First off, let's just get this out of the way: Fuck Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

While his playboy son spends his way up and down Rodeo Drive, Papa Mbasogo is predicting the near-impossible: That his impoverished people will vote him back into office by an almost unanimous vote after more than 30 years of rule, during which Obiang has has turned Equatorial Guinea into a "private cash machine" for him and his cronies.

From the AP:

Equatorial Guinea - a violent land of coups, petrodollar wealth and killer poverty - is holding a presidential election Sunday that its leader of 30 years says he will win by more than the 97 percent garnered in the last widely criticized vote...

"I am the people's candidate and I don't see anyone who can go against the will of the people," Obiang, 67, said at a rally Sunday.

OH REALLY? The only reason you are the "people's candidate," Obiang, is that you are their only candidate. According to one analyst quoted by Bloomberg, "There is no credible opposition to speak of, given the hegemony of the PDGE [Obiang's party]."

Or maybe the people of Equatorial Guinea are really inspired by Obiang's record. Let's take a look. Equatorial Guinea's GDP has increased more than 5,000 percent since oil was discovered in 1995, but the AP reports...

Some 60 percent [of Equatorial Guineans] struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. The U.N. Children's Fund says child mortality has increased and a third of children never complete primary school.

The average citizen is unlikely to live beyond 50, yet someone in Brazil — with an average annual income of less than $10,000 — can expect to live to 72.

''It's a scandal,'' said political analyst Paul-Simon Handy of the South African Institute for Security Studies. ''Only some 30 to 40 percent of the population has access to clean water and electricity.''

A chicken in every pot! What's that? You don't have enough money to buy a pot? Well we don't have a chicken for you, either.

Oh, and you better believe that Western governments are helping prop up Obiang's rule—or at least turning a blind eye to its infinite shittiness—in return for the privilege of suckling at its sweet petroleum-laced teats.

Honestly, Obiang, completely fucking over your country's people is bad enough. But pretending they are actually stupid enough to keep electing you to do it? Somebody needs to crash this guy's state dinner in a major way.

Hoffman's loss to Democrat Bill Owens, was embarrassing for all concerned: he was the first poster boy for the Teabaggers and 9/12 nuts, and only ran because said nuts felt that the Republican, a moderate called Dede Scozzafava, was too nice and normal.

Politico report that:

Even as he faces near-impossible odds of pulling ahead in the count, Doug Hoffman announced Wednesday night that he is officially revoking his concession from Election Night, and is accusing labor unions and ACORN of stealing the election for Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.).

Hoffman posted a message on his campaign site Wednesday alleging dirty tricks by Democrats, and is asking for additional campaign contributions to fund a legal challenge to the election results.

Maybe he's doing it to save Glenn Beck's health - as soon as Hoffman lost Beck's appendix exploded with rage. Or maybe it's a clever political tactic that we're all underestimating. On Hardball last night, when asked about Sarah Palin's potential strengths as a presidential candidate, 538.com's Nate Silver genuinely cited her perpetual victim status and frequent faux-outrage as a factor that makes her difficult to run against.

Democrat Bill Owens originally had a 5,000 vote lead over Hoffman. That vote shrank to 3,000. There are 5,800 of absentee votes left to count! And though Hoffman would need to win 75% of those votes, and though presumably many of those votes were cast before Republican Dede Scozzafava withdrew from the race (and endorsed Owens), Hoffman has decided that his concession was premature. Well, Glenn Beck decided that Hoffman's concession was premature. And Hoffman just does whatever Glenn Beck says. Because he is a true conservative.

As we mentioned on Monday, Dan Halloran is a member of a pre-Christian pagan religion that worships the Norse gods. There were actual photos of him performing rituals and stuff. He is the "First Atheling" of his "theod."

And he is a now a Republican City Council member from Queens. So, hey, let's all hoist our horns of mead, in his honor.

(Obviously voters across the nation are sick of Barack Obama's liberal monotheism, and this bodes il for Abrahamic Democrats in 2010.)

Sure, if you live in New Jersey or Virginia you might've thought the gubernatorial campaigns in those two states were mostly about taxes and jobs (and weight), but that is wrong. These were shadow reelection campaigns for Barack Obama, and he lost both of them, because he is a failure.

