Author: geoff

One from Not A Dollar Short:

And one from All I Know:

Update: And don’t overlook the Purple Haze….

Terry wrote: “The demagogues will continue… There are not enough Jon Stewarts. The lack of thought will appreciate (Franco had a teaching, “Education/intelligence + Military Fervor/Patriotism = K [a constant]) and the lack of real value to the elections will grow.”

Masood has been pointing people at an interesting piece in Counterpunch by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, criticizing Kerry’s campaign strategy and tactics for the loss. While the brute facts of the argument are incontrovertible – the role of religion and homosexuality, and Kerry’s difficulty in establishing a clear distinction between him and Bush on Iraq, outsourcing, and so forth – I’m not sure that those factors were decisive. Look at it another way: in spite of all of those handicaps, Kerry came extremely close to unseating an incumbent president who should have been a shoo-in. What could he have done differently? (No, he couldn’t have tacked left.)
As Cockburn and St.Clair point out, the choice of VP was probably decisive:
Edwards added absolutely nothing to the ticket. At least Dan Quayle held Indiana back in 1988 and 2002. No one state in the south went into Kerry’s column. Gore did better in Florida and West Virginia. Dick Gephardt would certainly have brought the Democratic ticket Missouri and probably Iowa and hence the White House.
Gephardt could have worked, but he has a lot of baggage. I actually think that the best choice might have been Wes Clark, in order to hammer Bush on the issue of military incompetence. Unlike Kerry or Edwards, Clark could have invoked Abu Ghraib as a moral catastrophe for which heads ought to roll, and done so without being accused of betraying the troops.

Baghdad Burning: “Everyone here knows Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi isn’t in Falloojeh. He isn’t anywhere, as far as anyone can tell. He’s like the WMD: surrender your weapons or else we’ll attack. Now that the damage is done, it is discovered that there were no weapons. It will be the same with Zarqawi. We laugh here when we hear one of our new politicians discuss him. He’s even better than the WMD- he has legs. As soon as the debacle in Falloojeh is over, Zarqawi will just move conveniently to Iran, Syria or even North Korea.”

At this point, I don’t know if Allawi is using Bush or if Bush is using Allawi. And the truly depressing thing is that I don’t think it matters. The dead, the maimed, and the orphans won’t discriminate. Meanwhile, please read River’s blog and spare a thought for the people of Falloojeh.

Independent of the actual result, one clear message to the rest of the world is that the US is simply incompetent at running elections. After 2000 one might have expected some improvement, but no: if anything it’s worse. A crazy patchwork of laws (whatever happened to “Equal protection”?) selectively applied; untested and unreliable machines; incompetent poll workers; running out of ballots; insufficient polling places. See this IHT report on overseas’ observers for one example, or the E-Voting Experts blog for more. And don’t tell me that it only affects a few voters, or that it’s an inevitable side-effect of the size of the country. Japan, UK, Germany, France… all make this stuff work at comparable scale with virtually none of these problems. When a city provides two voting machines for 1100 registered voters (Columbus), or halves the number of polling places in the face of significantly increased registration, that isn’t a “scaling problem”: it’s either incompetence or (worse) a triumph of partisanship over democratic principles. The ends don’t justify the means.
Listen guys, it may have been cute to spend a couple of hundred years pretending that you were just a bunch of agrarian sovereign mini-states, like Swiss cantons, but it’s time to grow up. Uniform laws. Uniform standards. Voting systems that work. Guaranteed provision of enough ballots, machines, and polling places for ALL, not just the people you expect/want to turn up. Absentee ballots sent out on time, not three days before the election. And voting spread over Saturday and Sunday – what’s the rush? (Although mandating an 11 day waiting period for counting provisional ballots is also ridiculous.) Try taking a few lessons from Venezuela, for instance. Or Serbia.
America may be the world’s second largest democracy, but don’t hold yourselves up as a role model.

From Tuesday’s Guardian: “Stuck in the middle” by David Clark:
Almost four decades ago, during the Vietnam war, the great liberal, Senator J William Fulbright, captured more eloquently than any recent commentary what is at stake in today’s US presidential election. There were, he said, two Americas: “One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good humoured, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.”

It’s time to choose.

From the Princeton Meta-Analysis of State Polls: ” Just for the record, my gut estimate of the likelihood of a Kerry win is about 6-1 in favor.”

Update: “Predicted electoral outcome (11/1/2004 noon EST): Kerry 323 EV, Bush 215 EV“

From Gary Kamiya’s article in Salon.com, American nightmare: As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, “The Iraq war … was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist.”

(And the rest of the article is well worth reading too.)