Done Voting? Good. Pay More for Gas.

Sigh.

Guess all those conspiracy theorists that were saying gas prices were down just for the elections were true. They're already going up.

Where's my hydrogen-hybrid RX-8?

Tap, tap, tap...

Yes, I voted today. Yes, we had electronic voting machines. Yes, they were Diebold. Yes, they had voter verified paper trails. Yes, I used it.

Seemed to work pretty well. I didn't have any problems with the machine not registering my vote correctly, so I guess my machine was properly calibrated. I also went after work, so if there had been any issues hopefully they got worked out. They also had paper ballots for those who needed to cast a provisional ballot and I suspect if I asked I could have gone that route. Which I would have if they didn't have the paper trail.

The only potential problem I saw was that the paper trail was pretty narrow, so some of the issue titles were cut off. In particular I think all the judge confirmations looked the same.

Decisions, Decisions

Well, I was planning to vote to reelect Susan Davis, since she did vote against the Military Commissions Act (you know, the one that lets the President define what torture is), but then she went and supported a bill to prohibit joint-use at Miramar. I'm also not fond of the idea of the Republicans keeping control of the House.

I wonder what Davis' proposal is for an alternative solution to the airport. Does she really want to build an airport in Imperial County? Does she really want to dislocate many people in order to build a second runway at Lindbergh? Or does she prefer to keep the airport as is and watch Lindbergh get busier and busier, and hope that the problem just solves itself.

Which is wishful thinking, because it won't. We can't just demand airlines bring in larger planes, unless we want to alienate San Diego's largest airline, Southwest, which doesn't have anything bigger than it's current 737s. We can't rely on Orange County and LAX to relieve us, as they have their own capacity problems to deal with, and Ontario is no better alternative for us than it is for LAX.

Vote for Me Calls

On election day and the day before, I received a total of four phone calls that contained pre-recorded messages asking me to vote to re-elect President Bush.

The first was on November 1st, a pre-recoreded message from the President himself asking me to vote for him.

The remaining three were all on November 2nd. Two were the same pre-recorded message from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The last one was an unidentified woman with a Hawaii-oriented message. Amusingly, this was about a half hour after Hawaii's polls closed.

I suppose I should mention that I sent in my absentee ballot a few weeks before the election.