Republican Bob McDonnell won in Virginia by a huge margin against Democrat Creigh Deeds, who was a white, conservative Democrat from southern Virginia, thus ensuring that not a single member of the coalition that won VA for Obama in 2008 would turn out to vote.

In Jersey, Republican Chris Christie squeaked by incumbent Jon Corzine. Corzine's was the campaign Obama belatedly lent his support to, once Corzine's double-digit polling deficit shrank to a couple points. This campaign was entirely about property taxes, basically, and so a Republican who campaigned entirely on cutting proptery taxes won.

Once again, gubernatorial elections have almost nothing to do with national politics. They are not House and Senate races. Meanwhile, in the nation's only two House races yesterday, Democrats won. They won handily in a California race that no one paid attention to, because a safe Democratic seat staying Democratic is not as newsworthy as a safe Republican seat that almost went to a Republican until national movement conservatives freaked out and excommunicated Dede Scozzafava from the Church of Teabagging. And then a Democrat won in New York's 23rd. He won a seat that's been a gimme for Republicans since a 1992 redistricting. (Before it was redistricted, this area of the state has been Republican since the 19th century. In 2002 the Republican ran unopposed.)

Please keep in mind that Obama picked up a new Democratic vote in the House of Representatives while you read some analysis piece on how Obama has just been crushed, politically.

As we said before, the special election in New York's 23rd was the only race yesterday that had anything to do with national politics, because movement conservatives inserted themselves into the race and promptly lost. In what could easily actually be a preview of next year's midterms, teabaggers and the conservative Club for Growth and Sarah Palin all threw their support behind a candidate they found more acceptable than the Republican, and their guy lost. As activists from out of town flooded the district, shouting nonsense about ACORN and waving "Don't Tread on Me" flags, imagining they'd already won, the Democrat turned out the vote and rode to victory on the back of union support and the president's popularity in the region.

And look at that: unions and GOTV made the difference! Hell, some of that might've won New York for Bill Thompson, even without Obama's support!

Here is the real lesson about and for Obama, though, and it touches on every single race yesterday: in 2008, Obama borrowed Howard Dean's 50-state strategy for the Democrats—open and staff DNC offices in every state to organize and run campaigns at every level—and applied it to the presidential primaries and general elections. He raised a ridiculous amount of money and compiled an amazing email list and organized a huge number of volunteers and won the presidency.

After the election, Obama turned those campaign resources into Organizing For America, "a grassroots network wielding some 13 million email addresses to mobilize former volunteers on behalf of the administration's agenda." And then they folded it into the DNC and they didn't do anything with it for months. And then it turned out that this massive organization couldn't be utilized to do much besides fundraise and canvass, and furthermore its ties to the DNC and the White House mean it can't actually be used to push progressive causes, which are the causes that this massive volunteer army cares about.

This means, basically, that the DNC has neutered Obama's progressive volunteer army and that massive volunteer army has consumed the DNC. The whole operation is now a 2012 reelection campaign already in progress, and if you are a local Democrat looking for organizing and canvassing and fundraising support of the kind Howard Dean promised to create for you back when he was in charge, you are shit out of luck.

This is the most worrying indicator for 2010. They need to fix this.

NOM raised a zillion dollars or so from hateful bigots across the nation whose names they refuse to disclose, which is, of course, a violation of state campaign finance law. But if it works, who gives a shit? 53% of Maine voters agreed that if the gays get married, they will attempt to force the children to learn, in public schools, that gay people exist, and that they should not be beaten to death for crimes against God.

Once again we learn the shocking truth that putting the civil rights of minority groups to a popular vote does not work very well. Crazy, right?

Here is a classic sketch from The Dana Carvey Show that is more relevant than ever, again:

Thanks to his brilliant campaign maneuvering, Bloomberg earned a landslide just-over-50% victory over Bill Thompson, a local man who is notable for not being Mike Bloomberg.

It was a slimy, scorched earth campaign. Bloomberg didn't campaign for a third term of Mike Bloomberg, he campaigned on the utter pointlessness of bothering to show up to vote for anyone else. Bloomberg won 50,342 more votes than Bill Thompson. Again, we remind you, because no one else bothers to: every night, 40,000 people sleep in New York city homeless shelters. (At the peak of the '80s homelessness crisis, that number was 29,000. It was around 30,000 when Bloomberg began his first term. Thousands more sleep on the streets.)

