Segacs’s World I Know

Jeopardy perennial champ Ken Jennings has broken the all-time game show winnings record on the episode that aired today, with his winnings of $2,197,000.

I wonder how many IQ points Jennings has over Bush. And I wonder what scenario is funnier: Jennings running for President, or Bush on Jeopardy.

That seems to be the buzz.

But could she really win? Could she capture more votes than John Kerry did last night? Certainly she’s more charismatic. She’s a proven campaigner and she was probably the brains behind any good decisions that Clinton made during his term. And both she and her husband are evidently still hugely popular.

But would it be enough?

I can’t help but think that… god damn, this election is just barely over! Can we give it a rest for a while before we start campaigning for the next one???

Bush winning the election is not what’s making me so uncomfortable. At least, it doesn’t make me any more uncomfortable than a Kerry win would have.

The trouble is, the combination of results that have given the Republicans another four years in the White House, significant gains in Congress and a virtual lock on the Senate all at the same time. That means that one side pretty much dominates all three houses – as opposed to the tenuous hold they had last term. And no matter what side the power is concentrated on, that is too much power for one team in a nation that is very much bitterly divided.

The GOP doesn’t have much to hold them back now. Despite the fact that nearly half the country didn’t vote for them, they have a popular vote win, a win on “their” issues in many direct questions, and pretty much a free rein to move the country even further to the right for the next four years – and, with Supreme Court appointments, for a long time after that.

Gay marriage is not an issue that should be decided by popular vote – because a majority shouldn’t get to decide to deny rights to a minority. But look for the Republicans to push ahead for a nationwide constitutional ban on gay marriage, for no good reason other than because many people find the idea distasteful. In fact, this issue probably helped Bush win the election, by encouraging Conservatives to go cast a vote. Similarly, abortion is once again in trouble. We can probably expect a woman’s right to choose being gradually chipped away in the next few years.

Many Kerry supporters are disappointed because they fear another four years of what they perceive to be devastating international policies by the Bush team. Personally, I’m much more concerned about the domestic American scene. In fact, the Democrats most likely lost this election by assuming Iraq was the only issue, and failing to make a strong case for their liberal values at home.

And with so much power concentrated on the Republican side, I admit I’m worried. I’d be just as worried if all the power were concentrated on the left. Either way, too much power in one camp with too few checks and balances is a dangerous thing.

Veteran center and former Montreal Canadien Sergei Zholtok collapsed suddenly at the end of a hockey game he was playing in Riga, Latvia today. He died of a cardiac arryhtmia.

Zholtok had 111 goals and 147 assists in his 588-game NHL career. He played two and a half seasons for the Habs, from 1998 to midway through 2000 before being traded to Edmonton, and then later to Minnesota and finally the Predators, the last NHL team he played with before the lockout.

He was only 31. That’s so incredibly sad.

Despite the conspiracy theorists’ claims, the Jewish vote is rarely an election factor, and certainly wasn’t this time. Concentrated in locked up states like New York, and not enough to do the job in swing states like Florida, who Jews were voting for wasn’t a top story for most media networks who were too busy covering the story-that-wasn’t-in-Ohio to notice.

But the big question going into this election was, would they or wouldn’t they?

The Jewish vote has been heavily Democratic since time immortal. But in light of 9/11, the war on terror, the situation in Israel and the alignment of the far left with Israel’s enemies, would some lifelong Jewish Democrats shift their allegiance to Bush? Would committed Democrats react like Meryl and Lynn and vote for Bush because of international issues? Or would they act more like Allison, putting these issues aside to vote for the candidate who they still feel is best on domestic issues?

Ha’aretz is reporting that Bush picked up 22% of the Jewish vote this election. That’s up 3 percentage points from the 19% he got in 2000. So it seems that there were at least some Jewish voters who switched allegiances.

On the other hand, that’s still 78% of Jewish voters casting their ballots for Kerry. And the “why” isn’t exactly a mystery:

They predicted “anticipated conflicts” between the Republican majority on Capitol Hill and the Jewish community on issues such as separation of church and state, abortion, gay rights, and same-sex marriage – issues, one Jewish leader said Wednesday, on which “the vast majority of the Jewish community disapproves of the Republicans’ positions and views.”

