Post whatever you’d like here — election day thoughts and stories, self-linking, other links, stuff that (gasp!) isn’t about the US election, it’s all good. And if you haven’t yet, please go vote.
From Damn Cool Pics, artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada “created an aerial view of the face of U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama, from gravel and sand in Barcelona.”
A relevant quote from law professor Amanda Frost: Attitudes towards nationwide injunctions also turn on one’s view of the courts…
With regards to the courts, I think we’re about to see the Supremes tell lower courts that their rulings will…
the people he picks to work in his administration are supposed to support that effort as long as they don’t…
@Ron: What do you think Trump did in his first term that was unique or made a positive impact on…
During his first term Trump walked into the White House with no experience in government, so he selected a lot…
I interviewed this guy. Enjoy!
http://bakertoons.blogspot.com/2008/10/interview-with-kevin-mccormick.html
I’m watching NBC, although I’ve got a meeting to go to and I’m about to get dressed for it. I watch NBC news probably about 2 to 3 times a week. They’ve trotted out a black man and given him quite a buildup at a 3rd seat on their desk and started up a bit of a
“just because the U.S. elects a black man doesn’t mean it’s a post-racial culture now”. I wonder what it’s like to have to go on national TV and be considered a representative for an entire race?
Then we had a hologram and a colonnaded set and dramatic music and a big graphic on the Indiana race and the anchor dramatically proclaimed that … no votes had been cast and it was “officially too close to call”. Then they did that with two more races. My good Lord people, get over yourselves!
It’s funny to see the coverage of the Grant Park party from a national viewpoint. I’ve been by or at those sites a number of times. There isn’t a cop or a fireman in Chicago who’s got the night off tonight. Literally. There’s been interviews of cops, from rookies to ones that were around for the Grant Park Democratic Convention riots of 1968. Lots of security, references to the riots when the Bulls won the NBA championships, etc.
Daley II wants the Olympics bad. Real bad. Real, real, really real bad. Legacy and all that, plus bread and circuses to distract the masses and lots of contracts to give to his friends. And it would look real bad to the IOC if, oh, half a million people tore up Grant Park and tossed it into Lake Michigan. Which the cops WILL stop, by whatever means, trust me. It’ll help a lot if Obama wins. If not, it could get real ugly down there.
I voted for mostly Republicans. Democrat for U.S. House. And for the three-member Water Reclamation Board (rather important for a region built on a bunch of rivers and swamps) I voted one Republican, one Democrat and one Green. The Green had the endorsement of the Chicago Tribune, and a well-reasoned one, so that’s the way I went. The Sun-Times recommended 2 Dems and one Repub, but I found the Trib more persuasive (the one Dem had been there a while and done nothing of note). My vote for Cook County States’ Attorney was for a Repub, but that was not a partisan position. He has been a member of the Cook County board, often referred to as the Crook County Board, and he promises to investigate the hell of out it. His Democratic opponent, a female Hispanic, is a decent woman and would likely make a fine prosecutor, but I think that the emphasis needs to be put on cleaning up government. I hope he wins.
O.K., these guys just awarded South Carolina to McCain with 0% of the vote in. I’m turning this off and going to my Troop meeting.
Ron, with all due respect, I think you’ve been reading racist information if you think there was any chance of a riot tonight. Sheesh.
Amp, I’m not talking about a race riot. I’m talking about something like when the Bulls won the NBA championship and cars got overturned and torched in the streets. And there’s a very real chance of it. Why do you think that Daley has put every uniform he’s got on the streets? Because there’s no chance of a riot?
“Why do you think that Daley has put every uniform he’s got on the streets? Because there’s no chance of a riot?”
Well… possibly because he’s racist. ;)
I think more likely because he knows damn well that when you put 200,000 or 500,000 people together in one place and emotions run high anything can happen.
Amp, Mandolin – why does this have anything to do with race? Do you think it was race that drove people to overturn and torch cars and break storefront and office front windows when the Bulls won the NBA championship?
And let the record show that we ended up with about the quietest 200,000 people in Grant Park ever. Quietest from the viewpoint of anti-social behavior, mind you – they were celebrating!
“Do you think it was race that drove people to overturn and torch cars and break storefront and office front windows when the Bulls won the NBA championship?”
Do you think that elections and sports are identical?
Where were the riot police when Kerry lost?
Look, maybe you haven’t read it, but Amp and I have. There have been a large number of conservatives saying the subtext outright. A friend of mine was even in a subway car the other day when some political stumpers came through the car to say it. “If Obama loses, the blacks will riot.”
