Oh, here we go again.

VNS, not getting the answers they wanted, aren't going to release their data.

They say that they doubt the information they're getting because it conflicts with the official numbers they're getting from the polling booths. It's an ongoing process for them, see, because they want to fix what they got wrong in Florida two years ago.

What they got wrong in Florida two years ago was not asking the people exiting the polls if Justice Scalia was going to allow their vote to be counted.

But hey, you know, as long as everybody got their statement made.

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ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Voter News Service, a vote-counting group used by major news organizations, cited dissatisfaction with its exit poll analysis Tuesday and said it would not release any "national surveys of voter attitudes" on election night.

Because of this, CNN decided it will not rely solely on exit poll projections to project winners in any state with a competitive election. Other news organizations indicated the development at VNS could slow projections during the night.

CNN, the other TV news networks and The Associated Press will rely more heavily on returns from state election officials and their own analyses of VNS sample precincts.

In addition, CNN has its own sample precinct system in 10 of the states with the closest races and will use those as a backup to VNS in making projections in those states.

VNS issued a statement saying it was "not satisfied with the accuracy of today's exit poll analysis and will not be in a position on election night to publish the results of state and national surveys of voter attitudes."

sad vignette (no, about something else)

Alas has a story about someone he used to know.

Robertson Davies, who was a frightful old tory, understood this stuff

When they asked Boy Staunton how he felt about losing the election, he said "Like Lazarus, licked by dogs"

The pundits thought it was amusing. The people never forgave him, for the contempt and the casual assumption of privilege.

I assume that the people who voted for or failed to vote against last night's conclusions think they want what we're going to get.

Enough of them have come of age in post-1980 red meat america, and because they've never seen anything else, they assume on some deep level that they can't lose, in the same way that I assumed that the Democrat always wins, back in the day.

Some of them will watch the voter intimidation stories come out and won't be able to live with it.

Some of them will watch their neighbors come home in body bags, if all the Fearless Leaders' men have their way.

Some of them just (just - god almighty, welcome to America in the oughts) will be poor and have bad or no jobs, systematically defunded schools teaching shaky religious doctrine to their children in science classes if the parents can't afford to get them out and the funds are siphoned off to subsidize private education for rich kids, increased poverty and increased crime in the places they can afford to live in and their children losing their futures in prison while the children of the very few walk away from felonies with a little awkwardness and a slap on the wrist

Hell, there was a poll in the Washington Post which suggested that the people who thought the country was going in the right direction at the highest rate were college-aged. I think we all remember what a shock the real world was for all of us who've already made that transition, right?

and it was ever thus, but it was ever thus for all the people who the great american middle thought were flawed for needing a safety net

so let them actually meet their new neighbors on the wrong side of the tracks, who I don't doubt they'll find to have a much greater supply of resourcefulness and empathy than their former neighbors in the world where everything always went up (that's how you survive in a world without safety nets) 'cause the new kids are going to need all the help they can get

and don't anybody do anything that'll make it awkward for them to jump back over the fence once they've seen the scenery in their brave new world, OK? Resist the impulse to draw up genealogical charts with too few branches on them for "the Bush voter" Convince their asses instead.

You're going to have tons of material.

Yeah, fine, I think they did a bad, bad thing too, but you know, sometimes the one vote you need is from someone who never did the right thing before in their life, and you might just get it if you don't do anything to piss them off.

see: Ventura, Governor.

Now, as bad things go, there are some issues on the left here too.

You're going to vote against peoples' interests for their own good because you're the only ones who can represent them and you just know your long-term goal is more important??

pfui.

I voted a third party yesterday. I voted them because they ran mostly candidates that were also running on the Democratic ticket, mostly. I wasn't impressed enough with the candidates they floated in the lower-ticket race to hop the fence for them.

Nonetheless, this is the first time I haven't voted straight yellowdog for a long time, and you know why?

Because the party I voted for is pulling the democratic party platform measurably to the left in return for a slot on their ticket. Reform gets a voice, the republicans don't get a free vote and the third party gets a slot on the ballots and more money to promote down-ticket races that they have a shot at.

