I have to admit, of all the blogs I throw up, I think I enjoy writing my "Stupidest People In The World" series more than any other, primarily because who doesn't like laughing at bad people for their own self-inflicted wounds? But rarely have I been given subject matter to work with of the glorious nature on display in tonight's edition. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I'm running a two-for-one special on this little corner of the Internet on calling out stupidity. I think after you're done reading, you'll agree that both contestants for tonight's prize really deserve to win, but, sadly, there can only be one winner for each edition of this prestigious award. So, while tonight's decision was difficult to reach due to the high quality candidates, I was able to eventually settle on a single winner. Read on to find out, and then afterwards please put in your votes for your own winner. One last thing, the second candidate is by far the funnier one. So if you get bored reading my explanation of the first candidate's credentials, I won't mind if you skip ahead. Our first contestant is the newly minted (and possibly soon to be departing), the one, the only, the "honorable" Senator Roland Burris, Democrat from the Great State of Illinois. Fresh off of producing the Rodster, Illinois has quite possibly out-done itself with Senator Burris.



As a brief recap, Senator Burris is the guy that was appointed by the since indicted former Governor Rod Blagojevich to replace a certain former Senator Barack Obama. (You may know him better by his new name "President Barack Obama".) Once it came out that the Rodster had been soliciting bribes in return for making some lucky lottery winner the next Junior Senator from Illinois, Democrats in the Senate tried to prevent Burris from being seated. But, since they are Democrats - whom everyone on all seven continents know to be completely lacking in a spine - they were unable to manage this and Burris was seated. Now, up until now, this is just business as usual in the messy world of politics. Nobody could prove that Burris was selected by the Rodster in return for having given the Rodster "incentives" to choose him. Since then though, Senator Burris has had a run of trouble keeping his story straight. The general sequence goes like this: Prior to being seated: Swears he was never approached by The Rodster for favors of any kind. January 15th: Sworn into the U.S. Senate February 4th: Admits that The Rodster asked for help with fundraising (which sounds oddly like asking for cash in return for a Senate seat) but claims he turned The Rodster down. February 16th: Admits that, okay, he'd been asked for help with fundraising and that he'd made a few calls...but that's it! February 18th: U.S. Senate opens an ethics probe into him. The State of Illinois starts an investigation. The leading paper in Illinois calls for his resignation. The Washington Post, which cracked the Watergate story, calls for his resignation. Jesus Christ himself dials him directly and tells him to resign. (Okay, I made that last one up...but you get the point.) The weird thing about all of this wasn't that he's going to probably go down in flames for trying to buy his way into the Senate. That isn't really what concerns me here. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that anyone reading this wouldn't try and buy their way into the U.S. Senate if they had the opportunity to. No, the sheer stupidity of all this comes from the fact that he admitted this to reporters, not under oath. The 2/16 statement to the media provoked all the investigations that have followed. The new Senator admitted publicly that he was a crook, when all he had to do was keep his damned mouth shut until the media in this country found the latest shiny bauble to distract them with and he could have probably kept on getting reelected as a Democrat in Illinois until they had to peel his rotting carcass out of his seat in Washington after he died! What the hell is in the water in Illinois these days? And how much more impressive is it that Obama managed to escape relatively dirt free? It seems like to gain power in that state you HAVE to be filthy. In normal times, Senator Burris would be a shoo-in to win the award. But these are not normal times, and the Republicans have come up with a truly stunning competitor of their own. Just like the Democrats seem to be doing absolutely everything in their power to hand over what should be a perfectly safe senate seat in Illinois over to the Republicans, (how much safer of a seat do you get when it used to be the current President's for crying out loud?) Republicans seem to be aching to hand over a senate seat in deep-red Kentucky to the Democrats. Gentle readers, your indulgence please.



Before I go on, I want you to put on some cla$$ical music or something else that studies have shown to increase intelligence, because I guarantee you that after I release the next statement, you will be dumber from having read it. [quote="Senator Jim Bunning - Republican of Kentucky"] During a wide-ranging 30-minute speech on Saturday at the Hardin County Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner, Bunning said he supports conservative judges "and that's going to be in place very shortly because Ruth Bader Ginsburg ... has cancer." "Bad cancer. The kind that you don't get better from," he told a crowd of about 100 at the old State Theater. "Even though she was operated on, usually, nine months is the longest that anybody would live after (being diagnosed) with pancreatic cancer"

Rarely has so much stupid been packed into so few words. And the best part is that, unlike Burris above, I don't need to spend a page or two explaining the punch line. It's self explanatory. The man is openly rejoicing, during a speech, that a liberal Supreme Court Justice has cancer - the bad kind mind you - the kind that you don't get better from - and that she'll be dead in nine months. Facepalm. This is a cosmic level of stupidity. Senator Bunning really wants my award and he came out swinging a stupid-powered haymaker of idiocy. Or, as one liberal blogger put it: [quote="Barbara Morrill"] Bunning Is Stupid. Bad Stupid. The Kind That You Don't Get Better From.

