If you’re not sure about your polling place, look it up here.
As Senator Elizabeth Warren points out, turnout in special elections is expected to be very low. From the Boston Globe:
… Secretary of State William F. Galvin predicted Monday that 1.6 million voters – a record low in a Massachusetts Senate race – will turnout out in Tuesday’s special US Senate election between Democrat Edward Markey and Republican Gabriel E. Gomez… If he is correct, the turnout will be about 600,000 less than voted in the 2010 race between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley, the only other special election for Senate held in Massachusetts history…
And we all remember how well that one turned out. Everybody go do your civic duty, because nobody outside of a few One Percenters wants to watch Gabriel “Like Cosmo Boy, But Without the Superficial Charm” Gomez caucus with the Tea Party for the next seventeen months.
4tehlulz
Vote because you don’t know the next time you’ll get to.
Daniel
Exactly
danimal
That was a kind public service from you to link voters to their voting places.
It made me think, do we have separate instructions for the white male voters and the other (provisional, non-white or non-male) voters yet, or is it too soon?
Maybe we can get that problem solved before the 2014 general election, right SCOTUS?
catclub
@4tehlulz: Or where the new voting place will be.
Xenos
I voted! Absentee, but the vote went in and was confirmed to be received by the town clerk.
Don’t fuck this up, fellow Massholes!!
Baud
Don’t mess this up, Massachusetts.
Violet
@4tehlulz: Yep. Please, please vote, MA folks. The rest of the country is counting on you to vote.
Just Some Fuckhead
I voted absinthe. What the hell happened?
JPL
A Republican Senator in MA would really suck because it is so unnecessary. Boston.com has a live feed where people can post… Torpid turnout: as of noon, 33,365 have voted in Boston. In 2010 special, 55,309 had voted in Boston at noon.
Baud
@JPL:
Ugh. Well, hopefully turn out is down on the other side too, given that the polls gave Markey a huge lead.
Cacti
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Que?
I’m guessing you meant absentee, unless of course you decided to write in absinthe as your preferred candidate.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Maybe the SCOTUS ruling hasn’t reached the consciousness of the MA voters yet?
Elizabelle
I’m thinking the Supremes’ decision may increase voter turnout today. Go Roberts court!
Ted & Hellen
As a registered Democrat living in Jamaica Plain area of Boston, I want to thank John Kerry and President Obama, who in their arrogance and concern for Kerry’s continued career advancement thought it best to tell the Massachusetts Democrats who elected him to fuck off.
Seems that eagerness to serve out his obligation, so sincerely expressed during his last Senatorial campaign, just kind of, oh I don’t know, doesn’t matter or something, or was insincere or whatever, I don’t know…do you?
Ted & Hellen
Kerry’s ambition was clearly worth our state’s expense at putting on a special election, and putting a safe Senate seat up for grabs once again, don’t you think?
It’s amazing the bullshit the American public has been acclimated over time to regard as acceptable behavior from the Oligarchs who supposedly serve us.
giggle
Yatsuno
C.mon Massholes, please don’t fuck this up. No mas pretty boy Repubs without two brain cells to rub together.
Ted & Hellen
@JPL:
I guess John Kerry and Barack Obama would disagree.
Because JK is the one and only living human who could possibly be an effective SOS.
The only one, I tell you!
Tonybrown74
@4tehlulz:
Indeed.
I am heading to my polling place at 4 PM.
SatanicPanic
@Ted & Hellen: It must have come as a shock that he would consider not finishing out his term, at least to people who slept through 2004.
Tim Eagan
Sorry to go OT, but I’m driving in my car and I just heard Sean Hannity literally say, “even the Liberal New Republic.” People in Trader Joe’s are wondering why I’m standing here laughing to myself.
Elizabelle
@Ted & Hellen:
Whatever.
You wearing your “I Voted” sticker?
All that counts is that you voted. The rest is noise.
Cheers.
