Election Blogging

A few points:

• The LibDems got absolutely slaughtered at the polls, with their worst result ever. I’d be stunned if Clegg is still leader inside a year.
• The SNP have a majority at Holyrood; expect plenty of calls for a referendum on independence
• So far as of 17:30 GMT, all declared votes against AV, but only a tiny amount. I’ll be surprised if we see a Yes win; it was undersold, the govt was against it, and the No campaign basically lied all the way through.
• Bill Cash is being an idiot:
  

  Combative stuff from Conservative MP Bill Cash. He tells Sky News people have voted with a “capital C for the Conservatives and not the coalition”. He says the Lib Dems are now “so unpopular” they don’t “have the right” to object to Conservative policies behind the scenes. He says they have “lost all authority and all legitimacy in insisting they have their way”.

  See what happens to your authority and legitimacy if they pull out of the coalition, Bill.

Cameron is new PM

David Cameron has been asked to form a government. He also stated that he would attempt to form a formal coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, although this is contingent upon the agreement of the LibDem party apparatus rather than simply Nick Clegg’s say-so.

Assuming the deal goes ahead, I expect to see Clegg in a moderate-weight Cabinet post, such as the FO or Defence, and possibly bringing Vince Cable or someone of similar stature along in a minor post. We’re also likely to get a referendum on the Alternative Vote system, which troubles me, given that voting law is always a matter of legislation per se and that the Tories will campaign against it; still, AV is a step on the road towards PR, so it’s better than nothing.

This is all assuming that the Tories don’t fail vote at the Queen’s Speech right from the off, of course; this is procedurally equivalent to losing a motion of no confidence, and if they did lose the vote, the constitutional convention is that the government resigns or that Parliament is dissolved. The first option would result in a new government being asked to form, whether a minority Lib-Lab coalition government, or for the Tories to ditch Cameron and try again with someone else. I don’t see it happening, to be honest; Queen’s Speech measures tend to be couched in uncontroversial terms, even if manifesto pledges, and nobody wants to rock the boat too much following the recent drama.

We’ll see what happens; in an ideal world, given the current state of play, I could cope with a minority Tory government led by the One Nation faction and bolstered by the LibDems. My worry is that the Eurosceptic, Thatcherite tendencies of Cameron will come to the fore. As I said, though, we’ll see.

Update: Details of the coalition have been agreed. Surprisingly, Clegg is coming in as Deputy PM, which suggest that the LibDems drove a pretty hard bargain; presumably one of the bargaining chips on the table was the fact that they could sink any minority govt Tory agenda in play if they wanted to be obstructionist.

Four LibDems to go along as well; good show. And even Ken Clarke has made a comeback. Looks like it could be a moderate Tory strain, even allowing for the fact that Cabinets immediately post-election are transitional and often cosmetic exercises.

Congratulations, Mr President

The 44th President of the United States of America

Buy shares in Reynolds Wrap!

Trusted since 1947, heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap is perfect for roasting, grilling and the construction of hats to keep out evil CIA mind control waves!

Le sigh, as they say in France. Or not.

I’m a person who’s interested in politics generally. I try to keep up with the news via a number of source as much as possible, and I frequently read assorted blogs of various political stripes and persuasions, just to keep my ear on the ground. One of the ways I find them is via links on other people’s pages, which is how I first saw Rumproast; another is by looking through RSS feeds and the tag listings on WordPress.

SCOTUS denies election stay

Following the dismissal of Donofrio’s spurious lawsuit, the Wrotnowski suit has also been denied cert.

Via Ed Darrell, from the AP:

Court won’t review Obama’s eligibility to serve

6 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has turned down another appeal arguing Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because of his citizenship.

The challenge by Cort Wrotnowski of Greenwich, Conn., was denied Monday without comment.

Wrotnowski argued that Obama was a British subject at birth and therefore cannot meet the requirement for becoming president.

He wanted the high court to halt presidential electors from meeting to formally elect Obama as president.

Echoing an appeal that was rejected by justices last week, Wrotnowski said that since Obama had dual nationality at birth — his mother was American, his Kenyan father was a British subject — he cannot possibly be a “natural born citizen.”

The sad thing is that this only seems to be spurring the wingnuts on further, as in here, here, and here (for more, visit the Obama and Birth Certificate tags).

Apparently all of their ranting, raving and nonsense about natural-born citizens and the increasingly finer and finer shades of the “true” meaning of the term have failed to impress anyone; the claim is not only dead in the water, but floating belly up.

Not that this’ll mean anything to them, as I said; these are the same people who think Clinton killed Vince Foster, after all. Facts and reason have never exactly been their strong suits before, so this is unlikely to change any minds. Many of them seem to have sensed defeat and are refocusing their efforts on the Blagojevich non-scandal, especially WingNut-in-Chief, Pam Geller, of the Google-hating paranoia-fest known as Atlas Scrubs Shrugs.

We’ll see what happens; personally, I don’t think these people can be reasoned with, and that they’ll remain at a low simmer of lunatic resentment until 2012, when they will resurface in support of Palin and promptly be told to fuck off with their old, discredited stories already.