Setting aside for the moment the utter cla$$lessness of rejoicing that someone you disagree with is terminally ill, let's examine how stupid Bunning's recent statements are. 1. Because apparently he hasn't been paying attention to such things, the Democrats won the presidential election and have a majority in the Senate. If Ruth Ginsburg gets replaced at any point during the next four years, it will be by a Liberal judge, not a conservative one. 2. Because ultimately, even in the reddest of states, expressing joy and happiness that someone is about to die is considered to be tacky, unlikely to win many votes. It just so happens that Bunning is up for reelection in 2010.



3. Because this is the sort of statement that can gain national headlines, which in turn could lead to a very well funded challenger in 2010. Well, it was a tough choice. Does the award go to Senator Roland Burris A.K.A. "Mini-Rod", or does it go to Senator Jim Bunning? Well, it was a tough choice. But frankly, I just think that in the case of a tie, the stupider person is the one who said something that might land him in jail.



So while ultimately I do think Bunning is, deep down, far dumber than Burris is, all his idiocy has managed is the very likely event that he'll be out of a job in two years. Burris wins my vote.

Ladies and gentlemen, I come to you today not to praise Barack Hussein Obama but to bury him.



Now, you may be asking yourselves how an admitted volunteer and supporter of our new president can do such a sudden about face that I'm talking about burying him after he's been in office for less than a month. If you ARE asking that question, then you're taking me too literally. I am not planning on burying Barack Hussein Obama the man. Frankly, I think he's doing a pretty decent job while being faced with enormous obstacles.



No, I am burying the use of the name Barack HUSSEIN Obama for good. (If only it was that simple.) I have few pet peeves, but one of them is people who, while in the act of criticizing something Obama has done, feel it necessary to spout out his full name and then act innocent and unaware of the connotations of what they are doing. "What's wrong with calling him that? It's his name right? If there is nothing wrong with the name then what is the big deal? I'm just saying his full name." (Because obviously we go around referring to people by all three names all the time...right?)



People who claim that they don't know what they are doing wrong are blatant, lying, intellectually dishonest phonies. (Wow. That was a liberating experience. I haven't been so blunt since becoming a moderator because I'm constantly feeling like I have to be extra careful to set a good example.) Nobody with two brain cells that they can rub together in their skull to create an idea can be ignorant of what is wrong with saying Barack HUSSEIN Obama in a derogatory way. People often claim that it is impossible to criticize Obama without being called racist. And there is probably some truth to the thought that there are Obama supporters out there who are a little too quick to see racism where none exists. That having been said, it is perfectly possible to attack Obama on policy grounds without being childish. Saying "Barack HUSSEIN Obama" is childish. But even more annoying than that is that some people think that by the very act of saying Barack HUSSEIN Obama, they are actually making an important argument. They feel that they are making a valid point by noting that the man's middle name is Hussein. When nobody seems to care, you can almost see them sitting at their keyboard, seething with anger and stuttering out loud: "His name is HUSSEIN! How do you idiots not get this? His NAME is HUSSEIN! What is wrong with you people that you don't understand how important that fact is?" Saying the full name it is a blatant attempt to associate him with being an arab, middle-eastern dictator. When you see clips like this one, it is an effort to play up Obama's being "different". He is the guy with the different skin color. He is the guy with the Muslim sounding middle name. He's probably not even a natural born American citizen. Would people be referring to Barack Obama by his full three names if the middle name was "Steve" instead of Hussein? Highly doubtful. Now...to this point, everything I have said has been pretty Liberal focused. What's a good conservative argument for dropping the "HUSSEIN" part of any criticism of Obama? Because people will actually listen to you and give you some measure of credibility! How much credibility will, of course, vary based on how good your argument is and how well you present it, but I guarantee you that I immediately start discounting anything someone is saying to me if they preface it with a snarling, uttered "Barack Hussein Obama" bomb. And the country needs a credible opposition to Obama. One-party rule without a credible opposition just isn't healthy. It leads to excesses and massive mistakes. The first six years of the Bush Administration were a VERY good reminder of that. Ideas get improved upon when they get challenged. Otherwise, the idea never gets tested to determine if it is a good one or not. So please, anyone out there reading this, can we bury Barack Hussein Obama? For the good of the country? (And the world when you get right down to it, because the world's economy is pretty heavily impacted by the U.S. economy.)

