(no subject)

There are a lot of things to say about last night. Some of them I'll have to wait on, since I want actual statistics to discuss, rather than exit polls (which are a statistical mess).

But a few scattered thoughts:

I'm glad Jon Stewart was the one to tell me. ^_^ (We were watching Comedy Central's hour-long coverage special at the time.)

McCain supporters at the concession speech: not cool. Speech good, but I wish he had been a little more energetic in quieting the boos.

Part of me wishes I were still in Indiana, not only so I could be part of flipping that state blue -- seriously, the results aren't finalized, but it looks like it happened! -- but so I would have had a real possibility of hopping in the car and driving to Chicago. Because a part of me really wishes I could have been there in Grant Park.

Sadly, my being in California does not appear to have made a difference in Prop 8. But there are already legal battles being prepared; we'll get rid of that thing, and I hope sooner rather than later.

As moving as the headlines from around the country are, what get me more are the international reactions. Very nearly the entire world was rooting for Obama. And while he's going to have a four-year uphill battle, trying to fix the many things that have gone wrong, the simple fact of his election is enough to make many nations look more kindly upon us. That alone is worth the weight of the White House in gold.

Now? The real work begins.

aneurysm time

And now I have to disengage my brain from thoughts about modern America and participatory democracy and post-racism and the disintegration of the conservative movement and all that stuff, and go back to thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of seventeenth-century monarchy.

Brain. Hurty.

Prop 8 info

Just as a heads-up to interested folks. (No, I haven't gotten to work yet. Surprise!)

First of all, they're still counting provisional/absentee/early/etc. votes, so the result is not official. However, it's highly likely that the measure will pass.

But, its passage in the election isn't the end. Lawsuits have already been filed. Short form, as I understand it, is that same-sex marriages were recognized in California because the CA Supreme Court ruled that opposing them was unconstitutional. Amending the constitution, according to more educated opinions than mine, doesn't remove the conflict with Article I. So on legal grounds, the amendment itself may be struck down as unconstitutional. Getting around that would require revising the original text of the constitution, which is much harder to do.

Moreover, as that link points out, the CA justices said back when they made their decision that there were two ways to solve this problem. The easier one was to legalize same-sex marriage. The much, much harder one was to say, "to hell with this; civil unions for everybody, gay or straight." Which in some ways I'm in favor of: I don't think what the government says about a relationship and what a given religion says about it should have anything to do with one another. If we could actually push through a terminology change that would recognize the difference, I'd be in favor of it. But (as noted in the comments to that post) this creates a massive inter-state problem, since civil unions are not simply marriage by another name, not under the variety of state laws the U.S. has. So this may be more of a nuclear option than anything else: do all the people who voted for Prop 8 really want to go down that road?

Let's be pessimistic, though, and say the amendment stands, and the legal fight continues. This analysis lays out the basics of how it would fare in the U.S. Supreme Court. Short form of that one is, this could be the queen sacrifice (no pun intended <g>) that wins the chess game. There's a strong body of federal law and precedent and so on that can be mobilized to support gay marriage rights, and a Supreme Court decision in that direction would address this question in all fifty states at once. And while we may be worried about conservative justices, conservative or not, they have to respect the implications of the law. kittenrae suggests those implications would, in the end, be in favor of acceptance.

So: while the proposition will likely pass, the results may not be as bad as you fear. And the fallout from here will be interesting to watch.


(Links by way of zellandyne.)

(no subject)

I'm going to get to work on this book, and stop reading political news. Really I am.

Eventually.

In the meantime, check out this map, by way of The Daily Kos:



Red is counties shifting more Republican than in 2004; blue is more Democratic.

Check out how dark Indiana is. That doesn't mean the state has suddenly become a Democratic stronghold; it just means the vote swung strongly leftward from where it had been (which resulted in it landing almost perfectly balanced in the middle). Virtually the only part of the nation where Republican sentiment gained in strength was Arkansas, stretching into Oklahoma and up through Appalachia. Even chunks of Alaska went more Democratic this time around, some of them quite sharply.

Even Wyoming, which last night had one of the strongest McCain margins of victory, is mostly blue on that map.

The information I'm waiting on, incidentally, for the substantive post I mentioned before, is electorate stats. I've seen exit poll data on electorate share for young voters, African-Americans, etc, but a) exit polls are not great data and b) electorate share isn't that useful metric, since it's a zero-sum game, where gains in one area must be matched by losses in another. What I want to know is how much the total number of votes cast by each group changed, and what the turnout rate was for each demographic. That's where the interesting meat is.

hah!

[EDIT: At the advice of my commenters, I'm putting in a notice that this is a post about revision, not politics. I've apparently given a few people minor heart attacks already, before they got far enough in to figure out what I was talking about.]

I said it all the way back in July: "When in doubt, throw in an assassination attempt."

Now, the attempt in question ended up being canceled, but I think putting one in elsewhere may in fact be the solution to one of my problems.

Send in a man with a gun. I don't think I'll have an actual gun, but the advice still holds. Funny how this whole "learning your craft" thing involves coming around to the basic lessons over and over and over again.