All the papers have done the math, pointing out that Bloomberg spent $151.27 on each vote. That's not really accurate. He spent that $100 million convincing people not to vote. And it worked.

To sum up our feelings this morning: fuck the New York Democratic Party, fuck Christine Quinn, fuck Barack Obama, fuck Valerie Jarrett, fuck Anthony Weiner, hard, and, in closing, fuck Howard Wolfson and his fucking Cosby sweaters and his fucking boring taste in fucking terrible indie music. (And fuck Jimmy Fallon.)

When an incumbent runs for reelection, it all comes down to whether or not people think he's doing a good job, not a normal comparison between two candidates. Love him or hate him, Mike Bloomberg is sweeping toward a third term not because of his heavy spending or his weak opponent, as the credulous local press thinks, but because his job approval rating is 60%. New Jersey proves the same rule from the opposite direction: Gov. Jon Corzine's approval is about 35%, so even in a heavily Democratic state, he'll be lucky to scrape by. And! There's a Virginia governor's race, a special election for Congress upstate, big mayors' races in Boston, Detroit, Miami, Houston, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Atlanta, and gay marriage is on the ballot in Maine and Washington.

Yes, Bloomberg's spending wildly. He's hired half the city's Democratic consultants just to tie them down, robo-calling everyone who still has a land line, stuffing your mailbox, and taking out redonkulous ads like one in the Jerusalem Post edition that comes with the Sunday NY Post. His consultants have a vested interest in convincing a very rich man to spend a lot of money he won't miss. But they can't take credit for making the sun rise.

And sure, Bill Thompson's a weak opponent. He explains why NYC's Dems, despite a 4-1 voter registration advantage, incredibly haven't elected a mayor since the 1980s. As a fixture in local politics for the last few decades, one suspects that if Thompson had any stirring leadership qualities we would have seen them by now. He's made Bloomberg's override of term limits the center of his campaign. But the sad reality is people care more about quality of life than the niceties of the political process. If they like the incumbent, they don't even look at the challenger, those are the rules. You can't beat someone the voters don't want to fire.

But if you're an incumbent who the voters do want to fire, like poor Gov. Corzine with his 58% disapproval rating, is all lost? Well, you still have one option: disqualify your opponent. Making voters hate him even more than they hate you. Which explains the relentless, ungracious ads attacking Republican Chris Christie. Driving up Christie's negative ratings — together with the Democrats' strong edge in New Jersey, and the presence of independent candidate Chris Daggett to drain the anti-incumbent vote (as well as the all-important Chris vote) — is what has Corzine clinging to life. But that doesn't mean he'll pull through.

Join me below in the comments as the returns come in.

UPDATE, 11:30: Tonight's 49%-45% loss for New Jersey's Democratic governor Jon Corzine to Republican Chris Christie is a blow to Barack Obama, as is the 18-point victory in Virginia for Republican Robert McDonnell over Democrat Creigh Deeds.

But the President's biggest headache is likely to be blowback from the narrower-than-expected victory of Michael Bloomberg, edging Bill Thompson by just under five points, 51%-46%, after Obama gave Thompson only the most grudging of endorsements and declined to invest any political capital in the race. Democrats are going to look at this near-miss with anger, and at a time when Obama is already under fire from Democrats for falling short of last year's promised changes, and losing ground to Republicans in NJ and Virginia, he's likely to bear the brunt of the recriminations.

Those (like me, above in this post) who derided Mayor Bloomberg's huge spending as excessive now look a little silly: Just as JFK's father infamously forbade his son from buying one more vote than necessary — "I'll be damned if I'll pay for a landslide" — Bloomberg's $100 million campaign now looks to be a model of efficiency. (On the other hand, the heavy spending may have turned voters off.)

For the President, and liberals, the special election in upstate NY is one bright spot. Democrat Bill Owens is holding a reliable lead of 49%-45% over Conservative Doug Hoffman after Republican Dede Scozzafava withdrew, with 84% of the vote counted.

In Maine, supporters of gay marriage are narrowly behind, 48%-52%, with 76% of the vote in (with a number of Portland votes yet to be counted). But gay marriage holds a narrow, 52%-48% lead in Washington State, with 42% of precincts reporting.

