Sunday, October 24, 2004

Somebody at the Guilford County Board of Elections has a serious pro-GOP fantasy life. Or maybe they like to tease a Democratic friend. Whatever. In any case, the test version of the page reporting election results shows big Republican victories across the board. All the bonds lose, too. Whatever the reason behind it, this won't inspire a lot of trust among some people. Here's the official page, and here's a copy I made so you can still see it when they take it down, which I bet they do pretty damn quickly after this gets out. (via Jim Capo, who in this imaginary scenario gets to tie for second place). UPDATE: George Gilbert, director of elections for Guilford County, says via email: "That just turned out to be this election's test vote pattern for insuring the accuracy of the voting machines and the tabulation. I change the test vote script each election to enhance security." 10:10:51 AM    comment []

War for oil is US policy. That's the headline of my newspaper column this morning. It's not meant to be inflammatory, or even judgemental, just a statement of fact -- a fact many Americans prefer to ignore. "None of which means that the current war was launched only to secure oil fields, any more than a list of other reasons to invade Iraq means that oil had nothing to do with it. But obviously we are in that neighborhood in the first place because of its primary natural resource. Yet we can't seem to discuss the role of oil in U.S. policy without using anything but the most reductive and politicized terms, which is dangerous, since it means that we are often willfully blind to an underlying cause of our own actions." I go back to that John Cassidy article in the New Yorker for a stat that says military costs add about ten cents per gallon of gas beyond what you pay at the pump: "You might feel that a humming economy and a Hummer in the driveway are worth a dime per gallon plus getting somebody's kid getting shot in Iraq or Nigeria or Colombia, but you should at least acknowledge that you are making that choice." Read the whole thing. 10:00:09 AM    comment []