ROGER SIMON has a Hollywood election scoop.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

HEH.

STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE notes that CNN’s Alan Wastler can’t seem to count. He’s claiming daily traffic totals of 34,000 for DailyKos, 80,000 for all of Typepad, and 325,000 for all of Blogspot.

What is this guy smoking? Back when I was on Blogspot I was running a third of that all by myself — and by these numbers, InstaPundit would be getting more traffic than all the Blogspot blogs put together. Hmm. Maybe he’s just trying to make InstaPundit look really good, but this is absurd.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear looks at the CNN methodology: “I gather that comScore is coming up with their figures by using a panel of web users and surveying their surfing habits, then extrapolating that behavior to the web universe as a whole.”

Sounds like exit polling. Hey, that couldn’t be wrong. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm, CNN has a rather dubious history regarding numbers and the blogosphere. It’s like they’re trying to talk down their competition or something. . . .

MARK STEYN writes that it wasn’t just rednecks voting for Bush:

The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they’re going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President’s victory to: “The self-righteous, gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, foreigner-despisin’, non-passport-ownin’ rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land ‘free and strong’.”

Well, that’s certainly why I supported Bush, but I’m not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin’ sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire country – not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too.

Read the whole thing, which is Steyn at his most amusing. (“You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it’s one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea.”) I’ve been reading James Webb’s new book, Born Fighting : How the Scots-Irish Shaped America and it’s amazing to note how the comments Steyn quotes above match up with things that English writers were saying about the Scots-Irish two or three centuries ago, now turned into a view of Americans in general. This supports Webb’s thesis that Scots-Irish culture has become the strongest thread of American culture, I suppose. If you’ve already read David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, there’s not a whole lot that’s new in Webb’s book, but Webb’s book is much more digestible for the casual reader than Fischer’s rather lengthy book. And as you might expect, it’s well-written. If you want just the gist, though, you might want to read this column by Webb, or this piece by a somewhat less impressive author.

IT’S LITTLE GREEN MEN, WITH SQUEEGEES:

As NASA’s Mars rovers keep rolling past all expectations of their useful lives, scientists have a happy mystery: For some reason one of the vehicles has actually gained power recently.

Opportunity recently experienced an unexplained rejuvenation from what can so far be described only as two or three significant “cleaning events,” said Jim Erickson, the rover project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

“Now we’re assuming they’re cleaning, but all we can really say is that overnight the solar panels produced between 2 and 5 percent additional power immediately,” he said. “We’re surmising that for some reason dust is being removed from the solar panel and that’s increasing the efficiency of the sunlight being converted to electricity.”

The rover team has been bandying about theories, but hasn’t figured out the cause.

“One favorite is that a dust devil happened to pick the vehicle to go through and go over the surface of it and clean it off a little bit,” Erickson said.

Another government coverup.

OKAY, ONE MORE before I head back over to the hospital this morning. Hugh Hewitt has some advice for Republicans:

The opposition to Specter seems headquartered at The Corner. Many friends post at The Corner, so I paused, considered their arguments, and thought it through. On reflection, it seems to me a very bad idea to try and topple Senator Specter from what in the ordinary course of events would be his Chairmanship. I hope my colleagues on the center-right that embrace pro-life politics will reconsider.

I understand that Senator Specter voted against Robert Bork, and that Senator Specter is not a friend of the pro-life movement. But genuine progress in the fight to return American public opinion to an affirmation of life before birth cannot be made through strong-armed tactics and almost certainly will not be lasting if it is accomplished through a putsch.

I’m not a pro-lifer like Hugh, of course, but I’ve felt that the folks at The Corner have been a bit carried away on this, too. I hope that they’ll listen to Hugh in a way they probably wouldn’t listen to me on this subject.

I’M PLEASED TO REPORT THE BIRTH of my nephew, William Glenn Uti Reynolds! Nine pounds, three ounces, 21 1/2 inches. We grow ’em big.

My blogging is likely to be limited today. But Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Sullivan have lots of new posts. So does Tom Maguire, who’s discovered an interesting campaign surprise for John Edwards.

And several readers note that Michael Moore doesn’t have anything on his website about the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by Islamic extremists, just more Bush-bashing.

That’s OK. Jeff Jarvis thinks Moore lost the election for the Democrats. Do we really want him taking an active role in the war on terror? Er, on our side, I mean.

I’M OFF TO MY BROTHER’S: Blogging will resume later.

ALL THE RED STATE / BLUE STATE “VALUES” TALK puts me in mind of this passage from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, in which he compares and contrasts the two styles:

Weirdly, the ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone were the Modern Language Association types who believed that everything was relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy. The friendliest and most sincere welcome he’d gotten was from Scott, a chemistry professor, and Laura, a pediatrician, who, after knowing Randy and Charlene for many years, had one day divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that, unbeknownst to the academic community at large they had been spiriting their three children off to church every Sunday morning, and had even had them baptized. . . .

Randy hadn’t the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially, that was not the issue, because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Where as people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.

Somehow, this seems quite relevant to the discussion.

EUROPEANS, TERRORISM and Theo Van Gogh: The Belgravia Dispatch has some useful observations.

