astolat

One hour wait here on the upper west side, at 11:50am! Crazy! (It was also an hour at 8:15am, so I came back later sans Hypatia.) I don't have a sense how it compares to usual because four years ago I voted absentee and worked in PA, but people were saying it was NOT typical at this time of day. Fellow USians please don't forget to vote! Find your polling place and hours and ballot summary on google!

\o/

Hey folks -- there's early voting going on in Ohio RIGHT NOW, but it ends THIS MONDAY. The Obama campaign is doing a get-out-the-vote effort right now and asking for people to make calls from home even if you don't live in Ohio:

http://my.barackobama.com/n2nOhio

Create an account and it will give you a list of people to call -- 15 at a time, not a whole lot -- to ask them to get out early. They DO NOT HAVE TO BE REGISTERED! They can register and vote all at once, BUT ONLY THROUGH THE END OF THE DAY THIS MONDAY.

In 2004, we lost Ohio by less than 10 votes per precinct in the state.

If you have an hour free the next couple of days, please make some calls! Early voters just need to head down to their local elections office --

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/ohvotinglocations/ (county-by-county locations, and you can use google maps to give the voter directions if they need help!)

-- and poll workers will help them register and vote.

They will need to provide either the last 4 digits of their SSN or their entire Ohio driver's license number, and it is a good idea to take some ID and/or a utility bill to prove identity, just in case. Some places are using electronic voting, some are using paper ballots.

So hey, I am basically all-coding all-the-time right now which is why this lj has been boring and dead, but I saw this at fivethirtyeight.com and it impelled me to post (and then to go trolling political websites for several hours, argh). It's an independent ad about Sarah Palin's record on wildlife conservation (which to sum up is pretty much "shooting animals is totally awesome").

DON'T WATCH IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO ANIMAL HARM I MEAN IT.

( However, it's a *really* effective political ad )

This ad is being run by Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund. If you'd like to help them put it on the air in more states, you can donate at their website. (This group has endorsed Obama, but they're independent and the Obama campaign isn't involved with or funding the ad.)

Also, I know for most of my flist this will be preaching to the choir, but penknife has a pretty heartbreaking post up about how McCain's election would hurt her and other LGBT people and their children. McCain's successfully created a vague impression of himself as a moderate on social issues that obscures the actual policy positions he's running under.

Plus, Hillary and Cecile Richards have an editorial in the Times about the Bush administration's latest attack on women's rights. It's awesome how to them protecting my pharmacist's right to impose their religious beliefs on the job they chose to take, knowing what it entailed, is more important than my right to get medicine prescribed for me by my doctor. It was insane enough when it was INDIVIDUAL wacko pharmacists pulling this shit on women one at a time.

(Hey, so with this, do Scientologist pharmacists get to object to handing out psychiatric medication? Or is it just any woman who wants to exercise control over her own body and sex life gets to be jerked around at the whim of anyone they can find an excuse to give the opportunity? Yeah, I thought so.)

The ACLU has an online form for sending in an official comment.

Finally: Obama's campaign is having a matching-donation drive. Please help if you can! He's retaken the lead in the electoral college today according to fivethirtyeight.com, probably as McCain's bounce from Palin dies and the "fundamentally sound" economy continues to erode away into the sea, but it's going to be tight.

In fluffier and more cheerful news, Supernatural last night == made of win. Also, I finally watched the s3 finale five minutes beforehand and OMG all of you who tried to get me to watch it, you are SO NOT MY FRIENDS, you just wanted me to SHARE IN YOUR MISERY over the ENTIRE SUMMER. *glares*

(Sam and Dean singing Bon Jovi in the Impala was however the best thing ever, I grant you. <3)

Okay, back to coding. I will have actual real fannish content in this lj at some point in future again! it will happen, I swear!