Where feminine hygiene is no laughing matter ...Rick's Cafe Americain

The volunteer lawyers for Kerry in Pinellas County didn’t have anything particularly legal for us to do today, so they sent us out canvassing in St. Petersburg. Zinester and I took our list and headed out to Kenwood Circle near the Five Points neighborhood in St. Pete.

We had a list of Kerry-friendly voters - all registered Democrats, purged of known absentee ballot voters and known Bush-supporters. We didn’t expect many people to be home, but the response was far better than we imagined. Not only were there a lot of people home on a Monday afternoon, but they all knew their polling places and intend to vote tomorrow. And they didn’t say it in that “I’ll-say-anything-to-get-you-off-my-porch” sort of a way. Floridians are ready to get out and vote; I don’t think anything could stop them.

Kerry (WF) 100%
Nader (*) 0%
Bush (R) 0%

With far fewer than 1% of the precincts reporting, here is how New York is shaping up, based on an exit poll of bloggers at Rick’s Cafe Americain who mailed absentee ballots from New York today.

Kerry (WF) 100%
Nader (*) 0%
Bush (R) 0%

See you in Pinellas County, you vote suppressing fuckwad.

Update: The percentage is the same, but the vote is now 2-0. And we’ve got Miami-Dade covered too, fuckwad.

10/25 Update: Add Zinester, Brother of Ugarte and Dawn. At 5-0, this is too much to bear. And Brother of Ugarte has Pennsylvania under control, dickface.

10/28 Update: Alceste will make it 1-0 in New Jersey as soon as he gets his ballot in the mail. Same for Signor Ferrari in Ohio. Swing states, my ass. Take that, jackhole. And you too, um, ... is there a Republican in Jersey with any actual power?

11/1 Update: For the superstitious among you, the election is sealed. The Packers defeated the Redskins on Sunday. A Redskins’ loss has augured victory for the challenging party in every election since 1936. Remember to thank the referee for saving our country. (Hat tip to Coach for encouraging publication, but I did know about this electoral arcana already.)

With a title like that it is clear that I couldn’t be talking about this or this. Those are just echo chambers on opposite sides of the building.

I am talking about the new issue of Stay Free! magazine. Zinester’s twice-yearly magazine has gone local and is now available free in selected parts of ‘fake Brooklyn’ - namely, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill. There will be a list of places to find Stay Free! on the website soon - along with more information about this issue.

For those of you living in less civilized places than Brooklyn (like, say, Manhattan), it is available for sale in better bookstores across the country (St. Mark’s Books, for example). Or you can get a subscription!

The magazine is great, you get to support independent publishing and one of the articles was written by yours truly. Subscribe now!

So, I’m in Florida now, ready to do what I can for the Kerry campaign. My assignment seems vague. I think my assignment will be “glorified Wal-Mart greeter” because as a non-Florida resident, I am not allowed inside the polling station. Instead, I have to stand at the electioneering line (50 feet from the polling station) as a conspicuous Kerry volunteer to provide assistance to anyone that requests it and stay ever vigilant for election day shenanigans. Whatever it takes, whatever boredom I have to endure, I will be there.

Those of you following the endlessly asinine melodrama unfolding in Karol’s comments sections know that her most substantive (and most unsupportable) criticism of me is that I am “waaaaaaaay too happy when things go wrong in Iraq because you think you can pin it on Bush . . . you are gleeful for errors because they meet your intended ends." She’s wrong, of course, but that’s Karol for you.

Given her strong feelings in that regard, however, I wonder how she feels about George Bush calling the new bin Laden tape a “little gift"? 

“It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the country (Bush) would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone ... because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important,” bin Laden said, referring to Bush’s visit to a school when the attack occurred.

“If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn’t attack Sweden, for example."

Bush renewed his call for an end to “attack ads”.

Rick’s is one year old today.  One whole year of entertaining ourselves and our readership, and pushing Karol ever closer to the inevitable nervous breakdown.  Please share your favorite moments from the past year in the comments section.  Here are some significant dates in Rick’s short history to get you started down memory lane . . .

Slate’s Election Scorecard has moved Wisconsin back to Kerry. And as Wisconsin goes (according to Slate’s calculator), so goeth the country.

In photo editing news, Slate has chosen a far more flattering “loser” picture for Bush. No more Kaposi’s Sarcoma in this one.

It’ll all be over soon, right?

The first to arrive at Al QaQaa didn’t inspect thoroughly ... and the explosives were still on site. We know because there is video footage of the explosives from the days after the troops left.

Daniel Radosh nails the analysis.

Karol, the next time you want to put “pack of lies” in a post on the media, here is the link you can use. The Russians removed the weapons during the runup to the war? Seriously?

My friend Jim Hanas agrees with George Bush for the first time in his life, and he is right.

He also notes that Fox News reminded us, as George before him, that we shouldn’t forget Poland. They have been waiting since 1918 for this.

Please welcome Encyclopedia Hanasiana to the blogroll at Rick’s. 

I guess technically the Red Sox players are celebrating in St. Louis. So will you stop whining in New England now?

A friend sent me a link to votepair.org, a site that matches up Kerry supporters in blue states with Nader supporters in swing states.  The idea is, Nader gets the votes in states where Kerry will win anyway, and in return, Nader voters don’t bring on the Rapture.  An interesting idea, at any rate.

James captures perfectly the essence of Red-Sox-fandom:

This is our time. Am I nervous? Yes. I have to be. In my heart of hearts, I KNOW the Sox will blow this series, probably in four consecutive 16 inning fiascos.

. . . be so right?

via NTodd

A Florida motorist was arrested on Wednesday on charges of trying to run down U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris.  Details are still sketchy, but some reports suggest the man may have been intoxicated.  If so, prosecutors could add “impersonating the President of the United States” to the assault charges.