Feel free to send this on to anyone else you want to.

* The Exit Polls will be near meaningless. With a huge turnout of voters voting early, the sample of voters the exit pollers will interview could skew away from the actual vote total. I’m certain network news execs have begun to figure out how to call the Election for many of the 30+ states with early voting. Early voting could make for a longer time to call a state for one candidate.

* Missouri will take forever to call. Why? Because it takes a long time for St. Louis to count their votes. The one exception to this is if Obama has a big lead from the rest of the state, then it would be safe to say the state will go for the Democrat.

* Watch the Senate. It’s pretty much a given the Democrats will gain at least 20 seats in the House. The bigger drama will lie across the Capitol with the Senate. Can the D’s get to 60, enough votes to nullify a filibuster. I expect the Dems to get to 57 easily. The next three will be tough.

* Kansas will stay Red. This will long be a deep Republican state, yet keep your eyes on the results. The Congressional Delegation will all get re-elected. (Though watch the 4th District—Wichita and surrounding counties. If it is tight enough, don’t be surprised if Don Betts runs again if the seat is open.) What will be interesting is if the Obama coat tails extend down to the legislature. If the Democrats in Kansas want to have a chance at more input in drawing redistricting maps, they need to pick up seats this year and 2 years from now. I would not be surprised to see the House Dem caucus go above 50 and the Senate maybe picking up a seat or two. Any of these victories will show that the national party’s investment in organizing in all states can pay off.

* McCain’s Strategy was foolish. John McCain, despite the results if he were to win, made the worst choice possible when he decided to focus more on a national media campaign and less on a state-by-state ground campaign. Yes, a campaign’s message is important. It does not amount to anything if you don’t get voters to the polls. McCain just this weekend started to publicly ask for people to volunteer to Get Out The Vote (GOTV). Obama seemingly focused on GOTV since day 1. If you watched most of the proceedings on the night Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination, his Colorado State Director made several appeals in between speeches for people to volunteer and contact fellow voters. The challenge for the Democrats will be keeping this machine in place for the next election and beyond. If they do, it will keep the party rolling for a long time. Also, McCain picked early on to run a national campaign; Obama went for an Electoral College campaign, the difference will be huge and it will show tomorrow night.

* Early Voting will show it’s importance. So far almost 300,000 voters voted before Election Day…in Kansas. Yes, in a state where the election doesn’t matter much, at least on the national stage. Secretary of State Ron Thornbugh estimates 1.36 million voters will turnout tomorrow. Almost a quarter of voters decided to not stand in line on November 4th. Advance Voting is very convenient for voters. It is also a great way for a campaign to control their vote totals. You know when someone has voted. If you work it right, you can help them vote. (wink, wink, nod, nod)

* This Election is as much about the Man Barack Obama as it is about punishing the Republicans. Hopefully even the most vitriolic anti-Obama person has to admire his life story and acknowledge his skills as a politician. Yet, he is at the levels he is in part because the electorate has grown tired of the Republican Party. Much of the fatigue rests with the President, as the Democrats have controlled Congress for two years now. The party failed to realize that the message it espouses is not the one for the economic times we are in now. That deafness will lead them to getting shellacked tomorrow in the voting booth.

* Final Predictions
President - Obama
Electoral College: Obama 340 McCain 198
Senate - 59 Democrats with a Run-off in Georgia. (I hope the peach state is ready for the flood of Obama staffers.)
House - 258 Democratic members
Way too many swooshing maps to keep track of on cable news channels resulting in a mass vertigo outbreak.

What is that you ask?

NaNoWriMo which stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is an annual “competition” to write 50,000 words for a novel in just the 30 days of November.

So far I have 3,760 words written. Still got a ways to go.

Wish me luck.

I know that many of you just use Internet Explorer because that’s what comes up when you click on the “Internet” icon on your Windows PC.

Shame on you.

Yes, I know that the new version of IE has more features than IE 6. And, yes, the security on it is a million times better. But, the user interface that Microsoft came up with is, well, total ass.

IE now hides many of the important menus, not to mention where some of the buttons are seems asinine. (I know, I know; again with the anal fixation.)

I could go on and on, but I won’t.

Instead I want to mention the newest kid on the block, Google’s Chrome. (I’m linking to a news story about it because Google hasn’t even turned their site for it yet.)

What’s cool about this web browser is that it will be totally open source. That means the code is available for everyone to look at and even to improve. Firefox is an open source browser while Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari are closed source, meaning only the developers see the code.

Now Google is big enough to develop a browser on their own, but to make it in a way that anyone can take the code and make it their own is cool.

Something interesting though lies in the fact that Google decided to use Apple’s WebKit engine instead of the Firefox Foundation’s Gecko engine. The engine in this case is the code that renders the web page. Apple’s WebKit is actually an open source product. One of the reasons for this choice could be that with the iPhone, more and more users now see what WebKit can do with the mobile version of Safari.

If you are interested in more, check out this 38 page comic book from Google on their new web browser. We’ll have to see how it works.

Seven days until I get a key.

A key that will turn the lock.

The lock that has held me in place for three years.

Three years that ends in seven days.

Know hope.

Hillary has won in Pennsylvania.

