Original plan was to roll out at 4 a.m. and get to the polling place by 4:30. Couldn’t sleep so wound up getting a good spot by arriving at 2:30 a.m. Didn’t see a soul for a couple of hours, but by 5:30 a.m. a line had formed. I am proud to say I was voter #1 at my place. Whatever happens, I’m glad there was an election and I got to take part.
Update: Very short video of the line as I left at 6:08 a.m.
Chuck the Z. shares some pix from this morning’s rally on the steps of the Missouri State Capitol. I’ll give her this, the girl knows how to wear a pair of levis.
I grew up in Kennett, Missouri, the county seat of Dunklin County. So when I heard the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a front-page story (by Todd C. Frankel) about Bootheel politics, I headed for the paper’s website to check it out.
I wasn’t really surprised to learn than Dunklin County was Obama’s worst showing in the primary. Just 18 percent.
But then I was heartened to learn that the Obama campaign has two office in the county and that Sheryl Crow’s momma and daddy volunteer for O.
They have a Republican campaign HQ but if I read the story right it’s a first for Dunklin County.
The story quotes Ronnie Johnson who’s “voting for McCain. Or rather, against Obama.”
“He is reluctant to explain this at first — “You don’t want to know why,” he says.”
“The others on the porch goad him. And Johnson, a lanky 20-year-old white man who works as a meatcutter at a grocery store, starts to talk about an issue that has persisted throughout the campaign: race.”
“It is not just that Obama is black, Johnson says. He has heard that Obama is Muslim. (Obama is Christian.) He also has heard rumors that Obama refuses to salute the American flag, and that Obama has promised that black men will have more rights than white men. (Independent fact-checking groups say these rumors
are false.)”“He’s white,” Johnson says.
The story concludes with a couple of demographics:
“Dunklin is one of the poorest counties in Missouri. The unemployment rate hovers near 9 percent. More than a quarter of the population lives in poverty.”
Not sure we’ll see this clipping on the Chamber of Commerce bulletin board.
[Alert: McCainiacs and Palinistas can skip this post. You won’t appreciate Matt Taibbi’s biting wit or pithy rage. Go watch a Sean Hannity re-run. And I’ve had some email reminding me I had said I wasn’t going to write about politics anymore. I believe what I said was, I would no longer ‘discuss’ politics.]
My favorite political writer, Matt Taibbi has outdone himself with his column on Sarah Palin. When interstellar archeologists dig through the rubble of what was once the U.S.A. and wonder what the fuck happened, I hope they stumble across Mr. Taibbi’s column. Every line is a gem but I’ll share just a few of my favorites:
“Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates (of the GOP convention) in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other “wild” drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the “unbelievable time” they will inevitably report to their pals back home.
Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.
Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules.”
And we love Sarah.
Aden Nak doesn’t understand why it’s taboo to say someone is too dumb to be president. He somehow managed to get his hands on the flow chart used to prep Governor Palin for last night’s debate.
“The truth is that Palin didn’t answer any questions she didn’t want to tonight, and she said she’d do exactly that at the start of the debate. She had a hand full of index cards and a brain full of buzz words, and it was her job to say them all in front of the camera. Actually, it was her job to say them while looking at Joe Biden for five seconds, then looking at the camera for five seconds, and then looking back at Biden to start over again. It was like she was on a timer. One of the many things she’d probably been coached on after the whole flap about McCain not looking Obama in the eyes.”
“Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth. On Tuesday, RealScoop will cover the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, putting each one’s statements to its Believability test.” [Link]
NYTimes’ Saul Hansell thinks Twitter might well be the birth of a media form that combines talk radio, Digg and late-night comedians.
“Like talk radio, you get an unvarnished and largely real-time window into what a wide swath of people are actually talking about. Like Digg, you see people point to the articles and videos that they want to share. And like late-night TV (or a politician’s sound bite for the evening news), there is a premium on pithy one-liners that try to get to the heart of the matter.”
“The city with the highest percentage of viewers was St. Louis, where 52 percent of the TVs were tuned to the debate, reflecting either an inordinate civic-mindedness or a complete lack of actual lives, take your pick.” — McClatchy: 57 Million Watched Presidential Debate: Nielsen Estimate