Democrats picked up the majority plus at least five seats in the Senate Tuesday by seizing seats from Republican incumbents in New Hampshire and North Carolina, while also gaining seats left by retiring Republicans in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico.
The
New York Times has a comprehensive Senate map with the state results as they come in, but at 4:30 EST on Wednesday Democrats had 56 seats and Republicans had 41. Fifty-one is considered a majority, but it could be a few weeks before Democrats learn the final stats.
Last week the series of
presidential debates began and tonight the saga continues with a showdown between vice-presidential candidates
Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. It's the perfect occasion to throw an impromptu viewing party! Hosting a debate party is a great way to feel more involved in the election process.
I can't tell you enough
how important email and online security is! I've been a little obsessed with the recent Sarah Palin email hacking scandal, but have put off saying much about it — until now. The suspected hacker — a 20-year old University of Tennessee student, and son of state representative Mike Kernell —
was seen in front of the Grand Jury on Tuesday, and was let go without an indictment.
Think you can run a better campaign than Obama or McCain? Then you PC users can give it a go with a free game download from the Political Machine! In the
Political Machine Express, you can play as Obama, McCain, Biden, or Palin in a 21-week race to the White House, stopping off in cities around the country for town hall meetings, speeches, debates, and produce TV ads to crush your competition.
If you haven't registered to vote because of one lame excuse or another ("I don't know how," "I don't have time," or my fave "It's too complicated") then I have fabulous news for you — you can now take the simple route and
register to vote using your Xbox! With all the time you spend playing games, the least you can do is make your voice heard in between Gears of War sessions and Mountain Dew runs.
Partnering up with
Rock the Vote, Xbox Live's voter registration is free to access with a
Xbox Live membership.
If there has ever been a year to vote, this would be the one to do it! Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, obviously
CitizenSugar has you covered on the details, but Election 08 is a handy little app to have in your pocket as well.
For only a buck at the
App Store, Election 08 shows you real time results from polls about who is winning each state, and electoral vote estimates on who will take the General Election.
Denny's: Candidate Lookalikes Win Free Breakfast Until 2012Rise and shine, here's your steaming helping of "oh, man the campaign is everywhere! Denny's restaurant is hoping brave citizens will come forward ready to serve the needs of "Real Breakfast" by entering their
candidate lookalike contest. Think you or someone you know has what it takes to become the leader of the free breakfast?
New Yorker Sheryl Oring decided that the general public should be able to write postcards to President Bush, so she started a project called
I Wish to Say, where she dresses in 1950s clothes and uses an antique typewriter to type up postcards from passersbys on the street (she even provides the card stamp for each and every one). Oring is already touring the country, collecting messages from voters who sit at her portable desk. You can see the scans of the postcards and photos of the people who sent them on her site, as well as check them out at the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago this Fall.
After spending more than $600 million on computers to facilitate a high-tech census, the US government has decided to go back to the old-fashioned way of counting the 300 million census forms — by pencil and paper.
CNN reports that this change will add an estimated
$3 billion to the cost of collecting data as 600,000 temporary workers will be needed to manually record the census information by hand.
You'd think in this day and age, the government would want to embrace technology and use the next two years to implement a more accurate way to record the data with computers, instead of spending billions of the taxpayers dollars on going back to the old-school method.
