Well folks, we’re just about there. Here on the east cost, it’s about 10 minutes until “election day”, though obviously we’re farther away from the ballots opening up. It’s going to be quite covered by the various news networks’ web sites. Get out there and vote.

Folks, I feel silly that it took me this long to come around, but here it is. After believing in Global Warming for years now, I have seen the light. Most surprisingly, it came in the form of a single-panel political cartoon I found on the web. Here it is.

My god, it’s so simple! I have never heard that argument before! Until this very moment, I had never seen anyone use the incredibly astute observation that it still gets cold late in the year, and thus invalidates the entire theory of Global Warming!

See, I had foolishly believed that a global average temperature increase of 2 degrees would be fairly unnoticeable given the changing of seasons, but oh how wrong I was. It seemed logical that if winter averages -20 degrees Fahrenheit on a given day, upping it to -18 would be hard to notice. But no, no, no. You see, I was unaware that an offshoot of Global Warming is the complete eradication of seasonal weather changes.

The Earth normally has a tilted axis that causes the seasons. During the winter, a given portion of the globe is tilted away from the sun and that makes it colder. Then the tilt changes and the seasons flip around. What I didn’t realize was that if global warming was true, it would actually straighten the tilt and turn the planet into a cylinder so it all got warmer at the same time and there would be no winter at all anywhere. After all, it’s called Global WARMING. How can it be real if it’s not always warm?

I had also, for some reason, thought that the average temperature increase would be an AVERAGE. Mathematically, that would mean that even if the coldest days stayed the same or even got a little colder, if the warmer days were warmer than normal then the average would still go up. To use a horribly ill thought out example (I’m embarrassed to admit I thought of it), if normally your winters average 20 degrees F and your summers average 90 degrees F, the year averages to 55 degrees F. If the next year the winter gets colder, down to 19 degrees F, but the summer temp averages 95 degrees F, now the year’s temperature is 57 degrees F and that’s an increase.

Wrong again! Clearly, for Global Warming to be true, EVERY day would have to blazingly hot. Oh sure, some of the matharazzis would say that if every day is 95 degrees, that would actually be an average temperature increase of roughly 40 degrees in our example, but that’s just the alarmists trying to ignore the plain and simple truth: if Global Warming were real, why is it cold outside?

Take THAT, Al Gore! Your charts and scientifically reviewed studies simply don’t stand up to this bulletproof logic.

This is the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to see, at least in that incredibly petty schadenfreude area of my brain. Take a look and enjoy.

[youtube]81xjAgCOX3A[/youtube]

Now I figured it’d be obvious, but I’ll point some stuff out just in case:

1. The guy was in a controlled environment. They gave him the tip of the iceberg concerning this treatment. As soon as he flailed a little and said “let me up!” they did so. Given that a person can go without oxygen for 4-5 minutes before death creeps up, you can bet a prisoner would be held twitching and trying to scream for far longer than we see here.
2. One of the most common arguments is that it isn’t torture if it doesn’t result in organ failure. The implication here is that since this isn’t a brutal beating, once they let you out of the water it’s all gravy. The guy even says he was impressed by how quickly he recovered. This is true if you’re only held for a minute or so, but brain cells start to die at somewhere around the 4 minute mark. So I’d be curious to see how many people are being waterboarded to the point of brain damage.
3. The entire crux of this damn debate rests on the assumption that every person being waterboarded knows something. As I’ve documented before, a lot of people in these prisons are innocent. So is there anyone out there who actually believes that someone gets waterboarded in Abu Ghraib, then they say “I don’t know anything!” and the guards go “Oh, I’m sorry! Go back to your cell!”? No way. They get thrown into the water again and again until they start to talk. Then we find ourselves back at point #2.

This is ugly stuff, folks.

Take a look, things aren’t good for the GOP. First is Dick Morris, Fox’s favorite “liberal” to have on, so reds can pretend like “reasonable liberals agree with us.” Here we have his prediction: a massacre.

Even with those nail-biters too close to call, 2006 will go down in history as one of the worst years for the Republicans.

Why the rout? President Bush let Iraq be the major issue of the election. He could have raised worries about North Korea and homeland security to the same level, but he insisted on focusing on Iraq, making changes in tactics and trying to sell them to a cynical America. Thus, he was left defending a failure rather than trumpeting his key successes.

Here’s a good rundown from AmericaBlog:

ABC host George Stephanopoulos
House: Dems pick up 25 seats in the House
Senate: Dems pick up 5 seats in the Senate

Conservative Republican writer George Will
House: Dems will take House, have a majority of ten seats
Senate: Dems get maybe a tie in the Senate

Democratic consultant Donna Brazile
House: 23 seat Dem pick-up in House
Senate: Dems will get 5 in Senate, maybe 6

ABC Pollster Mark Halperin
House: Minimum Dem pick up 21, max 40
Senate: Dems pick up 3 to 6

A great site I found via the comments, Political Critic, has a nice outline for both the House and the Senate. Then, just to have a little fun, let’s see what FOX is saying about the national scene.

Nearly half of likely voters — 49 percent — favor the Democratic candidate in their House district and 36 percent the Republican, with 15 percent still undecided in a FOX News poll conducted the final weekend before the midterm elections.

More Democrats (37 percent) than Republicans (26 percent) say they are extremely interested in tomorrow’s elections, and more Democrats (89 percent) than Republicans (81 percent) say they plan to vote for their party’s candidate in their district.

I’ve always said single polls are less important than multiple polls, and I think it’s very telling that the most “optimistic” redcoats are saying that the race is “tightening”. That’s the best they have at this point. That things are getting close. There isn’t a single poll, or series of polls, saying that the republicans are going to keep the House, and none that I’ve seen that will say the Senate isn’t at the very least “close”.

Even in the sunniest of scenarios for the right, the dems take the House and the Senate gap narrows. In the most likely case, the dems take the House with a solid margin and the Senate just barely. In what would be damn awesome, it’s a landslide in both.

Make sure to get out there tomorrow, folks.