Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Power. Politics. NYTimes.  Bush opts to delay power grid improvement proposal.  Why?  A more efficient power grid would save customers in the north east and CA $500 m a year.  It would raise prices for power in the south, Bush's political base.  Guess who lost that political equation?   Basically, CA (54) and the north eastern states NY (36), PA (23), CT (8), VT (3), NH (4), ME (4), RI (4), NJ (15), and MA (12) are being corralled into a solid anti-Republican block (total votes = 163 of the 270 needed to elect) by Republican hostility.  Building on this base, I think it is possible to mint this electoral map for the Dems in most elections moving forward. [John Robb's Weblog] 11:12:07 PM    comment []  trackback []

'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' Brian Eno, writing in The Guardian: ...the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. (The title is a reference to a conversation he had with Brezhnev's physician about what it was like to live 'immersed in propaganda.') 5:17:07 PM    comment []  trackback []