PS: we get to vote this fall in Virginia, for governor, etc. Yippee.
Cassidy
But who needs voting? If we just wish and project pure enough thoughts, then everything should be fine.
Yatsuno
@SatanicPanic: You don’t get it. Timmeh is DISAPPOINTED you see! Just so totes devastated at being lied to! How dare you mock his disappoint!
Chyron HR
@Ted & Hellen:
So did you actually go vote today, or could you not spare an moment from your busy schedule of haranguing “botulists” (whatever those are)?
Anne Laurie
@Ted & Hellen: Oh fck — don’t tell me you’re sock-puppeting the ‘David Koch’ Repub troll?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Cacti: Nope, he was making a joke.
Cassidy
@Yatsuno: Well, Elizabeth Warren isn’t perfect, but I think she’s pretty awesome.
Cacti
@Ted & Hellen:
Aw, go soak your head ya big baby.
You lost one of your two Democratic Senators temporarily, who in all likelihood will be replaced by another Dem.
When Janet Napolitano left her job as AZ governor to head up DHS, we got Jan Brewer for a replacement.
Cassidy
@David Koch: You’re just wrong, dude. lol
SatanicPanic
@Yatsuno: You know he likes it. And I’m feeling punchy today so everybody wins.
Yatsuno
@Cassidy: Well I did say Repub pretty boys. I know Liz was a Republican at one time (SSHHH!!! Don’t tell Timmeh! He’ll get even moar disappoint!) but she is definitely on the side of the angels now. Funny how studying how people get screwed does that.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Elizabelle:
Eight million Virginians and look at the choices we get for statewide office. That oughta be all the proof anyone needs to know democracy doesn’t work.
Soonergrunt
@Yatsuno: Shorter Special Tim: “It’s all about Meeeeeeeeee! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!”
Ted & Hellen
@SatanicPanic:
And yet he ran for another six year term and didn’t mention the fact that he wasn’t really into us…strange.
Ted & Hellen
@Elizabelle:
Of course not.
I voted for Kerry, expecting him to finish out his term as he is obligated to do.
He, as one of the most senior and influential members of the Senate, a position many honorable people would do almost anything to hold if they were rich and corrupt enough, told me to take my good faith vote and shove it.
Now I am offered Ed Markey, who along with other establishment Dems in Congress, fell all over themselves to enable the horrendous rule and legacy of George W Bush, as Kerry’s replacement.
I rather think not.
Fuck that noise.
raven
You people really STILL talk to this moron?
SatanicPanic
@Ted & Hellen: Fool you once, shame on him, fool you twice… well apparently Mass voters can be fooled twice
Ted & Hellen
@Anne Laurie:
AL, on occasion, you seem slightly sane as BJ’s token Nonbot FP, but then with comments like this one you remind me that you are just a different color of useful tool to the machine.
I thank you for that reminder.
srv
This anniversary needs more attention (not for faint of heart)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/24/remembering-the-upstairs-lounge-the-u-s-a-s-largest-lgbt-massacre-happened-40-years-ago-today/
quannlace
Cripes, soon you’re gonna bitch ‘why’d Lautenberg go ahead and die, to let Christie set up a special election?”
Ted & Hellen
@Cacti:
Useful and fully brainwashed tool of the corrupt two party Oligarchical system.
Good for you, you realist you.
SFAW
@T&H various
Never let it be said that there doesn’t exist a thread which you can’t fuck up with your whiner/purity-troll/sanctimony schtick.
Grow the fuck up, already, will you?
Jesus Mary & Joseph, I can be a major-league prick at times, but even I give it a rest once in awhile.
