Eileen Roy Elected

Among other election-related news tonight, Eileen Roy, my english teacher at Eastside High School for two years, has been elected to the School Board with 55% of the vote.

On another note, a former Republican mayor of Gainesville, Paula Delaney, won the Democratic nomination for a county commission seat. (She became a Democrat specifically for and just as she announced for this race.)

And there were other races decided today barely worth mentioning. The Senate race in Florida will be a Castor/Martinez fight. If anything else of note happens, I'll post it...

A related story is here.

Flop-Flipping the Flip-Flop

The Washington Post today reports on the latest change of heart in the Bush Administration with respect to the winability of the U.S. in the war on terrorism.

At least Kerry took weeks if not months to change his opinion, often based on new information. Bush seems to change his opinion by the hour.

Ghost Town

Among other notable things at my work today, it is more of a ghost town than usual. There are currently 6 people in my work unit (as well as our coordinator and our manager). Of these 8 employees, I and I alone am the only one that showed up for work today. If this was a sick-out, it was poorly planned because I didn't get the message. Hah!

Piscopo Hints at Run for N.J. Governor

This headline is from Fox News (and don't gasp at my highly unusual citation of Fox for anything, much less notable news).

This comes after Jim McGreevey announced, 3 months ahead of time, that he was stepping down as Governor of New Jersey because he had a consensual extramartial affair - with another man - and was worried that the scandal's threatening baggage might prevent him from being an effective governor. (As if the campaign fund-raising and other corruption charges hadn't already done that.)

Why is that celebrity and other well-known individuals come out of the wood work to try politics for a second career - but only do so during recall or special elections?

This is on top of speculation that Ben Affleck, whose acting career was damaged by his relationship with Jennifer Lopez, might run to replace Senator John Kerry (D-MA) in a special election should Kerry be elected President this fall.

At least have the gall to stand up and run in a real, regular election, people!

Another Gator Joins DC Crowd

Chaim Mandelbaum, CLASSC Exec-At-Large when I was secretary and an influence in the SWAMP and Access parties, is packing it up and moving to D.C. He's coming to my graduate alma mater, GW University, to get his own M.A. in international relations. Viewers in DC, look him up when he gets here and make him feel at home!

Spoiler - "A True Gator Party"

The revised draft of A True Gator Party is actually about 25 pages longer, currently, than the original version.

The major change worth mentioning is that the prologue - not written in the original but added afterwards - has been modified. We now have an opening chapter that provides an "historical" context for the novel, as well as a chapter that chronicles a major falling-out between Mike and some of the other characters. I also expanded the original prologue (now Chapter 3) to continue that theme as well as add more "face time" for other characters that figure prominently later on.

We've also been tweaking each chapter as I go to highlight previously unplanned themes (such as Mike's romantic interest), and to remove all sci-fi refrences (as they are largely unnecessary).

Priority Mail

They weren't kidding. I shipped a partial manuscript to a lit agent this week by Priority Mail, and it arrived in 36 hours. More impressive to me, though, is that this lit agent (or perhaps the mail room to his building) was available on Saturday to receive the package. Cross our fingers; it's the first revised draft of A True Gator Party to have an agent's eyes on it.

Obama Leads Keyes

There was a poll published this week that showed carpet-bagger, hypocrite and outsourced candidate Alan Keyes trailing the Democratic super-star, Barack Obama, by 28%-67%. Wow. It makes you think he won't do much better than that, given that there are few undecideds left and less than 90 days to go - much of it he'll spend raising money against the Democrat shoo-in.

#23

I turned 23 today. Ho-hum.

RTP 3B Goes Live

Check out http://rtp3b.kernscorp.com for more information about this latest sequel in my Road to the Presidency series.

RTP 3B

I am currently preparing a limited-run sequel in my increasingly popular Road to the Presidency series of election sims. It involves a mid-term election scenario that takes the players through 4 Senate races. Look in my blog, or use my links to get to RTP for more as it develops.

Wonderful Graphics

After looking at dozens of polls, you may not get the overall message being conveyed. That is why a fellow blogist has made this great graphic showing the relationship between President Bush's job approval and his unethical attempts to stem the natural tide against him.

Outsourcing Candidates

The Chicago Sun-Times reports the truth. After asking every last politician in the state Republican Party, the Illinois GOP outsourced its Senate campaign to a 4-time loser Alan Keyes, who still lives in Maryland!.

Now, I don't mind the idea of bring a "celebrity" candidate like Keyes into a race, and the analogy with Hillary Clinton in 2000 has some merit, but puhlease! Dozens of Republicans rejected their party's nomination, and it is only 90 days before the election. At least Hillary shoved some local pols aside to make her run, and she did it 2 years before the election, not 3 months. Keyes is a desperate action to get some attention on this race and give the GOP someone to run against Obama.

And if Keyes' past losing campaigns are any indication, Obama might still get 70% of the vote!