Love the LINK button; that’s brilliant. But please also retain your “How to Make Links” explanation page. That explanation is SO DAMN CLEAR that I use this site as a reference whenever I want to leave a link on any website’s comments. After all these years, I probably should commit that a href…. code to memory, but I haven’t.
(Hey — I’m over 40 which entitles me to be stuck in my ways. You whippersnappers settle down and show a little respect!)
While Amp’s “How to Make Links” explanation page clears up one mystery, it creates another. The page provides an example of how to create a link to http://www.example.com. Why doesn’t the computer treat the example as actual linked text, and replace the example with the text “Go visit this site.”? Is there some code to signal to the computer, “Don’t execute this instruction; treat it as a string of characters”?
Hey, nobody.really.
There are a couple of ways to get around this problem. One is to use the HTML CODE or PRE commands, which signal the computer to output the string directly, without formatting it or translating it to code.
Another one — and the one Amp used on that page — is: rather than directly typing in the left bracket and right bracket themselves, instead use the appropriate HTML character entities, the codes which tell the computer to output the left bracket and the right bracket characters. This also circumvents the translation to code.
Obviously I can’t tell you what they are here,
otherwise I’d have to kill youas the computer would just render them as the left bracket and the right bracket, which you’d likely find unhelpful. You can look ’em up here though.Nobody.really, I’m just happy to have less clutter on the “reply” area, so I’m not going to reinstate the link to that page.
But the page itself still exists — you can find it here — and I’m glad it’s been useful, since I was pleased with how it came out. Maybe you could bookmark it?
Actually, you can show the code that produces < just by using the code that produces & at the start of it, so:
> gives you >
< gives you <
(The code that produces an ampersand is &)
But Elkins link is obviously far more useful, since it gives the full list of special characters.
Some good news in my area for Democrats. This is the first election since 1992 where it’s been hotly contested between the Republican incumbent and a Democrat candidate. Usually, it’s an easy win for the republican and the Democrats invest very little money in this race but the Democrat actually carried the Riverside County portion of the district but the incumbent is leading in the Orange County portion. The counting is actually going into the provisional ballots. On some list of the 10 most corrupt Republican Congressmen, three individuals from the Inland Empire including Ken Calvert are on the list.
It’s actually kind of shocking the race is still undecided. But it’s a testimony to the slow transformation from Republican to Democrat.
Do you think that elections and sports are identical?
After this election, I’m thinking there’s a lot of similarities. But the point is not that an election is the same as winning a championship. The point is that in both cases there are a number of people who are greatly emotionally invested in the outcome of a contest. You put 200,000 of those people together in one spot (and estimates of how many people were actually going to show up ran up to 500,000+, which is what Daley II had to use for planning) to stand around and wait outside for hours until and through the time that the outcome is decided and you have the potential for something bad to happen. Potential being a key word here. Not a guarantee, but something that a prudent executive authority has to account for in planning.
I would say as well that between the rejection of President Bush felt by the electorate in general, the state of the economy (which, of course, I’ve seen much worse) and the presence of Obama and Palin on the tickets, it’s my personal opinion that there was more emotion surrounding this election than there has been in a long time. Don’t forget we’re talking about Obama’s political home town, too – I’d have to look at a map, but offhand I’d say that if Grant Park isn’t actually in his old Senatorial District it’s within a few miles.
The fact that some racists were making comments such as you related is not surprising but is really immaterial. Just because a racist thinks ‘x’ is going to happen for racist reasons doesn’t mean ‘x’ can’t happen. Now, as it turned out the crowd was mixed with regards to age. If you had had a flood of teenagers and young adults there (which is what you see in a lot of other gatherings outdoors at night in Grant Park – I’ve been there) things might have been different. But there were middle-aged and elderly people and children there as well. It’s the Mayor’s job to plan for the worst and hope for the best in a situation like this. He doesn’t just plan for what he thinks will happen or what he thinks should happen; he has to plan for what he thinks could happen as well.
Speaking of kids; one thing noted in the news locally (and that I myself observed at the polling place I went to) was that people brought their children when they voted. They wanted their kids to see this. I’ve never seen kids in the polling place before, and I’ve voted in at least the general election and almost always the primary election in every election year for just about my whole life.
Hey, nobody.really – if you see something really neat on a web page and you’d like to see how they did that, try right-clicking on the page and selecting “View Source”. You’ll have to plow through all the HTML code for the entire page and that can get confusing, but you might be able to pick out what was done.
