Category Archives: Politics

In Absentia

BallotI just spent all morning reliving the indecisive hell of last fall’s protracted U.S. Presidential election face-off. The New York Times published a massive article on that whole debacle in this morning’s paper, resulting from a detailed study of all the ballots (which resulted in what sounds like a complex analytical database). Journalists David Barstor and Don Van Natta Jr. focused on the Bush campaign’s mercernary approach to qualifying absentee ballots, and the results are disturbing. It just gets me so mad, thinking about the evil consortium of Republican playas who contrived to put that dolt into office…

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“Beijing Wins 2008 Olympics”

I get a kick out of this headline, captured this morning from a story on MSNBC which has probably changed by the time you’re reading this, but luckily for you I’ve posted a screen shot of it here.

Beijing Wins

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It has a bizarrely predictive quality, as if MSNBC looked into the future and saw that Beijing will basically sweep all of the games in 2008. What’s so interesting about this is how, unconciously or not, China is playing a larger and larger role in the West’s psyche. As the next great capitalist frontier, there’s a growing willfulness towards the idea that, if China does well, then we all do well. (Granted, there’s a corresponding anti-Sino mentality on the rise too.) I think that sentiment is very much at play here, not only in the Olympic Committee’s decision, but in MSNBC’s double-entendre headline. Get ready for more of it.

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Congratulations, Mr. Bush

Now that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court has clearly demonstrated it cares not a whit for the voting rights of African Americans, it’s virtually certain that George W. Bush will be our forty-third President. How we ever got to this miserable nadir, I can’t say.

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