Karen
11/30/06
I look forward to the advent calendar starting, always fun to check out every morning. Gary, be sure to go to Mom's tonight and get your present from me. You can start to open one tomorrow :) We have all been passing around a nasty cold. Erika was home on Tuesday, Brent and Emily both stayed home yesterday. We'll see who goes back today. Emily does her job shadowing tomorrow night. She gets to go the emergency room -- hoping for some sick people to come in. Then on Saturday she goes to a debate tournament. Erika has a choir concert on Tuesday. I think Erika and I will try to finish up our christmas shopping on Saturday. Tonight we get to go shopping at Lowes -- the washer died on Tuesday and the fridge has been on life-support for a year, so we will see about getting some new ones.

I do have the big bag o' gifts at my place already. Can't wait to start opening them. Hope Emily has fun in the ER, Erika has fun at her concert, and you and Brent have fun buying appliances! --Gary

Thanks for the info, Lindsey, and thanks also for the new reviews. --Gary

I did some shopping Friday but much later in the day and to a couple of stores that were not all that busy. I'm practically done with my shopping and I've wrapped all the presents I've bought so far. I still have to find some Christmas cards I like. They all look the same this year.

Livy, what is laca?

The good news is, it is fixed, and running like a well-tuned race car. So feel free to write in again!

So what's everybody doing for Thanksgiving??

I'm taking my computer in for an upgrade today (new motherboard, processor, video card, and adding a hard drive), and they tell me everything should be done by 5 tonight. It shouldn't create any problems with my internet connections... but if we had a computer tech guy playing our Five Words game, the phrase at the top of his list would be "That shouldn't have happened." Anyway, if there is a problem, all it means is I wouldn't be able to update this newsletter page from home. So if you send in an item this weekend and notice that it is taking a long time for it to show up, the problem is on my end and not yours. Feel free to send things to me; they won't be lost, but may not show up til Monday morning.

Oh yeah, I was at Best Buy to get a new video card for my computer. The more I looked at everything, the more I realized I should just do a major upgrade and replace practically everything. Expensive, yes, but hey -- it's my hobby, and I'm addicted.

One more thing: New pictures!

That's not going to make Dub too happy.... :-)
[later: if picture disappears, it was the cover of Newsweek headlined "Father Knows Best," with a large picture of the elder Bush in the foreground and a smaller Dub in the background]

Along those same lines, here's a good article on Bush Senior and Junior from a U.K. perspective (though the author is an American). It goes a little too easy on Bush Senior, in my opinion, but still a very interesting and revealing read.

MMMmmm, HuHot.... I'm going to Tico's myself, with some people from work. --Gary

Having fun watching the Republicans re-define themselves today, and give their variations on, "Hey, I never liked Bush either!" Rush Limbaugh throwing up his hands and saying he's been lying on his radio show for the sake of the Republican message but he's not going to defend the unworthy Republicans any more; and Joe Scarborough back-pedalling so fast he's making that beep-beep noise, today scolding the Democrats: "One thing the Democrats are going to HAVE to do is come up with some kind of health care plan. Too many Americans just can't afford health insurance." Hey, thanks for that advice, Joe -- I guess you Republicans were just too busy with eliminating habeas corpus to tackle it, huh?

I haven't watched Katie Couric's Corner News & Coffee Shop lately, but I heard from someone who did yesterday. She devoted two whole minutes to the election results, then nine minutes to the tragedy of Rumsfeld's departure. Then Couric interviewed Nancy Pelosi, looking the whole time "like she smelled a skunk." Aww, get used to it, Katie!

The Five Words game is over! Congratulations to Amanda!

Bush is having lunch with Nancy Pelosi today. I'd like to be a fly on the wall for that one!

I'll be posting the results of the Five Words game tomorrow, so if you are not Amanda, Donna, Emily, Erika, Grandma, Karen, Paul, Ryan, or Sean and you want to play, you gotta get in today!

Problem is, Gates is just another one of those same guys in a different suit. I'm thinking replacing Rummy was just a distraction, like when a magician waves his right hand in your face while his left hand is hiding the coin in his pocket. Hearings on Iraq will be starting one of these days, and this might have happened so Gates can sit in front of the panel and say, "Gee, I can't answer that, I wasn't here then" while Rummy is relaxing by the pool down in Paraguay.

There was another weird moment when I think Bush was listening to his earpiece and talking directly to his handlers. After he wandered off the subject on some answer, he looked down and said, as if talking to himself, "Stay on principle...I know, I know." I'm not sure about the first phrase, but he definitely said "I know, I know." And maybe he was talking to himself, but....

Later: Other people noticed this too, and they said the phrase was, "I'm anxious...I know, I know." Obviously responding to his off-stage coaches. :-)

The only good thing that happened for the Republicans yesterday is that Dick Cheney didn't shoot anybody in the face.