The least you could do would be to move to
Nuevo AztlanTejas, so you’d REALLY have something to whine about, instead of this penny-ante bullshit.aimai
Oh for Christ’s sake. Kerry has served in the Senate for fucking ever and done yeoman service–its an honor to be asked to be SS and to have a member of the MA delegation serve in that position. He can’t be accused of “cutting and running”–he gave years to MA as a Senator. And the real MA dems know it. Markey will be great. He was an excellent congressman. There are tons of great congressmen in the MA delegation and any one of them would make a great Senator. Its really not that fucking hard to get out and vote. If MA dems are too lazy to do that its not something Barack Obama did to them. He sure didn’t kill Teddy Kennedy and he didn’t choose Martha Coakley last time around. This is all on us. I have already voted Absinthe (I’m stealing that) since I’m out of the country right now.
Ted & Hellen
@Soonergrunt:
Well written and astute as per usual.
Tell me, Sooner, when people are urged to “vote their conscience,” is doing so not “all about ME (them)?” and their personal view of the world?
How then is it any less my right to withhold MY vote as I see fit?
Try to answer with drooling, killer.
SatanicPanic
@raven: Sometimes I can’t help it.
muddy
@raven: Apparently, and it just amplifies it figuratively and literally. I find it tiresome, but others have different ideas of what constitutes a good time I guess. #creativedifferences
SFAW
Anyway: voted a few hours ago. The SFAW-ette (i.e. daughter) voted absentee, her first federal-type election since she turned 18.
Fortunately, she hates Rethugs even more than I do.
ETA: Well, maybe not MORE than I do, but probably not less.
Ted & Hellen
@raven:
Feeling left out, killer?
Ted & Hellen
@quannlace:
No, I’d accept dying as a legitimate reason for leaving office.
SFAW
@Ted & Hellen:
… we end up with 8 years of W.
Glad I could help you with that.
Soonergrunt
@Ted & Hellen: bullshit. Your whining here is that Kerry abandoned YOU. THAT’S what your having your little diaper-shitting tantrum about. And it being all about you, you’re letting all of us know how terribly you’re hurt and outraged that John Kerry didn’t stay in MA just to cater to your needs.
Otherwise you’d have simply said “I’m not voting and here’s why” as if anybody REALLY gives a good goddamn what you do or why you do it.
piratedan
@Cacti: and boy hasn’t that worked out well for us!` Still Jan is either back off her meds or back on the sauce with her VRA statements because we don’t have an immigration problem here in Arizona, dontchaknow.
Ted & Hellen
@SFAW:
You sir, are a dildo.
Could you explain how YOUR thread was soiled by my presence? Does it belong to you? Is there a script in your head for each thread and how it should play out?
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: To be fair, I would care if it wanted to let us know it was going to say “goodbye cruel world”. I don’t care why, but good news is always welcome.
Ted & Hellen
@aimai:
No, not as far as we know, but another excellent example of the arrogance with which our “elected” Oligarchy rules is Kennedy’s refusal to resign during the extended period in which ill health and then terminal decline left us in Massachusetts without half of our Senate representation.
Because Ted’s royal right to nobly die in office is more important than our right to democratic represenation.
Ted & Hellen
@Soonergrunt:
Oh for god’s sake, fuck off, you half wit.
By this inane reasoning, your pathetic FP posts are all about YOU and what YOU think and how YOU feel and YOUR outlook on the world from your unique perspective as a mercenary killer.
Oh wait…
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
Your meds seem balanced today.
SFAW
@Ted & Hellen:
Dildo? Wow. OMG. I have been reduced to tears by your blinding, incisive wit.
Didn’t call it MY thread, shit-for-brains. It MIGHT help your argument if you could actually read and understand what was written. But that would be like asking Jim Inhofe or Jim Hoft NOT to be stupid.
Knock yerself out, Picasso. Your frequent use of pet names (“killer,” “dildo”) only enhance your argument, of course.
SatanicPanic
@Ted & Hellen: Clearly he was trying to finish out his term, because otherwise they would have had to hold a special election, which would put a safe Senate seat up for grabs.
SFAW
@Ted & Hellen:
Listen, you moronic fucking whiner, why don’t YOU run for federal office, so you can show us all how it SHOULD be done.
