Poet -- You're right about the polls. And yes, Perhansa, it's early. (And a great and depressing riff, btw, about how it is for most people.) But I can't look at the Democratic contenders, then at the Republican goons, and not feel that this is much more than Bush and Bush-lite. Nader people said that about Bush and Gore too, and well, never mind.

No matter how you cut it, any one of the Dem contenders is light years beyond the Repubs in every way, and on every issue I care about.

So it seems inconceivable to me that we could have another close election, but some folks are saying that's where we're headed.

And a quiet ballot initiative in California may play a big part in tipping the presidential election to the Republicans. Read Hendrik Hertzberg in the August 6 New Yorker to see what initiative mischief is afoot this time.

Here's a clip. "Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union."

Florida. Ohio. Now California.