Another Election Day

First, getting el V off to the airport was running late, due his inability to tear himself away from computer screen and e-mails.  

I made and have eaten the breakfast I'd intended to make for him.

I'll have my usual breakfast of yogurt and fruit for dinner, I guess.

It's warmer and less humid today, so I don't hurt as much as I did the last two decidedly cold days. Sunny too, and without wind.

I voted.  The polling place, for my district only, was quite busy.  The other districts had hardly anyone coming in.  So I had to wait in a longish line, while the other districts' election workers had nothing whatsoever to do.  As well, this time around we had to use the scanner machines.  For the primary the scanners had been jettisoned due to so much trouble in the last election and they'd resurrected the old mechanical machines. Things moved a lot faster with those old machines than with these digital scanners. Also the paper part of the process, the ballot itself, has such very small fonts, they are hard to read.  I hope all the voters realized the back of the ballot had issues to vote upon.  I'm not sure I would have realized it myself if I hadn't listened to a discussion about these matters yesterday on one of our public radio talk shows.

It's currently being reported that the digital scanners are having a lot of problems in various districts -- mostly in Brooklyn.  Even in my place, some of the machines didn't have working lights, which means you would not be able to see the ballot to fill in those little ovals.

In the meantime Rand Paul wishes to kill Rachel Maddow in a duel because she outed his plagerism.

I was wondering when out-and-out dueling would be back in totally armed all the time in all the places America filled with crazies who hate-hate-hate and will never ever allow that anyone anywhere anytime is allowed to disagree with ME! Or be allowed to provide the proof to the public that I am an ignorant lying piece of shyte.  Because I'm a right-wing crazy you cannot call me on my lying right wing craziness but I am utterly entitled to voice my desire to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime I so choose, particularly women.

As to be expected RP's telling the country to get ready for Nullification, which was the first big plank in secession, which John C. Calhoun, tried to pull off in 1832 -- except Andy Jackson kicked his ass and said, "No you don't."*

From Politico:

“Jefferson obviously was a clear leader on the principle of nullification,” the former Texas congressman said of the third president. “I’ve been working on the assumption that nullification is going to come. It’s going to be a de facto nullification. It’s ugly, but pretty soon things are going to get so bad that we’re just going to ignore the feds and live our own lives in our own states.”

So much are we resembling the run-up to the Civil War.

How many of us are aware the first time that equating a desire for civil rights with being a communist happened already in 1850's by the slaveholders?  It was common to hear the fire-eaters in the Congress and Senate, like Robert Barnwell Rhett,**  to howl on the floor that abolitionists were communists and traitors and should be imprisoned, or better yet, shot.

He bought the Charleston Mercury for his son. The Charleston Mercury functioned for the slaveholding power elite secessionists for years and years like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have been doing for years and years, drumbeating the horrors of government and negroes and northerners (even though they kept sending their sons up north for education) and glories glorious glories of slavery for slaves.

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*    I have not yet been able to determine whether or not it is apocryphal that on his death bed, Andrew Jackson expressed as one of his last wishes, "I wish I'd hung that son-of-a-bitch Calhoun when I had the chance."

** Think of this family name of Rhett the next time a glowing defense of Gone With the Wind comes up. Think also of this family: 

Butler's drunken, gambling ways caused the largest single slave sale ever.  It was so huge it got its own name within the African American community, The Weeping Time.  It's still remembered today. His wife, the great Shakespearian interpretor, Frances Kemble, divorced him because of slavery, which reasons included his personal contribution to the natural increase of his property.