I know the Awl and Gawker (where I'll be live-chatting tonight's results) have joined the haters who want to throw out the best mayor this city has had in my lifetime (which is longer than some). Here are the top ten reasons you shouldn't join them.

10. Term limits are for suckers. Seriously. Fuck ‘em. Gold stars to all the Council members who voted to override. Who are a bunch of Ron Lauder-manipulated voters from the anti-incumbent craze of the early '90s to tell me who I can and can't vote for? Oh, you say, the sacred will of the voters can't be touched. Well, go to California, where decades of voter-passed propositions that can't be changed have smothered the governing process in quicksand. And don't you support overturning the California voters' ban on gay marriage? Ah, as I thought. And if that still doesn't convince you, think of it this way: if the term limits law included a provision allowing the City Council to override it, then the override was totally legitimate.

9. He doesn't care what people think of him or the niceties of the political process, which often comes in handy. He just cares about outcomes. He's outside the city's established, still-clubby political structure.

8. The 311 system and NYC.gov. What a concept: customer service for everyone who lives in NYC.

7. He's kept crime going down without the Mussolini-like police tactics of Giuliani. There have been no mayorally-sanctioned police hate crimes like Diallo, Louima and Dorismond.

6. He supports the arts, instead of attacking them as Giuliani did.

5. Fuck Critical Mass. A bunch of spoiled, self-righteous kids who think they're striking a blow against… something, by indulging their free-floating aggression toward everyone and tying up neighborhoods. If they can't stop at red lights, take their bikes and slap them with citations.

4. Unlike Giuliani, who tried to shut down and sell off the city's community gardens, Bloomberg has been a champion of open space, reclaiming traffic lanes for de facto parks around Times Square, Herald Square, Madison Square Park, the Lower East Side and elsewhere. He's closed down Park Ave. during the summer and was key to rescuing the High Line. His planning commissioner, Amanda Burden, has waged war on overdesigned developments that would have disfigured neighborhoods, and works constantly to increase New Yorkers' access to waterways.

3. The Nanny State. I don't care what people say, using government to direct people away from habits that are bad for them is 100% awesome. I don't believe those studies that say posting calorie counts doesn't work - I've myself been surprised to find out how many calories certain foods contain, and grateful for the info that helped me avoid them. And the trans-fat ban is great for fighting obesity. Fuck "free choice" - you think you had free choice at age 13 when Joe Camel convinced you and your friends that it would be cool to adopt a deadly, addictive habit?

2. So: the smoking ban. If nothing else, this alone would make Mike Bloomberg a national hero. Don't you like not having to strip off your clothes, enclose them in a hazmat bag and drop them straight off at the cleaners after a night at a bar? Notice how it's spread to other cities and states, and even longtime smokers' bastions like Ireland and Italy? That, plus high taxes on cigarettes that come closer to paying the true cost smoking and smokers impose on society has nearly driven smoking onto New York's endangered species list, where it belongs, and strongly discouraged underage smoking when people have the least ability to resist adopting self-destructive habits.

1. He kept us from going under after 9/11, as many expected. Not caring about politics, he forced an austerity budget on the city and an 18% property tax hike - which he ended as soon as the budget was in the clear.

The Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races have nothing to do with Obama or national politics, at all, except in that Obama did not do as much campaigning and organizing in those two races as the Democratic candidates would've liked. Otherwise, they are strictly local races and the results will reflect only the material concerns of the residents of those states. Still! They have been in the news a lot, so let us talk about them.

New Jersey: Incumbent Governor Jon Corzine is a very rich former Goldman Sachs executive. Despite that, he was a pretty good liberal Senator, for a couple years (he voted against the war!). But then, like a moron, he decided to govern the ungovernable state of New Jersey. He was promptly met with a government shutdown and huge budget problems and a populace that enjoyed the various programs the government provided but did not want to pay so many taxes all the time, or at all. And so he has had to cut spending, which makes everyone mad, and raise some taxes, which made everyone mad.

So waddling in comes Republican Chris "The Big Man" Christie, who has a brilliant plan: he will cut taxes! And cut wasteful government spending! Sounds wonderful! Christie was initially kicking Corzine's ass in the polls, and Democrats wrote off Corzine. But Corzine, who is very rich, remember, launched a hilariously negative ad campaign against Christie. Now, because Christie is fat and also because he's refused to give any details at all on what he would do as governor besides "not be Jon Corzine" (but mostly because he is fat), he is neck-and-neck with Corzine.

