Today, most of the political blogosphere is going to be reeling from the massive wins for wingnuts during last night’s primary.  The two biggies that are going to be stunners are Christine O’Donnell winning in Delaware for the Senate Republican nomination and Carl Paladino in New York for the gubernatorial Republican nomination.  Both aren’t just wacky, but they’re cinematically wacky.  O’Donnell went on MTV in the 90s, for instance, to explain why masturbation is evil.

My favorite part of that has to be towards the end, when she asks, and I quote, “If he already knows what pleases him, and he can please himself, why am I in the picture?”  One could, if one wanted to, suggest that this kind of question that keeps O’Donnell up late at night may not bother other women in nearly the same way.  “Why me when he’s got his hand?” seems to be one of those questions that has a self-evident answer, but not perhaps if you’re a conservative Christian.  Personally, as I noted at XX, I’m skeptical of these stringent anti-masturbation claims. To wingnuts, it may sound like common sense to suggest that sex is way better if you resist getting off any time between puberty and getting married in your mid-20s (or later), but those of us who actually know something about sex would do well to point out that if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.  Then again, maybe that’s the hard line Catholic plan for birth control.  If you can’t get there for lack of practice, you won’t be making one baby after another, I suspect. 

Anyway, dirty jokes aside, the real question is going to be how the media processes these wins for wingnuttery. There are two potential narratives coming out after Christine “Masturbation Is Evil” O’Donnell and Carl “I’ll Forward Anything, The More Offensive The Better” Paladino.  One is to suggest that this is just a tidal wave of anger at the Republican establishment, and that the Tea Partiers brainlessly voted for anyone that wasn’t the party-backed candidate to register their displeasure.  This narrative puts the teabaggers in the position of being a bunch of dupes, but it springs them from the moral responsibility for voting for someone who liked to pepper his mass forwarded emails with pimp jokes, vicious racial slurs, and misogynistic porn, or a woman who quite likely is the worst kind of money-grubbing charlatan, as well as an anti-sex nut and a female misogynist.

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Remember a year ago, when the world was simpler?  Children were younger, the air was fresher, morons were out in your local VA hall screaming their fucking heads off about how the President was going to inject them with AIDS just so that they would have to get off their Medicare and buy insurance to cure it. 

Oh, those were the days…

Anyway, this summer’s new Thing The Crazies Are Angry About is the New Black Panther voter intimidation case.  Video below:

Adam Serwer has the rundown of it, but the short version is this: the section of the Voting Rights Act under which three black men and the organization to which they belonged is Section 11(b).  The main problem with the prosecution’s case in this instance is that it would have been incredibly difficult to successfully prosecute the New Black Panther Party as a group (because the whole group wasn’t there and nobody else did anything else), which essentially means that the DOJ would be left trying to prove systematic voter intimidation based on the actions of two guys. 

To parallel this, imagine that you tried to prosecute the Republican Party for voter caging...but the entirety of their congnizable efforts was two guys at a single polling place making nasty comments for a half hour.  It’s not that those men weren’t trying to suppress the vote.  It’s that they did such a shitty, disorganized job of it, and did so little, that pressing a claim against them would be fruitless.

Alas, we’re dealing with the modern Tea Party, which has basically decided that it’s the modern heir of the civil rights movement, and so they have deigned to follow Martin Luther King’s example of showing up in a public forum and yelling half-coherent sentences at people who have actual shit to deal with.  Look forward to a summer of white people dressed up like Angela Davis, threatening to take down the hegemony of black power that’s ruining their lives and making the drive-through at Taco Bell so inefficient.

When people stoop to low-blow ignorant propaganda tactics like this, it means their candidate of choice has nothing better to offer. Houston Comptroller Annise Parker did well on election night in the mayors race, earning her a seat in a run off against Gene Locke (polls now have her leading 47-34).

So with a lead like that, the gloves come off, and boy did they. Local wingnut Dave Wilson sent out a postcard to 35,000 people featuring a photo of Parker and her partner, declaring, “Is this the image Houston wants to portray?” and takes the “oh, so sorry you are a homosexual and need to be free from it” tack:

“I have nothing but compassion, respect and sensitivity towards those trapped in homosexual behavior. I have family members and friends who have been ensnared in this behavior, and I know something of the incredible pain and sorrow it has brought to them and their families. With God’s grace, I carefully balance this love and respect for these individuals with warnings about the promotion and demand for legal and political approval for homosexual behavior that will stifle religious freedom and trap millions of more people in its deadly grip. Therefore, I would ask you to vote against Annise Parker for Mayor.”

