The New Hampshire primary has officially begun. Two tiny towns have followed their tradition of voting just after midnight. Statewide polling will start, depending on location, at either 6 or 7am. Polls close this evening, again depending on location, at 7 or 8pm.

For the Republicans, the results from Dixville "First in the Nation" Notch and Hart's "No, We're First" Location:

10 votes for McCain
5 votes for Huckabee
4 votes for Paul
3 votes for Romney
1 vote for Giuliani

On the Democratic side:

16 votes for Obama
3 votes for Edwards
3 votes for Clinton

Of course, these numbers don't really mean much, but it looks like Hunter and Richardson are getting off to a slow start. And Obama managed to pay off most of one New Hampshire hamlet, right?

Okay, more seriously, this is going to be a long day for newsphiles. All eyes will be on New Hampshire with media exit polls recited ad nauseum throughout. Despite the polling barrage to which New Hampshirites have been subjected over the past month, the results may surprise.

McCain has shot ahead in the past week, despite Romney's 2 to 1 advantage in advertising. Huckabee is also enjoying a bit of a post-Iowa bump at the same time that Giuliani's already weak showing is getting weaker. Clinton's campaign seems to have had the wind knocked out of it (no one likes a crying senator) and another Obama victory seems like a sure thing.

The big deal here is that New Hampshire has open primaries and most voters are registered independent. That means that voters abandoning Clinton may not necessarily switch to Obama. Instead, they can cross to McCain, most likely, or possibly Giuliani.

Which means that I expect both Obama and McCain to win. I just think they're going to win by more than the latest polls show (Obama +9, McCain +5).

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:15 PM | Comments (8)
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Well, not cancelled per se. According to Cynthia Littleton at Variety, who is so special she gets her name in the byline twice, the network has decided to "shift the paradigm of the telecast."

By Monday evening, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.'s 65th annual kudos had been downscaled from a gala dinner ceremony and live telecast to an hourlong news conference at the Beverly Hilton, to be covered live (taped delayed for the West Coast) by NBC News, with only journos in attendance -- and most likely with WGA pickets outside.

The problem was that most of the invited actors, directors, writers, and composers refused to cross the picket lines. The dinner was going to be empty and NBC couldn't convince the WGA to give them a waiver for the show.

I'm not sure how desperate hausfraus will cope with the winter blues now that they won't be seeing their favorite starlets all done up for the red carpet. No glitz for the cameras, and no dirty afterparties for TMZ. Actually, I think the ad people are likely to be in worse shape because of the decision; no one is going to sit through an hour long news conference when they can just read through the list on the internet, with accompanying clips and pictures (Hint, hint, any enterprising 'net media companies; call me).

Honestly, the real reason I linked this piece is to make fun of Ms. Littleton-Littleton. "Shift the paradigm of the telecast." Really? Is that really what they did? As a few morons noted, "paradigm" should have been on the 2008 list of banished words. People just do not know what it means or how to use it correctly. She gets negative ten thousand points for using it in the same sentence as "shift" since that tells us where she started to go wrong.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:00 PM | Comments (9)
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A new course at the University of Michigan. Seriously. That's what it's called.

ENGLISH 317. Literature and Culture.

Section 002 — How to be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Instructor(s): David M Halperin (halperin@umich.edu)

Course Description:

Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to become one. Gay men do some of that learning on their own, but often we learn how to be gay from others, either because we look to them for instruction or because they simply tell us what they think we need to know, whether we ask for their advice or not.

...

In particular, we will examine a number of cultural artifacts and activities that seem to play a prominent role in learning how to be gay: Hollywood movies, grand opera, Broadway musicals, and other works of classical and popular music, as well as camp, diva-worship, drag, muscle culture, taste, style, and political activism. Are there a number of classically 'gay' works such that, despite changing tastes and generations, all gay men, of whatever class, race, or ethnicity, need to know them, in order to be gay? What is there about gay identity that explains the gay appropriation of these works? What do we learn about gay male identity by asking not who gay men are but what it is that gay men do or like? One aim of exploring these questions is to approach gay identity from the perspective of social practices and cultural identifications rather than from the perspective of gay sexuality itself. What can such an approach tell us about the sentimental, affective, or subjective dimensions of gay identity, including gay sexuality, that an exclusive focus on gay sexuality cannot?

Didn't we just used to watch Lost in Space to know all this crap?

Thanks to Deb.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 PM | Comments (54)
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Here's one way to do it.

I wish Duncan Hunter had supporters of Paulbot intensity.