That tie is also thanks to this guy named Steve Chris Daggett, who is running as an independent, which means "the guy you vote for if you hate Corzine but don't want to vote for a fat Republican." Daggett is running on a platform of cutting everyone's property taxes, which is always a wonderful idea.

This one is a toss-up.

Now: do you see anything in that summary about Barack Obama's approval ratings, or health care reform's popularity, or Nancy Pelosi? No, you don't. This has nothing to do with anything besides the terribleness of New Jersey's government and populace.

Virginia Virginia does not allow governors to serve consecutive terms, which is nuts, but it keeps things interesting. So there is Republican Robert F. McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds. But stupid Deeds is a rural southern Virginia Democrat, not one of the rich suburban northern liberal Virginians, so he is not really exciting those Obama voters! Or black voters! So the coalitions that helped Obama win Virginia will probably not be turning out for Deeds. McDonnell is a tremendous asshole but this race is his to lose. Once again: this has nothing to do with national politics, except that people who vote on national issues don't usually turn out for off-year races.

New York's 23rd Congressional District This one is wonderful. Barack Obama appointed a Republican congressman from a safe Republican upstate New York seat to be the Secretary of the Army. The local Republicans decided to nominate a local Republican assemblywoman to take his place. But!!! While she is a Regular New York State Republican, she is also pro-abortion and pro-gays. So, hah, the complete lunatics who run the national Republican party, with blogs and TV shows and so on, went nuts and decided to throw their support behind the Conservative Party candidate.

New York's Conservative Party was invented to police the local Republicans, who have a tendency to be more liberal than Republicans elsewhere, because they want to get elected. It was also invented so that William Buckley could run for mayor on a "John Lindsay sucks and I am so awesome" platform. (Fun fact: Buckley supported congestion pricing! And also police brutality. He was always big on police brutality.)

So! The regular "moderate" Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, was called all sorts of names by the internet, and every Republican who endorsed her, like Newt Gingrich, got called even more names, by the internet. The Club For Growth then organized the grassroots conservative campaign for the Conservative Party candidate, some guy named Hoffman who does not actually live in the district and who is also not very smart. Sarah Palin's Facebook page sealed the deal, and suddenly every Republican who wants movement approval and money had to endorse Hoffman. Scozzafava finally quit the race (though she remains on the ballot) and, hilariously, endorsed the Democrat.

Hoffman will probably pull this one off. Frank Rich thinks this is a good thing, because the Republicans are forcing out even more of their electable moderates, and making the party more extreme and more white. Josh Marshall seems to concur, comparing it to when Rush Limbaugh was making everyone apologize to him a while back.

And, ok guys, it is maybe beneficial to the Democrats for the Republicans to become even less inclusive and even less able to adapt to the new America and all that.

But honestly, because of our intractable and entrenched two-party system, all this really means is that the next time the Republicans take back control of any portion of the government they will be even more destructive and evil than they were before.

There is one last race you should keep an eye on, though:

Queens NYC City Council District 19 This race to represent Bayside pits Democrat Kevin Kim, who'd be the first Korean-American elected to the New York city council, against Republican Dan Halloran, who is a pagan lord who worships ancient Norse gods.

As the Tribune first pointed out, Halloran is "First Atheling," or prince, of a Germanic neo-heathenist "theod" or tribe. State records show that he incorporated the group in 2002 with the official name of "New Normannii Reik of Theodish Belief."

Colloquially, Halloran's followers refer to their tribe as "New Normandy," with a territory that incorporates New York City and parts of New Jersey (some of Halloran's Pennsylvania tribesmen recently broke away — with his blessing — to form their own group, which they call "Arfstoll Thjod").

Obviously there's nothing wrong with being a modern pagan (except that it is dumb), but this particular branch of paganism has been quite popular with white supremacists. Not that this guy his a White Supremacist! Like many Pagans, he may just enjoy playing dress-up.

You know those idiots who don't know anything about politics but think it sounds smart to say "I am a social liberal and an economic conservative?" Bloomberg is the candidate for them, if they love a liberal nanny state and a conservative religious fervor for the eternal goodness of private enterprise.

