This was buried in a story on the Fallujah offensive:

In the course of locating seven weapons caches in a single block around a mosque in northeast Fallujah, an Iraqi platoon Wednesday found a suitcase full of vials labeled "Sarin," a deadly nerve agent.

For the purposes of terrorists, wouldn't a suitcase full constitute a "stockpile"?

Who is your favorite conservative columnist? Go vote over at Crush Kerry. As of this writing Ann Coulter has a commanding lead.

Is there a such thing as a guest non-blogger? Someone who doesn't post when you are to busy not to?

Apologies to our readers (both of you!) for the paucity of posting. We are preparing to spend some time on sabbatical--still blogging of course--in the jungles of the West Indies and South America.

To do that you need shots, and those shots can put you out of business for a couple of days. On the positive side, it was fun to show our wife the bandaids...all over. Heh.

Come to think of it, what a perfect way to begin the new Senate next year--with the renomination of a previously filibustered nominee!

Looks like Alberto Gonzales will replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Gonzales is a good man and we expect a journeyman's job from him as AG.

We are also quietly relieved that Gonzales won't be headed for the federal judiciary any time soon. Gonzales had been on everyone's short list for nomination to a federal appellate court nomination, or even the Supreme Court. We don't think he's a Souter, but he is middle of the road enough to win easy confirmation. Miguel Estrada, whom the Democrats filibustered last year, would make a much better Supreme Court Justice.

Of course, our favorite candidate for the SCT job remains Alex Kozinski. And no, it's not just because we've met him and we both bungee jump.

Once again, the future has been foretold. By us.

We predicted that oil prices would plummet after the election. Here's a story on the seven week drop in progress--it actually started before the election, a little earlier than we had thought.

A quote from the Washington Post:

--Everyone--not just gullible reporters but top Bush and Kerry strategists--was taken in by those pro-Kerry exit polls that missed the Bush tide.

Nonsense! We told people to ignore the exit polls even before they came out! That's right folks. Your steady rudder was here all along.

More on Arafat from The Corner:

“Symbolically, it's sort of hideously beautiful. It would have delighted Balzac. A killer billionaire dies in a Paris bed ... having abandoned in his final hours the nest he fouled so thoroughly that he himself, in his final hours, instead of choosing to die in the place he said he'd give his life for, went off to France to croak in comfort.”

Now that this evil has left the world, what should Israel do? For now, nothing. Sit tight. Terrorism is so ingrained in the Palestinian areas that any new leader would have to embrace it. So don't recognize one--yet. Arafat, like all despots, constantly purged potential rivals. As a result he has left a vacuum. Israel can't fill that vacuum.

It seems likely that the various terror organs will fight each other for power. Let them. Let them kill each other. Let them create chaos. Let them further alienate those Palestinians who sincerely desire peace. At some point Israel can move in, round up the bad guys and offer the Palestinians that peace.

Timing is everything. No one in the current terror culture will support peace now. But if Israel waits too long someone will eventually consolidate power and lead a new Palestinian terror regime. Israel must be patient, and prepared. Move when the time is right and Mr. Sharon could write an epochal final chapter to an already remarkable life story.

The RINO Senator from Rhode Island, Lincoln Chaffee, is making noises about switching sides. It's probably just that, noise, as moving from the majority to minority party accomplishes nothing--except forgoing many perks.

But there may be a solution to the longstanding Chaffee problem. Rhode Island has a Republican governor, Don Carcieri. So why not "promote" Chaffee to ambassador somewhere on the other side of the planet and let Carcieri appoint a replacement Senator?

This would only work if Rhode Island law allows the governor to fill vacant seats. Anyone know?

Rumors that Ashcroft will be leaving the administration.

What about Powell, Mineta and Ridge? When will Condi get State?

Arafat is dead.

How apropos if he is buried in France.

Update: There are no conflicting reports. Debka says he's brain dead and being kept alive on life support. That, at least, is consistent with the reports so far.

