Brother, Have You Heard the Good News?

I’m at Interocitor’s house with the LA Bear Flag Leaguers. I’m not live-blogging, because the WiFi system is close to overloaded, with ten computers hooked up at the same time. So I’m composing this in Word, and I’ll post it afterward. (Every once in a while, someone will have trouble loading a page and ask our host, “hey, would you kick the router for me?�)

I’m here with Baldilocks, Master of None, the Angry Clam, Xrlq, Patterico, the Armed Liberal, The Pirate, and Presto Pundit.

We’re basically a bunch of blognerds: there are five laptops open in this room, and we’re channel-surfing the election returns on the large screen as we dig out information from the web and call it out to each other.

Bush is at 269 Electoral Votes, so the contest could be a theoretical tie— except that the GOP controls the Senate, so a tie would go our way. The Presidential race is theoretically over except for any legal challenges, because all Bush needs is one more state to break the tie.

Drudge has called the election for Bush.

Of course, a lot of the networks have Bush at numbers much lower than 269, and people have been tracking the points at which each channel calls Ohio for Bush. We flipped CBS on for a while so we could see Dan Rather's sad clown face, and have been following Brit Hume's persistently glum face. ("Why is he so legubrious?" people keep asking.
"It's his image," comes the answer.)

Mostly I’m sticking very close to the Angry Clam, because he’s one of the brightest people in a room full of very smart cookies. As an added bonus, he can do arithmetic in his head very quickly, which is nice when we’re trying to figure out how various possible scenarios might work out in the Electoral College.

Okay. It looks like New Mexico is red for sure. This is probably it.

The consensus here seems to be that Kerry won’t concede until tomorrow. Wait!—Carl Cameron has just broken in on Fox to tell us that Kerry is consulting with Senator Kennedy, so the speculation is that they may be discussing the timing of the concession speech.

Okay, kids. It looks like we’ll continue to fight this war on terror, after all.

Over and out.