The Yorkshire Ranter

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.…

Keep your heads. I can’t stand some of the nonsense about suicide waves, emigration and blaming gays that is circulating around some otherwise good blogs. MyDD gives the details. In Ohio, there’s a Bush lead of 138,866, but anywhere between 100,000 and 250,000 provisional, absentee and overseas ballots. In Iowa and New Mexico, there are…

It’s down to Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has just made a speech in which he stated as fact that Bush was winning Ohio by 140,000 votes and this was “statistically insurmountable”. His source was Republican Ohio Secretary Kenneth Blackwell. Meanwhile, Blackwell’s office informed UK journalists in Ohio…

Reuters supposedly calling Pennsylvania for Kerry. BBC figures put Kerry just shy of 57%, why this wasn’t called earlier is bewildering. Anyway I’ve had enough. Want to sleep. I’m not even going to drink the rest of the Black Sheep Ale.

The BBC figures in Ohio and Pennsylvania are converging on the exit polls. Positions reversed in Ohio – Kerry now 54.3%. Pennsylvania now 68% – 31%. Perhaps that early exit poll was the truth? Kerry also pulling in front by a nose in Missouri. Now up to 71% in Pennsylvania.