Do the people of the Keystone State have a sick sense of humor?

Honestly, why must you keep this going? Why?

Let’s just hope that Indiana and North Carolina see the pain this causes and finally do the right thing.

I know, but honestly, I wasn’t ignoring you.

Oh, you don’t need to tear up like that. I still appreciate you.

Did I say appreciate, I mean feel for you.

Hmm, I see this is one of those times that no matter what I type, you’re gonna cry.

I promise, I’ll do better.

Well of course I’ve been looking at other websites.

It’s not like that, totally.

I’m looking at them so I can fully understand just how beautiful you are.

Uh, you aren’t buying that are you.

Okay, I’ll grab the pillows and sleep on the couch tonight. I just hope you’ll see things my way in the morning.

This year I am in a position I haven’t been for a while.  I am a civilian essentially in the process.  I don’t work for the Party or an elected official.  I am capable of unleashing my talents for one of the candidates.

As you can tell from the title, I am choosing to support Barak Obama.  Two reasons why.

First, he is someone who truly can change not just the party in the White House but the nation.  We sorely need this.  America is reeling from 8 years of the Bush Administration.  The nation is fractured and standing on the edge of serious economic problems.  Add that to the existing problems with the military and our standing in the world and something needs to be done.

Obama is the person who can bring people together to get things done, not score political points.

The second reason rests with the fact that he was born in El Dorado, Kansas.  And the old partisan in me would love to stick it to the Republicans in this state by having a Democrat born in Kansas elected President.

Now it’s time for you to go and caucus for him on February 5th.

Today alone I have received about 10 e-mails telling me that I have comments to moderate.  All of those comments are not about the items I posted to the web-site.  No, those comments are spam messages from someone trying to sell drugs of some sort.

It is because of these spammers that I turned on the comment moderation.  What that means is that when you type a comment for a post, I must first approve it to be displayed.

Rest assured, I will allow valid comments, even if I don’t agree with them.

The ones I won’t are the spam comments.  These are not typed by a person, but instead inserted by a bot that is hoping to find some sucker out there to purchase the wares of the person who has enlisted them.

I have no problem with advertising.  In fact at some point, I will probably put up a Google AdWords banner on this site.  But I draw the line at spam.

So do not fear, I will do my best to defeat the spammers…I hope.

Hey, the cheeks of my face not my…you so need to get your mind out of the gutter there.

Yes, the movie was very much an over sized episode. No, not an episode from the good years of the series. It’s more on the level of the recent good episodes from a couple of seasons ago.

The big difference with the movie comes from the freedom of the film screen versus the TV screen. The writers, all fourteen credited writers, took the freedom to insert a few more craps and goddamns than normal. Not to mention one unmentionable body part.

The first half of the movie you will be laughing a lot. The jokes are coming at you almost every other moment. As the movie drives towards the climax, the jokes slow down, but some of the best of the film await you then.

I would give you some of the plot, but I won’t. You must see this for yourself. Yes, I know some of the storylines are re-purposed from TV episodes. Plus the shear size of the cast of characters of the show seems to weigh down the movie with trying to fit many of them into it.

Despite that, I would have to say it is one of the best comedy’s out this summer.

Sure it can’t compete in the unintentional comedy of the new Lindsay Lohan movie, but hey someone sold that flaming pile of crap as a drama/thriller/horror movie not what it really is…an excuse to get the young starlet to dance around scantily clad.

Sorry about that, tangent over. Like I said, The Simpsons Movie is the best intentional comedy of this summer.*

(* That I have seen so far. Which given the limited amount of movies in Great Bend, isn’t saying much.)

For all those years you have rode rough shot over the American League. You thought you were invincible. The small market teams were your farm system, not the minor league single A, AA, and AAA baseball teams. If you didn’t win the World Series, then it was a bad, bad year and Joe Torre should be fired. (Hell, if Torre had been fired as many times as you guys have called for his scalp, Billy Martin would look like a saint.)

But now, now you are six games under 500. The AL Wild Card seems out of reach. Let’s not even think about the AL East right now.

Sure the team could find itself and mount a major turnaround in July or August. Problem is, that is the mantra of long losing teams.

How many times have fans for teams like the Royals, Cubs, and Yokohama Dragons said, “Just wait until after the All-Star Break, man, we’re gonna go on a tear.” I will proudly admit I’m still waiting on that tear I promised in 1999. I know it will just start after this 12 game loosing streak.

So, what should a Yankee’s fan do? Well nothing drastic is needed. Honestly, placing a severed horses head in the bed of George Steinbrenner won’t get you any where, except maybe dead or permanently banned from Yankee Stadium, which is harsher than death for a Yankee’s fan.

What is needed now is patience. For the Yankees to get better they need to redevelop youth. For far too long they have gotten by through purchasing players from other teams while letting their cupboards get bare. Now that is starting to bite back.

Steinbrenner is no idiot. He will start playing where he needs to in the draft and trading deadline to get some new pieces for his team. The Yankees will be back, damnit.

In the meantime, Yankee fans, just sit back and worry and remember, George has a plan and he’s sticking to it. (Just like the Royals, Brewers, Orioles, Phillies, Pirates, and … have stuck to that successful winning plan.)