But the lunacy doesn’t stop there. The other reason that Dave Wilson needed to send a reminder about Parker’s lesbianism is that, apparently, if you’re gay and elected to office, you will help in the extinction of the human race., ah, that old saw again.

Dave Wilson, an electrician who has spent years pestering incumbent politicians of both parties, has turned his sights on Houston Controller Annise Parker. He says that Parker should not be mayor because ‘homosexual behavior leads to extinction.’ Wilson says he is mailing the fliers to 35,000 Houston voters who cast ballots both in the November mayoral election and in the 2008 Republican presidential primary. ‘I’d like to energize the conservative Christian base in Houston, and get them to vote,’ he said…‘I don’t see a good family, a Christian family, one man, one woman,’ Wilson said. ‘It’s a picture of her and her mate being sworn in in public and that’s the image I have a problem with.’ 11 News asked Wilson what he believes is wrong with the city having an openly gay mayor. ‘The openly gay lifestyle leads to extinction,’ he said. ‘You can’t reproduce.’”

I’m sorry, but is Wilson saying that hopefully-soon-to-be-mayor Annise Parker is going to outlaw sexual intercourse and artificial insemination? How exactly is her election going to stop reproduction?

I’m so tired f reality-challenged excuses “gays-cause the-end-of-the-world” horsesh*t like this. What’s sad is the number of sheeple who believe people like Wilson. The critical thinking skills of too many American voters are nonexistent, and even worse, celebrated by the religious extremists, teabaggers, who court the know-nothing vote. It’s sad.

Houston, show us that you’re a reality-based city in the Lone Star State looking toward the future and selecting your mayor on their qualifications to do the job. Toss that postcard into the recycling bin.

Annise Parker’s Campaign site

Hat tip, Andy @ Towleroad.

Conservative writer John Derbyshire went on Alan Colmes’s radio show and showed his not-so-inner bigot and misogynist. I’ll just let him speak for himself. (Think Progress):

John Derbyshire, a British-American conservative author and columnist for the National Review, has written a new book titled We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. The book contains a section called “The Case Against Female Suffrage.” Yesterday on his radio show, Alan Colmes asked Derbyshire to articulate his argument.

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Did I mention that Derbyshire has a wife, Rosie and two children, Dannie and Nellie? I wonder how those views go over in that household. He also said that he would like to repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act because you “shouldn’t try to force people to be good.” Well, in spite of that law, we still see a ton of racism out there. Obviously you can’t force people to renounce their racism.

Bonus points! He has appeared as a guest on The Political Cesspool. Remember that? It’s the a white nationalist, white supremacist, conspiracy theorist, and extreme right-wing radio show broadcast hosted by none other than James Edwards, who called me a “black lesbian pervert” for pointing out Hank Williams Jr’s racist ways.

From an earlier post about Edwards:And

on the guest list

of this proudly

racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic

radio show's site you'll find MSM talking heads like Bay and Pat Buchanan.

Pat,

btw, stands next to a beaming James Edwards on the site's photo page

. Edwards is also photographed at an event with former KKK Grand Dragon/Wizard/WTF-ever David Duke, who has

also been a guest

on The Political Cesspool. The

mission

of the Cesspool dovetails nicely with the Klan's, by the way:

America would not be as prosperous, ruggedly individualistic, and a land of opportunity if the founding stock were not Europeans.

Since family is the foundation of any strong society, we are against feminism, abortion, and primitivism.

We wish to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races.

We are cultural conservatives because we have certain morals to which we adhere. We are against homosexuality, vulgarity, loveless sex, and masochism.

It’s actually kind of awesome that Iran’s government blatantly rigged an election and cemented its dictatorial grip on its people because then it’s a lot more likely that Israel will bomb the Allah out of those fuckers. 

Now, from the perspective of Guy Who’s Paid Attention This Decade, I thought that the entire point of our involvement in the Middle East to make steps towards functioning democracies, not destabilizing the hell out of Mideastistan in order to further raise Israel’s position as the preeminent country that bombs the places we want to bomb anyway. But, you know, the liberal fascism, it gets in your head and makes you all crazy sometimes!

Anyone else remember how voter fraud was going to take the democracy that had lasted well over 200 years, bend it over, and paddle its unwilling ass with a barbed-wire bat until it screamed “uncle”?  Well, we got through the 2008 election cycle, and the reports are in!  Voter fraud one; democracy, zero.

And I do mean one. 

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said he had allegations last fall of widespread voter fraud – allegations a special prosecutor reported Tuesday were wrong, noting the only voter fraud found was from a Connecticut man who told on himself.

