Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Care to flip-flop Mr. Rumsfeld?

I was just watching a Frontline documentary called "Rumsfeld's War" when up cropped a fantastic quote from Don the do-wrong-wrong. It comes from his April 11, 2003 Pentagon briefing:

I picked up a newspaper today, and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest, and it just was "Henny-Penny, the sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it.

And here is a country that's being liberated. Here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator and they're free. And all this newspaper could do with eight or 10 headlines -- they showed a man bleeding, a civilian who they claimed we had shot, one thing after another. It's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country.

Do I think those words are unrepresentative? Yes.

Hundreds of US and thousands of Iraqi lives later, I wonder if he'd care to make that kind of statement again and not be laughed out of office? Just who is it that trusted him then when he made this comment that still trusts him now? Why does anyone wonder why over 50% of Americans don't trust "Bush and the New Cons" (aka NeoCons) to run this country and the vast majority of the rest of the world are actually paying careful interest in our little game of democracy-come-mediocracy?

I've heard from two Americans recently who had traveled to Spain and Germany and were both shocked at how much interest there was in who the next president would be and how overwhelmingly they were against Bush being that person. Its time for America to get its head out of the sand (or out of its ass) and take a sniff of reality.

Friday, October 22, 2004

Voter registration gone wrong

I was reading this story about a voter registration group telling its workers they would be fired if they brought back any registration cards from democrats and suddenly something struck me. Isn't this kind of corruption exactly the reason why your vote is supposed to be secret?

Just what kind of dumb ass system does this country have where someone who collects your registration card is able to guess, more or less how you are going to vote? Sure you might decline to state your preference, you might change your mind and vote for another party's presidential candidate, or you could deliberately register for the other party either to help select a lame duck candidate, or just to avoid fraudulent registration workers from shredding your card. But again, why on earth should a voter registration form give any indication whatsoever as to which party they are aligned? To require or even allow voters to express this when registering to vote is just plain and simply dumb.

Its high time that the respective parties manage their own party membership and primary elections in complete isolation from the other elections. The voter registration form should be purged of all voter preference information - this includes ethnicity too. In Florida you are requested to fill your ethnicity - that makes it real easy for Jeb Bush and Co, to shred all the non-caucasian forms and ditch a group that's historically 90% democratic party voters.

Its none of the country's business how a part selects its candidates. With voter registration forms purged of any party allegiance preference it will be impossible for such heinous election frauds from taking place unless someone willingly expresses their voting intention to the registration worker. Really the country itself should be making a greater effort to register people to vote in the first place, everyone should have been sent a voter registration form that is sent to a single location and the processing of which is handled by a bi-partisan non-corporation organization. Furthermore everyone should easilly be able to confirm their registration status with a simple phone call, or online check.

Friday, October 15, 2004

The wisdom of ages

I was driving home today and happen to catch this excerpt of a speech on the radio. Read it and guess by whom and when it was written.

Entangled abroad and embattled at home, America searches for answers, not just to specific programs, but to the great question, What do we stand for? Where do we want to go? Do we stand for our wealth? Is that what is important about America? Is that what is significant about the United States? Asked better perhaps, are we really so wealthy?

Half a million American children suffer from serious malnutrition, and I have seen of them, some of them, I have seen personally some of them starving in the state of Mississippi, their stomachs bloated, their bones and their bodies scarred, many of them retarded for life. Up to 80 percent of some Indian tribes are unemployed. And the suicide rate among the high school children is shockingly high, dozens of times the national average. For the black American of the urban ghetto, we really do not know what its unemployment rate is, because from one-fifth to one-third of these adult men in these areas have literally dropped out from sight, uncounted and unknown by all of the agencies of government, drifting about the cities, without hope and without family and without a future. By these standards, we are not so rich a country. Truly we have a great gross national product, almost 800 billion dollars, but can that be the criterion by which we judge this country? Is it enough? For the gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife and television programs, which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. And the gross national product, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither wit nor courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our duty to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud to be Americans. Is it then that, is it then our wealth or is it our military power that we stand for in the United States?

