In a complaint that has become all-too-common, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn makes this observation:

The advocates' legal claim now is that Prop. 8 represents too great a change to the California Constitution to be approved by a simple majority vote.  The courts may agree, I have no idea.  But the time for that argument was before the election; before asking for nullification of the result looked so much like the complaint of sore losers.

It's one of several points he makes about the Prop. 8 campaign. Many of them are good and valid points. The No-on-8 campaign clearly did a lot of stuff wrong. This isn't one of those things. Lawyers for the  No-on-8 filed suit against the ballot measure on June 15. At that time they raised most of the issues that have been brought up again in the current round of suits. The suit wasn't considered by the high court. It wasn't rejected. It simply wasn't considered. And that's a pretty common thing for courts in states where these kinds of ballot measures happen all the time.

Courts are reluctant to strike a measure from the ballot unless there's an egregious error.

But lawsuits after the fact are also almost automatic when anything but the simplest initiative passes. It's part of the process, and hardly the sign of "sore losers".

This is the time for the arguments -- after the measure succeeded. That's what the court was telling Prop. 8 opponents by its silence in response to the first round of suits.

Maybe this seems odd to Zorn because things work differently in Illinois. But this sort of post-vote legal campaigning is standard practice out here in the west where courts do their best to avoid dealing with the usual round of complaints filed against an initiative until (as only occasionally happens) the thing actually passes.

Well, that felt good. After all these months of campaigns, and after a week during which I somehow felt the absolute need to check campaign-centric news sites several times a day (examples of what I've been reading), it now feels like it over.

I just got back from the neighborhood church hall that is being used for the last time as a polling place. That's bittersweet, because this is scheduled to be the last election in this county that has live balloting. Elections will become all mail-in here from now on. That disappoints me, for reasons I can't quite identify. I suppose, though, that I like the feeling of participating in something larger that comes from walking into the polling place and filling out the forms for the nice (but almost always confused) older lady who's inevitably at the table.

This time, the woman at the next-table precinct said, "He must be important, because we have the same last name." And I responded, "Oh. Hi. You said that last time too. It's good to see you again."

That was it. I then went off to fill in the bubbles on the ballot, but even that minimal interaction makes it feel like we're all involved together in a civic endeavor which is, after all, what voting is.

Oh, well...

But filling out the ballot felt good. I've looked forward to filling in the Obama bubble for several weeks, although I didn't expect it would feel so good to do so when the primaries ended.

I also filled in the Gregoire bubble in our governor's race, although I fear that this time -- for only the second time in the 28 years I've lived in Seattle, the GOP candidate will win it. I hope Rossi will stay true to the fake-moderate image he created for his ads and won't get too carried away with his social conservative agenda, but I worry that he will succumb to the considerable pressure from those who have had to wait decades to get control of the governor's office. I hope for that, but I don't count on it.

It felt especially good to fill in the "Yes" bubble for King County charter amendment #2 which will, at long last, give the county the same kind of LGBT anti-discrimination protections that Seattle has had since the 70s.

I also was pleased to fill out the "Yes" bubble for state Initiative 1000, which is called "Death with Dignity Act". I've survived two rounds of chemo for lymphoma. Another, and final, recurrence was judged highly likely when it came back so quickly the second time. Somehow, it hasn't returned. But, having faced that kind of brush with mortality already, I'm offended that some preacher somewhere figures he should be able to force me to endure great pain and indignity at the end of my life because of the preacher's superstitions.

My father died this summer after 89 active years. He lived a very good life, but he didn't deserve to have to endure those last three weeks of it when, finally, he was unable to walk or even move himself in his bed. At one point, a week before he died, he refused to eat for three days, hoping that doing so would hasten the end that was obviously near, but remained elusive. His hunger strike didn't work, so he started eating the few spoonfuls he could endure, but he remained lucid enough until his last day to ask for multiple pills to maybe help ease the pain.

He went though three weeks of that before a doctor finally prescribed oral morphine. And that, finally -- even in very low dosage -- finally seemed to allow him to reach the end he'd been striving for.

And I don't see anything about forcing him despite his express wishes to endure those last few weeks that is either kind or compassionate.

I hope Initiative 1000 will allow me to avoid a similar situation which is likely to come sooner for me rather than later.

---

Ah, but voting for Obama was a most hopeful act for me today.

I didn't vote for him in the caucuses here. All along, I considered his candidacy inspiring and I knew -- even during the caucuses -- that I'd vote him in the general, but I've been surprised by how much more impressed I've become with him since this summer.

I reasoned, when I voted for Clinton in the caucus, that Obama's lack of experience would lead to a very shaky first term if he'd been elected (and I thought then that his election would be unlikely).

