Five points:

1. Everyone at my polling station appeared to be alive, though I'm pretty sure if I had gone around checking pulses, I would have been accused of tampering. It was the first time I ever had to do a lap to get a parking space, so that's a good sign. However, I was also the youngest person there, by far, who was eligible to vote. The guy immediately behind me in line had complained that he was nearly disenfranchised, because he had knocked off the voter rolls by PennDOT. I have no idea how that's possible, while some potholes are in fact big enough to live in, the postal service won't deliver.

2. I spent the evening over at the parents for chili, beer, and pollwatching. Issue one was getting ticked off at the local candidates. I was ticked that the rep in my old district was scaremongering for the draft (being one of the two who actually voted for it in Congress, but blaming the Republicans) while my parents were appalled at the tactics of their state rep, who had flyers accusing his opponent of accepting money from gay contributors. The irony being that in both cases, this was the Democrat behaving badly. Welcome to Washington County, please note blue Kryptonite is a deadly weapon here. And yes, both won handily.

3. As I got progressively under-ripped, off the leftover light beer from Labor Day. I started yakking about how ticked I was at Murtha. I then noticed that the reason he was able to make such a cynical move was that he was running unopposed. And I mean that literally, no other party bothered even to nominate anyone. If I end up at some point moving back into my old district, I may just pull an Alan Keyes, possibly just to prevent Alan Keyes from doing it. My first slogan will be:
Kidder '06: 90% of anything is showing up.

4. The simple rules of switching channels during election night: Everytime Tim Russert goes to the tablet PC take a drink. If a bleary-eyed Tim Russert scrawls "Ashtabula", all mascots in the room drink. If somebody makes the note about all the states so far holding serve, drink. For the love of all that's holy, don't play with the "Every time Dan Rather says something curious" rule. I knew enough not to turn to CBS until after Dan was four hours to the wind, but that was outstanding entertainment. I swear I heard him say "It's not time to put the baby to bed or to pop a cap in an adult." I was linguistically gobsmacked.

5. For those of you in the midst of circular firing squad practice, I'll just note what I said in 2002. The situation hasn't changed.