Post-election anecdote:

We happened to speak today with a former co-worker. She's originally from Michigan and a life-long Democrat ... who voted for Bush this year. Why, we wondered. Because, our friend said, she could not picture Teresa as first lady.

A good point. Doesn't Teresa kind of look like a bag lady wearing Chanel?

Here's a scary thought. Kerry in 2008!

Why not? He ran much, much closer to Bush than he should have. All his dirty laundry has been aired. Well, most of it. We still don't have Teresa's tax returns, Kerry's military records or the Heinz will--but the MSM obviously doesn't care.

The point is that Kerry kept his dignity with a narrow loss and a gracious concession. He's still got his safe Senate seat and more money than God. Al Gore did not have these things after 2000, but was still the presumptive nominee in 2004 right up until he decided not to run.

People are tossing around Hillary's name, but she has too much baggage. Nothing gets Republicans out to vote as reliably as Hillary Clinton.

It's far too early to be thinking about 2008. We have three good years behind us--2002, 2003 and 2004. We should be thinking about extending our winning streak in 2006. Still, we can't help but wonder if we've heard the last of Prince John.

What's in store for the Senate? We now have 55 seats, more than enough to insulate us from a RINO or two (cough, Specter, cough). But it's not enough to beat a filibuster--that requires 60 votes.

The filibuster, of course, is a procedural rule (no one actually talks anymore) that Daschle had been using to prevent Bush's Federal Appeals Court nominees from ever getting a confirmation vote in the Senate. It was a desperate tactic never before employed against any appointee to an Appeals Court, but the Dems had no choice and used it time and again. They couldn't win a vote, so they opted for the extreme tactic of preventing any voting at all.

We have always suspected the Democrats figured 2 years ago that their judicial filibusters would cost them a couple of Senate seats, and decided it was a price they were willing to pay. Well, they did pay--4 seats including Daschle himself, the only incumbent Senator to lose last night.

The question is, what will the Democrats do now? They have more vulnerable seats coming up in 2006. Will they abandon the filibuster or will they try to protect those seats?

Any predictions? Nope. We'll just have to wait and see, especially if/when a Supreme Court seat becomes available.

Yesterday we opined that the early "exit polls" showing a Kerry landslide were in fact nothing less than the Democrats' long awaited October Surprise. Dick Morris agrees:

Exit polls are almost impossible to get wrong this way. They are based on interviews with voters as they leave the polling places having just cast their ballots. They don't reflect absentee, mail-in or early-voting ballots, of course — but these voters generally tend Republican. When you combine military votes with those of voters who are likely to travel and need absentee ballots, the bias is all pro-Republican.

So why were the exit polls wrong?

That an exit poll is always right is an axiom of politics. It is easier to assume that a compass is not pointing north than to assume that an exit poll is incorrect. It takes a deliberate act of fraud and bias to get an exit poll wrong. Since the variables of whether or not a person will actually vote are eliminated in exit polling, it is like peeking at the answer before taking the test.

But these exit polls were wrong. And the fact that they were so totally, disastrously wrong is a national scandal. There should be a national investigation to unearth the story behind the bias.

In this election, we have seen CBS go with a story on Bush's National Guard service based on forged documents. We have seen the New York Times and CBS report 377 missing tons of explosives that were not missing, not that many tons and confiscated by American troops. And now we have seen exit polls that were wrong, quite possibly deliberately biased.

What was the dumbest story of the election? The competition is stiff, but we have our nominee:

Bush's turkey for Iraq troops was fake

It turned out the turkey was real, but the sublimely pointless "story" transcends the turkey itself. It is at the same time pedantic, irrelevant, mendacious and self-mocking.

Whatever the circumstances of the bird (real or fake) the story tellers have summited an Everest of idiocy.

In general this was a very good election for Republicans. That said, Colorado and New Hampshire were both unmitigated disasters.