I no longer think so. I am now convinced that the incredible executive skills he's shown in directing his astounding primary and general election campaign, will also serve to make him one of our most effective presidents.

Whereas I was impressed, but much inspired, by Obama's stunning oratory before the convention, I've since been ever more inspired by his words because I'm now convinced that he will actually be able to make the changes he promises in passages like this from his "closing argument" stump speech:

You can put an end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election; that tries to pit region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat; that asks us to fear at a time when we need hope. In two days, at this defining moment in history, you can give this country the change we need.

Because of the nasty and divisive campaign that McCain and -- especially -- Palin have run in the last, desperate weeks of their run for power, there's sure to be anger and frustration after tonight's results are final (even if they manage the near impossible and win it). But I believe that Obama will act quickly and decisively to quell the concern. I also trust that McCain's better nature will prompt him to work to overcome the negativity that he allowed his campaign to build.

I think McCain showed himself to be an ineffective and even dangerously unstable leader in the way he failed to run his campaign. "Erratic" was the talking-points word that was at the top of the list for most Obama campaign surrogates for the past month. But it seems an apt description that even non-partisans used to judge his poor performance as campaign executive.

If Obama becomes the victor in this long race, it seems certain that the main meme from conservatives will be that his victory -- no matter how big or how small -- doesn't really mean that Americans have rejected conservatism. Pundits from the right massage the numbers -- whatever the numbers are -- into something that they will say shows that the country really is "center-right" and didn't actually mean to vote for Obama. They'll say an Obama victory means only that the country didn't like GWB's deficit spending.

But all of that will play out in the weeks ahead, along with the blood-letting among the Republicans who are left over after whatever happens tonight.

But that will all be a sideshow.

The important work will (I fervently hope and expect) come from Obama as he begins his daunting task of leading us all toward that more hopeful kind of politics that he's promised from the start.

---

I'm far less hopeful, however, about the kind of thing that is the main subject of this site. I expect to have to post the stories tonight about the passage of California's nasty, divisive Prop.  8.

If it does pass, of course, it will only be the beginning. There will be plenty of finger-pointing about how a campaign that started out well could have gone so wrong. And there will also be lawsuits. Oh, how there will be lawsuits. Initiative campaigns are kind of a full-employment guarantee for both campaign consultants and lawyers. And they almost never end with the vote.

The suit filed by No-on-8 forces that challenged the validity of the vote was rejected by the court before the vote, but it will be back if the amendment passes, with all the same arguments in place.

And even if that reborn suit doesn't get anywhere, there's significant question about the interplay between the amendment and the broader language of the court decision that recognized marriage equality. The amendment would not override the court's determination that lesbian and gay citizens deserve full equality under the law.

And that might just turn out to mean that an amendment barring marriages for lesbian and gay couples means that the state -- in order to protect equality for all its citizens -- will have to stop offering a civil contract called "marriage" to any couple.

But most of that will be avoided if Californians listen to their better natures and reject the discriminatory amendment.

I suspect most folks who aren't the husbands of rich Arizona heiresses, would rather never again here about Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher.

Clarence Page has a good roundup of this week's many episodes of the JtP show, but it's worthwhile to take another look at the rope-line encounter with Barack Obama that started it all:

Somehow, I suspect that McCain's speech writers who drop "Joe's" name frequently in his stump speeches are hoping that most folks won't go back and actually listen to the original exchange.

Who knew? Sarah Palin tells a not-too-happy crowd in New Hampshire that they're part of the "Great Northwest".

hattip: Salon

But, then again, it may be wishful thinking. As Danny Westneat writes in today's Seattle Times, Palin's choice seems to have doomed the slim chances McCain ever had here in the real Northwest:

There hasn't been much polling in this state, but the latest — on Oct. 2 — showed women favoring Obama by 15 points. That's up from five in early September. Among the four candidates, Palin is the only one with a "favorability" rating below 50 percent.

It's not all about her conservative politics, either.

"She scares me," said Brenda Starkey, a wood crafter in Ferry County. Starkey's no liberal — she was in the Navy, and says she still may vote for McCain because "he's a good guy who will do his best."

"But Palin -- ugh. She's not at all ready to run the country."

Or take Julie Follette, a 25-year-old coffee barista in Issaquah who voted for George W. Bush last time.

"Look, I love women," she said, "but you have to be able to put together a complete sentence. You know, like when you're talking to those doggone foreign leaders?"

Follette then winked at me. She designed the wink to be Palinesque — "as perky as it is phony."

