door tags in a predominantly black neighborhood on the near east side of Columbus. Repugs had been there first, putting up door hangers that read: Vote for George Bush/Dick Cheney on Tuesday, November 2: Vote for John Kerry/John Edwards on Wednesday, November 3. Incredible!

The polls have opened on the East Coast. Go vote.

UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden explains why those in New York State (which has what's called "fusion voting") should consider voting for Kerry-Edwards on row E, the Working Families line on the ballot.

I think there's something intensely revealing about our current state of affairs in this passage:

While I was away Kevin was practicing for becoming a Master Costumer by entering the Halloween contest at work. He won a nice bottle of bubbly, which I shall enjoy drinking at some point. But I was more interested in his report of one of his fellow contestants. In America Halloween is an excuse for any type of fancy dress, not just spooky stuff. So one of Kevin's co-workers came as a hippy. But her "Make Love, Not War" placard was written in Italian so as not to cause offence.

Two things occur to me here. Firstly, while it was perfectly OK to say "Make Love, Not War" in America back in the 60's, now it is regarded as offensive and liable to cost you your job. And second, it is assumed that if you write something in a foreign language (even if it is pretty damned obvious what it is likely to say), Bush supporters won't have a clue what it means.

Being only 42, I can't say what would and wouldn't endanger your job in the 1960s. I entered the first grade in 1968. But I think Cheryl captures the essence of this historical moment.

There are a number of interesting things going on.

Josh Marshall reports that an outfit called the Florida Leadership Council has issued a Beslan-inspired scare flyer presumably intend to illustrate what will happen if Bush doesn't win. Go to their web site and listen to their sound effects. I think I know what they have in mind for people like me. Perhaps the rise of rightwing terrorism really is on the way. That's certainly the vibe I get from their site. (I'm a little surprised Josh didn't mention the gunshot sound effects.)

Kevin Drum and Ronald Brownstein (writing for the LA Times) have written pices along similar lines, pointing out that regardless of how the election turns out tomorrow, as an attempt to expand the Republican base, the Bush administration has been a failure.

Atrios notes that an Ohio judge has barred vote challengers from the polls.

I have this warm, happy feeling that we're going to do it; we're really going to do it. We're going to rise up and go to the polls and vote George W. Bush out of office. I'm no longer interested in the nuances of polls, though they send much the same message. I just feel it. I feel like we've all joined hands and are going to walk in on Tuesday and do it.