Ooh! My t-shirt design is being voted on today at the Browncoats website. If you’re a member, I’d love to have your vote. And if you’re not a member yet, you can sign up here and get me 50 points while you’re at it. Hurrah!
best news I’ve heard all day. Ashcroft, Condoleeza Rice, and potentially Rumsfeld are expected to be replaced in the next Bush administration. Colin Powell is on the list, too, which is unfortunate, as I quite liked him in the beginning. Too bad he let the Bush team use him as their sacrificial lamb and destroyed his credibility. And as for Rice, she may end up taking Rumsfeld’s old job as Defense Secretary, or she may leave altogether. Fingers are now officially crossed that the new boys and girls aren’t worse than the current bunch, though it’s hard to imagine a man more evil than Ashcroft, with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler. Yeah, fingers crossed.
Go here! Some lovely new HP artwork from Mary Grandpre for the 2005 calendar.
Humorous: Canada Reports Huge Jump in Immigration
Interesting: Global Vote 2004
Suspicious: The Trouble With E-Voting, and similarly E-Voting: Is the Fix In?
*goggles* Oh my good gravy. Someone is so getting fired tonight, but man if it’s not worth it.
Go here and rightclick the photo of the Bushes. Then check out the filename. If it’s down by the time you see it, go here to see the evidence.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t cheer me up enough to overcome the weight of my other cosmic shoe dropping in terms of why this election was so depressing. It’s one thing to say the DNC must be doing something wrong, for people to choose to reelect this man over our candidate. It’s entirely different to cope with the mentality of the people themselves. Renata summarized it nicely in the comments, “There are deep, deep problems in this country. Lots of them. Voter apathy, voter ignorance, racial tension, homophobia, latent misogyny, RAGING LIES FROM THE ADMINISTRATION, and whathaveyou.” Here’s a good reason not to blame Ohio or Florida. Rather sickening, really.
My brain is too fuzzy to think straight right now in order to continue this train of thought, so I’m going to sleep, but I’m sure I’ll post more tomorrow morning.
I’ve come to a realization. Curling into a fetal position and sobbing in a corner will affect no change. Bush is our president for the next four years, and barring a miracle, nothing is going to change that. Living in a state of post-traumatic stress disorder certainly won’t. Our civil rights, individual freedoms, women’s rights, environmental protections, and more are going to be threatened, and America and the world need us to be strong. I will go to sleep tonight, I will rest, and I will wake up ready to fight again. The DNC is going to have to completely reinvent itself, and we only have 3 years and 364 days to do it.
Obama in ’08!
Ko put it best in her “Baby’s First Political Heartbreak” speech to me last night:
What we have to do now is fight. Like what Joss Whedon said about the end of Angel: You have to keep fighting. Except we have half of the country on our side already, whereas on Angel they were four against fifty thousand. Whenever life gets you down, remember: Spike and Angel had it worse!
I have the best roommate ever.
And after all, if we let our mass depression affect our daily lives and we lose the will to fight back, then the Republicans have won [Note: was that phrasing obvious enough?]. I’ll make some snarky LJ icons, put mean photo captions on pictures of Bush supporters in today’s “Daily Pennsylvanian” and put them on the wall, and keep wearing my anti-Bush buttons proudly on my purse. While things certainly aren’t going to be great, they can still be okay.
Also, I found out that the prize for the Undergraduate Exhibition was $200, plus any commissions if my images sell. Add that to my salary from yesterday and I’ve made $295 in two days. Not too shabby!
At the risk of coming off as cheesy or trite, “Let’s go to work.”
It’s over.
MSNBC is calling Ohio for Bush. I can’t even begin to comprehend the gravity of what I’ve just witnessed. God, what the hell did Bush need to do? What is wrong with our country? What more do you want?
All those of you who voted for Bush? God, I hope you’re pleased with yourselves. I hope you’re happy that the US has now lost all credibility internationally, now that we’ve knowingly reelected someone of Bush’s incompetence. I hope you’re happy when Bush’s new Supreme Court appointees are put in a position where they can take away a woman’s right to choose. I hope you’re happy when we go off on our next harebrained endeavor, chasing whatever foreign leader Bush feels like targeting, and the ranks of terrorist groups swell, we alienate what allies we have left, and we still haven’t caught Bin Laden. I hope you’re happy when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; when more and more families drop below the poverty line, what few new jobs are available pay significantly less, schools don’t get proper funding, and students find their financial aid cut. I hope your happy when your health care premiums continue to skyrocket, Medicare has no mass buying power over perscription drugs, and patients can’t import drugs from Canada. I hope you’re happy when logging and mining companies gain power to venture further into old growth forests and other environmental protections are slowly eroded. I hope you’re happy when AK-47s find their way back on the streets, and street violence escalates. I hope you’re happy when discrimination is written into the constitution, and states lose the right to decide individually if they will allow two people that love each other to marry. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
I HOPE YOU’RE PROUD OF YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE FUTURE OF OUR COUNTRY. I feel sick.
I was so looking forward to taking all the anti-Bush pins off my purse. I feel cheated that “Avenue Q” will have four more years to sing the original lyrics of “For Now.” I looked forward to making jokes about Teresa being our first African-American First Lady and making a show over using Heinz ketchup at this burger restaurant managed by a Bush supporter I enjoy joking with. I’m angry that I couldn’t enjoy Aaron holding me as we cried our our rage and frustration on each others shoulders.
Obama in ’08. God, I’m depressed.
More glee in my mailbox:
Dear Igor, Priscilla, Spencer, and Mara,
I wanted to write to express my warmest thanks for volunteering at the polls today. People are voting right now at Steinberg-Dietrich thanks to you, and that strikes me as something like an act of heroism. I’m cc-ing Terry Conn about this; I’m hoping her office will find an appropriate way of recognizing the magnitude of what you’ve done. I’m going to set my own head to doing something on this end myself.
But thank you, thank you, thank you.
Sincerely,
Michael Gamer
Assoc. Prof. English
Undergraduate Chair
I feel warm and squishy inside.
W00t! Just got back from 12 hours at the polls. I went in to vote at 7AM, so that I could have the rest of the day to volunteer and canvass and get out the vote and such, only to find that the polling station was still closed. Apparently, none of the designated polling station attendants had shown up, and various people in mild positions of power were having to to assemble a team of volunteers to work the polls instead. I had previously contacted my two professors and asked for permission to miss class in order to volunteer, and they both gave me their blessing, so I agreed to contribute my services, as I would be able to spend the time I know I was going to spend volunteering out of the cold and with the ability to sit down. Also, as a poll worker, I would be paid $95! Huzzah!
We quickly got into a a rhythm and managed to process voters remarkably fast. We actually had quite a lot of downtime during the day! I was expecting mass chaos. The time passed quite quickly! I marvelled at the beauty of the party affiliations. Roughly one in every 20 voters was registered Republican. This certainly bodes well for Pennsylvania!
At 7PM, I had to leave early, as I had rehearsal at 7:30. I got home to more fantastic news: I got an email telling me I was one of 5 to win the Juror’s Prize for the Fine Arts Undergraduate Juried Exhibition! I submitted Death, Desire, and Destruction from the Sandman series, and while I don’t really know what the Juror’s Prize entails, I’m assuming it means I’m going to be in the next art show at Arthur Ross Gallery in the Adams Fine Arts Building. They mentioned tax forms in the email, so who knows, there may be cash involved! Woohoo! Life is so good.
Also, I got an email from Aaron, who said he wanted to watch the election coverage with me tonight. Bwa ha ha! Oh, the world smiles.