Beyond our borders, we have become the greatest force in the world. Some have even spoken of us as the new imperial power. Even if we should desire such a role, it is no longer possible, as the history of the last 20 years has so unmistakably shown. The day has passed when a country can successfully rule distant lands by force. The issue for us is whether we will live as an island in the midst of a hostile world community or whether we will be joined with other independent nations in search of common goals. We must understand this, because so much depends on what is going to happen in the future as to whether this concept is clear to us. Other countries will associate themselves with us, not because they will be forced to, but because they find in our acts and in our policies a common interest and an understanding of their own ideals and their own aspirations; an understanding of the values that they can respect and admire; an understanding of the values that they can strive to emulate; thus consideration of our wealth and our power brings us full circle to the question with which we began: What do we stand for? Nor should we be surprised, for this is the most powerful and constant lesson of all of history.

The wars and the conquests, the politics and the intrigues of state are soon covered by the years. The triumph of Athens, the empire of Rome, the march of armies, the names of governors - all these did leave some imprint, but it is the ideas and the statutes, the plays of Sophocles and the philosophy of Plato that endure most vividly shaping and enriching our lives to this very day. The mastery of transient events, our accomplishments, our victories will ultimately matter far less than what we contribute - all of us - in this country to the liberation of the human spirit. That is what we have always stood for in the past, that it is what we must stand for at the moment. That is what has given us our unique position, our unprecedented strength. That is why, in fact, we are proud to be Americans.

For two hundred years, America has meant a vision of national independence and personal freedom and justice between men. But whether it will continue to mean this will depend on the answers to difficult and complex problems. It will depend on whether we sit content in our storehouses, dieting while others starve, buying eight million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. It will depend on whether we act against crime and its causes and wipe the stain of violence from this land. It will depend on whether we can halt and can reverse the tide of ever greater centralization in Washington and return the power to the American people in their local communities. It will depend on whether we can turn the private genius of industry to the service of great public ends, using comprehensive tax incentives to help industry create the jobs, train the workers and build the housing, which all of the efforts of the federal government have, so far, failed to do. It will depend on whether we still hold, as the framers proclaimed, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, or whether we will act as if no other nations existed, flaunting our power and flaunting our wealth against the judgment and desires of neutrals and allies alike.

It will depend on whether men still believe, as de Gaulle said at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, that this great nation, the United States, does not act in small ways. But whether like Athens of old, we forfeit sympathy and support alike-and ultimately our own security-in the single-minded of pursuit of our own goals and our own purposes. These are the questions to debate in this election year. This is the true agenda, which faces not just the contenders for office but all of the American people. This is what we must really examine in this election year; to meet and master these challenges will take great vision and will take great persistence. But that seems to me to be the responsibility of the great political parties of this country. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln just 100 years ago, we must know where we are and whether we are going before determining how to get there.

In this, the most dangerous and yet the most challenging period in our history, this is what is so desperately needed [...] But the larger question of whether we have advanced our civilization and the cause of freedom will depend on our own morality and our philosophy and our commitment to our ideals and to our principles. These precepts must guide us again as the great debate begins or if we do have the will, the vision, and the courage to create and to hold fast, to be shaping ideals which men follow, not from the enslavement of their bodies, but from the compulsions of their own hearts. If we do this, then we know that men will stand with us at home and abroad among our friends and even in the camp of our adversaries. For it is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands matched to reason and principle that will determine our destiny. This is the pride, this is the pride and even the arrogance of America, but it's the experience and it is the truth. And, in any case, it is the only way that we can live. I thank you.

And the answer is... Robert F Kennedy addressing the Commonwealth Club in 1968. The rest of the speech in full is in their archives.

