November 4, 2004

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…