Well, after Valkyria Chronicles - which I'm pleased to see a few of the people I track starting to play - I shifted over to play the new Prince of Persia game by Ubisoft. And I have to say, it is completely different than any Prince of Persia game that I have ever played. It isn't that often that you see a company with an IP with a proven track record of glorious success reinvent itself this dramatically and, I hasten to add, so impressively. Prince of Persia is really a great game. I'd go so far as to say that it's the most underrated game on Gamespot in recent memory. Valkyria Chronicles was rated a 8.5 by Gamespot and I think it should have been around a 9.0 - 9.3, but Prince of Persia was given an 8.0 and it should have easily been around the same 9.0-9.3 rating. I think the difference comes in the weighting of how Gamespot is looking at various factors versus how I am.



With the Gamespot review, the fact that your companion Elika can save you so quickly, so often, and so easily is listed as a negative that adversely impacts a person's enjoyment of the game. My experience with this new dynamic was just the opposite. One of the things that has sometimes been frustrating to me about Prince of Persia games is how easy it is to fall to your death and die, have to take the time to reload and therefore have your immersion ruined. Having Ellika there to rescue you fixes this problem. It's a very liberating experience. Suddenly you can try new things, experiment around, and stretch your wings in ways that previous Prince of Persia games didn't allow for. If anything, being about to fall to your death can actually increase the immersion as Elika and the Prince frequently exchange a bit of banter after it happens. ("Don't die just when I was starting to like you!" "Hey, I had it under control!") Beyond that, the visual artistic style of the game really is quite stunning. It's also stunning in a way that accentuates and aides the gameplay rather than detracts from it. With some games, the fancy graphics actually make the game more difficult because they get in the way of your ability to see or act correctly. Prince of Persia's graphics actually provide hints of what your next move is, which is another improvement on previous Prince titles where sometimes a lot of trial and error (and death) were required before a person could advance to the next area. Sadly, the game does end on a truly disgusting cliffhanger (which I have come to expect and loathe about Ubisoft titles), but overall this is a really fun and beautiful game that takes away some of the main barriers of entry to the Prince series: 1. Punishing difficulty 2. An ongoing backstory It's definitely worth a look for anyone who wants a good platformer with a good character development (exposed in the form of talking with Elika whenever you want) and a beautiful visual style.

Hello everyone. I realize it has been an abysmally long time since I either posted a blog or commented on anyone else's blog. The fault is mine. One of my readers PM'd me a few weeks back as to why I, as a moderator, never seem to be online at Gamespot. This person certainly had a valid point. Gamespot is hardly lacking from absolutely stellar contributors who deserve recognition. That recognition could range from Soapbox to top reviewer to moderator to officer in unions. Frankly, this world is absolutely infested with talented and interesting people. That having been said, I DID have a very detailed and comprehensive Valkyria Chronicles review nearly finished and ready to go when there was a power surge in my house that shut down my computer and lost the entirety of the review that I had spent an hour and a half writing. Yes, I should have saved it. Rookie mistake. I take full responsibility. It was a child that died in the womb so to speak. Now, all that having been said, my first baby is the RPG genre. I refuse to abandon this completely. New job. New boss. I don't care if I mutate and develop a third nipple. I absolutely refuse to NOT write a blog acknowledging a brilliant new member to the RPG genre that I have played. The people demand to hear the news! And the news is that the best RPG of 2008 is not Fallout 3. It is also not Fable 2. The best RPG of 2008 is Valkyria Chronicles. Note that I did not say the "most hyped" rpg or even the "best selling" rpg, but I certainly DID say the "best" rpg. This isn't even a contest. I'm as big of a Fallout fanboy that you'll ever see. I have Fallout 2 is a tie for my second favorite game of all time. I consider it one of the greatest games ever made. I loved the original Fable and consider "Jack of Blades" to be an underrated villain deserving of much more discussion than he gets, and certainly more than that whiny momma's boy Sephiroth gets. But seriously, raven25286 who clued me into this game a year before it came out is correct, this is an underrated and unheralded gem of a game that does more for the genre than any game since Mass Effect and The Witcher have done. Quit wasting your time reading my blog and go buy the title. NOW. Go. Shoo. Why are you still reading? I promise...there are no naked lady pictures coming. I can't get away with that anymore. Go play Valkyria Chronicles.