The economists among you might have guessed the date from the figure given as the GNP of the country - its now around ten trillion dollars. Maybe there aren't quite as many suffering from malnutrition with bloated stomachs in Mississippi these days, but even today 20% (over half a million) of its inhabitants are living in poverty, much more than the 12.4% national average. Those historical spoilers aside, the rest of the descriptions of the USA seem to me to be bang on for October 2004.

I ask myself, has America really made so little progress in the last 36 years? Could a description of the state of the nation, now so hotly debated in recent time really still be so apt? That's a period spanning almost my entire lifetime and the USA doesn't seem to have learned or achieved a thing, and the same age old question remain before us and promote the same tired responses from those in power.

Maybe between 1968 and now the USA has earned and squandered a fortune, if it did I must have missed it. Or perhaps since then we have been witnessing some of the last spasmodic blasts of the once great American empire. Like a party ballon careening around a room with a rude exhalation of its last energies perhaps it will soon be over. Maybe then, when the wealth is gone like a late frost facing morning in America, will we truly learn the answer to the questions "What do we stand for?" and "Where do we want to go?"

The US government, a fine role model

Lets party like the US government does, lets spend, spend, spend! Well that's the message they are sending us when we read today that they have just reached their $7.6 trillion government borrowing cap. Yes, thats $7,600,000,000,000 dollars, or $106,000 dollars per US household.

That's a ****-load of borrowing, and we also read that the deficit has also just reached a record, already at $413 billion this year. So when the country is up to its neck in debt by over one hundred thousand dollars per household, the Bush administration is all system go, full speed ahead and adding an additional $5,700 per houshold to that debt this year alone.

Why the heck is Bush shouting about how he gave a few hundred in tax back to the middle class families this year when he's actually borrowing over five grand per average family? Its no time to be going on a $10 trillion tax cutting spree when you can't even avoid going deep into debt to do it. As my previous entry pointed out, he's just robbing our future generations to go on a huge tax cutting spending spree.

Bush misleading over flu-vaccine

I'm sure that the folks over at The Daily Mislead have a hard time picking what particular Bush whopper to highlight for the day. So I won't blame them for not reporting this one, I'll just do it myself.

During the third presidential debate, when asked about the shortage of flu vaccine this winter Bush said, an I quote from the transcript:

We relied upon a company out of England to provide about half of the flu vaccines for the United States citizen, and it turned out that the vaccine they were producing was contaminated. And so we took the right action and didn't allow contaminated medicine into our country.

Hello! That's Bushit and two counts! Firstly the shortage is because Chiron, an American company based in Emeryville, California, had their license for vaccine production in the United Kingdom pulled. Chiron acquired a production plant in the UK and fortunately for us the British authorities determined that output from that plant was contaminated and quickly prevented Chiron from continuing to use it. So secondly it wasn't the Americans that "took the right action", we actually have the British to thank for not letting the American public receive contaminated vaccine.

Our kids are in big trouble

Laurence Lessig over at Wired wrote today that our kids are in big trouble. He points out that the policies and mechanisms of society today are placing a huge burden on future generations. Those generations, even the kids alive today, have no say in what were doing now that will affect them - the burden falls firmly on our shoulders. Its a point of view that I can easily agree with, and even if I and my partner have personally chosen to be child free I still have a strong interest in the future of civilization on this planet.

I its a given that I whole-heartedly agree with the sentiments expressed in "Our Kids Are in Big Trouble". I believe the reason for this assault on the future is rooted in two problems: 1) the declining "wealth" of the current generation such that they feel ill inclined to give up anything for the future generations, and 2) the insistence of government and other establishments to only quantify our "Wealth" in terms of fiscal wealth.

There's not too much I feel we can do about 1) at the moment. We have squandered many of the riches accumulated since FDR's social revolution and it will take a long time to get them back, generations perhaps. However a solution for 2) may help us do this sooner rather than later by encouraging people to seek and elect forward looking political candidates that can invest in the future instead of squandering the past.