Westneat says he's found similar expressions of exasperation throughout the state during a pre-election tour he's taking. "After traveling around the state these past two weeks, I think I can pinpoint the precise day McCain lost it," he writes. "August 29, 2008. The day he picked Sarah Palin."

hattip: Andrew Sullivan

We don't follow the presidential campaign on this site -- not because we don't care about it, but because there's little about it that has much to do with the site's LGBTQ news focus, but there are some aspects that deserve yet one more tiny voice in protest:

John Lewis, the former civil rights leader who's now a congressman, has warned that GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her running mate, Sen. John McCain have descended into dangerous territory with the hatred that's been stirred up recently -- especially at Palin's rallies. [see videos below]

Lewis compares it to the level of hatred to that engendered on behalf of one-time presidential candidate George Wallace:

George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.

McCain, to his credit, has tried since yesterday to dial back the more virulent expressions of hate at his rallies (CNN video), and even Palin's stump speech was changed to focus on abortion rather than her previous attempts to paint Obama as unAmerican.

Although the record (aka facts) hardly matters in this kind of willful disinformation campaign, here's what FactCheck.org has to say about the silly charges that McCain surrogates are still spouting today:

We find McCain's accusation that Obama "lied" to be groundless. It is true that recently released records show half a dozen or so more meetings between the two men than were previously known, but Obama never denied working with Ayers.

Other claims are seriously misleading. The education project described in the Web ad, far from being "radical," had the support of the Republican governor and was run by a board that included prominent local leaders, including one Republican who has donated $1,500 to McCain's campaign this year. The project is described by Education Week as reflecting "mainstream thinking" about school reform.

Despite the newly released records, there's still no evidence of a deep or strong "friendship" with Ayers, a former radical anti-war protester whose actions in the 1960s and '70s Obama has called "detestable" and "despicable."

But it's not clear that the kind of willfully uninformed rage that has been unleashed by the McCain campaign can be easily stamped out.

Pam's  House Blend offers video evidence of how bad it's become:

And here's McCain trying to dial it down a bit. (Although his surrogates were on MSNBC this afternoon repeating all of the same talking points being spouted by the crowd at the rally, but without the veneer of respectability carefully encapsulating the official talking points.)

Politico reports that even "Bush's brain", Karl Rove, sees the current state of the presidential race as highly favorable to Barack Obama. Rove's current map shows that Obama would win 273 electoral votes if the election were held today, according to Politico. That's three more than the minimum needed to win.

Of course, Rove says that isn't meant to be a prediction and insists that McCain could still win on Nov. 4. It just means things aren't looking too good for the McCain/Palin ticket right now.

More bad news for the GOP ticket:

Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who was the architect of McCain's 2000 campaign said on Meet the Press: "It's McCain's barn that's on fire. ... Thirty days out, I think McCain can win. But the fact is, [if the] election were held today, he'd lose. And I think he’s on a losing path."

But the poll numbers are still tight in several of the states that would have to turn from red to blue if Obama were to win, and that's what GOP strategists can pin their slim, but still genuine, hopes on.

The blog Joe.My.God has a great post that should remind Obama supporters that even this week's great poll numbers for the Illinois senator should be greeted with trepidation because of the "Bradley Effect":

In case you're unaware, the Bradley Effect is used to describe the phenomenon of voters telling pollsters that they will support the black candidate but then vote for the white opponent. It's named after California gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley, who in 1982 led polls before the election and even led in the exit polls, prompting the SF Chronicle to publish its Deweyesque headline Bradley Win Projected. White candidate George Deukmejian was the actual winner.

Oh, how I love trivia like this. Jesse Sheidlower explains in Slate the linguistic source of Sarah Palin's accent.

I mentioned the accent a while back in a post about Tina Fey's first SNL skit: "Although it's not at all clear how Palin comes by her northern-plains accent, Tina Fey does a superb job in the skit of emphasizing it just enough to highlight the Fargo-like absurdity in it all."

Sheidlower makes it very clear how she comes by the accent:

Overall, because of the mixture of people and the large number of newcomers, Alaskan English is often hard to place, with both Westerners and Midwesterners thinking that it sounds oddly foreign; indeed, some Westerners have said that Palin sounds like a Midwesterner, and Midwesterners that she sounds Western.

Others have wondered whether her accent hails from Idaho, where her parents are from. But dialect features tend to come from one's peers, not one's parents, and Palin spent her childhood in Alaska's Mat-Su Valley, which is where she got her distinctive manner of speaking. The next town over from Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of Minnesotans—who were moved there by a government relief program in the 1930s—and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus prominent in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like elements in Palin's speech, in particular the sound of her "O" vowel. (Despite its name, Fargo took place mostly in Brainerd, Minn.) However, even in the area, many people speak a more general Alaskan English, the sort one would find in nearby Anchorage. Palin's frequent dropping of the final G in -ing words and her pronunciation of terrorist with two syllables instead of three are characteristic of general Alaskan English (and Western English) rather than the specific Mat-Su Valley speech.

