For four years I have been anticipating an election that will take place in 10 days. I have been thinking about it and writing about it and strategizing about it and planning for it. But it looks like I will be spending the week before this election preparing for, enduring, and recovering from a storm without precedent.
How weird is that?
it’s ok. republicans assure me that climate change is a myth. #carryon
Yes, the storm is just God’s wrath against the black usurper and the evil blue states. Just like God’s will that women be raped. Isn’t God a fun guy?
Isn’t it about time the President made a speech on climate change? It didn’t come up in the debates, but it is his responsibility to prepare the US people for the future.
And I don’t just mean a good answer to an interview question
I had a boss who said he never planned anything in his life and it always came out fine. I replied that I planned everything in my life and it allows went wary.
Life is strange. For some it is a Vegas casino with nothing but 7’s and 11’s, for others it is forever snake eyes.
awry, not wary
See what I mean?
did you plan that play on words, or do you just play with plans?
you’re forgetting the evil spellcheck – sometimes it doesn’t matter what one writes, spellcheck has its own ideas
Spellcheck is the spawn of satin.
love it! spellcheck trying to make itself not sound so bad!!!
who’s satin?
A cross between Satan and Putin?
There’s a difference?
I really didn’t plan it. It might be the evil spellcheck, but it think just flying fingers because the first two letters were interchanged.
Fate protects fools and children. Or what I prefer to call “luck of the stupid.”
Actually he was highly intelligent, competent and genuinely devoted to his employees’ interest. EXTREMELY rare. We all loved him and gave him 110%.
A venture capitalist (William Blair) bought the business, installed a CEO who “was known to Wall Street”, fired our boss and replaced him with a jerk who knew nothing about our work except how to find someone with a Green Card willing to work for less. A few years later the whole business collapsed in the aftermath of the dot com crash.
The firing was because Mike, our boss, had pride in our work and skill and sought challenging work, while the new paradigm was to become another
H-1B slave marketbody shop.Good for him and it doesn’t effect what kind of person he is, but never planning for the future and expecting it to work out is foolish.
Some would see a certain poetic symmetry there. And some would say God is an iron.
Shit happens. I’ve had my share of terrible surprises as well as wonderful ones. I think that overplanning leaves you inflexible to handle life’s little shitbombs, and underplanning leaves you unable to cope with them.
So because you are a smart and capable person, you will adjust where needed to make it through a literal shitstorm and be okay. It sucks, and sucks hard, but there’s precious little you can do to stop the weather.
Good luck, be safe, and keep us posted.
From my own internal wayback machine…
“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!” Burns
Wish you could vote early like we now can here. Hoping for a swing and a miss from this storm.
The real shit that could happen is Obama could lose. That would be a self inflicted disaster far beyond any natural act of God against the NE.
But at least you don’t have to write about the 2nd term of incumbent McCain.
Or the election of Palin who took over after the untimely death of McCain.
Hurricane Sandy is (apparently) unprecedented as a meteorological event, but also as a political event. As we no longer live in the eons-old natural climate, but in the first decade of the ruined man-made climate, these events can be expected with much greater frequency—they are the logical (and expected) result of our intentional decision to forever wreck the earth’s natural climate.
I cannot recall a prez election in which a weather system could play such a decisive role. If the projected sustained winds and deluges (spread over a vast geographical area in which over 66 million people live) knock down power lines and flood major roads, then polling places aren’t going to be open in many, many Mid-Atlantic locations. Electricity is a requirement.
So once again our hapless American election law will raise its ugly head. It has failed the nation every time we have had need of it.
The prez election is governed by a variety of federal statutes, prescribing the date of the election, and the reporting of results. It’s basically a “tough luck” regime—a state either gets its votes cast and submitted or it doesn’t. And some affected states don’t have early voting, so voters have no choice but to ride out the massive storm and see what the landscape looks like when the waters and winds recede.
If the votes of 66 million people are really imperilled, a rational democracy would like, maybe, do something about it, such as move the national election date or embargo results until all states have been able to allow all citizens to vote. But that would require a functioning Congress that passed laws, which we most certainly do not have.