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he's been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn't literally buy off. Like Sheldon Silver, who (thankfully) killed the West Side Stadium and (annoyingly) ended all that "Congestion Pricing" talk. And those unions and special interests were just bought off, which worked fine back when the boom whose end Bloomberg never saw coming was in full swing.

And about that stadium: what the fuck was that? And the Olympics thing? After bitching about Giuliani's disgraceful subsidizing of the fucking Yankees, Bloomberg both turns around completely on that particular issue and attempts to build the fucking Jets a stadium, so that New York could get an Olympics that it did not want. And that failed, and everyone forgot about it. Meanwhile: 40,000 people in shelters! Bloomberg could personally buy every single one of those people an apartment in a vacant Williamsburg luxury condo building and still have enough left over to bribe a City Council member into supporting his fifth term.

And those luxury Williamsbug condo buildings, by the way, that stand vacant? Yes, well, that was part of this brilliant plan to utilize rezoning to spur the free market (which always allocates resources more efficiently than anything else in the history of civilization but sometimes it needs government help, like with tax breaks and stuff) to create affordable housing all over the waterfront. This did not work, as developers decided to just not bother to build all those affordable housing units they were supposed to build. More than 2,200 promised new affordable apartments in Williamsburg and Greenpoint have turned out to be 768, 20 percent of which are renovations of apartments that were already affordable. There are lots more of these stories.

His record on housing, like his record on nearly everything having to do with the outer boroughs and poverty and human beings who make less than $100,000 a year, has been a ridiculous disgrace. His entire philosophy of development solving everything turned out to be precisely, 100% wrong, and suddenly the city itself was driving the real estate boom, driving up land prices to absurd levels across the boroughs and tearing down neighborhoods only to replace them with vacant lots and half-filled cheaply built hideous high-rises once the bottom fell out of the City Hall-inflated market. But hey, we got the High Line and 311! So you can sleep in that fancy park while you call 311 asking if there is room in a shelter because you can no longer afford your home.

Eight years into the Bloomberg administration, Ground Zero is a still a hole that everyone continues fighting about.

The MTA has raised fares while cutting service (without actually cutting service, officially—it's just that whatever line you happen to ride is suddenly experiencing a whole lot of track work every single goddamn weekend).

The Gays: still not married! And also a lot of them are getting beaten up on the streets these days for some reason?

Bloomberg is also the beneficiary of the most friendly news coverage of any big city mayor in the nation. Easily. It helps that, you know, he is a media mogul, himself, and he is good, close, personal friends with the three publishers who run the newspapers that went after each one of his predecessors for shit they've let slide under this mayor, because they know he's a good, decent guy, at heart, and the only one who can Fix New York, because of his Money.

Can you imagine how the Post would've blown up if David Dinkins lied about taking the Subway to work every day? The Daily News response to discovering that John Lindsay flew to Bermuda every weekend?

Let's talk about the cops, for a second: they are still operating under Giuliani levels of complete disregard for the law. They are getting drunk and running people over and shooting unarmed black people and sodomizing people in subway stations. The Civilian Complaint Review Board has become a joke, unless your case gets a lot of publicity. There's obviously no accountability, whatsoever, and no attempt to recruit and train more cops from the communities they actually police. The NYPD remains, primarily, the home of roided-out white people from outside the city with a great deal of contempt for civil liberties. The Mayor always sounds properly upset when some of them rape someone, but he's never done a damn thing to rein them in or change the culture.

What he has done is Keep Us Safe by never once giving a shit about Civil Liberties. The cops stop and frisk thousands more people every year, your 4th Amendment rights do not apply in the Subway system, and expensive and completely ineffective new rings of cameras are going up across Manhattan.

Bloomberg deserves to be run out of town on an inadequately funded public rail line for the 2004 GOP convention alone. Remember that ridiculous farce? No, of course not, no one does, besides the thousands of people improperly spied on, arrested, harassed, and detained by the NYPD. All of this was completely illegal. No heads rolled.

One more special bonus factoid: New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! Specifically, marijuana arrests of black people!

And he is personally a jerk. He is a thin-skinned, unpleasant, sanctimonious asshole. His company is being sued for a culture of sexual discrimination that plaintiffs say Bloomberg himself contributed to. He is a tremendous dick to reporters whenever he gets cranky. He is fucking race-baiting with Rudy Giuliani again, because why not?