Cassidy
Look on as the boring ,lonely timmeh lashes out at everything around it hoping to get some sort of emotional contact, yearning for someone to recognize it is a human with needs. It’s addiction to negative emotion, though, makes that impossible. Soon it will die lonely, boring and forgotten. its blood relatives will pretend grief and internally shout with joy as the burden of dealing with such a high maintenance, narcissitic creature lacking in any self awareness is lifted.
geg6
@Ted & Hellen:
Sorry, he never wanted to date you. Anyway, he’s too old for you anyway.
4tehlulz
lulz. looks like t&h is just mad that Kerry went to work for that one.
Just Some Fuckhead
See what happens when I don’t control a thread? You all like to bitch about me but I’m a very effective table captain.
geg6
@aimai:
You realize he’s just bitching about this to bitch, right? I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s not a Dem or a liberal or anyone on our side at all. He’s a GOP troll, sent here to derail any intelligent conversation about anything.
Cacti
@piratedan:
Actually, I had the opposite reaction. I was wondering if Jan had entered a 12-step program, and she was on the one where she was trying to make amends for the harm she’d done. Particularly, the people she let die on the organ transplant list, and her vilifying of hispanics in general.
geg6
@Just Some Fuckhead:
FTR, I never bitch about you. At you, sometimes, but never about you.
Ted & Hellen
@SFAW:
Touched a nerve?
aimai
@geg6: I’ve always assumed he was a republican troll. None of the things he says make sense at all, even for a disgruntled democratic or leftist. Its mostly just garbled, like a not very good turing test crash dummy.
SatanicPanic
@Just Some Fuckhead: I much prefer your drollery to a dipshit who can’t even maintain logical consistency through one thread.
Just Some Fuckhead
@SatanicPanic: I’ve never been accused of being a droll.
Ted & Hellen
@geg6:
I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s not a Dem or a liberal or anyone on our side at all. He’s a GOP troll, sent here to derail any intelligent conversation about anything.
lol
P.S. Who, precisely, is “our?”
Ted & Hellen
@SatanicPanic:
Because logical consistency is the mainstay of Balloon Juice.
lol
Ted & Hellen
THAT DAMN TED AND HELLEN, THEY CAME IN HERE AND TRASHED THE PLACE…AND IT’S NOT THEIR PLACE!
Elizabelle
@Ted & Hellen:
I hear your dogs. They say “walk us to the polling place and hold your f*cking nose and vote for Markey.”
They’re particularly insistent on the “walk” part.
I think you are teasing us. (Not you, right?)
SatanicPanic
@Just Some Fuckhead: As accusations go, it’s not one of the more serious ones.
Elizabelle
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I just don’t see Virginia going for Cuccinelli and his campaign o crazy, but no taking anything for granted.
Terry McAuliffe does not enrapture me, but I will take him happily.
He was running some excellent ads recently about working for transportation funding. Cuccinelli never mentioned, but that (embattled!) current GOP governor McDonnell supported enhanced funding was. Separate the Tea Party from the non-crazy Republicans.
I thought they were effective ads.
Chyron HR
Poor Tim. It must confuse him terribly that “bots” are allowed to post on the front page with impunity, while he has to change his name every couple months to escape being banned from even commenting here.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Elizabelle: See how me and Elizabelle did that, T & H?
ETA: I’ll break it down for ya, if ya want.
Tom Levenson
Voted. My precinct was at 15% turnout at 11:40 — the time I exercised my franchise. I checked in again at 2:30 as I was picking my boy up from school. (yup — snow days. Feh all round.) Up to right around 25% — and this before the after work bulge. The state may not be turning out, but my extremely Democratic neighborhood is, or at least enough to beat expectations.
gogol's wife
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Maybe it was a typo, d for a t. J/K
Amir Khalid
@Ted & Hellen:
Didn’t you know? We’ve set up a Balloon Juice Commenters Cabal. We have a special members-only treehouse and everything. Everyone is invited to join — everyone except you, that is. So there. (Sticks tongue out at T&H.)