The voting broke down similarly for Jews as it did for Christians, with the more secular voting for Kerry and the ultra-Orthodox religious allying more closely with Bush:

According to unconfirmed results, Bush won 75 percent of Jewish votes in two large Brooklyn voting precincts that have a substantial concentration of Orthodox Jews, compared to a 25 percent turnout for Kerry.

Ultra-Orthodox activists predicted Wednesday that the final results will prove that other voting precincts in Brooklyn with an ultra-Orthodox populace overwhelmingly supported Bush.

[ . . . ]

“In the current elections, Orthodox Jews played within the community the role of evangelicals in the general electorate,” Furst said. The difference is that evangelicals make up about 40 percent of America’s population, while the percentage of Orthodox members in the Jewish community does not exceed 10 percent.

That may be so, but it’s telling that the division line in the sand seems to be religious versus secular, not one religion versus another. (The Muslim vote, of course, is an exception. An estimated 93% of Muslims voted for Kerry.)

At any rate, the big story here hasn’t materialized the way some people thought it might. The Jewish population did not become conservative overnight, abandoning decades of liberal values in order to vote for a president whose support for Israel is – at least in part – due to his evangelical Christian beliefs. Considering that there was no Joseph Lieberman on the Democratic ticket this time around, getting only 3% less of the Jewish vote than four years ago can hardly be called a defeat for Kerry.

Yes, believe it or not, there is other news besides the US election. Starting with the fact that nobody can figure out what’s wrong with Arafat. I’ve heard discounted diagnoses ranging from stomach cancer to leukemia to AIDS. If you ask me, what’s wrong with him is a complete, utter lack of a conscience, coupled with a victim mentality that tells him that the best way to get world sympathy right now is to get sick. It seems to be working like a charm.

The NHLPA met again yesterday, supposedly to discuss “strategy” but in reality to browbeat dissenting members into submission (perhaps by tattooing “no salary cap” into their skulls… for any players who might have been confused on that point).

And a suggestion for the SAQ workers planning to strike: consider as an alternative… a drink-in.

It’s 7:15pm and finally Blogger is back up and running.

I could lament the fact that I missed my chance to blog the day after the US election… but I won’t. First of all, there’s nothing to say that hasn’t already been said. And second of all, I was too busy at work to blog.

Besides, according to CBS MarketWatch, nobody’s reading blogs anyway. Well, that’s certainly true in my case…

My hope is that with Kerry’s concession, the healing process can begin. Sounds like a cliché, doesn’t it? Besides, it has about as much chance of happening as Michael Moore voting for Bush.

Kerry should have conceded hours earlier, but at least he didn’t drag this out for weeks. Now, love him or hate him, Americans at least know that Bush is their president.

As I predicted, it looks like a fairly convincing victory for Bush.

But many of the networks are still labelling it “too close to call”, pointing to the slim 140,000-vote margin in Ohio for Bush that, if eradicated, could theoretically swing the election to Kerry.

Frankly, I think Ohio is still the big story because the major media networks want it to be the big story. That’s where they sent all their reporters, so that’s where they’re expecting the story. Plenty of other states have even slimmer margins and have been declared for one candidate or the other.

Bush won the popular vote convincingly this time, unlike four years ago. And he’s leading in the three states that the networks have yet to call, including the all-crucial Ohio. Very soon, Kerry’s going to come under a lot of pressure to concede. This isn’t Florida in 2000, no matter how much people were expecting it to be. This is a solid victory and Kerry should be gracious enough to admit it.

The Bush victory was pretty expected, and I don’t have much to say about it that a million other bloggers haven’t already said. Personally, I think the more telling stories were some of the direct ballot questions, particularly the issue of gay marriage. 11 states have banned gay marriage by passing constitutional amendments to disallow it. This is a serious step back for human rights in the United States, and it’s extremely sad that so many people have turned out in droves to deny even the possibility of granting rights to a minority that are already enjoyed by the majority.

I could say much more about this election, but I’m posting manually since blogger seems to be down (perhaps overloaded with election blogging?) so I’ll leave it at that… for now. More to come.