AddieStan

AMTRAK 79, BALTIMORE, MD.--"Remember, they're not done counting in Ohio," said the beautiful young man who drove your blogstress to the Trenton train station this morning in the hotel van. "Keep hope alive," he added, as he handed your Webwench her bags. Your cybertrix has begun to wonder whether hope isn't a pursuit best suited to the young. While she refuses to embrace cynicism (though she has been guilty of periodic dalliances with that cad), a sense of weary sadness so fills her being that she finds it difficult to feel much of anything else. Your écrivaine would feel less depleted, she thinks, had the president ever given her reason to believe that he had the humility to read the fact of the evenly-divided electorate as something less than a mandate for his earth-raping, pocket-picking, Constitution-mangling, innocent-killing agenda. And his deployment of the politics of trauma in his own cause--his blatant exploitation of the 9-11 horror...

From our dear friend, the Composer, comes this: Well, I feel the wind knocked out of me: it feels like an onrushing train--coming toward me. However wonderful it is to know so many people voted in this election, the results are horrifying....If I were a theist, I'd pray for interesting and effective art.

TRENTON, N.J.--Not having slept for days, and only fitfully for weeks, your cybertrix is calling it a night, in order to actually make an 8:00 a.m. train back to our nation's capital. Hang in there, America. We'll figure it out.

"We have waited four years for this victory, and we can wait one more night," Edwards told a weary crowd in Boston. Rather and Ed Bradley say it could be as many as 10 days before Ohio is decided, since the election's outcome may be decided by the provisional ballots delivered by the African-American wards of Cleveland and Cincinnatti. Why so many provisionals there? Republican challengers at polling places, it seems. Looks like Iowa is another cliffhanger.

TRENTON, N.J.--Josh Marshall is keeping watch on what he calls Republican delaying tactics in Ohio, a story he says the media are ignoring (like so many others). Read Marshall on Ohio Your blogstress was told by a poll-watcher on the ground in Columbus (on what is now yesterday) that the president's inpromptu visit to his Columbus headquarters at noon on Election Day served to shut down a number of streets in a Democratic ward. Because the Columbus drop-in was billed, not as a campaign appearance, but as a visit to thank his Columbus volunteers, the media apparently refrained from noting Mr. Bush's violation of a long-standing tradition in presidential politics: no politicking on Election Day after the polls open. But what do you want from a guy who thinks the Constitution was made to be broken?

TRENTON, N.J.--Guess they're not loving that U.S.A. Patriot Act up there in libertarian heaven, otherwise known as New Hampshire. Rather points out that New Hampshire is the first state tonight to go a different way than it did in 2000, and it went for Kerry. Nonetheless, it looks as though a Kerry victory is becoming ever less likely.

TRENTON, N.J.--Well, the Senate may remain in Republican hands, the House definitely will, and the White House is lookin' mighty red at this late hour. In this distressing environment comes this bit of good news: Coors is goin' down in his bid to become a U.S. senator from Colorado. It's hard to get much more hypocritical than the Coorses of Golden, Colorado. The brewing dynasty provided more than seed money for the religious right (they basically bankrolled Paul Weyrich and his Heritage Foundation) and continue to embrace that platform, all the while courting gay male patrons by sponsoring gay festivals (leather parties and the like) that feature some activities which, in the the lock-down minds of morally superior righties, should ensure the imprisonment of the participants, if not their death by stoning.

The smoldering Gang of One responds to your blogstress's post labeled Apocalypse : Ché was a medical school student; Castro, a minor league baseball player; Pancho Villa (née Doroteo Arango), a cattle rustler; Emiliano Zapata, a humble farmer; Mao was a peasant; Lenin was a lawyer. Hitler was the only "revolutionary" who considered himself an artist. Well, probably not the only one (your cybertrix comes to mind)--just the only one among the smoldering Gang's selected group. Intriguing nonetheless.

TRENTON, N.J.--Looks like Ohio will be decided by the county in which Cleveland resides, a single Midwestern county could determine the outcome of the election if the verdict goes negative for Kerry. They all say that he can't win without Ohio, and they're still counting votes in Cuyahoga County--and they figure to be doing so until about 4:00 a.m. From an election-night party in Washington, D.C., the Internationalist informed your cybertrix hours ago (10:55, to be exact) that it would be all about Ohio. About the chance of the election being decided before daybreak, Rather said to Shieffer: "I used to say that if a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun." Your blogstress is not sure what that means, but you gotta hand it to these old guys girding their loins for an all-nighter while your more youthful Webwench finds herself fading.

TRENTON, N.J.--Dan Rather to Kerry Communications Director Joe Lockhart: "I know you'd rather walk through a furnace in a gasoline suit than lose Ohio." This is why Rather is still worth watching on election nights. The forced folkisms are at least amusing, giving the viewer a reason to suffer through all the mathematical electoral-vote scenarios run across the television screen. Your blogstress's favorite harkens back to 1992, when Rather referred to Ross Perot as someone regarded by some folks as being "half a bubble off plumb."

TRENTON, N.J.--Here at Kerry's New Jersey election-night headquarters (Marriott Trenton Yard), the energy is pretty low. True, the state was called early in the evening, after weeks of yo-yo polls that yielded an exhausted sense of relief among the troops once the dead-heat surveys were handily defied. As your cyberscribe blogs, a hard-core group surrounds a large-screen TV in a hotel lounge, fretting and subdued--in fact, exuding a sense of quiet so uncharacteristic of the local culture so as to be downright odd. Earlier in the evening, Governor-not-elect Richard J. Codey* addressed the crowd, seeming like a nice man--which, in New Jersey politics, could account for the perplexed silence of the partisans herein. *Readers will recall the resignation of New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, effective November 15th, which propels the ascendence of the state Senate president to the governor's mansion. McGreevey, who resigned in the midst of a patronage scandal that involved...