Best lines of the day, so far

Nothing NewMexiKen can add to this from Whiskey Bar:

What the Dems are saying:

Pelosi praised “the beauty and genius of our democracy,” and thanked voters for giving Democrats the chance to lead.

“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in conduct of the work here,” she said, calling for “partnerships … not partisanship.”

What the Dems are actually thinking:

MARSELLUS: Step aside, Butch.

Butch steps aside, revealing Marsellus standing behind him, holding a pump-action shotgun. KABOOM!!!!

Zed is blasted in the groin. Down he goes, screaming in agony. Marsellus, looking down at his whimpering rapist, ejects the used shotgun shell.

BUTCH: You okay?

MARSELLUS: Naw man. I’m pretty fuckin’ far from okay.

BUTCH: What now?

MARSELLUS: What now? Well let me tell you what now. I’m gonna call a couple pipe-hittin’ niggers, who’ll go to work on homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. (to Zed) You hear me talkin’ hillbilly boy?! I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’m gonna git medieval on your ass!

Quentin Tarantino
Pulp Fiction

Smile Train

Got $250 (or more) you think you could afford to donate? Go read about the Smile Train.

There was one thing that impressed me more than anything about Smile Train. I sat at a table with one of the people from Smile Train, DeLois Greenwood. A nurse by training, she has been involved with cleft surgeries for 25 years. One could easily imagine that, by now, she would have become jaded or hardened. But when they showed a video about the life’s work of one of their partners, Dr. Hirij Andewalla, tears were streaming down her face. That more than anything convinced me that was a charity worth supporting. (Steven D. Levitt)

Think about what you might spend the $250 on — and what it could buy.

November 8th is the birthday

… of Patti Page. A good gift for Patti as she turns 79 might be A Doggy in The Window. Depends on how much, I suppose.

… of Morley Safer. He’s 75.

… of Bonnie Raitt. She turns 57 in the Nick of Time.

It’s also the birthday of Margaret Mitchell, born on this date in 1900. As you all must know (but just in case), Mitchell’s original name for Scarlett O’Hara was Pansy O’Hara. Just wouldn’t have been the same.

Best line of the day, so far

“I didn’t know there was a Green Party candidate in Virginia. You idiots. Why won’t you go shut up and go away? Not enough wars for you yet? Not enough corruption?”

— Altercation, commenting on the candidate who drained off 26,000 votes in a race where the viable candidates are less than 7,000 votes apart.

Unless you live in Vermont, please give up on the idea of a third party.

32,100,000 vs. 24,524,000

Brad DeLong does the underlying math:

One way to look at last night’s election is that the implicit gerrymandering of the Senate and the in-the-tank-ness of the press corps are keeping people from realizing how big the blowout was. Consider this: it looks like 32,100 thousand Americans voted for Democratic Senatorial candidates, and only 24,524 thousand Americans voted for Republican Senatorial candidates. That’s a 13.4% margin of Democratic victory.

Update:

Democratic senate votes/Republican senate votes:

2002: 21,428,784/18,665,605
2004: 37,645,909/38,164,089
2006: 32,100,000/24,524,000

Total: 91,174,693/81,353,694

Don’t know much about history

From The New Criterion:

A college education—that is, a college degree: education needn’t come into the picture—can cost upwards of $200,000 these days. The average student leaves the old ivy-covered halls almost $20,000 in debt. And what do they get for their pains? Not a lot. That, anyway, is the sobering message of The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions, a new study undertaken by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s National Civic Literary Board and the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy. The ambitious study—its findings are available online at this web address: http://www.americancivicliteracy.org—canvassed more than 14,000 college freshmen and seniors about their knowledge of American history and political institutions. Some of the depressing highlights: Seniors scored 1.5 percent higher on average than freshmen. In other words, four years and a couple hundred grand doesn’t buy much knowledge of American history. If the survey had been administered as an examination, seniors would fail with an average score of 53.2 percent The more elite institutions do not perform better than their less prestigious cousins—far from it. The report indicates that at Brown, Georgetown, and Yale (among other elite institutions), seniors emerge from their studies knowing less about American history and foreign affairs than freshmen.

Link via dangerousmeta!

The Quiet Man

U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman was re-elected to his fifth term yesterday, winning 70 percent of the vote and taking all 33 New Mexico counties.

Now seriously, how many of you outside of New Mexico could even have named our junior senator? (Yeah junior; the senior senator, Pete Domenici, has been in the Senate since 1973, Bingaman only since 1983.)

Our governor, Bill Richardson, was re-elected with 68% of the vote. He may have lost one county. The joke was Bill Richardson was the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate was someone “who isn’t Bill Richardson.”

The local house district is too close to call and a recount is inevitable — and after all that negative advertising.

Best line of the morning, so far

The Democrats have a victorious night and Michael Bérubé sums it up:

And all it took was the Abramoff scandal, the Foley scandal, the Haggard scandal, the suspension of habeas corpus, the creation of the Cheney Archipelago of secret torture sites, a criminally incompetent response to one of the worst natural disasters in US history, and a hopeless war that has killed thousands of US troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and may well go down as the single worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the republic.

Significant milestone

It appears that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi will become the next Speaker of the House, the first woman in that job.

As such, she will be second in the line of succession to the presidency (after the vice president).

Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi was born in Baltimore in 1940. She has represented her San Francisco district in Congress since 1987.

What Abraham Lincoln Teaches Us about Email

On election day, here’s one more thing we can learn from Abraham Lincoln. An excerpt:

When he used an electronic message Lincoln maximized its impact by using carefully chosen words. His August 1864 telegram to General Grant, “Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew and choke” could not have been more explicitly expressed. Emails, on the other hand, have tended to become the communications equivalent of casual Fridays, substituting comfort and ease for discipline and rigor.

Good stuff.

Here’s Jay

“Haggard says that he is a liar and a deceiver. I think it is way too soon for him to be entering politics.”

“He was also using meth. That’s why he was so popular as a preacher. His one hour sermons would last five minutes.”

“If he was using meth – does that make him a Methodist?”

I Voted

I Voted

Took about 20 minutes including the commute to and from the nearby school. This morning it was all backed up, so I’m glad I waited as there was no line at all.

We voted with paper this year — too much like taking the SAT if you ask me. Fill in the ovals. Once done, the ballot is scanned into a shredder vote counting machine while we watch.

I was asked to show ID and when I balked (because my preferred M.O. is ass), I was only asked to provide the last four digits of my SSN. (I did show my ID, I simply questioned why.) Anyone know what the law requires in New Mexico?

Poll worker charged with assaulting voter

A poll worker at the United Auto Workers hall on Fern Valley Road was arrested after he was accused of assaulting a voter, said Lt. Col. Carl Yates, a spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriffs’ Office.

The worker, whose name has not been released, has been charged with interfering with an election and fourth-degree assault, said Yates, who had not other details.

Paula McCraney, a spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Clerk, said the poll worker was accused of choking and pushing the voter out of the door. Election officials called the police and when an officer arrived, the voter wanted to file charges, McCraney said.

“That about tops off the day,” McCraney said.

— Louisville Courier-Journal.

As this is in the Louisville, Kentucky, area I’m glad to know Functional Ambivalent voted earlier.