A number have people have gone to see our old blog via this link: http://www.stompernet.com/StomperForum/tabid/111/forumid/44/postid/20736/view/topic/Default.aspx. Does anybody have any idea what it may be? "Stompernet" appears to have something to do with SEOs.

So one major nuisance created by voting absentee in the Indiana Ninth and having an Indiana cell phone is the huge number of calls I received today by interested partisans urging me to turn out and vote before the polls close today.

The bulk of these calls have been by Democrats-- is that because something in my profile makes me look like a likely Democratic voter (I'm not registered with a party), is it simply because the Democrats figure they are more likely to benefit from increased turnout on average, or is it sheer chance?

From an alarmingly un-prescient post just a little bit over a year ago:

Selling Crescat:

Some recent silliness has led people to attempt to figure out the cash value of various blogs-- including this one (circa $114,000). ... [But] if Crescat were run by somebody other than us, it would hardly be anything but an unpronouncable latin name and a load of Movable Type malfunctions. ...

At any rate, the $114,000 figure is intriguing. Leaving aside the problem of splitting the lucre with my co-bloggers, I am actually not sure that I would give up blogging for that sum ... I suppose I could give up Crescat and simply set up shop elsewhere, but this is home, and the one-fives are far off. And, of course, it's not as if there's an actual buyer out there with a six-figure check, so virtue untested is ignorance.

Early this election morning, I'm left wondering, as I always am on election day, why we've been left with such a bunch of clowns to choose from. Where's Washington? Where's Jefferson? Why can't I even get a Hamilton somewhere on my ballot? Have we degenerated genetically? Or is it all a kind of moral lameness?

Of course, I know everyone's answer. Raffi's a naive idiot to think that those people were better. After all, they owned slaves. And just read what they wrote about each other.

There's no excuse for the crime of slavery. And they knew it was wrong. It was, in a sense, the great blind spot of our first century. But they were nonetheless a great generation. To my mind, unparalleled since. People who governed with a sort of clarity - a sort of panache haven't seen since Teddy Roosevelt.

I've never gotten very far finding an answer to the question of their singularity, until I read Gordon Wood's new book on the founding generation, "Revolutionary Characters". Wood's response to this question, simply, is that the greatness of the founders was based in the fact that they were aristocrats. They governed as if they saw history looking over their shoulder, because they assumed, as naturally born great men, that history would be writing about them. Wood tells the story of Washington's complete befuddlment at being given some shares of stock by a friend while in private life, and his desperation to give them away, to avoid looking like he had self interest in the eyes of posterity. Can we imagine any of our politicians now doing such a thing, awash as they are in money? Of course not. And Wood is right to say that it's partly because politicians have lost their sense that they ought to be better than everyone else.

As Wood concludes, aristrocracy isn't a price we ought to pay for greater individual people. We're stuck with our politicians, in part precisely because we're a democratic people. So tomorrow, I'm going to open a history book, and read about a few of the heroes I wish I could have met. And then hold my nose and vote for those reflections of ourselves that I find on the ballot.