Author: Nate

From the Onion, last May:

In case you missed it then, just like I did: Fed-UP Cheney Enters Presidential Race Himself

WASHINGTON, DC—As President Bush’s public-approval ratings hit an all-time low, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced Monday that he has been “forced” to throw his hat into the ring for the 2004 presidential race.

“Enough is enough,'” the visibly annoyed Cheney said at a morning press conference. “George blew the whole Iraqi prison-abuse speech, and he barely did better with his Nicholas Berg reaction. Now he’s below 50 percent in the polls. I’m sorry, but I can’t allow him to drag me down with him in November.”

“Do I have to do everything around here?” Cheney asked, pausing to gesture angrily around the White House. “I guess I do.”

(Found via Daily KOS)

Saturday Night Live…

…is rather lampooning the debate. It’s the very first thing, no less. Seems to be parodying both candidates pretty effectively, although they’ve just got so much more to work for with Bush. They got in the “Internets” line and “Needs some wood”, and if everyone else saw Bush as being as whiny as the parody on there, the election’s already won.

(… a few minutes pass …)

Ok, it’s over. Sadly, I can’t say that some of the parody of Kerry didn’t have some grains of truth, although I really can’t see what some of the Kerry lines had to do with anything he said.

This just in: “Bush opposes slavery …”

Apparantly, Bush opposes slavery and he brought up he brought up two little words: “Dread Scott” as an example of a bad judicial decision.

Damn, I nearly fell out of my seat laughing. Especially since he very nearly confused the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution a moment after that, and completely ignored the need for the 13th/14th/15th ammendments.

Call me a pessimist if you’d like…

There was an interesting challenge on Matthew Gross’s blog asking bloggers to predict the outcome of the election. Since he didn’t put any qualifications on it, here are my totally unqualified brand-new-blogger guesses on it:

My gut feeling is that it’s going to be very, very close. But put me down for 275 Kerry, 263 Bush, with Colorado split.

Since there was a request for a popular vote split, I’m going to guess that neither side has a majority, but that there will be a slightly bigger edge for Kerry than Bush had in 2000, so to again guess wildly: 49.3% Kerry, 49% Bush, leaving 1.7% for Nader and other.

OK, there’s my guess, and I do think Kerry’s going to win.

Let me give one other pessimistic guess, though: that we’re not going to have a definite President-Elect on the morning of November 3rd. I sincerely hope that we don’t get another Florida-like situation, and don’t expect another mess of that magnitude. But I’ll be very surprised if it’s not close enough that something contentious will delay a definite answer until at least sometime during the day on the 3rd.

Two small notes…

This color scheme (*) is tentative, and I should mention that I’m mildly red-green colorblind. I’ve run it by Marie, and she seems to like it, but if you dislike it or have any suggestions for improvements, please leave a comment or email me.

(* It’s mostly dark green, with a pale green sidebar/menu, if the colors are long gone and this is in the archives.)

As a second note, this address (the main page of http://www.sfchat.org/ ) may or may not be a permanent URL for this site – I’m waiting for cubiclehermit.com to become active, and intend for that to be the long-term address of this site, although in the short run that will just redirect back here until I can get some of the technical details worked out.

Welcome, though there’s basically nothing here yet.

I’ve been meaning to start a blog/journal for a while now… this election is giving me an ulcer (only metaphorically, I *hope*), and the mailing lists and newsgroups I’m on have only a limited tolerance for off-topic speculation on the topic.

Similarly, I expect that by being able to just post things here, I’ll be passing on fewer junk forwards, whether humor or otherwise. We’ll see how that goes, and ditto for personal announcements and news.

I don’t honestly know whether this will be of any interest to anyone who doesn’t know me, either in person or online. I’ve just spent too much of this evening installing and tweaking WordPress to really write much, but as the subtitle will say if I can figure out what to change to have it display, we should be seeing “Random musings, justifiable rants, and occasional News of the Weird.” Keep tuned in.