Well, I intended my next blog post to be my comparison of Fallout 3 vs. Mass Effect. I know a couple of folks have expressed interest in hearing what I think on Fallout 3 and whether or not it is worth getting. (It is. Particularly if you're a fan of the Bethesda/Oblivion/Morrowind style of game) But events have conspired against me. I've thoroughly enjoyed previous "Stupidest People in the World" blog posts and today's headline about the soon to be former governor of Illinois was too enticing to pass up. After all, I've covered sports figures and Republicans already. I may as well hit a Democrat before I move onto a religious figure of some kind. (I'm smelling a Rick Warren roast in the future.) So, without further ado, I'd like to invite down our next contestant. Rod Blagojevich come on down! Rod Blagojevich, henceforth known as "The Rodster" since his last name is annoying to type, has staked an aggressive claim in the last couple of months to being the world's stupidest human, but today he really brought his "A" game with him. For those of you who are unaware of The Rodster's background, he is, this guy right here. He also has the dubious honor of being the least popular political figure in the entire nation. Yes, that is a nation that still has Dick Cheney as a member of its political establishment. Polling in October of this year had The Rodster's approval rating in Illinois at 4%. That is not a typo. It's Illinois! If I was governor there I could have sex with a gay prostitute in the middle of town square at high noon and still pull a 15% approval rating as a Democrat! The clincher is that that approval rating of 4%...WAS BEFORE today's indictment on federal corruption charges. United States attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (yes, the same guy who investigated Scooter Libby and Karl Rove whom Republicans screamed was a partisan hitman for Democrats) today called The Rodster's case, quote, "the most staggering crime spree in office that I have ever seen." (Really? THE MOST staggering? Wow. Considering who he has investigated in the past that's really saying something.) Those are the facts thus far. But ultimately, I've only shown that The Rodster is potentially corrupt and astonishingly unpopular and unliked, even, or perhaps particularly, among Democrats. Let's now switch gears into describing what makes him remarkably stupid. This man has been under federal investigation for months by the same ruthless bastard of a U.S. attorney who managed to bring Scooter Libby down and came a hair's breadth away from nabbing Karl Rove and possibly even Dick Cheney's scalps. And what was the final nail in the guy's coffin? He allegedly tried to sell Barack Obama's senate seat to the highest bidder. Yes, that would be President Elect Barack Obama. Biggest celebrity in the world Barack Obama. The guy getting more attention and press coverage than any human being on the planet at the moment. The Rodster, already under federal investigation and almost certainly having his phone tapped, tried to solicit bribes to appoint Barack Obama's replacement to the U.S. Senate. This takes a galactic level of stupidity to even attempt, and, frankly, some cojones the size of watermelons as well. This isn't a case like the one today where I bribed a coworker to support an idea I had at work by cleverly suggesting I might be willing to loan him my copy of Saint's Row 2 for the PS3. This stuff actually has folks paying attention to it. There are actually a few people who are curious as to how Obama's former Senate seat gets handed out.



As you might expect, The Rodster was caught red-handed on federal, judge approved, wiretaps. Patrick Fitzgerald's full statement can be found here but I think a reasonable summary is here.

Hey folks. After playing Fallout 3 extensively, I've decided that simply doing a user review (which I WILL do) will not be sufficient to describe my very mixed feelings about the game. Fallout 3 is very much following the road that Mass Effect tried to pave last year. It is trying to blend RPG and Shooter genre elements together. These two games make a natural comparison. Similar to The Great Debate I did comparing The Witcher and Mass Effect, I plan on doing a comparison of Fallout 3 and Mass Effect by a completely arbitrary set of criteria that I will select and judge as my next blog post. But before I jump into the gaming equivalent of Ali vs. Foreman, I'd like to give a couple of bits of happy news in my life. First and most importantly, I have just been promoted at work! You may have noticed my being a bit absent over the last month or two, I'm happy to say my long hours and stress at focusing at my offline job rather than playing around on here like I prefer doing during the day when work is slow have paid off. Let me tell you a little story. When I graduated from MBA school, jobs were quite scarce in the area of the country that I wanted to live. I ended up taking a job as a contract/temporary worker at a Fortune 500 country that happens to have a branch where I wanted to live. I did a particular job, and did it well, for about a year. The idea was that if I did really well in it, then when the company finally got a real job opening doing the job I was already doing, I'd get it. Well, after about a year an opening became available and naturally, I went for it. Sadly, midway through the hiring process, the job opening changed to an internal only hire. Only people already working for the company could apply and someone else got the job. Given that working for the company instead of as an external temp worker means about a roughly $25,000 a year difference in pay I was a little irritated. A year later, I was finally hired on. Despite doing the job already for two years, I was placed at the very bottom of the pay scale. Then, a year later, the person who was hired instead of me initially was made team lead. To her credit, this person was good at what she did. She was an effective leader, smart and capable. Despite my general satisfaction with her as my lead though, I always wondered how things would be different if that job opening hadn't been changed to an internal only hire. Well, now I get the opportunity to find out. My team is getting a new manager and the new manager has decided to appoint her own team lead, and based on feedback from the previous manager and my peers, she's appointing me rather than either the person she brought with her from her old team or the previous team lead from my team. Jumping someone that was previously highly ranked than you is very rare in my company and so, naturally, I'm very honored and proud. I'm also quite excited and a little nervous. We'll see how I do. My OTHER promotion that I got recently was to be elevated from iMod status to gMod status. My apprenticeship was a little long, but really I can't blame Gamespot for that. I have not been a particularly active iMod. When I do mod and post in the public forums I think my contributions are good, but others have been far more active and far better at both than I have been. Still, I am pleased and happy about that promotion as well.