“Ultimately,” Special Prosecutor Michael O’Neill wrote in a report, “the investigators discovered ‘get-out-the-vote’ practices, sponsored by community organizations, which took full advantage of this unique absentee-voting period, but no evidence these practices violated Ohio law.”

But what about all those stories of homeless black dudes getting their thug thizzle on?  We were promised some illicit hordes of brown people tearing down the walls of our voting precincts to propel Obama into office, not Joe Lieberman’s cousin writing in “Big Ole Ballz” for Attorney General.  I want the fucking anarchy I was promised, and I want it now. 

For shame, liberal comedian pornographer.  For shame.

You’d think Democrats would be content with last week’s electoral rout. But judging from the odd doings in Minnesota, some in their party wouldn’t mind adding to their jackpot by stealing a Senate seat for left-wing joker Al Franken.

We’d actually be content with stealing a Senate seat for virtually anyone, but Franken was the only one who showed up the audition.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the Minnesota recount, Republicans are crying foul because…no reason necessary, really, but in this case, because a few corrected counts came in that helped Franken.  Keep in mind that in the razor-thin race, Franken still isn’t leading, meaning that the entirety of Democratic “vote tampering” (or whatever phrase they come up with for correct vote counts) is still resulting in a loss.  Democracy is at stake here, people, and Minnesota owes Norm Coleman a recount that results in his still winning. 

Minnesota has a voter intent law, which means that election officials can take a second look at ambiguous ballots. Mr. Franken’s people are already arguing that a vote for Mr. Obama certainly indicated a vote for Mr. Franken. This can’t possibly be true, however, because nearly every campaign poll showed Mr. Franken lagging Mr. Obama by five to 15 percentage points—and on Election Day he trailed by 12.2%. Mr. Franken ran a nasty, polarizing campaign, and in any case he was part of a three-man contest.

To summarize: Al Franken’s lawyers should not make arguments because Mr. Franken is a horrible person.  This actually makes the administration of our criminal justice system much easier, too.  Thanks, WSJ!

With their party only three Senate seats from the 60 needed to break a filibuster (and two still not decided), Democrats have a political incentive to cut corners to steal a seat if they can get away with it. Mr. Franken and his left-wing allies also know that if Mr. Franken couldn’t win election in this fabulous Democratic year, then the not-so-funnyman never will. If Minnesota wants to retain its reputation as a state with clean elections, it needs to run an honest recount.

And it seems as if the only way to truly guarantee an honest count is to ensure that Norm Coleman keeps his lead, as Jesus and the voters on behalf of Jesus intend.  Hot Air actually asks a

good

terrible question in relation to Mark Begich pulling ahead in Alaska:

Isn’t it odd how late vote counts inexorably favor Democrats?

Better question: isn’t it odd how fewer votes being counted inexorably favors Republicans?  Weird, huh?

Barack Obama has received more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history.

Apparently, black people are standing at a predominantly black polling location to intimidate black people into voting for a black guy.  Or something.

This shocking turn of events (a couple of assholes apparently show up to stand around and look like assholes) is, to absolutely nobody’s shock and/or awe, being used to prove that SCARY BLACK PANTHERS are being MEAN and BLACK and SOMEHOW RELEVANT.  Rush Limbaugh does some crack on-a-different-spot reporting with a guy who’s desperately trying to prove how much of a man he is:

What I appreciate most about this is the thinly-veiled insinuation that this is the grand plan of Obamaism, a liberal fascist move to send two people to one polling place in a heavily Democratic area and have them stand around and be interviewed by conservative white people who then run away and talk about how awesome it was - they could almost taste the grape drink!

Ten dollars and a t-shirt to whoever can find actual voter fraud in this Amanda Carpenter post. 

What the fuck does “voter fraud” even mean?  Give it a shot in this post - best definitions get highlighted later on today.

The National Review opines today that early voting is bad for democracy, for two key reasons.

The first is that early voting deprives us of potential last-minute information that could sway our votes.  This would be a better point coming from an organ that wasn’t a diehard partisan magazine which began shilling for John McCain roughly thirty seconds after he defeated their chosen faux-Reagan, Mitt Romney or, perhaps, anyone else in the world. 

I defy anyone at the National Review to show me the bit of potential information that could have swayed them from voting for McCain, particularly given that they still support Bush (except when it’s impolitic to do so).  Early voting works precisely for the partisans who are ironclad in their preferences, allowing them to register their vote and, potentially, not clog the overcrowded polls on the final day.  If early voting is good enough for the elderly, the infirm and the merely absent, why isn’t it good enough for other informed voters?