If one of those down-ticket candidates turns out to have legs, they have a shot at winning an up-ticket race for their party, or, you know, even _getting a genuine progressive crossover_ to the major party ticket.

The only difference between this and the approach that has proved to be - somewhat controversial - in the past few elections is that rather than convincing a bunch of skittish campaign contributors that you're radioactive and forcing the major parties away from you, if you actually mustered your troops and got to the polls in off-year elections you could probably clear the know-nothings out of the school boards in very short order. Then you'd have elected officials out there meeting your voters until the next election.

Not as emotionally satisfying as burning the village to save it, but very effective (and the quiet satisfaction of winning should make up for any disappointment over leaving with untoasted marshmallows).

I'm angry too. I'm angry with the situation, I'm angry about the mendacity, about the loss of lives and pensions and jobs, about the return of Jim Crow in national elections and about that creep Scalia crawling ever closer to my uterus and about my tax dollars going uphill to some bozo with a duplex in the southeast who contributed to the right people while the kids in my kid's school are losing educational enrichment and they're going to be eating irradiated meat with fecal materia in it and that I still have it better than most and they're targeting homosexuals for consensual adult sex while 'proper' genital deployment is grounds for low-bid subhumans to be handed children to abuse to death unsupervised and the answer to pharmaceutical price-gouging is to let grandma and junior die instead of allowing competition in producing drugs that the taxpayers paid to develop to begin with and we're supposed to go to war even though every reason for doing it now and doing it this way falls by its own weight until we're left with the same arguments we used to hear when we terribly few who were against arming Hussein back during Bush 1 were told by the usual suspects that we were bad Americans for it and I'm terribly terribly angry that I haven't yet heard anyone explain what a progressive mind weighs against all that and sees the scale tip

So here's my challenge (and I'm not really aiming this at any particular group, oddly enough, because I think a lot of things have evolved since the last election)

Set up a table in a supermarket in a tough neighborhood with a couple of friends and get the registration forms signed and send them in

keep a few on you when you volunteer at that soup kitchen

put in a few hours for your local elected official

Have something to show - something more concrete than going to a rally they'll disappear in the Washington Post tomorrow.

and (god help me, I'm channeling Cokie "I'm looking at this as a mommy" Roberts - please, somebody, get me a spoon to push my eyeballs back in) if you can't bring yourself to overcome the cynicism (and boy, I can understand that all to shit, I really can) there's no reason that you can't show a little restraint and leave the bright shiny new voters with their cute little feathers still wet and sticky with egg-stuff to lose their illusions about making a difference all by themselves.

No, nobody did it for me. In your secret heart of hearts, don't you wish someone had done it for you?

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Empty rhetoric and pyrrhic symbolic gestures is how They win (and they keep lots of money in their sleeves just in case).

We have to actually *do* something.

And no, you're not absolved if your heart is pure.

the worst possible time for the Harding family to have to look for work

Patronage magnate Ray Harding was going to have a rough time when Giuliani left office. We all knew. Let's face it - Rudy was never really One Of Us to Ray's people. People suspected a quid pro quo - pointed to rumors of nepotism, of no-show jobs, or Harding family pets being named to head city agencies...

To most of us, though, the sight of America's mayor (and remember - I will provide free shipping if you guys want him) being endorsed by the Liberal Party was pretty routine stuff.

Oh, no no no, the Conservatives are run by a bartender from Long Island and he wouldn't support a pro-choice candidate to save his life.

So it is with great sadness that I am forced to announce to a grieving world that the New York Liberal Party got fewer than 50k votes in this past election and will no longer be on statewide ballots.

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Without that automatic ballot place, the Liberal Party must go through the arduous task of collecting petition signatures for every race it wants to enter - an extremely daunting task that no minor party has been able to perform consistently.

"The Liberal Party is not going to make its 50,000 votes," Raymond B. Harding, its leader for two decades, conceded in an interview last night. "Up until now, ours has been the most enduring third party in the history of the nation." The party was founded in 1944, and, Mr. Harding said, it has been on every New York ballot since then.

