Category: Politics

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.)

Seymour Hersh on why Kerry isn’t winning by a landslide: “I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution – and those are Bush supporters.”

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

OK, this is priceless. The mercurial expat Brit writer Christopher Hitchens (note my restrained description) has seen fit to endorse both Kerry and Bush!! Maybe another bottle of port will cure his double vision. Or perhaps he should stick to writing about Henry Kissinger and George Orwell.
(Thanks to Atrios.)

From the Des Moines Register: “Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what’s to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals’ lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms.”

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

This piece in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal (registration possibly required) needs no comment:
Oct. 20, 2004  |  Passing almost without notice earlier this month, the public release of the official staff report prepared by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on “The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration,” whose submission is required by federal law, was blocked by the Republican commissioners. Nonetheless, it was posted on the commission’s Web site. “This report,” the site states, “finds that President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words.”
[more, particularly on the implications for minority voting]

This morning before I left for work I started downloading the film Going Upriver. At 650MB, I figured it would take a couple of hours, even via cable modem. This evening I sat down at my PC to watch it. This may sound like rank heresy, since the Red Sox were playing the Yankees at the culmination of a series which has turned even cricket-loving expat Brits like myself into baseball enthusiasts! (I must admit, however, that I did have a browser window open to keep an eye on the score…..)
The film runs for 90 minutes. The first half hour is about the Vietnam experiences of John Kerry, Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, and others. It is not for the squeamish: the snapshot of US soldiers grinning over Vietnamese corpses is disturbingly familiar. The remainder of the film is about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: the Winter Soldier Investigation of winter 1971; the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in Washington a couple of months later, which culminated in Kerry’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the repudiation of medals; and Kerry’s subsequent TV appearances, including the confrontation with O’Neill.
Over the last year or so, I’ve seen many clips from these amateur movies and TV recordings, but this is the first time I’ve seen the material assembled so completely, unhampered by the exigencies of MTV-generation editing. Kerry is remarkably impressive for a man of his age, both in his speech and his actions. One thing that really comes across from the body language of those around him – whether long-haired veterans or pin-stripe-suited Senators – is the fact that he clearly commanded enormous respect. As we now know, this respect even extended to the Nixon White House; the legacy of their response is still with us in the form of John O’Neill’s vicious “Swift Boat” lies. (He learned his dirty tricks from the master.)
Even though the film is playing in theatres, and can be purchased on DVD, you can download it from here, as I did. You can also get it through BitTorrent, eDonkey and Kazaa. Please watch it, and share it. It’s an important part of American history, and painfully relevant today.
And yes – the Red Sox did it! 10 to 3. Who would have believed it? As I finish typing this, people are outside in the street, sounding car horns, letting off fireworks, whooping it up… and this is in a quiet residential area of Brookline. I wonder what it’s like downtown?

Ambitious, but cogent.