Travis McGee votes

I am Travis McGee today and a committed, decided voter, convinced that the oval I blacken makes a difference.

It is vainglorious, but it is good for the soul to scour the rust from the tin-plate  armour, adjust the cookpot helmet, mount my pathetic Rocinante, swaybacked, galled  and, like me I fear, something of a redundancy in this Brave New World.

I am off to tilt me the Hell out of a quasi-American Windmill. May my bent lance lodge between the blades -- stopping them cold -- of narcissism, revenge, contrived drama, and a lust for those glorious days when Lenin was still respectable, the days when all that was deemed good was deemed collective. Collective planning. Collective work. Collective reward. Collective guilt. Or, as the Windmill huffs it: "Forward." Or, sometimes, "You didn't build this."

Which is to say that I take my little vote seriously, almost ceremoniously.  I will shower and closely shave, dress neatly, and enter the polling place as a first sergeant enters the company barracks.

But sadly I will still be thinking of the corollary decision. Against the sitting ruler, certainly, but for whom?

My state is close. The historically best poll calls it His Ineptness by five, meaning I should feel free to cast an honest libertarian vote. Other polls have it closer. Meaning that I should choose the quasi-Republican.

I suspect the decision won't come until the pencil hovers over the paper. I may or may not report it, but you'll be able to figure it out if you happen to be around  Smugleye-on-Lake voting central.

If for Mr. Johnson, I'll walk out whistling a happy tune as I stride off to round up a few election-gathering supplies for this evening.

If for Mr. Romney, I'll slink home, futilely trying to persuade myself  that I am a hero of the fighting retreat, but feeling badly in need of another shower.

The wisest of the wise

Lindsey Graham just told MSNBC that if Romney loses it is for "just one reason -- demographics."

Man, you just can't fool a United States senator. Or a crack political analyst like Chuck Todd who treated the Lindsey revelation as a profound, eerrrrr, revelation, like, y'know, from Mount Sinai.

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Richard J. Daley of Chicago: When people are out of work unemployment results.

The cost of Sandy: zero or so

The cabal news networks on the electric teevee are running out of human interest stories. (Tell me, Elizabeth, did it make you cry when you lost your dolly and saw your pretty little kitty drown right in front of you?)

So they're forced to move on to higher-IQ journalism --- Cost of Sandy $50 billion, OMG!!!

Of course it won't be $50 billion. That's a number plucked from bureaucratic butts in order to persuade us proles that our leaders are on top of things and have some foggy notion of what they're talking about. It will be higher, much higher with Obama's promise to "ignore red tape" and give every New Jersey tax-sucker everything he asks for.

Just for giggles, let's pretend the actual Sandy loss is $85 billion. So what? That's just what Ben Bernanke and the Feds spend every thirty days in buying debt that even a Lehman Brothers trader wouldn't have touched. Kwee 1, Kwee 2, Kwee 3 et seq.

You argue back that the Fed doesn't have any money to buy anything, not even enough to replace a single tassel on its Guccis? You forget. The Fed is allowed to make money. And we mean "make," not "earn."

It works like this. Every 30 days Ben strolls into his office about 9 o'clock. He rings for his administrative assistant who wheels in the cart with his fresh-squeezed orange juice in a silver server. He smiles at the first sip, starts humming zippity doo dah zippity day what a wonderful job. The he turns to his Cray and taps a few keys. Presto, $85 billion in nice new money.

The only difference this month is that he'll have to do it twice. Once to routinely buy the unrepayable debt. Once more for New Jersey pols and their neighbors.

So he puts in for overtime?

CNN has just made the Walking Dead zombies look compassionate and tasteful. A producer who missed a fine career as a ghoul sicced his film crew on the woman whose sons were "swept from her arms" and on the man who refused to take her and the boys in. Or who did not.

J---- H. C----- on a pogo stick.