2004

Amid all the excitement, of course, serious illness seized someone else’s president. Yasser Arafat collapsed in his Ramallah bunker and was, after some parley, transported to France for treatment. Something of the division this is likely to unleash was well pointed up by the political squabble that broke out over the question of whether or…

Back in 2000, I was astonished to hear of the odd, Heath Robinsonesque voting machines of chad infamy. Being British, I was used to a voting system based on three P’s – paper, pencil, public counting. I’ve never been very keen on e-voting for the simple reason that I don’t see a benefit that outweighs…

The Daily Kos reports a case of what you might call fuzzy electoral maths in Franklin County, Ohio. Franklin County, OH: Gahanna 1-B Precinct 638 TOTAL BALLOTS CAST US Senator: Fingerhut (D) – 167 votes Voinovich (R) – 300 votes US President: Kerry (D) – 260 votes Bush (R) – 4,258 votes Well, some people…

When Kevin MacDonald’s film version of the tale of Joe Simpson, the British climber who barely survived an accident on the summit of Siula Grande, appeared I clearly went to see it at once. Unfortunately, Blogger fell down in a pool of its own credibility when I posted a monster review of the flick, and…

Whilst everyone was glued to the US election, our own politicians weren’t idle. No. They gave the Children Bill its third reading, and no-one did anything about its proposed database of all children in the UK. The press, for example, were too busy yelling about whether or not you could really “go to jail for…

So, what effect did the Guardian’s Operation Clark County, its effort to swing the key district in the key state to John Kerry by getting readers to write to undecided voters, really have? According to Ian Katz’s article on the 21st of October, 14,000 voters had been contacted by the time a distributed denial-of-service attack…

Matthew Yglesias has a proposed solution to all that polarisation: Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly provides the following useful information: “Republicans are way freakier, probably because they are more repressed,” one Manhattan sex worker told New York magazine after the recent GOP convention. Another, a dominatrix, said: “It always surprises me how many of…

Get this read. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times: “At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly that happened because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly because…

I suppose it’s time for a WHAT IT ALL MEANS post, so let’s have it. The election tells us several things. First, and one I’ve blogged before, is that triangulation, third ways and the rest of the Blair/Clinton consensus are dead. The idea is that you identify the two (left/right) positions on an issue and…

He’s given up. Called the White House and said “the country is divided enough”. Look, these aren’t nice people who care about that. They are revolutionaries. They want your country divided, so they can define the other half as the enemy. That’s what they do. The Nation vs the Other. The Leader and the Mass.…