I've been noticing a disturbing trend among game developers lately. There has been a distinct tendency to release buggy games, and then announce DLC expansions that people can pay to add in. This, to me, is putting the cart before the proverbial horse. Before you ask consumers in a down economy to spring for extra content in your game, might it not be wise to make sure that the game you are releasing into the marketplace works right first? Two prominent examples that come to mind are Fallout 3 and Last Remnant. While I have not yet played Last Remnant yet (and probably won't due to its 6.5 rating due, primarily, to it being a buggy, broken game), I have played Fallout 3 for the PC extensively and can tell you flat out that the game needs patching badly. One example of a bug that I encountered in Fallout 3 is the case of the statue NPC. At one point during the main quest - DEEP into the main quest mind you - an NPC you talk with asks you to follow him. You need to do so to initiate the next stage of the quest in question. Sadly, when I talked with him, he wouldn't move. He would not walk to where he was supposed to go. This frustrated me. I had played the game for something like 50 hours at that point and felt like I was going to have to start over. Fortunately, at that time I hit upon a rather brilliant idea. I quickly googled a walkthrough of the game to find out where, exactly, this guy intended to lead me. As luck would have it, he wasn't planning on walking far. I figured he needed to be in a specific spot for the game's programming to have him queue up the next part of his dialog. So I put my character beside the statue NPC and...pushed...him a couple of rooms over until he was in the spot shown in the walkthrough's picture. Sure enough, that activated the guy to start blabbing the next piece of dialog he was supposed to impart on me to trigger the next quest. That having been said, I'm not sure how many other people wouldn't have been stymied by this sort of glitch and have had to start completely over. I got really lucky that my hairbrained approach worked. A game that buggy should be having their developer talking about a PATCH not new for-pay DLC. Similarly, for Last Remnant, Gamespot dings the game for, among other things, "When you first begin The Last Remnant, you'll participate in a battle within moments of inserting the game disc, and chances are that you'll be struck by a glaring issue: The frame rate is awful, and the texture pop-in is shockingly bad. It's an issue you'll never quite get used to, considering that it mars the entirety of the experience. What a shame, because this long and fascinating Japanese role-playing game has a way of getting under your skin." On the flip side, allow me to give a BIG shout out to The Witcher Enhanced Edition. Longtime readers of my blog will know that I considered either The Witcher or Mass Effect as the runaway, in fact only, decent choices for RPG of the year last year. I'm happy to report that the Enhanced Edition of Witcher isn't just a mild improvement on the game, it is a breathtaking insurgency of a patch that raises the bar for what post-release support for a game should entail. Not only does it fix the most glaring issues of the regular edition (some roughly done dialog/localization/translations and bad loading times) it ALSO adds additional content for free. The fact that the Enhanced Edition is absolutely free to anyone who bought the regular edition of the game is one of the most significant developer decisions made in years. CD Projekt has earned my unconditional support for the next game they put out. I will be preordering and buying sight unseen their next offering.

Liberal bloggers at Talking Points Memo report that Republicans are substantially out hustling Democrats in Georgia in advance of the upcoming runoff between Saxton Chambliss and Jim Martin. Based on this information, I'm going to update the probability of Democrats winning this seat by downgrading Martin's chances from 40% to 30%. This downgrades the chances of Democrats getting to 60 seats (counting Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats) from 19.5% to 14.6%. (75% chance of winning Minnesota * 65% chance of winning Alaska * 30% chance of winning Georgia.) More information in previous blog post on the subject.