The second rationale is that we must go to the polls together, because otherwise some evil monarchy will arise from our already-cast ballots and threaten to overtake the communal exercise of the franchise, and then, uh, taxes and abortions:

Voting is by its nature a communal exercise, and the franchise should be exercised in a way that reminds us that in our republic the people are the masters of the state, not the other way around — that we are citizens, not subjects. Americans are accustomed to convenience in all things, but votes are not cheeseburgers and need not be handed through drive-thru windows or collected on websites. There is nothing like a presidential campaign to remind us that democracy is not especially majestic, but there is a kind of austere beauty in free people coming together to cast their votes, whether they are purple-fingered Iraqis or citizens of the world’s oldest democracy gathering at schoolhouses and town halls. The togetherness of that exercise should not be diminished. There will always be some necessary exceptions, but those should be — exceptional. Today is the day to vote.

Again, if we’re to look at the accepted and necessary practice of absentee voting, are we to conclude that those core groups which routinely use it are somehow divorced from the democratic process and unaware of the nature of the democracy in which they participate?  My grandmother’s voted absentee in at least the past four elections; I’m pretty sure that

if

when she starts worshipping Barack Obama as her new nubian monarch, it’s not going to be because she didn’t physically go to the polls.  I felt plenty together with my fellow Americans when I cast an absentee ballot in 2000 and 2004, because I understood the nature and impact of what I was doing.  Also, because I wasn’t a fucking idiot.

And why wouldn’t the people who spent hours in line at early voting locations feel some communion with the hundreds of others also waiting with them?  Or are they a part of some secondary fiefdom of last Tuesday’s President?

The crux of this argument has nothing to do with societal togetherness or anything so fuzzy - expanded early voting opens the door to increased Democratic turnout, because the same voters who may have skipped the line or been discouraged by some external factor that made waiting to vote problematic now have days, if not weeks of opportunity to cast that same vote.  There’s no element of democracy so problematic as the opportunity for your fellow citizens to make a choice you don’t like.

Total time in line was about 50 minutes, and the length of the line was the same when I got in as when I left.

A lot of parents with kids at the polls, which is probably my favorite part of the whole thing.  Well, that and the actual voting.

For those of you who are voting today, share your experience. (I voted last Friday, and shot video at the polls).

* How were the lines?
* What’s the weather like? It is rainy here, so I’m concerned turnout will be lower, though 66% of NC citizens have early voted.
* What was your wait time?
* What is the GOTV like in your area (we had Obama canvassers visit our home on Sunday)

As Amanda pointed out, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE and report if you have problems casting your ballot. You can record it at the Voter Suppression Wiki.

One of the contributors to PHB, Daimeon Pilcher, just sent in this one from his polling precinct in Virginia - 6AM, the line is out the door:

More below the fold.

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Granted, today will be nerve-racking for everyone, but today’s still my favorite day of the year.  There’s something uniquely wholesome about the practice of Election Day, over a hundred million people headed to similar places to do a similar - and meaningful - thing.  It doesn’t involve the consumerism of our other national holidays and hallmarks.  It’s a day of reward for true believers, the ones who’ve spent all their spare hours folding mail or knocking on doors for their chosen candidate.

Gavin at Sadly, No gives us a what to watch for link with some needed corrections.  Barack Obama is the president of 21 white people, at least 15 of who are named after Transformers.  I’m really surprised Grimlock voted for McCain. 

Do you have any traditions or superstitions you perform on election day?

Networks may call a winner if someone wins.

Here’s the thing about tomorrow: no matter what happens, if Obama wins, there will quickly arise the zombie narrative that the media did something to sway the election, the Congress and the very future of marriage to the radical left.  If Proposition 8 fails in California, it’ll be because evil networks insisted on suppressing the conservative turnout by reporting the results of elections whose results are being posted online for the world to see anyway.

The most telling result of tomorrow won’t be Obama’s victory margin - it’ll be the vehemence and hatred with which disillusioned Republicans attack the media for the systematic failures of Republican rule.  The conspiracy will blossom and grow, taking on a life so much larger than the ability of any reporters and any campaign to accomplish that you’ll begin to wonder if the newly constructed MSDNC’s world-altering powers aren’t the right form of nascent totalitarianism for our troubled times.

Tomorrow will be a night of guilt and obfuscation on our major news networks.  Perhaps your best drinking game of the night will be taking a swig every time a bet is hedged.  You’ll be in the hospital by nine.