Kirk Douglas says that we need to have peace in the Middle East, and something about maybe our children can do better than ourselves. I think he did, Kirk, I think he did.

Headline of the week: "Germans Fear the Worst for Sausages"

ITN news commented that we now know what sort of president W would be: the sort who puts in charge of his transition the guy who just had a heart attack.

Bob Dole has an op-ed piece in today's NY Times saying that Gore should concede because he conceded quickly in 1996. Oh fair point, Bob.

Bush went on tv yesterday to tell Gore to give up, that Gore is now not contesting votes but the election outcome. To paraphrase Gore on election night, just because the Lady Macbeth of the Everglades certifies the election doesn't make it so. Notably, Katherine Harris said that she had no choice but to certify the
election without the new votes from Palm Beach County because it was a couple of hours late, although she had shown up Sunday when she could easily have waited another 16 hours according to the Florida Supreme Court, and when she herself was so late getting her hair and makeup and facelifts done that she certified the
election after the Palm Beach results she was ignoring had come in. She also said that she couldn't accept their partial (99.75%) figures submitted by the deadline, which is actually untrue under Florida law.

Personally I remain agnostic but sceptical about the admissibility of dimpled chads. I would have to play around with a stylus and some punch cards for a couple of hours before making up my mind on that one. But any procedure that has counters deciding that a voter must have meant to vote for Gore because they otherwise voted the straight party line has to be wrong. Which means that, clear as it is that more people who went to the polls intended to vote for Gore than for Bush, a count that didn't involve mind-reading might well still return Bush. That said, Palm Beach's ballot design was still illegal, which no one is addressing in court, and Seminole County allowed Republicans to play with absentee ballots that had already been submitted but not those of Democrats, and as the Bush people have been pointing out, different rules is a violation of the 14th amendment.

The best way for this story to be driven out of the newspapers for ever is for Clinton to send in the Marines. I mean it. He sent in the Marines to Haiti and are we paying any attention to their elections, now occurring? Of course not. Has Aristide, the little priest, turned into a complete raving lunatic? Possibly, but there isn't enough coverage to tell. What do you suppose is going on in Somalia these days? We ignored the East Bloc so long that Romania is about to return to communism, and no one is paying any attention. In Kosovo, NATO is talking about having joint patrols of the Kosovo-Serbian border---with the Yugoslav Army! Which we were bombing just last year. How did that happen?