Not Pumas, But Weasels

I was feeling fairly well-disposed towards the world lately, but I’ve recently seem some things which have made me rather angry generally.

Specifically, PUMAs. Not the big cats, although I have my own beef with enormous felines (to whit: they want to eat me alive), but the disgruntled supporters of Hillary Clinton; the acronym is variously said to stand for People United Means Action or Party Unity My Ass.

Their initial claim was that because of the various electoral shenanigans and irregularities taking place in the Florida and Michigan primaries, HC had been done out of what was rightfully hers, and that she was unfairly robbed of the nomination. Robbed, I tells ya!

Current Events

Last night I made a huge pile of pork enchiladas with chili gravy and ate about half of them for dinner, so I’m feeling relatively well disposed towards the world today, and thus, vaguely in the mood for blogging.

Recent current events of interest include the news that Ridley Scott of Alien fame is due to adapt and direct Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the silver screen, which I think is really exciting news; ever since I first read BNW at the age of 13, I’ve been longing for a film adaptation. The material lends itself to the kind of simultaneously small and epic scale that can be produced on the screen in the hands of a talented director.

While Huxley was very much writing in the mould of his time and referring to then-current events, specifically the tendency of totalitarian regimes to dabble or fully engage in eugenicist practices, in my opinion, the message of the book is bigger than that and could be applied to a number of different situations regarding dystopian futures; the great part about writing about current events using symbols or exaggerated consequences is that sooner or later symbols can be seen to mean whatever people want them to mean, and consequences can be exaggerated so large that they become somewhat distinct from what they really should be connected with.

My only concern is the involvement of Leonardo DiCaprio. I don’t think he’s right for the savage, but that’s my own conception of it, I suppose. We’ll see; maybe his performance will be seminal and cinema-altering.

I’ve also discovered another webcomic to obsessively read until I get up to date on it. Damn it, this is becoming a habit; I may need to have to start using Google Reader or something and add all my favourite toons to it so I can get my fix all at once in one handy seizure inducing parade of brighty-coloured drawings.

Anyway, the newest addition to the stable is Least I Could Do, which is mostly about a juvenile 24 year old called Rayne Summers and occasionally also his friends and family. It’s a real gem, not least because of comics like this one:

In other news, Barack Obama has criticised the McCain-Palin campaign for negative practices less than two weeks before the election, calling them “ugly” tactics. Such practices include the robocalls, accusations of being friendly with terrorists and so on; these tactics have all revolved around lies, mistellings and out-of-context criticism, and all of the negative claims have been soundly debunked.

The McCain-Palin campaign fired back a criticism that Obama’s campaign had allegedly already written a draft inaugural speech, and accused him thereby of already “doing a victory lap”.

*blinks*

Uh-huh. Even if the allegation of having a draft inaugural speech were true, what of it? I’d be extremely surprised if McCain didn’t already have something on file somewhere too (I hope he didn’t let Joe write it, though). Isn’t that what politicians do, generally? As far as I knew, it’s common practice to have one speech in place for a win, and another for a loss, so as to cover all the bases. It’s only rarely that they need a “we don’t know yet, and it’s going to court” speech, although we have Florida to thank for the possibility of that.

Seriously, if the level of criticism at this point is between shady electoral practices on one side versus common and insignificant acts on the other, then I think there’s not much more to report in this election. I don’t want to say that this is where McCain jumped the shark, because I think his selection of Palin was that moment; at this point, I think he’s coasting along and flailing desperately at any opportunity to try to claw back some points in the polls.

I don’t want to say that the election is in the bag for Obama, because that’s arrogant and the gods reward hubris with failure, but I would certainly be surprised if he didn’t take it by a large margin on the 4th. Even allowing for the (probably fictional) Bradley Effect, I think he’ll gain the majority of the electoral vote.

Again, though, we’ll see.

These goggles, they do nothing!

My wife’s been on at me lately to blog more. I tell her that I really don’t feel like I have much to say lately, although something I just saw made me sit up and growl. Courtesy of Pharyngula:

This, folks, is why the US has gone from a nation rightly respected across the globe to a laughingstock. Listening to this woman makes me realise just how far from its once-great ideals America has fallen.

I don’t think this video needs any further commentary — the idiocy and bigotry is so blatant, so obvious, that nothing further needs to be said. And the really scary thing? Huge numbers of people will have watched it and nodded along.

To address the final smug little point she makes about the right decision for her husband, I’d say it begins with d.

Obama picks Biden as running mate

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Obama picks Biden as running mate.

US Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has announced that Joe Biden will be his running mate in November’s election.

Mr Obama’s choice, confirmed on his website and with a text message to supporters, comes ahead of next week’s Democratic Party convention.

This is quite a savvy move on Obama’s part. Biden is an experienced Senator with a lot of foreign policy experience under his belt –he’s on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee– and has been in the Senate since 1972.

Hotbuttons

There are some topics on the internet which arouse a lot of ferocious argument. They tend to be pretty obvious – people’s hot buttons are pretty consistent in most cases, whether on the net or off.

The subject of politics figures pretty highly, of course, as does religion, in all its aspects. As an example, the consistently-busiest tag categories on WordPress seem to be on politics, religion, atheism and similar.