Well, the elections have come and gone and, as anyone who isn't either a lunatic or in a persistent vegetative state was able to predict weeks ago, Senator Barack Obama will soon be President Barack Obama. I could respond to some of the arguments presented by McCain voters like Hokies and 311 in my previous blog post, but really, that would be academic at this point. Let's talk about something more interesting. In addition to winning the presidency, the Democrats have gained at least six seats in the Senate and now have a gigantic advantage in the House of Representatives. But what does it all mean? What can we expect? And what about the currently unresolved races in Alaska, Georgia and Minnesota? How will those turn out? In the last couple of weeks prior to the election you may have noticed that the smarter news sources were gently starting to pivot away from talking about the Presidential race and started talking more and more about the Senate. This is because, where elected government is concerned if we toss out the Republican stacked Supreme Court, the entire federal government is now controlled by the Democrats and a McCain victory a couple of weeks ago was extremely unlikely. However, Republicans in the Senate still have some power to block a liberal agenda if they choose to use it, if, and only if, Democrats fail to get to 60 seats in the Senate. This is because 60 votes is what is needed to shut down a filibuster in the Senate, which any single Senator can start. A filibuster is when one or more Senators get up in front of their peers and talk forever. It prevents an actual vote from being taken on any particular piece of legislation. I'm pretty sure that Senators John Kerry (D) and Tom Coburn (R) invented it just so they could listen to themselves speak forever. Those of you who only casually follow American politics may be wondering if I've lost my mind at this point. After all, the election was a week ago. Shouldn't the Senate also be resolved? The answer to that is no. As I alluded to earlier, three very key Senate races are not yet decided. If the Democrats win all three then they get to 60 seats (counting Lieberman) and have their filibuster proof majority. Let's discuss the three races in question. I'm going to talk about them in order from most to least likely to be resolved in favor of the Democrats. Minnesota This race pits Comedian Al Franken (D) against Comedian Norm Coleman (R) and was the closest Senate race in the country. Final votes are still being reviewed and tallied, but as of the time of this writing Coleman is leading by 206 votes out of roughly three million votes cast. This is well within the margin required for an automatic recount and down from the 700+ that Coleman was initially leading by. So what's causing some of those adjustments? Human error mostly. Data entry is a process fraught with user errors of all kind. One example that was discovered over the last week was an instance where a person was about to record 124 votes for Franken in a particular voting municipality and accidentally input 24. That's why recounts are important. Nate Silver had a more detailed, stats based analysis of Franken's chances of coming out on top here, but local news in Minnesota says that it's looking good for Franken's chances since most of the votes that they think are missing are coming from areas Obama won handily in the presidential election. Winning this race would put the Democrats at 58 Senate seats counting Lieberman. Alaska This race pits convicted felon Senator Ted Stevens (R) against Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D) and is one that if you had asked my opinion on the day before the election I would have predicted Begich would win in a landslide. That this race is even close is mind-boggling to me. But it is close. As of right now, Stevens is leading by over three thousand votes, which is obviously a lot more than the 206 vote difference in Minnesota. Game over, right? Wrong. This one isn't anywhere close to being over either. And the reason is the number of votes left to be counted. According to the Alaska Daily News, roughly 30% of the ballots in Alaska remain to be counted by those lazy Alaskan election officials. Irritable blogger snark aside, that is obviously a huge number. 61,000 absentee ballots, 20,000 "questioned" ballots and 9500 "Early" ballots. What are questioned ballots? Well, the ADN states that "Questioned ballots are votes people cast on Election Day someplace other than their designated polling place. That might include an out-of-towner who wanted to vote for president, or someone who simply stopped by the wrong precinct." for those of you too lazy to clickie the linkie. Given that we're talking about 90,500 votes here when the difference between the two camps is only about 3000, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that Begich may yet end up on top. How reasonable? Well, given that I'm shocked that Stevens even came this close, I think I'm going to cla$$ify this race as "tilt" Democrat. Why? Because I think absentee and early voters are going to tilt Democratic. Begich has been leading in the polls during most of this election season. This would mean, logically, that voting done early or absentee, when Begich was leading, would likely tilt Democratic. IF the Democrats win this, well, that brings them up to 59. Which means it all would come down to... Georgia This race pits Senator Saxton Chambliss (R) vs. challenger Jim Martin (D) and conservatives probably feel a bit cheated here. There was a third person in the original race that ended on November 4th. By state law, when no candidate in a Senate Race gets to 50% of the overall vote, an automatic runoff is triggered. Chambliss "won" on November 4th, but apparently ended up just shy of that 50% threshold. He came in at roughly 49.5% of the overall vote. Final results are still being certified but I suspect that there will be a runoff and that the election for the runoff will be held December 2nd. I can't even begin to predict how that will turn out. There are too many factors at work here favoring one candidate or the other. I can tell you that this is one particular Republican scalp that I badly wanted to take this year. Chambliss won in 2002 by painting then Senator Max Cleland (D), a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee from war wounds, as a coward and weak on national security. He showed Cleland in ads juxtaposed next to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. I find calling a triple war amputee a coward and weak on National Security disgusting. But how much I may want something has little impact on whether I'll get it or not in a situation like this. What are the factors favoring each candidate? Favor Chambliss 1. "Won" the first election. 2. Georgia is a red state not generally considered welcoming to Democrats 3. He's the incumbent. Incumbents win most of the time. 4. Better personal fundraising. 5. Desperate Republicans will pour everything they have into retaining this seat 6. Black voter turnout likely to be lower for special election than regular election Favor Martin 1. Democratic brand obviously much more popular than Republican these days 2. Better party fundraising for the first time in decades 3. Georgia is one of the few southern states starting to move more into being a purple state 4. Black president may campaign for Martin and re-motivate black voters to turn out 5. Democrats have won every single special election of the last two years, regardless of where they were held 6. Energized Democratic party will pour everything they have into taking this seat and getting to 60 votes. This is a chance for them to be more powerful than at any time in U.S. history since FDR passed the "New Deal" programs. When all is said and done, I'm rating this seat "Lean" Republican at this point. I'm not saying that Martin can't win, but if I had to lay odds I'd probably say that this seat is 60% likely to go to Chambliss. So, what about the chances of Democrats getting to that magical number of 60? Well, let's say that Democrats have a 75% chance of winning that Minnesota recount, a 65% chance of winning in Alaska once all the votes are in and a 40% chance of winning in Georgia. Doing the math, which I'm a bit rusty so someone in high school who is studying this stuff correct me if I get it wrong, I calculate that Democrats have about a 19.5% chance of getting to 60 seats (.75*.65*.4). For my fellow poker players out there, this is roughly the same chance of hitting a flush on the river heads-up against a single other player in No Limit Texas Holdem if all your outs are live. (9 outs divided by 46 unknown cards = 19.56% chance of hitting your flush.) A roughly one in five shot isn't great odds, but then again if you asked most Democrats a year ago if they thought they'd have a 20% chance of ending up with both a Democratic president and 60 seats in the Senate by December 2nd I think most Democrats would have thought you certifiably nuts so I'll happily take 20%. But really, how important is getting to 60? Will Obama be able to implement most of his legislation with between 57-59 seats? I think so. Let's assume that they get to 59 seats. Think that they might be able to peel off Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) now and then? I think that's pretty likely. No Republican is completely conservative. I think in most cases Obama will be able to peel off the two or three votes needed to at least end a filibuster if the personal charm he's shown to date is any indication.

