Kerry and Edwards are determined to go down swinging, but down they’re going. Setting aside the inevitable frivolous lawsuits, their hopes are pinned on winning Ohio’s electoral votes, because they’ve already lost the popular vote.

Unfortunately, as of 5:09 AM EST, the vote stands at 2,791,912 for Bush and 2,653,046 for Kerry. That’s a lead of 138,866, with a projected 175,000 provisional ballots that won’t be counted until 11 days from now. Assuming that all of those ballots survive the inevitable challenge, Kerry needs to win 156,933 of them to tie in Ohio. That’s 90% of the expected new voters, just to muddy the results enough to make for a plausible lawsuit, and only if they’re all upheld as valid (which is highly unlikely).

Update: he’s toast. The official count of provisional ballots issued is 135,149, which is smaller than Bush’s final lead. It’s over, and the winner has a clear majority in both the popular and electoral votes.

Update: Highest nationwide voter turnout since 1968, first candidate to win a majority of the popular vote since 1988, and otherwise rational people are still saying things like “225 years is a pretty good run for a republic, historically speaking”. And that’s one of the saner sore losers I’ve seen today.

The admin for our group just sent out email with the following subject line:

rack up for grabs

I think I’d get fired if I responded with the first thing that came to mind…

Just got back from voting. I had a 45-minute wait as the 30 or so people ahead of me in line deciphered the new connect-the-arrows ballots, but that gave me plenty of time to look over my fellow citizens, and I liked what I saw. Blue collar. Veterans. Parents.

And not a single parasitic “observer”. Just us citizens, exercising the franchise.

My official endorsement for President: Bush.

Why? Because the small percentage of his enemies, foreign and domestic, who are not already batshit insane will become so should he win decisively.

There are all sorts of things I dislike about Bush, particularly his domestic policies and the over-hyped but still real abuses committed in the name of “Homeland Security” (even though Gore would have done exactly the same had he won), but when it comes to foreign policy, there’s no contest. Bush has one, Kerry has none.

Not a bad night for trick-or-treaters. 60 degrees and clear skies brought nearly twice as many kids to my house as last year, so I went through about 35 pounds of candy. I’ll try not to eat the remaining 15 pounds of the stuff myself.

Update: dumped the leftover candy in the breakroom at work. It’s all gone now.

When claiming credit for kidnapping and murdering an American citizen in Iraq on your propaganda websites, try not to pick a victim who is alive and well and living in Detroit, and who would be very interested to learn how you got her name and an old driver’s license photo.

Wow, the eyes really are the windows of the soul.

This one has been following me around since junior high school Health class, and for some unknown reason it once again popped into my brain. Google seems to have no record of it, so I might be the only one in the world who remembers this little ditty:

I got those V, VD blues,
careless love, what ya got to lose?
I got high, on two-bit booze,
careless love, loser's blues, VD blues.

(note that for full effect, one must picture a bad country-western singer, backed up by a banjo (if I recall correctly), serving as the title song for a Sex-Ed video made in the 1970s. And I can still sing it. These are the brain cells I wouldn’t mind losing as I get older.)