The Republican politicians, with a few exceptions, are still acting like the power is still theirs -- warning the Democrats they better not act like winners, we're expecting you to cooperate and play nice. (The one exception I've seen was, of all people, Tom DeLay -- saying things like this represents a shift in thinking in this country, and his party had better pay attention, etc.) But most were still trying to make it somehow into a Republican victory, and condescendingly offering to share power if the Democrats would only approach it in the spirit of bi-partisanship....

The Right Wing still owns the media, and starting today (in fact, it started last night) the media will be going full-force to minimize this accomplishment and, worse, to pin all the failures of the Bush administration on the Democrats.

Matt Lauer this morning on the Today show, to Tim Russert: "Are the Democrats just going to continue to complain and tear down the President, or are they going to work with him for a solution [to the war in Iraq]?" Russert: "They've got two years. If they don't get busy and produce by 2008, they're gone." They were acting like the newly-elected Democrats are a new crew of busboys for their country club, and they had better perform better than the last one...!

Also maddening was Chris Matthews, all last night on MSNBC. In the early evening as the results came in, he was visibly in mourning for the "innocent Republicans" (yes, he used those words) who are getting "voted out of office just because they're Republicans." As the numbers came in showing that another one had bitten the dust, Matthews moaned, "He shouldn't have lost -- he shouldn't have lost..." When he interviewed Howard Dean (who is most responsible for the strategy that produced last night's Democratic sweep) Matthews still badgered him with "the Democrats don't have a plan" and "the Democratic Party seems to be in disarray." And worst of all were his remarks after Hillary Clinton's victory speech, late last night. Matthews said (not an exact quote, but very close to this): "A man could have given that speech and it would have been ok, but when she did it it sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard." He immediately went on to include Nancy Pelosi in this female-bashing: "When she takes on the President face-to-face, how will she do it without screeching and becoming grating?" He criticized Bill Clinton for standing behind Hillary during her speech "looking like Lex Luthor hovering over her," and he even criticized Hillary's clapping along with the crowd at one point: "What was that about? It looked Chinese or something." Whatever that means. Normally my attitude on Matthews is about 60-40 against -- sometimes he's ok, most times not -- but last night was 80-20 at best....

But forget all that for now. Last night was a great night, and amazing times are ahead -- starting today at noon, when Bush has a press conference about the election. Let's see if he can do it without smirking, without claiming it as a Republican victory, and without saying "The terrorists have won." :-)

On CNN, Jack Cafferty just said the neocons (neo-[new]-conservatives, i.e., Bush-style conservatives) "are toast"; and he also made a remark about how Bush was elected by a very thin margin "if he was elected at all."
Wow! But remember: Even though everybody is doing it now, we hated Bush before it was cool! :-)

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Karen
11/7/06

I voted!
Went in at 8 this morning (polls open here at 7), I was already #40. Quite often I go in at 8:30 -- 9 and I'm maybe 25....

Again, high turnout... This is gonna be fun! :-) --Gary

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Gary
11/7/06
Some sleaze news and some good news. First the sleaze: The sleazy Laura Ingraham (Republican talking head, kind of an Ann Coulter-lite) has a radio program, and on it she urged her listeners to flood the Voter Protection Hotline -- the number you call if you're having any trouble with voting -- with phony calls. Which they did. I understand the Hotline had to go offline for a while. She is... words fail me. But I'll be nice and simply call her a "sore loser."

This is interesting. There is a nationwide Election Incident Reporting System. It tracks the numbers of voting problems (of all kinds) and displays it in map form. (The map may take a while to load -- lots of people watching it today.)

Now the good news. It is beginning to look like a record voter turnout. Some precincts reporting 70% and higher. When people show up to vote, Democrats win -- simple as that. (Why else would the Republicans focus on voter suppression?)

P.S. Everybody, keep your heads down today. While Bush is cutting more brush, Dick Cheney is spending the day hunting!

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Gary
11/7/06
Hey, Donna, I'm afraid Gallup has been insulted by Montana Senator Conrad Burns (Republican). He's trying to retain his seat against the challenger John Tester ("the liberal with the conservative haircut"). Tester has come from way behind, in this heavily Republican state -- in spite of tons of Republican money being spent there, and a personal visit from Bush himself. And just within the past few days, a Gallup poll showed Democrat Tester ahead of Burns. But Burns dismissed the poll as "inaccurate" -- and then revoked one newspaper's credentials to report from his headquarters on election night because that newspaper mentioned this poll! :-) Burns' spokesman said, "Running a bogus poll on the day before an election to try and suppress Republican voter turnout is irresponsible and in poor taste." Gallup...bogus?? :-) I loooove watching all them desperate Republicans...