Some of you may have been wondering where I've been. Well, all I can say is that sometimes offline takes priority over online and leave it at that. It's been a difficult, stressful stretch with my job. Hopefully that will let up soon, but in the meantime, it has been too long since I wrote a blog and seldom have I had subject matter that I cared as much about. I rarely find myself unable to enunciate what I'm thinking. Sometimes I don't always say what I want to say as well as I would like to say it, but I'm rarely at a loss for words. Despite this, I've struggled for weeks now with how I would write this blog and what I would say in it. The U.S. election is tomorrow. Most sane conservatives who have been following the polls at both the state and national level realize that a McCain victory is a very long shot indeed. They've resigned themselves to what they feel will be a disastrous Obama presidency. They base this belief upon conservative views that they hold near and dear to their hearts. Some of these conservatives acknowledge what the majority of the U.S. and the rest of the world now feel is blatantly obvious: that the Bush presidency has been a dismal failure. Others still think that Bush has done a good job and has gotten undeserved blame for things that aren't his fault and are outside of his control. But both camps of conservatives, by and large, aren't very excited about Obama governing this country. This was driven home to me about two weeks back when I was at work chatting with a few of my coworkers. In contrast to the coworkers outside of my team, I really like the ones on my team. This is why I feel comfortable chatting with them about issues that are generally considered taboo in a work environment. (Politics, religion, and, of course, the fact that Colin Farrell is a complete douche bag.) Therefore I was considerably surprised that, when the subject turned to politics, one person who I admire and whose intelligence I respect responded to the subject of why he didn't like Obama by spitting out (and there is really no other words appropriate here other than "spat out") that "he's a liberal". This guy could not have inserted more contempt into his tone if he had just said "he's a child molester!" (To be fair, after I gently reminded this guy, who I consider a friend and someone I see every day, that I myself was a liberal he apologized afterwards.) This was a key moment for me in trying to figure out one of the key "meta" issues that appeals to me in this election. Now, obviously, no politician is ever as good or as bad as we think they are. But one of the things that has always resonated with me on an emotional level was the inclusiveness of the tone Obama has tried to strike. That isn't to say he has never attacked during this long two year campaign season. A politician, to be successful, needs to know how to throw a punch. But always, always, I've gotten the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he truly wants to be inclusive in his governing philosophy. Call me naive if you wish, but I feel that he has plenty of ammo he could have deployed but chose not to against his opponents. First with the Clintons, is there any question that Obama could have hit the Clintons harder than he did during the primary? The laundry list of Clinton slime is a mile long! But just to use a single example, did you ever, even one time, hear the words "Monica Lewinski" emerge from Obama's mouth? Hell, as I remember the Clinton years I couldn't go a week without a fresh scandal emerging. One would think that after a ridiculously long Democratic primary I'd be able to spout off ten different Clinton scandals off the top of my head and I can't. Because Obama didn't bring them up. Now let's talk about McCain. At any time during this election season, did Obama bring up the fact that McCain was near the very bottom of his flight class no matter where he went and that he would have been tossed out years before he reached active duty if his father wasn't a respected admiral? Did we hear even a peep about how McCain had multiple affairs and then eventually divorced his first wife after she got in a car accident and lost her good looks in order to marry an heiress? (Something that the Reagan family never forgave him for) Again, no we didn't. Because Obama didn't bring it up. Hell, Obama didn't bring up McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal until McCain struck first by trying to tie Obama to Fannie Mae. If there was ever an opportunity to bring up Keating Five it was after the mortgage crisis. Are you getting my point? People talk often about the divisiveness of our politics. There has been one candidate who has been pushing divisiveness this election season. Only one candidate's final election strategy these last few weeks has been "Ayers", "Who is the REAL Barack Obama?", "Jeremiah Wright", "Muslim", "death of Israel", "Terrorist", "Socialist", etc. We've had eight excruciating long years of a Bush Administration that cared more about ideology and winning than doing what was best for the country. No, conservatives will not always agree with a liberal Obama on what is best for the country. But you won't get the impression, as liberals have these last eight years with Bush, that Obama isn't at least listening. This is why you have seen a steady stream of conservatives ranging from Colin Powell to Charles Buckley saying how they will be backing Obama. The man listens. He is intelligent. He is inclusive. We need this man