Posted by: Ace at 08:15 PM | Comments (10)
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Tied up, 10-10 LSU up 24-10 31-10 31-17, a (was almost) for fuckin-real game (ok maybe still is), for which we who all have less than nine wrinkles in our foreheads can be grateful.

(go tigers)

I hope the Buckeyes pull it out.

They need it.

Rout yet? Inquiring minds, I say this as a guy who works with an LSU grad who's been insufferable since the USC tie.

Bastard. He's out of town and I'm pulling all of the phillips head screws out of his chair.

That's how he falls.

UPDATE at 10:49 in the 4th. Up till now, some of you homos OSU fans had hope. It was just now cruelly crushed, and I feel badly about that. Recalling the earlier UT OSU game this year, well I feel just awful about that.

Damn.

You may get your shots back in at me on Sunday at 4 EST.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 06:17 PM | Comments (45)
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Click To Play

He's looking for donations.

Posted by: Ace at 05:23 PM | Comments (28)
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Lucky for us, it's a chick, but not that lucky, because, as they say, politics is show business for ugly people:

It amuses me that people continue sharing intimate details and pics of themselves on-line with just a few few dozen million of their closest friends.

Thanks to MichaelB.

Bigger Pic:

Eh, better than I thought, but still butterfaced.

Thanks to liberrocky.

Posted by: Ace at 04:26 PM | Comments (56)
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Even averaging this blowout number in with pre-Iowa polls still has him up 8.3. And nationally, he's the new front runner as well.

Isn't that lovely?

Soon -- not now, but soon -- we'll have to just write off 2008 altogether and begin rebuilding the party. The evangelicals in the party will have to recognize, hopefully, that they cannot go it alone without the rest of the GOP. Huckabee's catastrophic loss in the election will, hopefully, instruct some of them as to the need for coalition, and repudiate the sort of magical thinking I think many are sometimes prey to -- If I just dismiss notions like "electability" and the like, and just vote for whoever I like the most without any taint of practicality or consensus with my fellow party-members, I will be rewarded, because somehow the country will come around to sharing my minority viewpoint.

Liberals and the nutroots have been pushing this idea for years. It doesn't work. Yes, the Democrats won in 2006, but on the strength of moderate candidates. A president needs to both unite the base and grab a decent number of independents, and Huckabee can do neither.

I'm not sure anyone can beat the the very-electable Obamessiah anyhow, so perhaps this is the perfect year for an object lesson in the perils of nominating a candidate anathema to half the party.

More: George Will serves up some uncharacteristically bloody red meat on the topic of Huckabee.

But he's part of that GOP establishment, of course.

Like Rush Limbaugh.

Posted by: Ace at 04:05 PM | Comments (110)
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...over FoxNews' decision to exclude the Bircheresque Crank from the last debate.

There does seem to be at least the threat of mob violence here:

Click on the Radio Equalizer link above for more background and reaction.

Posted by: Ace at 03:54 PM | Comments (16)
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You have to give the devil his due. I wish Republicans would have acted this way when these freaks first started showing up.

As he was answering one on Iraq, one of the Paul backers interrupted and shouted that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job, and that the U.S. didnÂ’t need to be in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When he dropped an F-bomb, the crowd booed. Clinton, who had tried to talk over the man, gave up.

"You wanna know what I think?” Clinton said. “You guys who think 9/11 was an inside job are crazy as hell. My wife was the senator from New York when that happened. I was down at Ground Zero. I saw the victims' families. You're nuts."

These Troofers shouldnÂ’t be reasoned with but rather treated like the scum they are.

Sadly, they aren’t anything new. I caught the great post WWII move “The Best Years of Our Lives” recently and have been looking for an excuse to post this scene.

Ideally, thatÂ’s how you deal with a Troofer. And if you havenÂ’t seen the movie, you owe it to yourself to do so.

UPDATE [Dave in Texas]: Goddammit, I have nothing to contribute here anymore.

DrewM hit upon one of my favorite films, The Best Years of Our Lives. The title is bittersweet enough, but the performances by Frederic March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell, a non-actor veteran who won the Academy Award for best supporting actor in 1946 for his portrayal as Homer Parrish, well, they were magnificent.

If you haven't watched it, you should. If you have, I'm preaching to the choir. It's a very good film.

Harold Russell lost his hands in a training accident in 1944. Doing the job. Getting men ready for combat. It is a very good reminder to us all that these magnificent men and women who serve in harm's way, do not always take the hit under fire in anger.

It is a difficult, dangerous job. God bless them.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:23 PM | Comments (30)
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