Nathan Tyree: Crystal Ball- Updated with Election Details

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It's time for my election predictions. First to the senate:

The Democrats are going to pick up Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana, Rhode Island, Virginia and Missouri. Mo is going to be very tight, but the stem cell initiative is going to carry the day. This has energized a lot of voters that may not have bothered to show up otherwise. That works to the Dems advantage.

Tenesee is too close to call right now. I suspect that the Republicans will hold this one (barely), but Ford does have a shot. The polls on this one have been horribly contradictory, so I'm not placing it in either column.

For those keeping score at home, that's six seats and control of the senate.

Moving on to the house, there are too many races to list each one, so I'm just giving an over view: The Democrats will pick up at least 33 seats. That is a scaled back prediction. I like to hedge my bets, so in a couple of races where the Democrat has suddenly surged ahead, but remains within the margin of error, I'm placing it in the R column (assuming that the most recent polls have been flawed, or that the momentum will reverse).

If the last minute momentum continues the Dems could pick up 36 seats.

So, my House prediction (soft as it is) The Dems pickup 33-36 house seats, giving them control of that chamber.

On a side note, The national Democratic party is spending money to back Nancy Boyda against Jim Ryun in Kansas. This is a big deal. Kansas is one of the reddest of states and last time Ryun won by a comfortable margin. That this race is close enough to be worthy of the national party getting involved is a bad sign for the Republicans. The GOP is spending a lot of money defending seats in places like Wyoming and Kansas. These were supposed to be safe seats.


ADDENDUM: Details

PA- this is a no brainer. Casey is up 53% to 42%. Santorum is dead in the water. The GOP has pulled its funding from this race.

OH- Brown is crushing Dewine 52% to 40%. Dewine is gone.

RI- Whitehous is kicking Chafee's behind 48% to 40%.

VA- Webb is ahead of Allen 49% to 45%. Webb is gaining as as Allen faces some new controversy in recent days.

Montana- Tester is beating Burns 51% to 47%

MO- A tie right now. This one is a statistical dead heat, but there is a momentum with the stem cell initiative. On election day McCaskill will push ahead of Talent by about three points.

When it comes to Kansas, the state is very, very red. We haven't elected a Dem to senate since the '30s. The exceptions are : Lawrence is quite blue; bits of the Wichita are are light blue; and, this one will be a surprise, Southeast Kansas is deeply blue. In Cherokee and Crawford counties Democrats outnumber Republicans by a wide margin. This corner of the state still retains some of its left leaning heritage, which started when the mines were going. Southeast Kansas was, for a time, the center of American socialism. Socialist newspapers were printed here.

We aren't that far to the left these days, but we're still the counties that voted for Kerry and Gore.

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Nathan Tyree: Fucking Rush Limbaugh

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Rush Limbaugh very nearly made my head explode yesterday. As I have mentioned earlier, Michael J. Fox (a fine actor, a nice guy and a Parkinson’s sufferer) has been appearing in ads is Missouri. These ads favor the Democrat running for senate. The reason is simple: she supports stem cell research and her opponent (the ethically challenged Jim Talent) does not.

For those of you living in a non-HD ready cave, Rush Limbaugh recently criticized Fox for this. He claimed that Fox was faking his symptoms for political reasons. Limbaugh then went into an animated physical parody of Fox’s tremors. I really wasn’t surprised by this. It’s the sort of thing that Rushie is famous for. He’s known as a mean spririted windbag.

So yesterday I tuned in to his show to see if he’d be making some sort of contrite apology. He wasn’t. Instead he was ranting that somehow the video of him ridiculing a man suffering from a dread disease was a “lie.” That’s right, according to Limbaugh, playing the video of his words and actions is equivalent to lying about him. I tried to wrap my head around the logic of that. The circuits started to go haywire and for a moment I thought that my head would explode.

On the debate over stem cell research the Republicans cannot win on the issues. The overwhelming majority of Americans support stem cell research and are not likely to be swayed. The GOP has tried hard to convince people that this is abortion (which it is not) or that somehow it will lead to human cloning (which is an asinine assertion). Since that isn’t working they have to resort to hateful personal attacks on the victims of disease.

The Talent McCaskill race is still very, very tight. In fact, a statistical tie.

Here’s a good article I found about Jim Talent


Oh, and here's a great article about what's wrong with the Republican hate Machine

addendum:

Today Limbaugh is ranting that the DEmocrats are behind teh Foley scandal. I guess he believes that Ted Kennedy used mind control to force Foley into being a sexual predator.

He also can't lay off of Michael J Fox. Today he talked about how Fox has been a Democratic operative for years. About how he's highly partisan. I guess he doesn't remember that Fox campaigned for Arlen Specter (a Republican).

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Nathan Tyree: Zombie Scotch

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Last night I watched The Thing (The John Carpenter version). I enjoy watching that film when it gets cold out. Normally I wait longer in the year, but I decided that it was time. It turns out that I have a horror movie schedule. Every year on the 4th of July I watch Jaws (“You’ve got a panic on your hands on the 4th of July”); every Christmas I watch The Shinning, which is my favorite holiday movie; when winter comes I watch The Thing. Maybe I’m weird.

My favorite sort of Horror movie is the zombie movie.

