Election and whatnot

Well, it's more entertainment than we got from the actual election, isn't it?

What I want to know is, why do I never get a chance to vote for a dead guy?

Look at Salon for Wednesday, Jacob Weisberg's piece on why Al Gore lost (which he did, stop living with hope right now).

For my money, Gore didn't lose because we didn't like him, but because he didn't like us, and it showed. Call it condescension, but really he didn't like campaigning because he doesn't much care for people who are not like himself. He was a member of the American House of Lords, the hereditary aristocracy, and considered himself to be above the task of explaining his policies to the proles. Bush, another member of the hereditary aristocracy, has spent all his life pretending not to be one,
in order to be liked. Usually he takes it a bit far, as when he chewed tobacco at Harvard Business School, which he thought showed his down-to-earthness, but really just showed that behaviour is tolerated from an aristo puppy which would not be tolerated from you or me. The opposite of Gore, Bush liked campaigning but will be no good at governing. For him, it is all downhill from here.

Which we wouldn't have to find out if we could just get Palm Beach County to vote again, this time with a properly laid-out ballot. If you haven't yet seen what that ballot looked like, find a picture. It is genuinely confusing and non-intuitive, as the mysteriously high Buchanan vote there shows.

If you want light comic relief from the thought of a(nother) Bush
presidency, see the London Times's story "Man Cooked Wife's Head to Cover Killing."