Went to bed early rather than listen to all the blather. When I woke up, the thing that struck me most was the electoral map. My high school history book had the electoral map for every election from John Adams on, and the thing I remember about that is that the electoral vote always seemed oddly scattered. The red states and the blue states were intermingled seemingly at random. No so much with this year's map.

There is no scatter. There is no intermingling. There appear to be two or three different countries here. I recognize that to a certain extent this is an illusion due to the binary nature of the Electoral College, but damn.

Linc Chafee cast a write-in vote for Bush the elder rather than vote for Dubya. He says he's not ruling out a party switch. On one hand, I'd like to see him stay, because God knows we need moderate Republicans, but on the other hand, he may have isolated himself so much from the rest of the party that he won't have any influence anyway.

I'm trying to maintain an even strain. I am worried that the sky might fall, but I think I'd rather try to see what can be done about keeping it up there rather than running around screaming that it's falling.

Eternal yammering is the true price of freedom. -- veejane