You’ve no doubt already read about the voting machine that added thousands of votes to GW’s totals in ohio. 

Now there are also allegations of more systematic vote-fraud in Florida.  I’m skeptical, of course.  The fraud described would, for one thing, be too easily detectable, since it would have involve a misrepresentation about votes cast on punch-card ballots.  Since these ballots leave a paper trail, any computerized miscounting of them would be easy to detect.  So this is a conspiracy theory I’m reluctant to believe. 

However this does bear looking into, and there’s surely no reason that news organizations should avoid double-checking any anamolous looking results.

[update 1: Democratic Undergound is sure to have the latest on this story, though I’m not sure that anything (facts included) would stop the folks there from uncovering massive country-wide vote fraud.  Which is not an especially likely scenario, imho.
update 2: the not-too-professional-looking Blackboxvoting.org  also promises some dramatic revelations about vote-fraud, in the very near future.  But as of this posting, no such revelations have yet materialized.]

Since this whole election thing, I’ve heard no end of fantasies about moving to Canada, in traditional, and less traditional ways.  Or seceding from the Confederacy, or Jesusland, or whatever the US “homeland” has become.

But why move to another country when you can start your own?

Well, there are a few reasons, it turns out.  Not every Sealand has a happy ending.  You might for instance ask Michael Oliver about the hazards of such an endeavor:

The Republic of Minerva was the brainchild of Nevada businessman Michael Oliver, who in the early 1970s announced plans to reclaim land from the southern Pacific Ocean and build a libertarian-inspired city-state capable of sustaining a population of 30,000.

The site chosen was at Latitude 23.40 S, Longitude 179.00 W - about 400 miles south of Fiji and 260 miles west of Tonga - and was the location of a group of hitherto-unclaimed underwater reefs. Construction commenced in 1971, and Minerva was declared independent on January 19, 1972.

Unfortunately, the only nation that responded to Minerva’s calls for recognition was Tonga. Various reports claim that the Tongan government reacted to a neighbor it viewed as an unwelcome threat by sending (a) a naval gunboat, (b) a convict work detail, or (c) a rowboat populated by King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV and a brass band, to Minerva. The outcome, in any case, was that on 21 June 1972, the Minervan flag was hauled down, and the atoll was later formally annexed to the Kingdom of Tonga.  [but is it all over, really?]

Two lessons here, at least:
1) Libertarians are crazy.
2) Do not fuck with the King of Tonga.

Maybe too a third  having to do with sticking around here and fighting for what you believe in, or something like that.

My fiction class thought it odd today that I wanted to read _The Dead_ in terms of last night’s election.    Stanley Fish, surely, would have fired me on the spot.  I didn’t press the issue too hard or for more than a few minutes, but Joyce’s story concerns a rural vs. urban divide within which the intellectual protagonist becomes hopelessly tangled as he tries to fake a kind of cultural authenticity, to win the approval of his bourgeois family and his “country-cute” wife.  Ultimately, it’s Ireland’s old folk-traditions and memories — to which he has no real access — that re-emerge on the sudden, to foil Gabriel, and render him absurd at the moment of his anticipated triumph, when he had hoped to win final acceptance and recognition.  Gabriel had no answer to the Dead.

It was hard for me not to see the grey ghost of the Confederacy on the march last night.  Like the flesh-and-blood Tyrannosaurus that demolishes the dinosaur museum in Jurassic Park, last night seemed like a moment of uncanny triumph for the evangelical right — a twentieth century  Birth of a Nation.  That the Republican win was driven by God, an anti-Muslim crusade, homophobia, and a desire to a abolish the church-state relationship made this North/South battle far different from contests like Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis.  Really Paleolithic.

I don’t have the energy to write much about this.  I’m finishing off a chapter, and I’ve been followed all day by a muscle tension headache.  But I do think that a lot of what I said about Allan Bloom and Liberal Education is worth noting here.  A really good essay could be written to show how Neo-conservative “Liberals” cut from the cloth of Allan Bloom’s “Illiberal Education’ have quietly gone on to define not just the Bush Presidency, but to frame the entire national public discourse, while “Liberals” in the Political sense of the word have virtually vanished.

But are liberalism and radicalism really so easily separable?  Or does the example of the Straussian “Liberals” demonstrate the viability of liberalism as a *method* rather than a ideology that merely points to a finally moderate political outcome?

In the face of the last night’s display, it seems that a widespread defense of and retrenchment around critical and rational “Liberal” thought itself is required.  H.G. Wells described history as a race between education and catastrophe — last night it was depressingly clear which is in the lead.

In a few hours, polls open.  The only vote I’ll be getting out is my own, but that’s something, at least.  Here’s hoping.