Senate 48-50-2 (Dems/I +5). Webb, Tester, McCaskill, Steele, Corker, Menendez, Kyl, Lieberman, Casey, Whitehouse, Brown in the battlegrounds. Least confident on Steele. Chafee and Burns each have an outside shot.

House 229 D, 206 R. (Dems +26).

Bad for trade, good (?) for small government, mixed for immigration.

Side note: maybe I'd feel better about Democrats and their relation to their exploited base (African-Americans), if I didn't read stories like this one about their wonderful compromise with my socially liberal, fiscally conservative Austrian who vetoed a gay marriage bill, increased public spending by 27%, and killed prison reform at the behest of the Democratic party run, corrupt prison guards' union: [here]

Thanks Dems. Thanks Pubs. Aargh.

Update: Predictions in the box below. Closest to House/Senate (Senate deviations count double, tiebreaker is the vote in MD [Steele: 51.2]) wins a copy of Hume signed by me and posted to you. "Contest" closes with the release of the first exits (tomorrow around 7:30 PM EST).

For what it may be worth, I predict that the Democrats will take back the House (for better or worse), but will not control the Senate. If so, what follows?

The Nonprofiteer hopes that the Democrats will push for D.C. statehood, so as to entrench their gains.

Nancy Pelosi, however, has cautioned that impeachment is off the table. Ethan Leib discusses the propriety of the pledge.

Meanwhile, Kaimi Wenger jokingly explores the possibilty that a Democratic Senate will lead to fewer Supreme Court Justices like O'Connor and more like Thomas.

While trying to escape my blog troubles, I have seen a few movies, old and new:
The Queen: Tyler Cowen loved this movie ("One of the few must-see movies of the year"), and he was right. I don't really care about the underlying subject matter (the tension between the Prime Minister and the Queen during the death of Princess Diana) but it was a fascinating political science drama. I couldn't stop thinking, though, about how bizarre it is for the head of the government and the ceremonial head of state be different people. Tony Blair doing his own dishes? Heck, what is Tony Blair doing living in a crowded urban apartment? In America, the President has a huge staff devoted to giving him as much free time as needed to run the country. And The White House looks a lot more like Buckingham Palace than 10 Downing Street.

Shortbus: As Phoebe warns, this movie has a whole lot of sex, right off the bat, much of which is not particularly sexy, attractive, or desirable. And yet not exactly undesirable either. I think to like this movie, which is essentially about experimentation and the quest for satisfaction of heterogenous sexual preferences, one probably has to like sex a great deal, or at least to be happy spending a great deal of time thinking about it, and thinking aobut how other people do it. Sort of like the Kinsey Report, only in the form of a pornographic movie.

Beautiful Girls: If the movies that are called "Chick Flicks" were made for male audiences, this is what they would be. Stable and loving relationships are exalted over Uma Thurman or (a very illegal) Natalie Portman. Rosie O'Donnell discusses breast size. I liked this one, although I watched it with only half my attention while cooking dinner. I don't regret not giving it the other half.

Sitting on the table in front of me is my Indiana (District Nine) absentee ballot. The Republican candidate is the first one listed for each office, which (I am told) increases my likelihood of voting Republican by two percentage points.

While I know who I will vote for for Representative, all of the other races (including the uncontested ones) pose interesting questions. Yes, I know that my vote is statistically unlikely to count, but that makes the political ethical question harder rather than easier. Here is a blog by a libertarian covering the Ninth District. He only ever wrote one post, but he doesn't like Representative Sodrel.

Suggestions and comments are welcome.

From the new owner of www.crescatsententia.org, in response to my demand that he take down the faux-Crescat currently there:

The content on crescatsententia is not copyrighted nor is it revenue generating so there would be no issue with the domain in its current state ... the content will stay up for now.

Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

[R]egistration is not a condition of copyright protection.

I should also mention that now that we no longer own dot-org, the old emails you used to reach us may be non-functional (although those accounts had become so clogged by spam that not all of checked them anyway). I can be reached at william dot baude at yale dot org edu, and I'll update contact information and other information for the site as soon as possible.

UPDATE: That's yale dot edu!