right now. We don't need Sarah Palin and her references to her political enemies "palling around with terrorists". We don't need John McCain and his claims that his political enemies "prefer to lose a war so they can win an election" or who "don't always put country first". As Obama puts it, there is more that unites us as Americans than divides us. We can disagree without being disagreeable. This is what America needs. We have serious problems and we need a serious man to solve them. We don't need a man who "suspends" his campaign as a stunt to rush back to Washington D.C. to politicize an economic crisis. We don't need anymore ideologues. An argument can be made that the Bush Administration has not governed as true conservatives over the last eight years and therefore conservatism has been given an unfairly bad name because of the disastrous mess that this country is now in. Well, folks, if that's the case then the time to say that was a long time ago. Until they were evicted in 2006, Republicans in Congress gave the Bush Administration everything that it wanted. More to the point, these are the men and women that conservatives got elected multiple times. They are the people you chose as your standard bearers as conservatives. Rightly or wrongly, they are the face of the conservative brand and if the country now blames conservatism for the actions of these individuals, then you should have put forth different conservative standard bearers. Conservatives do not deserve to win because of the record of these standard bearers. This includes John McCain. As has been well documented, for all his maverick reputation, he voted in agreement with George W. Bush 90% of the time. Yes, that's less than many Republicans, but it's too often for most Americans these days. Often times in the U.S. we vote for what we feel is the lesser of two evils. Liberals don't have to feel that way this year. Most liberals I know are THRILLED to vote for Barack Obama. I know that I was. But conservatives probably are feeling pretty miserable right now. So here then is my final reason for why conservatives should back away from the ledge. This is my "don't jump!" message to my conservative friends if the election goes as the polls predict and Democrats win a landslide tomorrow. Can Obama really do worse than what Bush has done from a conservative standpoint? Allow me to enunciate, factually, the Bush record. 1. Two wars started early in his first term that will be nowhere near successfully ended by the end of his second term. 2. A huge erosion of our civil liberties in the course of prosecuting those wars. 3. A complete trashing of our reputation with the rest of the world and an absolute abdication of our moral high ground. 4. Torture as official government policy for the first time in our history. 5. A weakening of environmental legislation. 6. An economic disaster that has led to completely flat wages for eight years, oil that is hovering around $4/gallon instead of the $1.38/gallon when Bush took office, record budget deficits, and a stock market that will end the Bush presidency at about the same level as it was when Bush took office eight years ago. 7. The biggest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor despite a memo a month earlier titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within The United States". 8. A horrifically botched response to Hurricane Katrina despite an army recommendation that the levies were vulnerable. "Heckuva job Brownie!" 9. Record number and percentage of Americans without health insurance. 10. The largest income disparity since right before the Great Depression. 11. Zero increase to the federal minimum wage since 1997. 12. Tremendous increase in government spending on discretionary programs. 13. An utter failure to capture Bin Laden. 14. Tax cuts overwhelmingly slanted towards the richest Americans. I could go on and on, but I'll take mercy and end there. (Though if my readers want to submit nominations feel free.) But here is my final argument for conservatives. Look at that list. Look at it from a conservative standpoint and ask yourself, can Obama possibly do any worse? For some of you, maybe most of you or even all of you, the answer is probably "yes, he can do a lot worse!" But be honest here a moment. Can Democrats possibly spend more than Republicans have? I doubt it. Can Democrats prosecute wars with such painful incompetence? Not likely. Can Democrats possibly trash our economy as badly? Given that Obama seems to be promising to follow the Clinton economic mold that was such a staggering success probably not. Now ask yourself this. Does McCain really know anything at all about the economy? Does McCain being shot down and tortured really mean he'll make a good Commander and Chief? After the ugly campaign he's run, will any Democrat be willing to give him anything at all if he wins? When I look at the upside and downside potential of McCain and Obama, I think Obama has far more upside than an erratic/short tempered McCain with far less downside. Even if I wasn't thrilled with Obama as a conservative, I'd still vote for him because he has, by far, the more conservative/calm decision making style and temperament. So to my conservative brethren, when you go to the polls tomorrow, even if you don't like Obama, consider voting for him as the lesser of two evils. Barring that, when Obama wins (and he's going to) at least give him the benefit of the doubt and see what he does going forward before you hate him.