The "Zombie" genre has been around for quite some time. To be fair, "Zombie" movies are really a sub-genre, of a sub-genre. Horror is the genre, Vampires make up a sub-genre, and what is a zombie but another type of vampire? (maybe it's the other way around: what is a vampire but a sort of zombie?). My reasons for this conclusion are: Zombies are Re-animated Dead humans; they feed on the living; their victims are converted to zombies. Sounds a lot like vampires to me.

Anyway, the genre really got going with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Romero saw the zombies as a metaphor for us, and used the fright film structure to satirize American Society.

Romero took the satire even further with Dawn of the Dead, which pitted consumerist zombies against consumerist survivors in a modern shopping mall.

The Dead Series spawned a third film, Day of the Dead, then a fourth (Land of the Dead) and soon a fifth (Diary of the Dead) and the parody Return of the Living Dead, and its sequels.

Dario Argento (who had a connection with Dawn of the Dead) made many low budget, extremely gory zombie flicks in Italy. He passed his mantle to Lucio Fulci who made such ultra-violent zombie flicks as City of the Dead and House by the Cemetery.

Along the way many films have imitated Both Romero and Argento. I contend that movies like Halloween, and Friday the 13th (and their sequels) are members of the zombie community. Think about it, undying, slow moving, implaccable, remorseless killers stagger about and hunt hapless human victims. (I suppose by my logic Jaws also fits, but perhaps that's taking it a bit far).

Speaking of that, there is some contention about what is and isn’t a zombie movie. Some say that 28 Days later doesn’t count, because it’s Zombies aren’t dead, but rather merely infected with rage. Evil Dead (as well as ED2 and Army of Darkness) are controversial as well. The undead in those films can think and come in may forms. And, what about The Dead Hate the Living? In that the zombies are brought back by a sort of magic. Then there’s Undead, which has something to do with aliens.

That gets us back where we started: The Thing. The Thing is tough to kill, it hunts humans and when it gets one the victim becomes a thing as well. I know, it’s an intelligent alien, not a re-animated human, so it doesn’t count at all.



In other news: Last night I wanted a glass of Scotch. I walked into the kitchen, where my bottle of Glenlivet had been, and stood next to the table (where, as I said, the bottle had been). I reached out and found no scotch. “Woman,” I bellowed, “where’s my scotch!”

Sarah, my lovely young wife, called back: “You left it on the buffet, dumbass.”

“Oh… Yeah,” I replied.
So, having been reminded, I walked to the buffet. Sitting there was my bottle of Glenlivet. Next to it was a Laphroaig bottle, which I had believed to be empty. Looking at it then I discovered that I had been wrong. There was, in fact, about an ounce and a half of the fine and lovely Laphroaig.

Thus, I discovered unknown scotch. The joy was nearly unbearable.




And, as always:

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Nathan Tyree: Going Out of Business

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Not Work Safe T-Shirts is likely going out of business. This may be your last chance to get a shirt to offend your Mom. You know you want it, get it at Not Work Safe T


The URL is:

http://www.cafepress.com/notworksafet

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Nathan Tyree: Deer and Such

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These days it seem that all of the horror in cinema comes from Japan (that’s J-Horror to the initiated). Between Ringu (and Razen and Ringo) and Ju-on, and the films of Takashi Miike (Audition, Imprint) we are overwhelmed with Japanese horror films. Then there are the American remakes of those films (The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, etc etc).

Many of the truly good horror films being made that aren’t remakes of Japanese films are still heavily inspired by them. Could we imagine Hostel with Takashi Miike?

With all of this it could be easy to forget about the Italians.

Let’s remember that the Italians gave us great thriller/horror films in the 60s and 70s (Bird with the Crystal Plumage); they continued the Zombie Genre (Zombi, City of the Dead, House by the Cemetery); and they invented the Cannibal genre with the repugnant Cannibal Holocaust. Filmmakers like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci crafted our nightmares for years.

Now we hear little of that. All the hip kids dig the J-Horror, and now we are seeing the rise of K-Horror (from South Korea) with films like A Tale of Two Sisters. I for one love it. Asian directors are crossing lines that Americans are afraid to go near, and they are changing the face of horror films. But let’s not forget about the Italians.


It’s worth mentioning that there are likely reasons that I’m spending so much time thinking about Horror films right now. Sure, Halloween is approaching and that always puts me in the mood for a good fright fest; but I think that there may be more to it this year. It’s hard not to notice that we are nearly drowned in horror films these days. It seems like a new splatter flick opens at the theaters every week (mostly bad remakes like The Hills Have Eyes, House of Wax, The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw massacre- it’s terrible the way that these films sully the reputation of the movies they are based on, but I digress). Author Stephen King, in his book Danse Macabre, suggests that horror grows in popularity with the public as their fears about the real world increase. These days that hypothesis makes a lot of sense to me. What with the war and all.

Anyway, on to other things.

The MO senate race is one of the most closely watched this year. I just learned that Michael J. Fox is doing an ad for McCaskill (against Jim Talent). This race is a must win for both parties and it is going to be very, very tight. The most recent poll I’ve seen shows the Democrat with a slight lead. Control of the Senate may well come down to Missouri and Virginia. If one party can take both of those seats they will control the Senate. If those states split (one to each party) we will have a tie.

And then there’s this:


The field next to my house is starting to fill with deer. Each evening I see them standing about, all jittery and sleek. Damn those are beautiful animals. It’s a shame people spend so much time shooting them.


Man, I am all over the place today. That is all.

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