I was just on my way over to Alec Baldwin’s house to help him pack when once again the TV predictions flip-flopped. In case you missed it, Alec had announced to the world that he was leaving the country if George W Bush won the election.

I don’t know Alec Baldwin, but I liked him in Hunt For Red October and Thomas The Tank Engine, and I do know from a tabloid news article from a year or so back when he had a falling out with a member of the paparazzi that we live fairly close, within a couple of miles or so here in The San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles.

So I thought maybe I could not only help him pack, but also try to convince him to take his brothers with him wherever he was going, and see if I might talk him into leaving his lovely wife Kim Basinger home while he was gone.

But just as I was fishing around for the car keys the TV prognosticators had said Florida was again too close to call. Hey!! I’ve got long distance telephone service- -I’LL CALL. First Gore then too close to call, then Bush, making him President-elect for a while, and then too close to call again.

I’m sure Al Gore was very dejected when he had to make that first call to concede to Bush: "I want to congratulate you and now I’ll just take my lockbox and go home."

But can you imagine an incredulous Bush when Gore called back a while later to un-concede? "Say, Dubya, I’ve got to tell you that I’ve given this a lot of thought and I’ve changed my mind about this need to concede." There are reports from sources who were in the room with Gore that they overheard him say to Bush that there was no need "to get snippy". It doesn’t get any better than this!

Did you see the videotape of the Bush family sitting around the suite with Poppy and Barb saying they hadn’t stayed up that late in years? Do you read body language? And can you honestly say this whole election hasn’t been about revenge? Thanks.

One other thing this whole election has been about is polls- -up 2% with pasty overweight white men age 24-49- -down 1.5% with women over 29 with one child in elementary school and a cat with a flea collar. Cheese Louise. GET OUT!!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this, one would hope, it’s that the next time some news anchor comes on with the latest poll results we hit the remote mute button so fast that we flip to Comedy Central or Australian Rules Football on Fox.

Instead of reporting about issues that mattered beyond prescription drugs for seniors- -by the way, a great way to cater to the graying baby-boom generation who have always considered drugs an essential part of life- -and Medicare and Social Security- -an actual Federal program- -newscasts dwelt on poll numbers that were not news in and of themselves. And the "Flip-Flop In Florida" ought to tell every American to stop paying attention to anything labeled a tracking poll. Enough already.

And speaking of enough already, it’s high time to retire the Electoral College in favor of the Popular Vote. Yes the Founding Fathers had a point, because Delaware and Rhode Island were small and needed to feel as important as Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia and Massachusetts, but that’s done now, like so many other things from two hundred years ago. It served a function then by making all these states equal, and to keep an untrustworthy populace in its place. But just as the horsecart is gone, so should this be. Yes it will take a constitutional amendment, but we’ve done that before to correct other earlier inequities such as, oh, slavery, or a woman’s right to vote. The time has come to graduate from the Electoral College.

And while we’re fixing things, how about some form of 21^st Century ballot where when you vote for Gore you don’t vote for Buchanan by accident. Did you see those South Florida Bubees trying to explain that no one they "ever knew or heard of would vote for Buchanan "and mispronouncing his name). Of course not. They were trying to vote for that cute little mensch Joe Lieberman and his friend Al Gore.

My theory is that this was "The Revenge of The Miami Relatives"- -The Fisherman In The Closet strikes again.

So the irony in all of this is that the man who "trusts the people, not government", George Bush, will be getting his new job- -by the way a Federal job- -by way of a system designed two hundred and thirteen years ago by aristocratic "founding fathers" who did NOT trust the people and so conjured up the Electoral College to be a firewall against the populace. He’ll come to LOVE government after all this.

It’s time to trust the riff-raff. The candidate with the most votes wins.

Alright, I have to go over and help the Baldwins put a few things in storage.