Back in the Ukraine
It seems like such an obvious point, someone must have made it. But snichols emerges from a turkey haze to wonder: why is that people are shutting down the entire country and factories in the Ukraine because the opposition candidate didn't get declared the winner of the election and here we're mocking our fellow democrats for wanting to look into it?

On a related note, does anyone detect any irony in the US demanding a fair election there but not here? Please flood snicholsblog with all the well-written punditry on this very point that she's missed...

Special paranoid point: snichols notices that on the precise day that Russia considers switching some of its investments from dollars to Euros, the US publically backs the Ukraine candidate, not the one the Russians want--is a new post cold war chilliness moving in?

Why is snichols not blogging?
snichols is not really sure why she hasn't blogged this week. She is not, contrary to popular belief, still rocking alone in the dark in a room moaning "mommy." You forget. snichols lives in California where you must pay large amounts of money to spend a weekend in a large retreat center doing this with hundreds of others. To date, snichols has drawn the line at that (although she's scrolling through websites even as you read this...).

No. snichols would like to think that she is thinking. She is thinking about hate and why she thinks it is okay to hate Republicans while she wants everyone else to love everyone else. And she is thinking about "hippocritism," which is what her son accused her of today--hitting the mark so squarely that he used his leverage to extract a promise from snichols not to drink diet coke for 2 days (but realistically how will he know when he is at school? and would the exclusion apply to caffeine-free diet coke?).

See? snichols is thinking. and that, for now, will have to suffice.

Randi Rhodes Rants
Hey, snichols doesn'tt know whether to put any stock in it, because snichols has found her to be wrong at times before, but Randi Rhodes, afternoon host for Air America Radio, has quite a rant going about the election. She is absolutely convinced it was stolen. She bolsters her case with the following:
She says that in Cuyahoga County (in which Cleveland, Ohio resides) there were 97,000 more Bush votes cast then there were registered voters in the county.

She had experts on which cite the scientific nature of various exit polls that showed Kerry with a 5% lead in Florida and Ohio. She cites evidence that if you compare counties with verifiable voting systems to counties with unverifiable voting systems, you find that in counties with verifiable voting system a higher percentage of Republicans voted for Kerry than did Democrats voted for Kerry in nonverifiable counties.

She says that for Bush to have won the populous Florida counties, virtually 100% of independents and 30% of Democrats would have had to have voted for Bush. Yet, some 60% of independents and 95% of Democrats have reported voting for Kerry.

You can listen a long "sermon" she gave in the style of a southern hellfire preacher "get thee behind me, exit pollster" that kind of thing by clicking here Listen here and then scrolling down to "sound from the show" for November 9th.

Unbelievably profane and cathartic (not for the faint of heart): http://www.fuckthesouth.com

The MSNBC link made hot.

Hope and Dreams Presumed Dead
Okay, snichols is coming out of the closet: snichols doesn't want to get any more emails telling her why not to slit her wrists or leave the country or how we need to stop whining and organize. She is not through whining. Not by a long shot. In fact, she'll go so far as to say, don't read snicholsblog anymore if you don't want to hear whining. snichols feels like someone whose loved one is presumed dead and everyone else has given them up for missing except her.

But wait, there's more!
At the risk of being branded a paranoid, non fact-based, black helicopter conspiracy theorist for the rest of her days, she's going to say it, unambiguously: snichols doesn't think George W. Bush won this election.

snichols suspects foul play on a massive scale. snichols points to an MSNBC story last night which showed thousands of more people voting in key Florida precincts than were registered in those precincts. snichols points to emerging and growing scores of stories out of Ohio and Iowa of people pushing the Kerry button and seeing it come up Bush.

Let's fight: but for 2004, not 2008
What is it with you people? For months in a run up to this election we hear about voter fraud, voter suppression, voter intimidation, and easy chance of hacking into Diebold machines without paper trails. Then Bush appears to get hundreds of thousands of votes more than Kerry and we say, "oh. he won. he must've done it fair and square, it wasn't close."

Well, would you make it close if you were going to steal an election? snichols wouldn't. if snichols were doing the stealing, she'd steal it but good.

So what now?
Okay, snichols, you convinced me. The election was stolen. But how do we prove it and isn't it too late because Kerry conceded? snichols admits. It looks bad. Damn bad. But let's get some backlash going here. Find out: who is looking into this? Who is doing what? What can we do? Who can we call? snichols knows there are people who haven't given up and she is joining them. In church last week, a woman whispered to snichols that there was a rumor in her community that Kerry's victory was still coming, but on "CP time." snichols is too much of a scaredy white liberal to spell out what that means if you don't know, but it gives snichols hope. And you?

(:)(:)(:)(:)
Four Snouts up for I "Heart" Huckabees
Nothing to shake you out of a post-election slump like a good movie, but hey, snichols would call this one great. It's her new favorite movie. Jeez, what's not to like? Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as existential dectectives alone makes it worth it. But it's brilliantly written, philisophical and political at the same time.

This movie, one observer said, is like What the Bleep do we Know? only better and funnier. snichols totally agrees--what wants in to the culture right now? Fascinating: profound transcendant beliefs about the inherent connections between all of us coinciding in a world where the winning sports and political theme out of Texas is "Just a bunch of idiots"

Shit. If we're all connected, what does that make snichols?

Frustration with your comments--methodology
For months snichols has set up the blog so that you can comment freely and have it posted either anonymously or not without her editing or intervention.

Yet none of you ever avail yourselves of this offer. Instead you persist in flooding snichols' email with replies to the email you get with the post, but you rarely make it clear whether you want snichols to post it or not and whether you would prefer to remain anonymous.

