Author: Anthony

After unisex hairdressers, the unisex branch of the Church of England. BBC

It’s morning in America, in at least the astronomical sense. John Kerry is about to concede the presidential election to President Bush, after a strong campaign that was just not quite strong enough to unseat an entrenched incumbent.

The strong uptick in turnout was very welcome – it is plain bad that US election turnouts have been so low for so long – but I do wonder whether that will be sustained into the next election, or whether the “new” voters are going away disillusioned. Moreover, the best ground for new voters to come from is the centre – it will be interesting to read the full profiles of the voting when they become available.

The early election commentary is as usual, the back-of-the-envelope notes for the first draft of history. One worthwhile read, however, is Andrew Leonard’s article for Salon on the echo-chamber effect of the blogosphere. It is a timely reminder of the harmful nature of such reverberation. The piranha-shoal treatment meted out to news stories on both sides of the fence (see much of the commentary on Free Republic or the WELL) shows the ferocity of belief, and the distrust of the other side can be pathological, not just the rough-and-tumble of politics.

The elections in Ukraine have not got off to a good start.

How do the moral majority see the rest of us?

If President Bush wins, it will be interesting to see what happens to the nature of anti-Americanism in other parts of the world. At the moment, surveys are reporting that Americans themselves are not unpopular, although the present Administration is widely despised. How would that change if the Americans seemed to take the decision to approve of Bush, after all the (perceived) bad things he has done?

Hunter S Thompson makes the same point:

The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more
and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American
people want it that way. That is what this election is all about…

Martini Republic gives us a snapshot of the Second World War 1,138 days after Pearl Harbor, today being 1,138 days after 9/11.

Of course, the Poles, British, French and others had been fighting for some time before Pearl Harbor happened, but the point still applies. The territorial advance for this sort of war is not on the ground, but in the mind – and there it’s looking a lot more like Dunkirk than the relief of Paris.

John Dean writes a sobering article from a lawyer’s perspective on the likely legal wrangling that will follow next Tuesday’s vote.