Ryan McFarland

Tomorrow a few of us will go and vote. I’m glad the day is here - too bad we won’t know who the president is right away. You know, we’ll have to endure lawsuits and court hearings and accusations of a stolen presidency. Honestly, i hope that all doesn’t happen. But i won’t hold my breath. You would think that in a world where someone can sit in a restroom, play a demo of Bejeweled on their cell phone, decide to buy it, go online with their phone purchase, install, and play the game all before flushing that we could figure out who won an election within a few hours of the close of the polls. I’m really looking forward to the pre-recorded telephone calls to stop. Cripes - i know this is an important election with Lisa and Tony battling for the senate seat… but stop with the calls already.

The handy badge below is from electoral-vote.com. The creator does have a Kerry lean to his site - but i think his projections are not biased. But if you want to look at a site with a Bush tilt here is one. I find it particularly interesting that the latter predicts Alaska’s senate seat to end up a democrat. We’ll see.

This can make for pretty fun stuff… make President Bush talk. And if you have not seen the Subservient President you should check that out too.

I was kind of curious about just how wars impact our national budget. I also wondered what our deficit/surplus history looked like compared to presidential party affiliation. I found it pretty strange that democrats tend to have a flat or favorable slope during their overall term especially with the social programs usually associated with liberal political parties. The nearly overwhelming unfavorable trend during republican presidential tenures might be attributed to greater military spending - but that’s just speculation and oversimplification on my part i’m sure. Somehow LBJ managed to lead the country into a surplus during the Vietnam conflict despite a plummet in his popularity at the time.

Not to be outdone by the Republican party’s presidential photos, the Democrats also sent me a “photo”…

As you can see - the envelope clearly stated that the contents shouldn’t be bent.

The glare shows the damage done to my photograph by the postal service. That’s alright. I mailed my peso anyway. There was no promise of a bumper sticker though.