Cartographs of the US electoral map adjusted for population and electoral representation, which gives you an idea how much the whole “small state bias” distorts things.

He’s apparently openly threatening to caucus with the GOP if he loses his committees. Knock yourself out, Joe. The Dem margin is big enough that we don’t need you, and you need a fucking spanking like nobody I’ve ever seen.

Josh Marshall puts it pretty clearly:

I think much of what Lieberman did over the last year was inexcusable. But magnanimity in victory is always a virtue and usually wise. So I don’t think it’s necessary to expel him from the caucus. And perhaps there are some perks of seniority he could be allowed to retain. But allowing him to keep his chairmanship is simply unacceptable. It’s a position the Democrats hold because of the joint efforts of Democrats across the country pulling together to support Democratic policies and ideals and elect Democratic candidates. For Lieberman to enjoy the fruits of that labor after working so hard to stymie that effort would be unconscionable.

Sen. Reid, show your mettle. Kick Joe to the curb. Connecticut will elect another Dem in 4 years, and even if they don’t, you’ll still have the majority.

The Obama campaign has released a set of snapshots taken by a campaign staffer of Obama and his family watching the returns, realizing the result, watching McCain’s speech, and heading out to give his own address. There are several really nice and unposed moments caught there.

You may not have voted for him, but the pictures are fascinating anyway — I don’t recall seeing similar pictures from any other election, and these are in particular neat because the candidate has a young family around him. Check ’em out.

As it turns out, in every election since 1980, each successive Democratic candidate has gotten more (popular) votes than the prior one. Mondale outscored Carter, Dukakis outscored Mondale, Clinton outpolled Dukakis, and then outpolled himself four years later, etc. The line for the Republicans is vastly less consistent.

A reckoning is coming for Joe Lieberman. It’s unlikely the Dems will reach 60 even with him, so for my money I say freeze his sorry ass completely out: no chairs, no nothing. Don’t even let the turncoat bastard speak. Let him vote with the GOP if he wants to; if he does that, he’s unlikely to win his seat back given his constituency. He’s of course free to endorse and campaign for whomever he wants, but he shouldn’t expect the party he shat all over for two years to support him or reward him for that behavior.

At 1:20 in this video, our friend AJ is clapping. In a crowd of 200,000 people in Grant Park, CNN caught a shot of someone we all knew, and 30 people in Jason Nodler’s living room immediately pointed and yelled “THAT’S AJ!”

Did Nate Silver pull it off? The current called-state map looks an awful lot like his last projection. Like, exactly. Being essentially right is one thing; calling 50 states correctly is something else again. If Indiana and Virginia break Dem, he’s done it.

Currently, the closed-projections from major media outlets total 207 electoral votes. This total does not include the 55 votes for California, the 7 for Oregon, and the 11 for Washington, none of which have been even close to competitive. Further, Virginia and Florida are still uncalled, but Pennsylvania and Ohio are in Obama’s column.

We are Done. Oh thank you Jesus, we are done, in so many ways.

The writer is fairly centrist, but has made no bones about his disdain for Bush’s administration. Yesterday, he made his endorsement official. Here are some choice bits, reproduced here because I like them enough I want to make it absurdly easy for as many people as possible to read them:

I endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States and will be voting for him on Tuesday. I heartily encourage you to do so as well, if in fact you have not voted already.

I’m going to vote for him because I believe he is what I think a president should be: Smart, informed, engaged, practical in ideas and in the execution of those ideas, deliberative and as we have seen in this campaign, someone who keeps his head while all those around him are losing theirs. […]

He’s not where he is now because he got lucky. He got there because he worked for it. I mean, holy God, people: He’s a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Think of what you have to do just to get beyond that here in these United States. I joked the other day that it was a verifiable miracle of St. Obama, but in the real world, it’s no miracle. The man earned being where he is today, and likely where he will be at the end of Tuesday night.

I’m voting for Obama, but I’m also voting against both the Republican Party and John McCain, and voting against both for the same reason: Outside of a drive to win and be in power, there’s just nothing there. […]

… Bush is the standard bearer for the GOP because the GOP wanted him. He was (in what will likely soon be more than one sense of term) the ultimate president for the modern GOP: a genial figurehead for the general population to have its figurative beer with while the “smart guys,” rather less attractive (no one wants to have a beer with Karl Rove), do their thing in the background. Bush was what the GOP wanted him to be and did everything they wanted him to do. Its problem is not that Bush wrecked the GOP brand, but that through him the modern GOP became what it was always going to be, in the end.

I was never going to vote for John McCain, but of all the GOP primary candidates this year, he was the one I would have had the least problem with eventually becoming president. But he lost me with his campaign, which was substanceless, stunt-driven and more focused on trying to scare voters from Obama than on making the case for McCain. I wanted to feel like if McCain won that there would still be enough of a break between his administration and the Bush administration that we wouldn’t continue the downward spiral we’ve been on — that McCain at least would be there at the controls, trying to yank the flaps into a “climb” position. Instead all I got from his campaign was that McCain’s a maverick, and Obama hangs with terrorists and probably wants to eat my children. You know, I’m not stupid. I know when someone’s trying to distract me with handwaving from the fact there’s no there there.

And then there’s the Palin thing, which exposed the bankruptcy of both the McCain campaign and the modern GOP. No one in the world believes that the Palin pick was anything more than a spur-of-the-moment choice, a sop to the GOP base and a transparently cynical bid for the Democratic women still smarting from Clinton’s loss in the primaries, an estimation by McCain’s camp that Palin’s possession of a vagina outweighed the fact that she shared not a single policy with that presidential candidate. […]

But the Palin pick did firm up the support of the GOP base, a fact which should terrify anyone with a working brain. Palin is indisputably the single worst major party candidate for high office in living memory, a proudly ignorant political automaton whose only notable qualities are a pretty face, a sufficient lack of awareness to blind her to her own incompetencies and a quality of ambition that can only be described as voracious. The GOP base should have been insulted that this was all it was given by the McCain campaign; instead it embraced her and has declared her a frontrunner for 2012. Which tells you that the GOP base has learned nothing in the last eight years; Palin, in every way that matters, is nothing more than Bush with boobs. […]

It’s appalling that the GOP base holds up Palin as the sort of person it wants as president of the country, and it points to the sort of intellectual and moral vacuousness that party has that the rest of us simply can’t afford anymore. McCain’s decision to pick her as his running mate is something politics wonks will discuss for decades, one of those credibility-destroying moments that in retrospect simply defies belief.

As for how I felt about it personally, let me put it this way: before the Palin pick, I was going to vote for Obama. After the Palin pick, I was also and most emphatically voting against McCain. The only way Palin should be in the White House is on the public tour.