My Election Day

Hi everyone,

Please use this post to tell us what your Election Day experience was like. I’ll stick this to the top of the blog and let’s see where it takes us.

I’ll go first: I live in an eastern suburb of Pittsburgh. I voted in the basement of the church just down the hill. The church parking lot was crowded but the line wasn’t too long. Only a few people in front of me. The poll workers were numerous and efficient. We vote on paper ballots and feed them ourselves into a scanner. The poll worker at the scanner glanced briefly at my ballot and looked most seriously displeased. Meh.

There were more young women voters than I’ve seen before and at least one mother-daughter pair. Sooo… there’s that.

Some observations: Fetterman has an EXCELLENT position on the ballot. The US senate race is first and he’s the first name. That might push some wishy washy undecideds to just pick his name and be done with it. Mehmet Oz is underneath. I hate to say it but it looks foreign in more ways than one. I guess if you’re committed to vote Republican, you’ll pick him but it might give other people a reason to go with the local boy who lives in Braddock about 6 miles from here.

In and out in a jiffy in spite of the crowded parking lot. I live in a nice little neighborhood. Demographically it’s diverse but still mostly white. They’re working class and middle class voters. Mostly Democrats but sprinkled with occasional Reagan-Tea Party-probably MAGA types, though it’s rare to find Trump, Oz, Mastriano signs in my neighborhood. There weren’t any noticeable hostile poll watchers and except for the scanner poll worker who gave me the stink eye when I scanned my ballot, nothing out of the ordinary.

Und now ve vait.

Your turn. Put your experience in the comments below.

My Election Day

Hi everyone,

Please use this post to tell us what your Election Day experience was like. I’ll stick this to the top of the blog and let’s see where it takes us.

I’ll go first: I live in an eastern suburb of Pittsburgh. I voted in the basement of the church just down the hill. The church parking lot was crowded but the line wasn’t too long. Only a few people in front of me. The poll workers were numerous and efficient. We vote on paper ballots and feed them ourselves into a scanner. The poll worker at the scanner glanced briefly at my ballot and looked most seriously displeased. Meh.

There were more young women voters than I’ve seen before and at least one mother-daughter pair. Sooo… there’s that.

Some observations: Fetterman has an EXCELLENT position on the ballot. The US senate race is first and he’s the first name. That might push some wishy washy undecideds to just pick his name and be done with it. Mehmet Oz is underneath. I hate to say it but it looks foreign in more ways than one. I guess if you’re committed to vote Republican, you’ll pick him but it might give other people a reason to go with the local boy who lives in Braddock about 6 miles from here.

In and out in a jiffy in spite of the crowded parking lot. I live in a nice little neighborhood. It’s diverse but still mostly white. They’re working class and middle class voters. Mostly Democrats but sprinkled with occasional Reagan-Tea Party-probably MAGA types, though it’s rare to find Trump, Oz, Mastriano signs in my neighborhood. There weren’t any noticeable hostile poll watchers and except for the scanner poll worker who gave me the stink eye when I scanned my ballot, nothing out of the ordinary.

Und now ve vait.

Your turn. Put your experience in the comments below.

The Curious Absence of Details

This tweet seemed particularly relevant today:

The most remarkable thing about this midterm has got to be Republicans’ ability to campaign on their plan to fight inflation without actually having a plan to fight inflation.

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) November 7, 2022

Yep, pretty much. The media let the Republicans get away with it yet again. Just belch a lot of nonsense on gullible people and never ask, “what is your plan, exactly?” With a healthy dose of “Cutting taxes for the well off was a disaster for the UK and Liz Truss. What are your plans to avoid that?” Or “What do you mean by “energy independence”? Wouldn’t giving consumers choices other than fossil fuel give them the independence to tell the big oil companies to stop applying a Vice to our junk?” Or how about, “Do your voters know that the Keystone Energy Pipeline was intended to take Canadian oil through the US to the Gulf of Mexico to FOREIGN ports? It was never meant to stay in the US. And preventing it from reaching its foreign destinations would be considered theft from our largest trading partners?”

So many questions left unanswered. Like, “Republicans have had multiple chances to help small businesses over the decades but they never quite get around to it. How can voters make sure that the GOP focuses on small business and not huge donors?” Or “when Republicans had a chance to vote on bills to curb oil companies gigantic profits, why did they vote against that?” Or “the stimulus payments to Americans were intended to keep the economy stable during the pandemic and subsequent supply chain problems. They worked. What would Republicans have done differently? Who would have been asked to sacrifice the most and would that have lead to instability?” Or how about the question that’s been oj my mind, “Do you think that the oil companies and other industries run by Republican super donors have intentionally made inflation worse in order to anger the masses enough to vote against Democrats? Has the Fed deliberately put us on the edge of recession by over correcting interest rates in order to slam the brakes on inflation? Was that absolutely necessary or was it a gratuity?”

The thing is, we will never know how bad life could have been the last couple of years because the Republicans were not in charge. When you’re doing the best you can for as many people as possible and the economy is still flourishing, employment is down and people can socialize again, people tend to forget that only two years ago, we had a president who thought it might be a good idea to drink bleach to fight a Covid infection.

The vaccines were developed by scientists and were serendipitously ready when Covid struck but the former president put a lot of pressure on the FDA and CDC to rush approval without all the safeguards in place.

This will blow your mind: he didn’t have a distribution plan. I take that back, he didn’t officially have a distribution plan as the Biden administration soon found out. But he likely had a list of good states and naughty states, some of which would get an abundance of vaccines and some more densely populated urban cities run by Democrats getting little or no vaccine at all.

As it happened, his anti-science position meant that thousands and thousands of Republican voters in many states were adamantly opposed to the vaccine or mask wearing and social distancing and the numbers are now out showing that there were more deaths among his base from Covid than there were among the Democrats who dutifully got the shot like the life affirming sheeple they are. That might actually make a difference in Georgia, Arizona and maybe even Pennsylvania today.

But we may never know how truly bad it could have been if Biden hadn’t been elected, if the Democrats hadn’t taken over the senate, and that the lunatics were prevented from running the asylum during the darkest days of the nation since the civil war. And we can’t expect the less introspective among us to think the alternative scenario through.

They certainly didn’t get any mental stimulation from the media’s less than probing questions.

Anyway, it’s almost time to go cast my ballot. I’ve decided to do it in person so as to help neutralize the red mirage. And until there’s some law prohibiting Republicans from trying to disqualify every f{}%ing mail in ballot in Pennsylvania, voting in person seems like the best way to get my vote counted. My precinct has paper ballots and scanners. So, I think I’m covered.

Happy Election Day, Oh Best Beloveds. I’ll put up an open thread a little later and stick it to the top of the page so you can tell us what’s happening in your state and precinct. Stick together, hold hands, look both ways before crossing the street. Look out for one another. 😘