Other stuff… not a lot of good news out there.  Damn.

GOP is gaining roughly four seats in the house.  Senate looks firmly in GOP control.

Seven states are banning gay marriage.  Because that’s so damned important to our society.

Florida will now require parental notification before minors can get an abortion.  Which is really gonna help parental abuse victims a lot.

Incidentally, the two jackasses in robes who OK’d voter challenges in Ohio, favoring the GOP, are both nutjobs appointed by — guess — the GOP.

See, this whole separation-of-powers thing is fragile as hell.  And the courts are already more than half-filled with ideologues willing to skew the process.  If Bush gets to stick 3 right-wingers of his choosing on the Supreme Court, ratified by a GOP-controlled Congress…

Going over Ohio’s precincts.  My home state.  I know the place pretty well.  Can tell you the difference between Cuyahoga and Coshocton.

I don’t think anybody has made any projections.  I just did some math, based on the numbers at 4:15 am London time, which I guess is 11:15 pm back in Ohio.  Here’s mine, and I hate it:

We’re going to the courts.  Ohio is the next Florida.

Hope I’m wrong.

A lot of bloggers seem to still be saying that it’s still early in Florida, that when the heavy Democratic precincts of Broward and Dade come in, Bush’s unlikely 5-point lead will melt away.

Um… Dade and Broward are already in, at least mostly.  Broward has 906 out of 1044 precincts in as I write this; Dade has 802 out of 856.  Those are comparable percentages to the statewide count in progress.

Maybe the absentees — which Jeb is trying to delay counting — and some early-voter ballots will swing this to reflect something at least more reasonably approximating numbers from most pre-election and exit polls.

But my personal smell meter is going off.

I still think Kerry will win.  Even conceding FL (whose numbers really look funky, honestly) to the Bush crime family, Kerry should take PA, MI, MN, WI, WA, OR, and CA, giving him (at this point, 3:30 am in London) 243 EV.  (That’s assuming the votes are all counted and nothing completely insane has happened, which unfortunately is a major assumption.)  That means he needs 27 more votes from some combination of OH, IA, NH, NV, NM, and HI.  I still think that’s entirely likely.

But if that’s not what happens, I know there are going to be some frustrated people around here, and not all of us are particularly brilliant at channeling that frustration into productive, non-violent direct action.  So let me make this clear: anyone posting any comment, anywhere on this site, calling for any violence of any kind will be banned immediately.  No warnings.  It’s not something I condone or will give any forum to.

It’s not a free-speech issue.  You’re welcome to get your own blog and call me any name you like if you think that’s somehow helpful to the world.  But nobody calls for violence on my blog.

End of discussion.

Before going any further, review the Zogby exit polls, which gave Kerry a win, with at least 311 electoral votes.

And yet in state after state, the early numbers are coming in much more Republican.  Much more.  Despite record new voter registrations, young voters, and overall turnout, all of which favor Democrats.

In my limited understanding, it’s not that unusual for early returns to lean to the right, since small, rural precincts are much easier to tabulate than large urban ones.  And absentee votes, which were unusually large and likely left-leaning, have yet to be added.  Still.  Something doesn’t add up.

Given how well the GOP has learned to spin the media, and given how many states have mostly GOP state officials… is it possible that some officials are slowing the release of data from Democratic precincts, which would create a false impression of a sweeping GOP victory for the media, thus enabling later shouts of "fraud" from the right when the votes are all finally tallied?

Just asking.  There must be something I’m missing.  I don’t know how else to explain this.