Could it be that you don't know how to do this? You need to click on the blog link at the bottom of the email and then click on comment and choose whether it's anonymous. It's that easy. Please do it.

Also, soon snichols is going to finally implement Daniel Weintraub's advice and stop emailing you my posts. snichols will wean you by emailing you the link but not the posts.

Culture Clash at the New Safeway
Everything about the spankin' new Safeway on 19th screams upscale mom, shop here: cool architectural features, gourmet items and corresponding wines everywhere, organic meats and vegetables prominently displayed. But that's not who is there on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Sacramento: it's hard-livin' white folks in for their cigarettes and quarts of beer and hard-working brown folks clutching coupons, food stamps, diapers and frozen food. More the crowd snichols remembers from shopping at the dismal Safeway on Capitol Hill in DC...well, and snichols, their target demographic.

So what does this mean for the latest midtown retail innovation? snichols has no earthly idea (so Bill sort of indicates he doesn't know why snichols is blogging about it and he has a point). Maybe the Land Park moms pass through on their way home from work weekdays. Maybe they will never come. In which case will it stay upscale in its focus or start having different displays?

Personally, snichols is cool with the current configuration--a great supermarket convenient to everyone with stuff for everyone. Good work, Safeway (unlikely kudos to a corporation snichols normally avoids, but hey, they're union and not Walmart).

Another reader (who is remaining nameless, only because it's 11:41pm and I forgot to ask his permission) doesn’t blame the “whole defeat” on gay marriage, but notes:

that homophobia was used as a tactic in this election to a degree we have never seen in our lifetime. Karl Rove, remember, said three years ago that, after the 2000 election, there was no middle in American politics. He noted that there were about 4 million evangelical Christians who did not vote in 2000, and determined that those four million could make the difference for Bush.

Abortion not being what it was as an issue on the political landscape, and stem cell research involving too much science for most people’s taste, Rove decided that gay marriage would be used as the bait to lure those people (a) into registering and (b) into voting. The constitutional amendment in Congress was only one part of that strategy. Similar (and worse) constitutional amendments on the ballots in key states (e.g. Ohio, Michigan) were placed there specifically to assure a higher turnout than would otherwise be expected from those “missing evangelicals.”

The strategy worked. First, Bush’s margin of victory in the popular vote was 3.5 million. Can’t say how many of those were from the missing 4 million from 2000, but the numbers are close enough for government work. Second, Bush’s victory margin in Ohio specifically tracks the difference between (a) the additional numbers of voters Democrats brought to the polls and (b) the additional number of voters Republicans brought to the polls. Among Ohio’s voters, 22 percent said that “moral values” were the most important issue for them. Not Iraq. Not terrorism. Not the economy (which, by the way, sucked in Ohio). “Moral values.” Read “gay marriage.” This 22 percent was a plurality among ALL issues that voters in Ohio said were most important to them. And of those, 85 percent voted for Bush.

Certainly, this election was about other things. But it sickens me, as a gay man, that the existing prejudice against us was used – that WE were used – as a tool of political strategy. Not since Nixon’s Southern Strategy has a political party (interestingly, the same political party) so nakedly used a minority against the other party.

Of course I regret that this tactic worked. But of course it worked. Karl Rove is apolitical and amoral, and he has an appallingly astute sense of the mechanics of ugliness, the machine of our dark souls. There were plenty of other gay issues that could have been talked about – and which a majority of Americans now agree on. A federal law protecting gays against workplace discrimination has over 54 percent support among all Americans. Even civil unions now enjoy broad enough support that George W. said he would not oppose them. But on marriage – and only on marriage – is there still majority support across the board against us. The President (and, to be honest the press) did not focus on any of those more acceptable areas. The focus was relentlessly, obsessively, on the single gay issue that a majority of Americans oppose.

I give political strategy an awful lot of leeway. I am, if anything, a political realist. But the use of gay marriage in this election is beyond the pale, is appalling beyond any measure. And I am confident that this victory will embolden the religious right in ways we can’t yet anticipate.

snichols concedes...
After thinking it over last night, snichols is ready to concede the election to George Bush. The time for division is through...screeetch! NOOOOOOOO!!!!

snichols spent all day keeping busy, retail therapy and the like; the alternative was rocking in a fetal position with her thumb in her mouth moaning.

Meanwhile snichols' readers have been much more focussed on the "internets" and sending her all sorts of tidbits:

**One faithful reader muses that this is really for the best because Kerry would've been set up for failure with a Republican Congress and the mess in Iraq, now the blame will be laid squarely at the Republicans' even larger feet. snichols finds this cold comfort since she already thought the whole f---ing mess was laid at their feet--they've been running the whole show for 4 years!

**Meanwhile in her analysis of the debacle, Arianna Huffington, who possibly is not a devotee of snicholsblog lays the blame squarely at defeat of Kerry (get it, the feet, defeat? hmmm...)

**Another reader feels tempted to blame the whole defeat on gay marriage but then rises above it and realizes that democracy is messy and these are growing pains. snichols admits she isn't feeling very gay today.

**Perhaps to comfort snichols, her most faithful contributor, Bill, offers these two thoughts:

1) The Colorado and Vermont legislatures made decisive Democratic gains in this election.
2) This poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney:

"History says,
Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and
history rhyme."

Spiritual growth advisory in effect: in an upcoming post, snichols reserves the right to discuss the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation (but sorry, not today).

No on Prop 64 Ads
Even though its proponents, the Chamber of Commerce and big tobacco and oil have been outspending its opponents by more than 10 to 1, this initiative may be going down. Part of the reason may be these great tv ads gotten out by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and others.

Click here to view them. And send them to any California voter you know who might be tempted to vote away their right to clean air and privacy because they Chamber of Commerce tells them it will help small businesses.