For your records,and so you can follow along, during the pre-tally hours I will post useful guides. This is a map of the U.S. with poll closing times marked.   

I will be at NPR headquarters Tuesday night, the guest of NPR and the Guardian who have created a space for us to blog away the evening--It seems we will be well fed so while I may fall asleep from time to time, there appears to be little danger that I will starve in the process of bringing you my pithy observations. Since I'll be live blogging and my typing stinks, I ask your indulgence ahead of time for any errors I failed to catch before posting.

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So here we are, endless months of watching poor folks whose only sin was to insist they were undecided being hooked up to Doc Luntz' electric chairs and forced to listen over and over to campaign ads. We watched and learned that per Luntz ("Words that Work") and his electrodes that campaign ads need to follow some utterly boring templates or lose the "independents" and the election. It somehow seems un-American, boring and questionable to allow people too dumb to be able to make up their minds to decide the tenor and substance of campaign advertising and messages. Then there were the polls and pundits which are exceedingly helpful if you don't mind being consistently wrong. After all is the election tonight pitting Rudy Giuliani versus Hillary Clinton? If you'd gone to sleep for a few months and just woke up that's what you might think. The media helped immeasurably in helping us decide for whom to vote by carefully and fairly exploring the candidates and their views.

Special thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle for making it possible for coal miners to sleep soundly rather than fret upon learning that the candidate their union was promoting was pledging in the salons of San Francisco to bankrupt the coal industry and put them out all of work. I pick that paper only because it's the most recent. Almost all the major newspapers, magazines and TV news bureaus should share the dishonor of the worst campaign coverage in my memory.It's all been one big macaca as far as I can tell, Some, anticipating an Obama victory are already trimming the jibs. Why just yesterday as Tom Maguire noted, the NYT which banged the get out of Gitmo drum loudly since the facility's creation, apparently just realized that the folks in there are really bad guys and there may be no other place to put them so maybe a new Administration shouldn't rush to shut it down.

There is some recompense. The people who write this drivel are losing their jobs and the folks who pay them are quickly going broke. Dick Morris says no one has any idea how this election is going to go. Rush says it all depends on turn out. NRO's Obi-Wan Kenobi questions (as I do) the pollsters easy but inexplicable assumptions.   And blogger suitably flip picks McCain quite definitely: [quote]

"Prediction: McCain Wins 281-257 This conjecture is predicated on the latest Rasmussen swing state polls, the RealClearPolitics battleground averages, a slight, eleventh hour, unpolled pro-McCain swing in Pennsylvania based on the anti-coal flap, a dash of wishful thinking, and an assumption of 4-5 percentage points of Obama overpolling due to a combination of 1) Democrat oversampling/unrealistic turnout modeling, and 2) lying pollees, whether you want to call it Bradley effect or just a tendency to skew artificially toward the socially desirable answer of Obama (or "undecided"). Broadly speaking, this implies that McCain wins all 5 major eastern battleground states (Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Ohio) and that Obama will win the three key western battleground states (New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada).[/quote]

Sleep tighly. Tuesday looks like it will be a long night. This html is a tag permitting those watching the npr blogathon to read all our posts.
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