When asked whether yesterday's result meant the end of the Liberal Party, he said, "I don't know."

Mr. Harding refused to assign blame to anyone but himself, saying, "The fault is the fault of the commander, as they say in the Army." He would not say whether he would step aside as party leader, however.

The Conservative Party and Working Families Party, which nominated Gov. George E. Pataki and H. Carl McCall, respectively, easily surpassed 50,000 votes. It was unclear whether the Green and Right to Life Parties would reach 50,000. The Marijuana Reform and Libertarian Parties, like the Liberal Party, fell far short of that total.

New York is the only state that allows a candidate to add up the votes received as the nominee of multiple parties. That has given small parties a disproportionate influence over the major parties, as they give their ballot lines to Republicans and Democrats, or withhold them.

The Liberal Party's original mission was to stand for liberal policies and clean government, and to draw the Democratic Party away from the control of corrupt machine bosses. It supported Democrats from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman to Hugh L. Carey and Mario M. Cuomo. The party has also supported its share of moderate Republicans, including Jacob K. Javits, Louis Lefkowitz, John V. Lindsay and Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The party's fortunes started to change when it threw its support to Mr. Giuliani for mayor of New York City, over David N. Dinkins, the city's first black mayor. Through the Giuliani administration, the party gained power and patronage, but it made implacable enemies of many Democrats, and critics began to say it had ceased to stand for anything.

"The Liberal Party's support of Rudy Giuliani was viewed, notwithstanding the independent tradition of the party, as an unforgivable act by certain elements of the Democratic Party," Mr. Harding said.

In 1998, the Liberal Party nominated for governor an unpredictable Republican - turned - Democrat, Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross, capitalizing on her name recognition to surpass 50,000 votes. Democrats said the move hurt the Democratic nominee, Peter F. Vallone.

That year, a group of labor union leaders and Democrats who were angry with Mr. Harding founded the Working Families Party, with the specific aim of supplanting the Liberal Party as the left-of-center partner and alternative to the Democrats.

This year, the Liberals nominated Mr. Cuomo, but he withdrew before the Democratic primary when it became clear that he was far behind Mr. McCall, who said repeatedly that he intended to put the Liberal Party out of business. Unlike Ms. McCaughey Ross, Mr. Cuomo did not continue to campaign on the Liberal line, staying true to his pledge to support Mr. McCall

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Sadly, Giuliani's call to Golisano asking him to step aside from the Independence slot and take his gazillions of vote-buying dollars over to to Ray Harding didn't work out.

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Well, if you can't get money, get a name, right? And Ray got Andy Cuomo, and a lot of heat from Carl McCall.

Andrew Cuomo's hypocrisy doesn't stop there. Earlier this week he called for prohibiting registered lobbyists from making campaign contributions. The next day, the Village Voice published an article by Tom Robbins detailing disturbing lobbying activities by Cuomo confidant and Liberal party patronage boss Ray Harding.

Robbins details how Ray Harding used his political connections to grow his lobbying business. His law firm did essentially no lobbying business during the Koch and Dinkins administrations only to become one of the city’s top lobbying firms during the Guiliani administrationÑgrowing from three lobbying clients in 1993 to more than sixty in 1998 with, as Robbins reports, “clients ranging from contractors after city awards to companies after city tax breaks beating a path to the firm's door.”

Not only that, the article reports that his son Russell, who was given the job of heading the City's Housing Development Corporation and wrote a memo excusing himself from "any business, action or decision" represented by his father's law firm, was used by Ray Harding's law firm to actively seek approval of five multimillion-dollar deals for its client Westchester-based developers L & M Equity Associates. Clearly, Ray Harding will stop at nothing to push his lobbying clients.

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and there was so very much for McCall to point to:

Since it's tax season, we couldn't help but think about the tax implications of the restitution RUSSELL HARDING, the former New York City Housing official, is making to his off-budget agency.