Ted & Hellen
@Just Some Fuckhead:
No thanks.
You run your shtick and I’ll run mine.
Besides, I have page views to generate for Cole.
Ted & Hellen
@Amir Khalid:
You pretty much nailed it.
Another Halocene Human
@Ted & Hellen: But I don’t want to vote, because that, would, like, be letting the bastards win.
Also, I love the smell of NOX in the morning and hate the sound of trolley bells.
Wolverines!
Another Halocene Human
@SatanicPanic: Note that the kitchen utensil says nothing about voting against Kerry in the primary (there was a primary yesterday? weird), which I did during the Iraq war runup/debacle … hell, we hit the streets in the South End. Not actually to unseat Kerry but to make our voices heard, and we did.
Markey is a huge improvement over Kerry.
4tehlulz
Just voted in the fascist commonwealth of Watertown. Polling place was busy. No line, but a constant flow of voters in and out of the school.
SFAW
@Ted & Hellen:
No, you whiner. I just get tired of your sanctimonious (ooh, there’s that word again) whining.
Someone I know, some years ago, was bent about the way certain elected officials were conducting “the people’s business.” He thought about it, said to himself that, if he wasn’t willing to do something about it, then he had no right to whine. He decided the right to whine was important enough to him, so he “put up” rather than “shut up.”
So he ran for office. Unfortunately for him, and maybe the electorate, the jerkoff won.
Let us know when you do something more than this bullshit trolling of which we have all become so fond. Until then, you might consider FOAD.
In the meantime, maybe you could write in Saint Ralph, so that you can “vote your conscience.”
SFAW
@4tehlulz:
Not sure “fascist” is the best term to use, given the demographic makeup there. But better than calling them turkeys, I guess.
Regnad Kcin
one hour left here; 19% turnout in my town as of 3pm
different-church-lady
@Ted & Hellen: I take it you filled the oval for the “twelfth seal” party, or whatever the hell it was?
different-church-lady
@4tehlulz:
And damned proud of it.
MomSense
@Xenos:
And the bonus is that every time a Democrat votes, Alito cries!
ellennelle
can’t find any results coming in as yet, but fwiw, in the months leading up to this election, i have seen one – ONE – gomez sign. in a yard. NONE on a vehicle.
not that this is any measure, but i have been quite struck by that, especially in comparison to the scott/coakley contest, where brown signs were everywhere.
loads of markey signs all ’round now tho, cars and yards. and there is just not the rumbling undercurrent of hatred we saw in ’10, either. which i think to a great extent was fueled by a rather sick incitement of kennedy hatred, not to mention the koch-fueled ACA rage.
hoping the MA voters have returned to their more common sanity, after seeing the insanity that is the republican party. and oh yeah, the rude bombast that is this gomez guy; gag.
Ted & Hellen
@SFAW:
Tool.
Ted & Hellen
@different-church-lady:
I made it clear up thread that I chose not to vote today.
So far there’s no law requiring all good American comrades to vote, as there was in the old Soviet Union but I’m sure the BJ Bots wish there were.
Tools.
Ted & Hellen
@Regnad Kcin:
Looks like I’m not the only one who chose to vote with my non participation today. We’re allowed to do that, you know.
Cue eemom: IF YOU DON’T VOTE YOU ARE HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER.
different-church-lady
@ellennelle: Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/news/special/politics/2013/senate/mass-us-senate-results-2013.html
different-church-lady
@Ted & Hellen: The two of you sure are mouthy for people with no preference.
SFAW
@different-church-lady:
Tool
Oh, sorry, my PFL just got done, I thought I was
Dumb & DumbererTed & Picasso for a second.different-church-lady
@Ted & Hellen:
Well no, that’s not the only reason in this case…
ellennelle
@different-church-lady:
thx; clearly i do not live in those red areas!
thankfully.