He has been a shitty mayor and he does not deserve the support of anyone who claims to be a liberal. Though what all of his most destructive missteps as mayor have in common is that they do not in any way upset or inconvenience the well-off self-professed liberals who support him. Besides maybe a couple Critical Mass riders arrested in illegal sweeps. (Though he sure does like bike lanes, so it's a wash, right?)

We cannot encourage you to vote for the Democrat in the race, because even we still aren't sure if we'll go for him or the much more delightful Billy Talen. Just don't fucking vote for Michael Bloomberg.

It has been a depressing primary season, full of uninspiring hacks! Many candidates are people who thought they would be term limited out of their city council jobs, and then they were not, but it was too late to not run for whatever they decided to run for. The Democrats basically conceded the Mayoral race, even though this is basically a wonderful time to be running against an out-of-touch billionaire. (Sigh.) So we understand that it is not very exciting, but you should still probably go to your local middle school or whatever and vote. Because if you don't, Liberty will disappear! Check out this awesome animated gif from the Board of Elections website!

As for who to vote for? Christ, who knows.

Comptroller

This is a very important job! This person takes care of the city budget. The Working Families Party has endorsed John Liu, who seems fine, whatever, but he said he worked in a sweatshop when he was a child and that turned out to be made-up, and who the fuck makes that up?

New York Tumblrers have endorsed Melinda Katz, who has the best commercials, but she has taken more money from scumbag developers than anyone else, and that is lame. Also she was a Clinton delegate but she claimed she voted for Obama in the primaries until someone was like "what?" and she was like "nevermind." WTF, Melinda?

The Times endorsed David Yassky. He is the only candidate from Brooklyn and not Queens! He has complained about the G train! But RFK Jr. and Chuck Schumer also endorsed him, for what that is worth.

So, hell, this one's up to you.

Public Advocate

This is like the shadow-mayor, or something. This person's job is to annoy Michael Bloomberg—and on that count, Betsy Gotbaum has been a failure. So there is Mark Green, who was very good at bothering Giuliani, but he has just been hanging out on TV doing nothing ever since he was not allowed to be Mayor, before 9/11. There is Bill de Blasio, who won the Times endorsement. But is he too close to corrupt unions? And the Working Families Party, which is having some issues with their accounting, at the moment? There is Eric Gioia, who is some punk kid. How about Normal Siegel? He is the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union and he is basically a pretty good guy. He receives the coveted Gawker Endorsement.

Manhattan District Attorney

Billion-year-old zombie DA Robert Morgenthau decided Cy Vance Jr. should be the next Manhattan DA, and that is a good reason not to support Cy Vance Jr. Leslie Crocker Snyder has always been a little too zealously "lock 'em all up" for our bleeding heart, and she used to enjoy killing people a little too much. Richard Aborn, the third candidate, will not win. In this race, Gawker endorses moving to Brooklyn.

City Council

Just indiscriminately vote against any and all incumbents.

If you live in City Council Distict 33, why not vote for Steve Levin? When he attended Brown, he played drums with MGMT! How awesome is that! (Or vote for Evan Thies who is less entangled in the filthy DEMOCRATIC MACHINE.)

Abdullah is alleging massive voter fraud, including ballot stuffing, and he claims to have video evidence. But he's also urging calm and calls on his supporters to refrain from violence.

Voter turnout may be as low as 29%, because of threats of violence from Taliban forces and because many Afghan voters doubted the legitimacy of the elections.

It will not be until September 3 at the very earliest that we'll know who won the election.

Abdullah, an ophthalmologist, is a former member of the Northern Alliance. The bulk of his support is in Afghanistan's population centers, and he is basically a big fat smarty-pants elite intellectual reformer. He would like a parliamentary system instead of a strong president, elected officials in the provinces and districts instead of corrupt and ineffectual appointed officials, and other liberal nonsense.

He also promised to curb the rampant corruption and review foreign assistance programs to ensure that they focused on grass-roots development and addressed poverty and unemployment. In his public meetings, he emphasized support for the rights of women, the unemployed, the disabled and the victims of war.

If Karzai receives less than 50% of the vote—which might depend on how much the vote was fixed or on the incredibly poor turnout—there will be a runoff. Also lots of people and things will be blown up and killed.