In the case of New Hampshire, the last bastion of freedom in the northeast has been overrun by refugees from the various peoples' republics, especially Massachusetts. Liberals are an animal that fouls its own home, then moves into yours.

Why is it taking so long for Kerry to concede? Perhaps he has no plan.

Military Safety Tips (from an email we received today)

"Aim towards the Enemy."
-Instructions printed on US Rocket Launcher

"When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend.
-U.S. Marine Corps

"Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate. The bombs are guaranteed to always hit the ground."
-U.S.A.F.Ammo Troop

"If the enemy is in range, so are you."
-Infantry Journal

"A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit."
-Army's magazine of preventive maintenance.

"It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed."
-U.S. Air Force Manual

"Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo."
-Infantry Journal

"Tracers work both ways."
-U.S. Army Ordnance

"Five-second fuses only last three seconds."
-Infantry Journal

"Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid."
-David Hackworth

"If your attack is going too well, you're walking into an ambush."
-Infantry Journal

"No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection."
-Joe Gay

"Any ship can be a minesweeper... once."
-Anon

"Never tell the Platoon Sergeant you have nothing to do."
-Unknown Recruit

"If you see a bomb technician running, try to keep up with him."
-U.S.A.F. Ammo Troop

One of the great thing about blogging is that we don't have to think of clever things to say. We just post the best of what every one else says. Here are some gems from The Corner, National Review's blog:

[On the Swiftvets]...as Kate said last night, Kerry concession--when it comes--is the Vietnam Vets parade they never got.

------------------

A physics Ph.D. candidate at a very respectable university: "Mr. Derbyshire---I felt a strong need to actually figure out John Kerry's odds of winning Ohio in a somewhat rigorous fashion. Not too promising for the Kerry campaign: I figure there are 175000 provisional ballots out there, as that seems to be the high end of official estimates. If we assume that each has a 50% chance of being counted (and that's way high, it's really probably more like 15-20%) then having more ballots than Bush's margin of victory is a 360-sigma event, which comes out to a probability of 2.8*10^-28145. [That's a number with 28,144 zeros to the right of the decimal point, then some nonzero digits: 2, 8,...---JD] But hey, it could happen. And if every one of those votes goes for John Kerry (probability of this is around 10^-850000 or so) then Kerry might just pull this off."

------------------

President Bush:

• Became the first President to be re-elected while gaining seats in the House and Senate since 1936 and the first Republican President since 1924 to be re-elected while re-electing Republican House and Senate majorities.
• Became the first President to win a majority of the popular vote since 1988.
• Received 57.4 million votes - more than any other candidate in history. He broke President Reagan's 1984 mark of 54.5 million. (96% reporting)
• Increased the popular vote by seven million votes since 2000 - more than twice Clinton's increase from 1992 to 1996.
• Improved his percentage in every state except four (MD, OR, VT and WY). This includes a four percent increase in John Kerry's home state, Massachusetts.

------------------

When I get back... if someone can explain to me what John Edwards did for that ticket, I'd love to know. He was supposed to make the south competitive. Brrrrrr: Wrong! He was supposed to gin up the rural voters. Brrrrr wrong! He was supposed to make economic populism work for Democrats.....Brrrrrr oh you get the point.

Actually, we can answer this one. Edwards kept the trial lawyer money flowing into Democratic coffers. This helped keep Kerry in the race and made the difference in many down ticket races.

The Dems put up a truly Herculean effort. We are still stunned. Who would have thought they could flog that old nag vigorously enough to finish just behind a thoroughbred?

As with every election there was a genuine heartbreaker. For us it was Nethercutt in Washington state. A long shot, but a good man running against a hack voted by her peers as one of the dimmest bulbs in the Senate. Patty Murray will be returning to the Senate to represent the people of Washington state. How fitting.

Four years ago Al Gore did his best to turn this nation into a banana republic. Now it appears that Prince John and his Court Jester intend to continue the process.

