sunrays and saturdays

Woot! No lines at the polling place! Some little old ladies from the church always give out free coffee, lemonade, and cookies on election days, so I ate one of the most amazing pecan cookies I've ever had. Whodathunk you could make cookies out of cake batter (she told me how she made them, lol).

Anywho, I'm looking forward to an evening of being glued to CNN and MSNBC. I might switch over to Fox News just out of morbid curiosity too.

Oh come on...somebody give Obama four more delegates so that we as a country can move on. Please?

This officially makes today a great day. Although, even without an official position in the White House he will still probably have a lot of influence.

Anyway, I'm back at work today, and it is almost 90 degrees outside already. Can I go back to the mountains now?

I got this in a mass email just a little bit ago from MoveOn.Org:

"The Senate votes this week on climate and energy legislation. Please call your senators and ask them to vote against a proposal to use billions of tax dollars to make "liquid coal" America's next fuel—a global warming disaster.

Senator James Inhofe
Phone: 202-224-4721

Senator Tom Coburn
Phone: 202-224-5754"

They want me to do what??? Are they serious???

Wow, the governor, lieutenant governor, state treasurer, state auditor, attorney general, state superintendent, labor commissioner, and insurance commissioner positions (all but corporation commissioner, big surprise) here in Oklahoma have all gone to Democrats so far. Admittedly a few of those races are still a little close, but wow. Oklahoma? Seriously? I'm impressed! They're still all either moderate or slightly conservative, but I'll take what I can get.



If you're like me and are easily amused, the independent running for Lieutenant Governor's name is E.Z. Million. Yes, this is apparently a real person. By the way, you should really check out what issues he supports.

P.S. I was just checking results online on MSNBC, and there's a breaking news banner across the top saying "South Dakotans reject nation's most restrictive law on abortion."

The results don't surprise me much except that I'm so extremely liberal as to be a socialist. Go me!

( It's kind of a long one, so I'll cut it. )

I loved this so much that I had to steal it from doospack and put it in my own journal.

For those of you that are defending Bush by saying that Kerry would be no better, allow me to explain why I think that is certainly NOT the case.

The most obvious reason is that the Republicans control the House AND Senate. That means that any Conservative measure, war measure, or anything tickling Bush's fancy will pass pretty much without question. I imagine that there will be no attempt made whatsoever to appeal to both sides of the aisle. If Kerry were President, he would have to make a harder effort to get things done by making his ideas as bipartisan as possible. This doesn't mean that everything he passes would be exactly the same as what Bush passes. Not by a long shot. Look at how Clinton was able to make his ideas work with a Republican controlled Congress. Plus, he holds the ultimate power to VETO the really ridiculous shit that the Congress would try to pass. But Republicans could never try to pass anything ridiculous now could they? Well, if banning gay marriage and trying to ban abortion aren't enough for you, then I wonder how great your "morals and values" really are. Why don't we reinstate slavery while we're at it, or take away the right for women to vote?

Anyway, here is a list of things that I predict will happen in the next four years, and we'll see how right I am:

1. We will still be in Iraq.
2. We will also be in Iran.
3. We won't do anything about North Korea (unless they strike first of course).
4. Outsourcing of jobs and war/defense spending will only increase, so as a result our economy and the deficit will be even worse than they are now.
5. Education, Social Security, agricultural, and health care funding/aid will decrease, because you know, killing people in the Middle East without being provoked is more important than taking care of people at home or ensuring that we can still feed the world.
6. Something that violates the separation of church and state will be passed, even if it is taken to the Supreme Court, because guess who will be appointing the new justices.
7. We will endure another terrorist attack, possibly as a direct result of Bush being re-elected but more probably because of our shitty foreign policy, but in the end Bush will look like the hero for "bringing the country together in this terrible time."
8. Osama bin Laden will still be at large.
9. We will be even more isolated from the rest of the world, partly because they won't understand why we re-elected him, and mostly because Bush doesn't believe the opinion of the world matters. So when we are attacked again, I don't expect to see many countries reaching out to help us.
10. Nothing will be done about the Patriot Act.
11. Roe v. Wade could be overturned or at the very least modified to better suit the God damn Conservative majority in this country.
12. Embryonic stem cell research will never get off the ground, and in ten or twenty years from now millions of people will have died thinking that there could have been a cure for their disease if the "morals" of the healthy hadn't have interfered.

I think I might save this list and bring it back every time one of these things happens.

EDIT: Yes, I know that Kerry just conceded, so don't be a fuckwit and comment saying "Bush won, so stop talking about Kerry being President."

Ho hum. You can tell by my lack of entries that there really hasn't been much going on in my universe over the last couple of days. I voted early with Jeremy since he wasn't going to be able to vote on election day. He has been giving me SUCH a hard time for voting for a republican on my ballot. It's the fucking County Auditor for crying out loud! She's the incumbent, and she seemed to have done a good job at it, so I figured what the hell. How does partisanship make a different in a position like that anyway? She'll probably win by a landslide anyway. I left half the damn ballot blank because I knew nothing about any of the judges or boards up for re-election, and I don't want to throw my vote away to someone who doesn't deserve it just because I've never heard of them before. Maybe I should have done some research first, but it was kind of a spontaneous decision to vote on that day.

I'm going to be second author on a presentation that my advisor is doing at a conference in San Francisco in December. Wheee! If it's a conference presentation, does that mean I'm published or does it have to be in a journal of some kind?