Since I grew up in Montana and have lived most of my adult life in Washington, with a couple of stays in Colorado along the way, I'm definitely a Westerner. (And, yes, I too drop "g"s and will probably sometimes substitute "ya" for "you".) And I'm also among the "some Westerners [who] have said that Palin sounds like a Midwesterner."

Now, if only someone would explain how W. came up with that Texas-like accent when his brother Jeb who spent more time in Texas didn't pick it up.

Source: Placing Sarah Palin's accent. - By Jesse Sheidlower - Slate Magazine

This site, seaQwa.com, has been online for just about a year. The first few posts started appearing in Qnews on Sept. 19, 2007. At the time, I was still pushing the news posts in through an RSS feed that I'd been using for over a year to build a news digest on a Squidoo gay news page.

I put up the seaQwa.com with an under-construction page in August of last year, which means that the server bill came due last month. And I stretched my too-full credit card to pay the bill even though the site doesn't come close to paying for itself.

I'll admit that in the past year I wasn't able to build the site into what I'd hoped it would become. Because it sometimes seems to me that what I'm doing here now is little more that useless web noise, I was tempted to just give it up when the server bill came due last month. But -- even though there's little evidence to support this -- I still retain some slight hope that it might be worthwhile to keep it up.

I'll admit that I've pretty much completely failed on the "sea" and "wa" part of seaQwa. I'd been doing a blog at blog.ttca.org for a couple of years that focused on local Seattle events and started this site with a plan to expand on that focus. But, just before I started this site, Bill W at what's now called SeattleGayScene started doing a better job of what I'd started at blog.ttca.org. I decided to leave the events focus to him.

Unfortunately, that left too little for this site, and I allowed the local Seattle section -- Qblog -- to wither away. Since it's extremely difficult to scare information out of Seattle organizations, I've pretty much given up on local news.

Instead, I have given increasing focus to what I'd originally thought would be a sideline of the site, the national/international gay news digest in Qnews.

The first original news item appeared in Qnews on October 14 last year, but even then, it was just a summary of a single-source news item. That part of the site has developed well (or so I tell myself) and now features multiple-source digests of MSM news items. Instead of just a link to a story or a snippet from one source, most of the summaries in Qnews are now compilations from multiple sources. 

I think that what I do here when I copy edit those stories from multiple sources does, indeed, provide a unique take on gay news, especially because the links to the original source reporting is (unlike some better known gay news digests) always prominent. The links are included both above and below the digest, so those who want more information can get to it quickly.

Although I believe it's a good national gay news source, I'm less confident that it matters. The site's news summaries are carefully ignored by the uber-gay-bloggers and by Google's news search site. And that matters a whole lot since Google is the company that seeks to become the single-source of control for all things on the web. (At least, they quickly add our links to their primary search engine, but it's the news site that matter more for a site like this.)

Since I am not and will never be a dogmatist, what I offer in Qnews lacks the color and bite that is expected by most blog readers. Opinionated screeds tend to encourage comments on blogs and more links from the wide world of blogs, most of which tend to be dogmatic.

But most of the failure of this site is squarely my own fault. I would have needed to have engaged in far more self-promotion than I did to make this site into what I'd hoped a year ago it would become. Unfortunately, that kind of thing isn't in my nature. I've become too much of a hermit to do it locally and too uncomfortable with the whole process to do the kind of web-self-promotion that's required. Mea culpa.

But, despite the evidence that I should just give up on it all, I figure I'll muddle on with it. I'm working on changes to the site that might start to appear late next month. I might even shift away from the 'seaQwa.com' url to something more generic and more indicative of what the site has actually become.

When I started the site a year ago, I was still recovering from my second round of chemotherapy, and really didn't expect to be here a year hence. I was also hobbling around on crutches because of an ill-advised short-cut I'd taken while visiting Butte in late August. I used my three months on the crutches, as an excuse for my failure to get out and make the kinds of contacts I'd have needed to build the site into what I'd hoped then it would become. But, really, I'm just too much of a hermit to have done it with or without the crutches.

And so... It's a bittersweet anniversary, and not much of a cause for celebration. And now, even though I understand that doing so is part of the overall problem, I nonetheless find myself compelled to look to Beckett for guidance: "... it will be silence where I am. I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on."