Of course, the Taliban have reportedly executed a couple people for voting and rocket attacks have killed a couple more people, but on the whole it is a very proud day for Afghanistan. Though turnout seems, so far, to be incredibly low, in part because of those concerns about being executed but maybe more because of cynicism.

Corrupt and largely useless President Hamad Karzai will probably be forced into a runoff election, unless he actually does manage to steal more than 50% of the vote.

Hah, remember that time when all those people in Congress gave themselves purple fingers, because they loved democracy in Iraq so much? Poor forgotten Afghanistan!

Yesterday it was reported that Britney Spears was registered to vote in Afghanistan, but as of yet there's no word on which candidate she supported.

It looks like it could be winding down. The protesters don't have the brute force and weaponry that the police and Basij do, nor the incentive for violence, it appears. Also, some of their strongest voices are being identified and arrested:

- Andrew Sullivan notes one incredibly prolific blogger/twitterer from Iran who's appearing to have been detained.

- The daughter and four relatives of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjan were briefly detained. Despite being one of the more powerful figures in Iran, Rafsanjan is "believed to be" a supporter of the protests, and thus, susceptible to the wide net cast during the crackdown.

- Strong words via Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as he lashed out again at President Obama, this time asking: "Didn't he say that he was after change? Why did he interfere? They keep saying that they want to hold talks with Iran ... but is this the correct way? Definitely, they have made a mistake."

- The nighttime raids and beatings are getting particularly bad, notes Human Rights Watch. The Basij have been given run of the country. They're destroying private property, beating civilians, savaging entire neighborhoods, and detaining essentially anyone they feel like taking on. They're doing it to quell the rooftop chants and protests at night; nobody's complaining to the police, who're turning a completely blind eye to this sort of thing.

- The Basij are fighting back on the internet, using crowdsourcing to identify prominent protesters they can arrest and detain.

The picture that's beginning to come together: the protesters are tired, and the dissenting contingent of Iran is exhausted and starting to get a little scared. And now that Mir Hussein Moussavi has promised to conduct only "official protests" under what could only begin to be described as government pressure - which, come on, I'm more likely to get clearance to run assnaked on Lex from 92nd on down tonight - the figurehead of the political opposition to Iran's standing government has been more or less crippled.

It's easy to sit around and blog about how hard people are fighting, or how hard reporters are actually reporting, but honestly: we really have no idea what kind of energy it takes to do so. Moving the ground beneath one's feet, let alone that of an entire government's, can't be easy. Maybe they just needed a weekend off, maybe there's more to come tomorrow, or maybe this game's already been called. Whatever it is, it isn't looking good for anybody who hasn't already aligned themselves with Iran's re-ignited regime.

Ken Ballen and Patrick Dohery polled 1,001 Iranians last month, and they found Ahmadinejad leading "by a more than 2 to 1 margin." Almost a third of respondents were still undecided but basically everyone else loved Mahmoud. And they were not just lying to pollsters because they were worried that maybe someone was going to arrest them! (That is the Iranian version of "the Bradley effect.")

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents' reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians — including most Ahmadinejad supporters — said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran's supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly "politically correct" responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

It is heartening to know that, as in America, Iranian voters generally refuse to vote in ways consistent with their own self-interest. Ahmadinejad must've had a lot of support in the Iranian heartland.

But all Nate Silver (from whom we got that nifty map!) will say is that "the statistical evidence is intriguing but, ultimately, inconclusive." Tell us what happened, number god!

Joe Klein, in Tehran, reports:

The candidates are listed by name and by number...and also by code. You vote by writing down the candidate's name and then his...what? Number...or code? No one is quite sure. The leading reformer, Mir-Hussein Moussavi, has the number 4 and the code 777. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the number 1 and the code 444. So the question arises: If you vote for Moussavi and list his number as 4...have you actually voted for Ahmadinejad? And why on earth have they devised such a complicated ballot in the first place?

Now polls closed... like a half-hour ago? But no one will know the results until tomorrow morning. And also there might be a run-off on June 19, if for some reason the Ayatollah hasn't made up his mind which guy to throw the election to.

Hah, no, seriously, he doesn't need to actually interfere in the election itself too much because he will retain his ultimate power over the nation no matter who the president is.

Here is a thing about how the government in Iran works, in case you are curious.