George W Bush has won the election. It's over folks. Sore losers damage the democratic process itself. They damage trust and legitimacy. It's bad enough that the Democrats run crummy candidates, but could they at least run someone who respects the system itself? Must they all be megalomaniac sycophants bent on destroying what they cannot rule?

For shame.

Some good news: Lawyers with nothing to do.

According to the exceptionally well connected Redstate.org, the election is "over." Bush has won Ohio and Florida.

We were right about the Democrats' October Surprise. It came on election day itself, in the form of bogus exit polls.

Sorry guys. We'll be drinking tonight, but in celebration, not defeat.

Irregularities in Chicago.

Some Californians vow move to Canada if Kerry loses

Is it too early to start up a collection to buy them tickets?

More:

Another report from a guy on the ground: "Dem operatives are calling the Republican voting lists and (falsely) informing them that their precinct location has changed. They then give bogus information to the R voter."

Ack!

According to several reputable sources, the Allegheny County GOP HQ in Pittsburgh just had lost power. Because the office building at 125 Seventh Street is without power, telephones, computers, and other office machines are unusable, a huge blow to Bush supporters hoping to remain competitive tonight in this key area of the country.

While it is still not clear the cause of this electrical problem, politics could potentially be a factor.

The Democrat Headquarters across the street and other surrounding buildings are said to be with power...

Take a break and read this story about a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Gabon, Africa.

We're having trouble connecting to a number of blogs, including Instapundit and Polipundit. There's a post at Viking Pundit about blogs experiencing heavy traffic rates.

Heh. Blogspot crapped out on us the first time we tried to post this. It's a busy day in the blogosphere.

Heh. We told you not to take the early exit polls too seriously. Feeling upset? Discouraged? That's the whole point! Ignore the FUD and go vote.

More via Daschle v. Thune:

At the McLaughlin Community Center on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, a Daschle operative (a male lawyer in his 50s) has taken over part of the election table and is interfering with the election workers' duties.... When told this was illegal, he responded "F--k you, do something about it." These sorts of reports are coming in regularly. It's a nice summary of the Daschle campaign's attitude toward the election process.

UPDATE: The auditor has just sent the sheriff out to the polling location

Update: The lawyer has been forcibly removed. Can someone explain why he wasn't arrested and disbarred?

Via The Command Post:

Edwin Edwards, Louisiana’s former governor currently serving time on a federal conviction, was moved from the Fort Worth facility where he began serving time in 2001, to the federal prision in Oakdale, Louisiana this week.

A spokesman for the DNC said they had lobbied to have the colorful and still politically influential Edwards moved back to Louisiana in time for him to do some last minute stumping for Sen. Kerry’s bid for the nation’s chief executive, but more importantly, “To help force David Vitter into a run-off with Chris John.”

Edwards will be visiting fellow prisoners today, handing out provisional ballots and cigarettes.

The Club for Growth blog has a press release from Thune who says he will appeal the decision in Daschle's federal lawsuit last night. The judge was a close personal friend of Daschle's. The two go back to the 70's and Daschle got him his seat on the federal district court.

More:

Mr. Daschle took little risk in bringing the case before U.S. District Judge Lawrence Piersol. A more compromised figure in a Daschle lawsuit can’t be imagined. Mr. Piersol, a former Democratic legislator, was Mr. Daschle’s personal attorney in his first race for Congress in 1978, which Mr. Daschle won after several recounts. Last year, Mr. Daschle told a group of trial lawyers: “I got my start in politics thanks to lawyers, rather, one lawyer in particular. In 1978, I won my first election to the House by 14 votes… I was fortunate to be represented by a great lawyer and a dear friend, Larry Piersol.”

