The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey:

I've been out of touch since before dawn. Was pollwatching, canvassing, running errands for Dianne McGuire, our Democratic candidate for Illinois state representative in the 96th district (near Naperville and Aurora).

Last year I joined the township party organization, started learning the ropes, and got elected precinct committeeman. This is a county utterly dominated by Republicans. But Democratic voters are proliferating. Cracks are beginning to show.

After the polls closed, I brought my precinct numbers to the storefront campaign office, mingled in the party, and ate stuff. In one corner, a laptop was showing the MSNBC coverage of the national election. In another, somebody was constantly refreshing the Dupage County and Will County results pages. In the back office, the campaign staff worried over the numbers.

Eventually, McCain made a concession speech. We watched that. Somewhat later, Obama made a victory speech. We watched that with greater interest.

Our race was a nail-biter; Dianne's opponent won by 693 votes, I think. She gave a heartfelt bittersweet talk to her volunteers.

Would have liked to join in the fun here, but I was distracted (and couldn't get a connection on my own laptop).

My first campaign.

I'll probably be chasing results in my precinct, or hanging out somewhere with other Naperville Township Democrats.

Just got back from canvassing and phone-banking today. Dianne McGuire is our candidate for State Representative in the Illinois 96th district. Got three people to display yard signs today.

Met a jolly team of workers for the opposing candidate. We swapped literature.

Next week: Hand out Obama yard signs, for donations please, at a rally for local candidates. (They go like hotcakes; it's been hard to keep a supply in stock.) VFW hall in downtown Naperville, Thursday night. Phoning for Scott Harper for Congress (Illinois 13th), Friday night.

Election day: all kinds of stuff to do, starting at sunup.

With luck, Republican dominance in Dupage County is beginning to melt.

PNH writes:

We’re just beginning to think about how we need to change our lives in order to keep this from happening again. Some commitments are going to have to go.

If work-induced stress is a factor, the doctors may take the unusual step of recommending less moderation.

In # Zed Lopez writes:

I'd heard of this, and wondered about #5 (Palin is just the sort of person Oprah would normally have on her show.) Is that assertion actually defensible?

I'm no expert on Oprah Winfrey's show, but my common sense says: Heck, yeah.

Sarah Palin has an interesting job, governor, in an interesting place, Alaska. She has been thrust into sudden prominence. In addition, some of her family's problems have become known across the nation. Her political views are far from Oprah's, but that's no barrier to a worthwhile hour of conversation of interest to the show's audience.

However, the show's stated policy is not to invite current candidates.

What's the optimal defensive play for the Democrats here?

"Oprah already announced that she won't invite any candidates onto the show until after the election is over?"

"It's Oprah's show, and she gets to decide who appears, no matter how much whining is heard?"

Something else?

(I'm thinking the word "whining" has power.)

Like Lance, I too have Chore Day (and Brother Guy is showing up tonight), but here's a quick answer to David Goldfarb at #94.

Visit the Heinlein Archives. Choose one of their groups of documents, pay online, and they'll park a big 80 MB PDF file on their site for a few days and send you the URL. This represents around 200 pages; they are images, not OCR, so you can't search the text.
Every page is watermarked and the file has your name on it. They don't want you passing it around the Web.

Being interested in Heinlein and space suits, I bought a box of his wartime correspondence and another of his Philadelphia Naval Air Material Center pages. (I know who was in his car pool from his gasoline ration forms.) I bought correspondence advising the Destination Moon filmmakers, the manuscript of "Misfit," notes for Have Space Suit, Will Travel, and some 1969 letters to his agent that include an account of his trip to NASA in Houston after Apollo 11. As I noted, I also bought four boxes of Campbell correspondence.

This came to a total of thirty bucks. Fairly reasonable.

You can get all Heinlein's manuscripts, and a great deal of his correspondence and scrapbooks. I think they have put more than half the archive online, and they will be adding more.

A book of his unproduced TV scripts, including a bunch of adaptations of his short stories, is being prepared now for Subterranean Press.

So they shot. They believe they hit.

We'll see whether they damaged the meter-wide sphere of frozen hydrazine.

(Learning that the missile was fired during a lunar eclipse makes me wonder if The Laundry was involved.)

I should point out, since it's less than obvious, that Chicago and Cook County are overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats; Dupage and the "collar counties" have been very Republican.

Rural Illinois leans Republican, but there are so many people in the northeast corner of the state that Democratic presidential candidates usually take Illinois's electoral votes.

Unofficial election results are available.

In my precinct, running unopposed, I received 204 votes.

The Republican precinct committeeman, also running unopposed, received 163 votes.

County-wide, 43% of the 549,621 registered voters turned out. Of those voting, 109,132 pulled Republican ballots (19%), and 132,434 (24%) took Democratic ballots. So the D/R ratio is 1.21. (In Precinct 23, 1.25.)

Dupage County has always been dominated by Republicans in my lifetime. I am told that not one single Democrat holds any office here.

The total turnout in 2004 was 25% of registered voters; in 2000, 27%, in 1996, 38%.

In #16, TNH writes:
...News?

Check your moderation queue; I just posted a URL-heavy reply.

None, really, but that scarcely keeps me from blogging about it.

The Dupage Election Commission has a relaxed attitude about posting results from the committeeman balloting, and who can blame them?

Democratic ballots exceeded Republican ones for the first time ever around here.

The most interesting local race, next congressional district over, is the struggle for Denny Hastert's seat in the 14th District. The former Speaker of the House resigned abruptly in November[1]. This triggered a peculiar double primary.

In the regular primary, of course, voters select their party's nominee to run for the House of Representatives in November.

On top of that, a special primary was needed to select candidates to fill out the rest of Hastert's term (between now and November). The special election will be held in March; the primary was held yesterday because, hey, you're already in the voting booth anyway. Slogan: Vote twice, without moving to Chicago!

Candidates who were already running for the November election scrambled to get new petitions to also run in the special primary. For the entertaining results, Google for Hastert+Foster+Laesch. Things are not entirely settled as I write this, but it's looking like Big Physics vs. Big Ice Cream.

[1] Which was not exactly helpful to Fermilab in the astonishing budgetary trainwreck on Capitol Hill in December. $52 million disappeared from Fermilab's budget overnight, one-quarter through the fiscal year. Furloughs for all, amounting to a 10% pay cut for the year, PLUS layoffs of 200 people.

Thank you, Patrick, and thanks to the rest of you for your very kind words of encouragement.

The Democrats in Dupage County sent out letters, and followed them up with phone calls, asking for volunteers. I figured maybe it was time I did something to help.

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