When TOM ROBBINS published his blockbuster story about how Harding had billed more than $250,000 in expenses to his agency, part of the embarrassed former aide's rebuttal was that he had repaid his agency for about $51,000 of the questionable charges. Harding's father, Liberal Party powerhouse RAY HARDING, also appeared prominently in Robbins' story in defense of his ethically challenged son. In fact, the Daily News Boss Harding seemed more contrite about the flap than his foolish son.

Since we're naturally cynical, we doubt that young Harding actually coughed-up any of his own money to repay his agency. Hey, if this single-guy couldn't live on the $110,000-a-year salary his agency paid him (remember, Russell was expensing his morning bagels), why should anyone think he still possesses one dime of the money his allegedly misappropriated from his agency that would be required to make restitution?

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We'll all miss Ray. He's the only thing in New York City politics my arch-conservative dad and moderate moi can agree on without reserve.

Somewhere, Boss Tweed is wiping away a tear and the ghostly doors of Tammany Hall swung a little bit more tightly closed.

applause

Supporting Our Values in the axis of Good

Someone else says it

Making Light, well, does.

Ground-level politics Bad news. The Republicans have the senate. Mondale lost in Minnesota. How? It snowed. The Republicans organized a better get-out-the-vote operation than the Democrats.

How these things work: This past weekend, I was visiting my friends Nancy and Elric in Auburn, NH. Along with all the political solicitation phonecalls, they got a call from their local Democratic organization, asking whether they needed a ride to the polls on election day. They didn't, as it happened; they're both mobile and their house is very close to their polling place. But if the election had happened when Nancy was ill and Elric had a dislocated shoulder, the offer of a ride could have been good for two votes.

(Note: Either side will give you a ride if you ask for it. There's no obligation. But local Democratic organizers phone likely Democrats, and Republicans phone theirs.)

This is real political action. And if you'll excuse me for saying so, if even a fraction of the effort some lefties put into personally gratifying but politically low-yield activities like petitions and street theatre were to instead go into voter registration drives, door-to-door canvassing, and get-out-the-vote operations, their causes would be in much better shape right now.

...

Attitudes, ideologies, allies, and language:

Power is good; purity's a trap. Our political system is based on compromises and coalitions. Sacrificing effectiveness in the cause of perfect ideological purity is for wankers and dilettantes. If you want to do good, you need the power to do good things. That means you have to get into the game and play it right alongside everyone else, even if it means you have to come into contact with people who don't think exactly the same way you do. After all, if you're not coming into contact with people who don't believe the same way you do, who are you preaching to?

Activists who pretend to disdain the compromises of power politics are just complaining that they can't get as much power as they want via their preferred means.

Before you put the boot into your own candidate for insufficient adherence to some point of orthodoxy, ask yourself whether you like the Republican candidate better. This Cultivate all your potential allies. Above all, stop telling people they aren't on your side. They may never figure it out on their own, in which case they'll be indistinguishable from people who are on your side.

Be polite. Most especially, be polite to people who don't have a perfect understanding of all the fine points of your political analyses. Explain how you think this point here, which they do agree with, hooks up to that point over there. They may thereupon decide they agree with that one too; whereas if you denounce them for not understanding that second point, they may decide they don't agree with any of your points, so there!, and will undoubtedly decide that you're a jerk.

Nobody will ever think you're a genius because you're berating them.

Endbit:

Democracy isn't something we have; it's something we do. Giving an equal shake to the little guy is important because we're all little guys.

This is so frustrating. If the government had proposed to take as much money away from people with 401(k) plans via taxation as has been lost by the market going into freefall, there'd have been white collar riots in the streets. But just mutter "No new taxes," and they'll all stand there, hypnotized, while the bad guys rifle their pockets and clean out the till.

You hurting? Go volunteer

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and you know, I'm counting in my head the people who are going to drop me like a spoiled oyster because after months of Telling Truth to Power I just got nasty. Hell, there are already a few on that list.

There isn't anything I can do about that, which makes me terribly sad.

What'd you lose? Anything that's going to make your life harder (in the not-abstract sense)?

Hey, at least we're on the same side now. Speak truth to power.

If you haven't heard, they have all the power now. Go wrestle with the people with the sharp elbows.

I'm sad. I didn't win a thing yesterday.