Via Political Diary:

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, Fox News reports that Republicans are upset over where some polling stations were to be set up -- including a Democratic state lawmaker's office, when a public school was nearby. In Lancaster County -- where Republicans outnumber Democrats three to one -- some elderly voters have received phone calls telling them they are no longer eligible to vote. Republican Congressman Joe Pitts calls the tactic "an outrageous effort on the part of someone to try to repress the vote." Other calls have falsely told voters that their polling place has been closed or moved to a different location.

The first exit polls are expected at around 2:00pm EST. We'd advise a grain of salt. These have skewed badly in the past. The real news will break after 8:00pm EST. The 7:00pm results won't be that significant.

Also, keep in mind a favorite Democrat trick of late has been to withhold results in one or two heavily Democratic precincts until all the other precincts have already reported. That way they know just how many votes they need... It also means that you could go to bed tonight with your candidate up by several thousand votes only to discover Wednesday morning that he or she "lost" the final count.

More:

I've heard this from several readers this morning and have Bush-Cheney confirmation. MoveOn.org has set up at polling places in several places. They have tables and claim to be doing exit polls. Legally, they can be within 100-300 feet (varies by state) but not any closer, and they are violating this in many states. County officials are working to move them and in some cases cops have been called to remove them. These problems have been reported in: IA, MI, MN, ME, CO, NH, WI.

Posted at The Corner, National Review's blog:

Hearing reports throughout Colorado that moveon.org is sending infiltrators into republican phonebanks as volunteers in order to sabotage.

Lots of good stuff over at Power Line. This story caught our eye:

A reader in Wisconsin reports that thirty vans that the Republican Party had rented to drive their voters to the polls had their tires slashed last night. Will report more if we get further information.

UPDATE: This story has been confirmed by Milwaukee police. Thirty vans were disabled.

Last night Daschle sued to exclude Republican poll watchers from heavily Democratic Shannon County -- home of significant irregularities in 2002. Today he has filed another suit attempting to prevent Republican absentee ballots from being counted.

Daschle is toast, but this race may be tied up in the courts for a while.

Drudge has a story claiming that voting machines in Philadelphia showed up with a couple of thousand votes already on them.

Dead people are voting in North Carolina.

We voted. Never had to stand in line before. Then again, we've never voted first thing in the morning before either.

A woman next to us in line flashed her driver's license. Poll workers told her to put it away. Sigh. Why do Democrats think that showing ID is fine for renting movies, but unacceptable for voting?

Soon to be former Senator Tom Daschle couldn't wait for the election and has already filed suit in federal court -- to stop poll watching of course. Read all about it at Daschle v. Thune.

We'd like to be among the first to congratulate Senator elect Thune on his historic victory tomorrow, and extend our deep gratitude for his ridding the Senate of a vile, odious hack. No doubt Thune will be as distinguished as Daschle was despicable.

Our predictions for tomorrow's election. If we're right you can buy us a warm bottle of pop.

We think Bush will win comfortably and with enough margin to preclude untoward delays and litigation. We'll know the outcome by late Tuesday evening or the wee hours early Wednesday. There will be widespread cheating and some litigation, which will cost us a state or three and probably some down ticket races as well. The Dems will spin this as good news for them.

Oil will drop precipitously over the next few months--it's already started. North Korea, Syria and Iran will suddenly get serious about talks. Best of all, we'll stop hearing about Iraq. That will happen for the same reason we've stopped hearing about Afghanistan--most of the news will be good.

Bush's second term, like most second terms, will be disappointing. It will also see the second half of the Democratic pincher maneuver. The left thinks of Vietnam and Watergate as high points in history which they always seek to recreate. Having failed to recreate Vietnam, they'll work on making the second Bush term as scandal ridden as possible, ala Watergate and Iran/Contra. And the administration will provide them with something. All the aggressive intelligence and military work in the War on Terror that we never hear about will provide fecund ground for scandal--especially from the crowd that can chew so vigorously for so long on non-stories like Bush's Guard service.

See you at the ballot box tomorrow.