It would also require that the quasi-fascist party that the Repubs have morphed into elect not to use this hurricane as something that they imagine could help their Plutocrat n’ Theocrat ticket win. If they think Sandy will benefit them, then election chaos is what “democracy” will look like.
So once again our hapless American election law will raise its ugly head. It has failed the nation every time we have had need of it.
Very true.
The prez election is governed by a variety of federal statutes, prescribing the date of the election, and the reporting of results. It’s basically a “tough luck” regime—a state either gets its votes cast and submitted or it doesn’t.
Well, there are some federal statutes, notably around voting rights, but otherwise most of the laws are state and local and vary greatly – a fact that greatly helps the GOP by adding complexity and confusion at every stage to the degree they can get away with it.
The main federal rule is the date of the election in the original Constitution – Tuesday after the first Monday. Likely back in 1792 if a storm prevented people from getting to the local courthouse on Tuesday they’d have allowed people to vote on Wednesday or Thursday, since it typically took weeks to get all the votes counted and tabulated across states in those days. Can you really imagine them not holding any election in, say, Vermont if a blizzard stopped all movement on election day in 1792?
But these days the “originalists” on the SCOTUS consistently interpret the constitution to favor the rich and screw everyone else, so of COURSE they Constitutional dates have to be met regardless of anything else (unless meeting those dates hurts the GOP, of course). We saw this with their interpretation of the state statutory dates in Florida in 2000 – nevermind that the Florida constitution, as interpreted by the Florida Supreme Court, stated that accurate voting was a higher priority.
So, if the storm greatly depresses the urban vote in eastern Pennsylvania and thus helps Romney, so be it. As the headline said in December, 2000: SCOTUS TO DEMOCRACY: DROP DEAD.
I agree with most of your observations, but can’t agree on the source of the date of the prez election—that was set for the nation by Congressional statute in 1845 and has been the same ever since. Before that the states each picked some date before the first week in Dec, when electors were to meet. Congress selected a uniform election date in 1845.
I suppose it would be quite extraordinary for Congress to modify the date of the federal election because of a massive storm ravaging the eastern seaboard, but they could indeed do it (they have the power) and in certain circumstances it would seem to be the wise thing to do–if we had a functioning democracy.
But I agree with you that if Sandy’s rampage ends up creating Prez Rmoney, Repubs will gleefully say “so be it!!”—how they “win” is of no consequence to them, as you point out. They loved their electoral college prez, one who had to be picked by 5 Repub “justices” even to win that! So democractic values aren’t of too much concern to today’s “conservatives”. For them, the ends justify the means, always.
How embarrassing. All these years I recalled that the date of the election was set in the Constitution – after your post I researched and yes, it is set by law. Interesting how some dates are constitutional and some are by law.
And…none of the moderators of the debates saw fit to ask a question about global climate change, which likely will drive foreign policy over the next two decades more than will response to Islamic military jihadism.
Saw this on reddit earlier. Pretty funny:
“I’ve got all the necessary supplies for Hurricane Sandy!”
Also on reddit, some practical advice on preparation for those of you in the storm’s path, from someone who’s been through several hurricanes in Florida.
That is funny.
We’ve had storms and multi-day power outages before…we’ll live through this storm too.
For over five years I hadn’t experienced a power outage for more than a few seconds. Most of the electric infrastructure in my area is underground so there’s little risk of a failure. But last week a major transformer blew up and my whole immediate neighborhood was without power for THREE WHOLE HOURS!
Well, it was ghastly. It was just ghastly! It was nighttime and everything went black! Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness I found some old candles and managed to get them lit. But then I realized that without electricity, I just don’t know what to do with myself. So I went to the grocery store and wasted time there for an hour. Then I came back home and went to sleep – in absolute darkness and silence. The instant the power came back on I woke up and felt normal again. The cats, of course, barely even noticed that anything had happened.
I think I should probably plan a little better and have things I’m able to do to keep busy in case tragedy like that ever strikes again. It had been a while since I had thought about how dependent I am on electricity.
Good luck to all the Frankenstormers on the east coast. I hope this tragic tale makes you feel like rugged individuals in comparison.
Obama cancelled part of his election campaigning due to the storm. Unfortunately this included canceling his stop in Colorado Springs Tuesday. Bummer, and we had tickets too.