I voted. Did you?

You still have time; get it done.

This election will be a fun one. I suspect that the Dems will get the House but the actual result is going to be wildly unpredictable, more so than any previous election. The number of people who refuse to take part in polls is something like five or six times what it has ever been, leaving a huge "unknown, but presumably decided" vote out there. The Dems could get 20 seat more -- or less -- than they think they will.

I think people are very tired of polls, and that it's been clear for quite some time that the establishment media is using polls to tell people WHAT to think, not to find out what they already think. (You can get any result you want from a poll by asking the right questions. Consider asking the question "Do you support a draft for military service?" AFTER either one of these questions: "Do you believe in involuntary servitude?" or "Do you think young people need to learn self-discipline?")

Push polling by both sides ("Congressman Smith has voted six times to protect the rights of Child Molesters. Do you think this is right or wrong?) is rampant and the newspaper this morning said that 90% of the political ads this year were negative. I don't know that this is a bad thing since you can hardly count on your opponent to tell the voters things that may influence them to vote against you.

The evolving media is something to account for. When I was growing up, the constant one-sided drum beat of the news meant that the Republicans had to keep their mouths shut during the coffee break conversation because "everybody knew" that the Democrats were right and the Republicans were wrong. But now with Limbaugh and Fox News, the Republicans have the other side of the story and coffee break conversations get to be a lot more fun.

I have heard a lot of pundits saying that the Republicans should blow off this election so that the Democrats get blamed for the two years before the next election. That seems kind of silly to me, but I guess whoever wins (and whoever loses) will try to make the best of it, spinwise. The miracle of American democray is that now and again one party calmly hands over power to the other party and the country just moves forward all the same.

I suspect that this election will very much be about Iraq and I think that's probably bad because too few people understand it. I have heard the mantra of "send the troops to hunt Osama" but if you actually know how the military works you realize that we have exactly the maximum number of people hunting him now. (You just cannot supply more troops in that mountainous area.) Iraq didn't turn out like I wanted. I wanted it to be the new West Germany, a shining beacon of free-market multi-party democracy with a free press and an independent judiciary. I wanted to see an Iraq in ten years that was so far beyond the rest of the Arab world that even "the Arab street" could realize that the way they have run their countries for the last ten centuries isn't the right way. But I think now that the culture of bribery, tribalism, and "rule of the gun, not of the law" is so ingrained that you just cannot make democracy work in a country where everybody winks and grins and says "So if I get elected, I get to collect bribes, right?" Remember, guys, I'm the one who called the President of Turkey and offered to broker a deal to give Iraq back to the Turks and they would not take it.

Enough of all that. Go vote. Make it count.