In Greece, not only will prisoners be allowed to vote in the next elections, but so will draft dodgers. They will be allowed to come back into the country, vote, and then sneak out again without being arrested. The cradle of democracy, ladies and gentlemen.

Did anyone else see Mario Cuomo at the convention? He had the huge projection screen behind him, but all you could see of it in the PBS feed were his hands, so you had a little Mario in the foreground and these huge hands making Italianate gestures behind him, like a translator for the Italian-impaired.

When the US signed the deal with Russia to buy up the uranium from its decommissioned nuclear weapons, the job was assigned to a corporation owned by the US, but which is slated to be privatized. The problem is that it's increasingly making decisions based on profit rather than national security. Since the Russian stuff is more expensive than what's mined domestically, it actually refused repeated requests by the Russians to buy more uranium than had been planned. Capitalism at its finest. I'm assuming this has something to do with reducing the size of government, in the same way that federal detention centers are being privatized even though that's more expensive.

The Democratic platform mentions expanding the death penalty and even Star Wars.

Clinton, mixing his political imagery badly, took a train to the
convention (old fashioned politicking combined with a phallic symbol, right up Billy Bob's alley), but when he reached Chicago took a helicopter the rest of the way. Didn't I see that in Mission Impossible? Clinton thinks he's Tom Cruise now, maybe?

The aforementioned giant tv screens have printed text along the bottom, nearly simultaneously turned by computer from spoken word into print. By computer. So Sarah Brady's reference to gun nuts who talk of "jack-booted thugs" became "Jack Buddhist thugs", Tipper Gore became TP Hour, Mario Cuomo Marry Oh Quen Oes and one speaker was seen to refer to Republican ideal logs.