And read this piece on post-Arafat maneuvering, too.

I’M BLOGGING FROM BORDERS at the moment, and I couldn’t help but notice all the Michael Moore films in the discount bin.

Yeah, I know. Probably this has absolutely nothing to do with the election, but . . .

And note all the Jerry Lewis films behind them. Well, they’re both big in France!

BUSH OR BUST! I think they should have taken this picture a bit earlier, though.

JIM LINDGREN notes David Brooks’ comments about the Scopes Trial in the column I link below, and points out that things aren’t as many remember them where that trial is concerned. He’s right. For a more — dare I say it — nuanced view, I highly recommend Ed Larson’s book, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. Larson and I were on a Court TV program about this trial a few years ago, though I don’t think it’s available anywhere.

ECONOPUNDIT: “Great election, kid. Don’t get cocky.”

A VIEW OF THE ELECTIONS FROM IRAQ, via The Mudville Gazette.

DAVID BROOKS:

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.

He’s got numbers from Andrew Kohut.

HEH: “Post-Election, Hollywood Seen as Liability to Left.” Indeed.

HOW YOU COULD HAVE HAD MY VOTE: Another reluctant Bush voter tells the Democratic Party why:

Many Bush voters, like myself, were not happy to be voting for the President’s re-election. Many Bush voters agonized over our decision and cast our vote in fear, trepidation, and trembling. Many of us would have given our left arms for a Democrat we could have supported. . . .

Read the whole thing. Especially if you’re a bigshot Democrat — or E.J. Dionne.

VAN GOGH UPDATE: Dutch Charge 7 Muslim Men in Killing of a Critic of Islam.

CHRISTMAS IS COMING, and Kim du Toit has noticed that the Violence Policy Center has published a helpful list of guns specially designed for children. Unfortunately, there’s no link for ordering them, though after perusing their list and using Google, I’m thinking that the Anschutz 1451 youth model might be good for the Insta-Daughter.

ERIC SCHEIE isn’t so sure that reality is what the “reality-based community” has a grip on.

UPDATE: Meanwhile at “reality-based” blog The Daily Kos, reality seems less important than, well, lying:

And thus, the biggest silver lining of this election is how the GOP’s victory is thus far being claimed, framed and explained. To that I say, “Let us join that chorus.” And we should do so now, because there is immediacy in the post-election window of opportunity.

Marching order #1, therefore, is this: No matter whom you talk to outside our circles, begin to perpetuate the (false, exaggerated) notion that George Bush’s victory was built not merely on values issues, but gay marriage specifically. If you feel a need to broaden it slightly, try depicting the GOP as a majority party synonymous with gay-haters, warmongers and country-clubbers. Because I, for one, am tired of hearing whiny complaints from conservatives that, not only do I not have values, but that I fail to properly respect the values of people who are all too happy to buy into, no less perpetuate, inaccurate caricatures of the 54+ million Americans who voted Tuesday for John Kerry.

Criticizing the GOP ain’t gonna build us a new national majority. But the process is brick by brick, or perhaps, brickbat by brickbat. We didn’t decide the rules of engagement, but that’s what they are and so we may as well start firing away.

This doesn’t strike me as a very productive approach, but the post is certainly revealing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reality: “Daily Kos raised more than $500,000 to assist the campaigns of fifteen candidates. None were elected.” Ouch.

MORE: Further reality-based blogging, here.

INTERESTING COMMENT FROM A RELUCTANT BUSH VOTER over at Roger Simon’s place, illustrating some of the things the exit polls left out. Meanwhile, over at Andrew Sullivan’s an emailer crunches the numbers on states with anti-gay-marriage initiatives and states without them, and concludes: “On the contrary, there is no evidence that suggests that the strategy of putting the anti-marriage initiatives on the ballot in several states did anything to improve Bush’s performance in those states.”

Sullivan’s posted the numbers, which are quite interesting. This is the kind of analysis we ought to be getting from Big Media.

UPDATE: More here on “Gay Marriage and the Ground Game” from the Ashbrook Center. It’s generally consistent with what Sullivan’s reader says — gay marriage didn’t make much of a difference.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s Paul Freedman in Slate, saying the same thing: “Terrorism, not values, drove Bush’s re-election.”

These differences hold up at the state level even when each state’s past Bush vote is taken into account. When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.

I think that’s right.

OLD POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS DON’T REALLY DIE — they don’t even fade away much, apparently, as this 1996 bumper sticker I noticed on campus the other day illustrates.

I’m not sure why this sighting struck me as somehow profound on the day before the election, but it did. A political campaign is an evanescent thing, but its consequences live on . . .

Let’s hear it for long-lasting ink.

TORONTO SUN COLUMNIST THANE BURNETT offers advice for angry Kerry supporters wanting to emigrate to Canada:

As Canadians, you’ll have to learn to embrace and use all the products and culture of Americans, while publicly bad-mouthing their way of life.

Not much of a stretch, really, for some people.

NEWS FROM FALLUJAH: The Green Side is a blog worth reading.

It looks like things are about to happen there. And Ann Althouse notes a post-election shift in tone at the New York Times.