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Gary
11/7/06
Well, there are lots of reports of voting problems coming in from all over; but it doesn't seem to be fraud so much as just flaky machinery. I understand that there are new and untried electronic voting machines of one sort or another in 50% of the polling places around the country. Add to that the volunteer election officials in each polling place, who have had little training in operating them, and you got problems. Big problems in Ohio (home of Diebold, interestingly) and Florida, the two main trouble spots in 2000 and 2004. Maybe six or eight elections from now, we'll have these problems licked -- if we're still having elections then....

The GOP seems to be focusing this time not on rigged machines but voter intimidation. First are the so-called "robo-calls": Your phone will ring late at night, and the recorded message starts talking about the Democratic candidate. At the end of the message, the voice says (as it must, by law) "paid for by the Republican etc etc." But you've already slammed down the phone before you hear that. All you know is that some Democrat called you at 2 in the morning. Then it does that three or four more times that night. Democratic candidates are reporting that people are calling them to say "If you guys call me one more time I'm never voting for a Democrat again!" I just realized I already wrote about this below. But it is a big problem, which Howard Dean himself (head of the Democratic Party) got on television this morning to warn voters about.

More sinister are the automated calls going out to voters in heavily Black or Latino precincts, where the recorded voice informs them (rather, MISinforms them) that "if you voted in the last election, you don't need to vote in this one." And ends with a threat: "If you DO try to vote, you can and will be arrested." Other recorded messages tell people that their polling place has been changed, and gives them an address across town.

The good news is, a lot of people see this going on and will follow it up with legal action, and even the media have gotten on the stick and are pursuing it. Bad news, the damage is already done.

But the Republicans are going to lose today. And they're already putting together their fall-back stories. Just now, I heard Tucker Carlson (one of MSNBC's Republican commentators) say, "In a year like this, with so much going against the Republicans, if the Democrats take control of the House by winning only 25 seats -- as opposed to 50 or more -- couldn't you consider that a defeat?" Yeah, Tucker, right -- big Democratic victories everywhere, including taking control of the House, but YOU WIN! Pathetic! :-)

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Donna
11/7/06

Oh how the mighty have fallen. That is hilarious. So do you know if Bush got booed while giving that speech in FL? I heard he was back in Crawford to vote today. I voted absentee a few weeks ago. Why doesn't he?

Olbermann's special comment last night was really good. I loved his last line -- Vote!

Gary, keep the voting news coming. You're the best source for what's really going on.

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Donna
11/7/06
Emily, I keep forgetting to thank you for the pictures. I got them last week. They are so good. So how are you and Erika feeling?

BTW Erika, Tristen and Teghan both got baby dolls from their Grandma Cathy and Teghan named hers Erika. We went for a walk and they both took their dolls with them. Teghan said that her baby was so good because it didn't cry at all and that she was a good mom. I asked her what made her such a good mom and she said 'my heart ... and my brain.' ;-)

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Gary
11/7/06
And another HA! :-) Remember Katherine Harris, who in 2000 was in charge of counting the ballots in Florida, and delivered the election to Bush?

Yeah, that's her.... Well, as you may know she is running for Senate in Florida. But even with all the Republican money and machinery behind her, her personality and her positions were so repellent that she is waaaay down in the polls. Then the Republicans turned their backs on her. So a few days ago, Bush was in Florida, and Harris wanted to be on stage with him. White House said no. Harris persisted. White House said, maybe you shouldn't even come.... Harris said, OK, where do you want me? White House said, Why don't you sit out with the audience?

And here she is, looking oh-so-happy to be there. And by the way, check out the body language in this "enthusiastic" crowd: crossed arms, and hostile faces....

P.S. Paul just sent in his Five Words guesses. Thanks!

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Gary
11/7/06
HA! :-) Love this picture from Fox "News": They just can't bring themselves to say Democrats are leading!

[later: if picture disappears, the headline read: "New Fox News polls show one party with a solid lead"]

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Gary
11/7/06

Woo-hoo! #1 at the polling place today. Now I just hope it gets counted. :-)

Four more players in the Five Words game, meaning Amanda, Donna, Emily, Erika, Grandma, Karen, Ryan and Sean are our participants so far. And one of those newcomers turned in a perfect score! I'm impressed: This game looked really hard to me. If anyone else wants to play, get your guesses in within the next couple of days, and I'll put up the results on Friday.

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Donna
11/6/06
I just sent in guesses for the word game. That is harder than it looks. My last 2 names were Gary and Teghan so I'm not real confident in my answers.

It is a pretty hard game -- harder than "Who Am I." Even so, I'm impressed with how well everyone is doing so far. Four people are already in -- Donna, Grandma, Karen, and Ryan -- and the leader of the group only missed two. So we're still waiting for a perfect score.... --Gary

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Gary
11/6/06
Election Eve -- I'm excited!