Interesting Daily Kos article from a data miner on the NSAs database of phone numbers. -via pedro.

All of this brings us to ask who the real targets of all of this spying is . . . In order to identify them [terrorists], you need to know an awful lot about those who are not terrorists. This helps to eliminate false positives. However, the data for terrorists is so sparse, that even if a possible terrorist is identified, the algorithms used will rarely generate a high probability and a high confidence . . . On the other hand, if you want to predict how a person will vote in a given election, you can get an amazingly accurate prediction from the high-quality data from Joe and Jane Sixpack.

These days the news makes me feel as if I am two bit character in a badly made, futuristic movie with an overtly Orwellian bent:

Voice Over:

I crouch in a corner of my living room that is not in the line of sight of the telephone. I scrawl this diary on squares of self rationed toilet paper with a sliver of wood and my own blood as ink. I have a box hidden under a floor board that contains french fries, a small bottle of french wine and a few outlawed texts and pamphlets. Each night I eat one fry, take a small pull from the bottle and read a ragged photocopy of a document titled the United States Constitution. I can't remember the first time I read this document, or what its significance is. I just know it's important somehow, and I read it over and over.

President Bush plans to reactivate his reelection campaign's network of donors and activists to build pressure on lawmakers to allow workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock market . . . The campaign will use Bush's campaign-honed techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and using the politics of fear to build support -- contending that a Social Security financial crisis is imminent when even Republican figures show it is decades away.

Washington Post
Social Security Push to Tap the GOP Faithful
January 14, 2005

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas . . . only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.

Adolph Hitler
Mein Kampf
1925

via - Wiskey Bar

The good Dr. post some interesting numbers related to wartime elections.

<snip>

No wartime president has lost an election. Following are the victory percentages for each wartime election in the 20th-21st Century

World War 1
Woodrow Wilson won by 3.1 %

World War 2
Franklin D. Roosevelt won by 9.9 %

Korean War
Dwight D. Eisenhower won by 10.5%

Vietnam War
* John F. Kennedy won by .2 %
Lyndon B. Johnson won by 22.6%
Richard M. Nixon won by .7 %
Richard M. Nixon won by 23.2 %

Iraq War
George W. Bush won by 3%

Bush had the lowest percentage of any wartime presidential victory, except for Richard Nixon's victory in 1968 over Hubert H. Humphrey. The closeness of the election during World War 1 can be attributed to the unpopularity of that war, due to a significant number of german immigrants in the US and a sweeping sense of isolationism.

Vietnam was probably the most unpopular war, and Nixon probably the most unpopular president in history, and that can account for Nixons close race, but what does that tell us about Bush and Iraq?

* - Not really a war yet, more of an "gulf of tonkin affair"

Sources:
Encyclopedia Britannica
CNN

</snip>

This doesn't explain the loss of seats in the house or the senate, and the gay marriage bans for that matter, but interesting non the less.

In related news, anger stocks make huge gains in this morning's trading.

I have no comment about the election today, and I have nothing even quasi political to say. I am pretending that nothing is happening. I'm going to my happy place. I need to find my happy place...

Because, if we had found weapons of mass destruction that we said we would find we would have proved that we could find what we didn't, because if we didn't find what we said we would, we would have proved otherwise.

Cheney Says Report Finding No Illicit Arms in Iraq Justifies War - New York Times

Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Thursday that a finding by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government produced no weapons of mass destruction after 1991 justifies rather than undermines President Bush's decision to go to war.

So go out there and vote:

vote till it hurts,
vote bigger and badder than ever,
vote 'till your voting stick goes limp,
vote like an electrified voting machine on the votingest voting day in votesville,
vote your flippin' ass off

keeping america scared ( 5232.63kb .mov ) - via peter

update: video by Brennan Houlihan via Oliver Willis

Impressions from last nights debate.

George W. Bush: Me smash puny terrorists, and I'll use preemptive unilateral war to do so.

John Kerry: Me smash puny terrorist, and I'll use preemptive war with a coalition to do so.

They are both so strong and decisive, I just don't know who to love more.

We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.