Who says there’s no such thing as a “2nd Amendment Democrat”?
Hail Of Bullets Celebrates Obama Victory
So, the Supreme Court said that individuals have a right to keep and bear arms, but that there is room for reasonable regulation? I don’t remember the exact language, but as a strong supporter of the RKBA I also strongly support this fuckwit losing this rifle permanently and his rights to use one overall for some time. Damn lucky no one was killed.
RonF, you’ve really never seen kids in a polling place before?
I’m not doubting your word at all, I’m just surprised. When I was a child I accompanied my mother to the polling station every year. When I was very small, she would let me pull the little levers for her. When I got a bit older, she would explain her reasoning for the levers she was pulling. She stopped bringing me into the booth with her altogether when I was around nine or so. That was when she told me that, since I was now getting old enough to have political opinions of my own, she no longer felt it appropriate for me to witness her vote. It was time for me to understand that ones vote was a private and personal thing.
The ladies at the polling station would always give us those “I Voted” stickers, and sometimes there were even cookies. Cookies!Cookies!Cookies! Naturally, I thought that voting was the best thing ever.
I guess I always figured that this method of delivering a basic lesson in civic responsibility was a very common thing for parents to do with their children. Certainly I remember there always being other kids my age there at the polls with their parents. This was in the ’70s, by the way, in New York State. Maybe it was a regional quirk?
If people really stopped doing that with their kids at some point, then that makes me feel a little sad. If excitement over this year’s campaign has led them to start doing it again, that’s all to the good, as far as I’m concerned.
I voted at 6am in Manhattan and don’t recall seeing any children, but there were way too many damn dogs for my dog-allergic spouse.
Unrelatedly, I’m wondering what’s going to happen to Doug Kmiec in the long run. If upstarts like Ross Douthat feel comfortable very publicly denouncing him as ‘a “pro-lifer” who has spent the past year serving as an increasingly embarrassing shill for the opposition party’s objectively pro-abortion nominee,’ that’s a sign that the current GOP has no place for Kmiec. (And possibly not the current Catholic Church, either, given the refusals to serve Kmiec Communion.)
But is there a place for him in the Democratic Party, if he continues his strident and at times irrational opposition to homosexuality? The Obama campaign already got criticism this year for using Kmiec as a spokeman to people of faith.
There was an interesting article in my city’s newspaper.
Before it became Mira Loma
So when are you authors here going to take your articles and post them someplace where the pageviews don’t give hits and cash to the misogyny on reviews.amptoons.com ? It’s been more than 2 years already. What’s the holdup? Why can you not do something about the misogyny you’re helping?
Aerik,
When are you going to pay for the cost of maintaining this website and Amp’s existence?
Actually, since the initial payment, all the money has been donated to charity. (Most recently, $400 to “no on 8,” making “Alas” the 18th highest contributor to “no on 8” in Portland.)
The crap on reviews.amptoons.com helps sleazy porn site A get better search engine rankings than sleazy porn site B. How does that make the world a worse place, specifically?
Keeping “Alas” where it is raises a little money for charity, thus doing a tiny bit of good in the world; and it also gives me an emergency cushion of sorts if things go badly, although happily that hasn’t been necessary yet. Moving “Alas” doesn’t do anyone any good, that I can see. So it’s staying here, for the foreseeable future.
That’s really all I have to say about it, at this point.
Wow. So you’ve gone from your sad, nearly tear-filled explanation of how you had to make reviews.amptoons.com because you had no choice and needed the cash desperately, and now you don’t see how helping give cash to misogynist porn peddlers makes the world worse. You’ve sunk, Ampersand. You’ve sunk low. Cuz that’s quite a whopper.
First of all, I didn’t make “reviews.amptoons.com” (and for someone who doesn’t want to help that page out, you sure do link to it a lot); the owner of amptoons.com made it. Because I’m on the same domain doesn’t mean that I control or write everything here, as you probably already know.
Secondly, yes, my opinions have certainly changed a lot from a couple of years ago, when I wrote:
A total contrast with what I’m saying now!
And by the way, I wasn’t “nearly tear-filled’ back then. I was and am sorry I didn’t tell people about the domain sale immediately; but other than that, I don’t think I’ve done anything I need to apologize for.
Now, if you’d like to stay and disagree intelligently, without acting like a concern troll or making personal attacks, then you’re welcome to. Otherwise, go away and don’t come back. It’s entirely your choice.