I recently came across the work of a group called Redefining Progress that is busy trying to fix problem 2) by attempting to quantify all those other factors that determine our "wealth". They include simple stuff like how much time we spend commuting, and the amount money spent on health care to "fix" the side effects of pollution, to complicated stuff like the cost of depleting our common assets like non-renewable resources, and the costs of global climate change.

Graphs of their genuine progress indicator maybe based on a lot of guess work, but the reality of that huge difference between fiscal progress and actual progress is something that many of us starting to feel as we wake up to the absence of a sustainable future in the way things are going.

The lack of sustainability in our current global systems is obvious, no one with reasonable IQ and scientific background can deny it. Furthermore even a dullard can understand that oil will run out, and resources like steel, coal, fresh water, habitable land and clean air are all finite on this planet. Only a fool will stand up today and proclaim with unreserved euphoria "The future's so bright I've gotta wear shades" and implore us to cure all our woes by going shopping. Why devote the entire energies of our country to striving for something better (that inevitable march of "growth" and "progress" that the fiscal economists laud) when we can't even guarantee a sustainable future based on what we have now?

Modern retail therapy is a quick fix no better than stick in the arm with a needle and the drug of your choice. I have no problem with that but its not going to do anything for the rest of the planet and future generations. If you want to burn out and not fade away then fine, go shopping my friends. Just remember in a few generations there may not even be anyone around to excavate your 72" Plasma and Hummer H2 and marvel over your fantabulous riches. However I'm a firm believer that social and fiscal reform are a long lasting lifestyle changes that will benefit all the worlds people and future generations.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Your tax dollars at work - for Wal-Mart

A Berkeley report puts the average cost of welfare and health assistance to poorly paid Wal-Mart workers at $1952 a year. That's 39% more assistance than the average retail worker who makes 30% more a year. The story at Hometown Advantage points out that Wal-Mart's defence "well those workers would be unemployed without us" is specious at best since the net effect of Wal-Mart stores is to shift equal numbers of jobs from higher paying local stores to lower paying Wal-Mart stores. In fact, since Wal-Mart is "more efficient" it will probably actually create fewer jobs. In a final blow to the local community some states will find a large corporation will exploit a tax loophole to shift its profits out of state and avoid paying any taxes. Fortunately California has already closed that one!

Now if I could only convince my wealthy friends not to run off and shop at Wal-Mart to save a few bucks. Sending your hard earned dollars into the bowels of a huge multinational is simply funding the Axis of Retail! Remember folks, shopping at your local neighborhood store is patriotic.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

The Gini Index - how does your inequality measure up?

All my life I've thought that Gini was just a refreshing bitter lemon beverage now only available in France. However today I read An Open Letter to George Bush (thank you Chicken or Beef? and learned that Gini is also the name of a coefficient or index used to measure a population's income inequality. According to Wiki its named after Italian statistician Corrado Gini.

In a population with perfect equality everyone has the same income and the Gini coefficient is 0. In a population with perfect inequality of income one person has all the income and everyone else has none. Naturally most countries fall somewhere inbetween but the general rule is that when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, income inequality measured by the Gini coefficient rises. The Gini index is just the Gini coefficient multiplied by 100, so it goes from 0 to 100.

The open letter to George Bush makes the point that our Gini index "is far higher in the United States than in any other developed country and is continuing to move upward". It also implies that our level of income inequality may be approaching a level that is extreme "which can be socially corrosive and economically dysfunctional." Furthermore it claims "we believe your tax policy has exacerbated the problem of inequality in the United States." Having blogged on the topic of income inequality before this is naturally of great interest to me. So I decided to dig up some figures and find out what the truth is.

Now it took me a long time to dig up Gini figures for the US that include Bush II years, all easily located sources stop at 2001. However I eventually dug up the document "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2003" by the US Census Bureau. This document includes historical figures for the Gini index from 1967 through to 2003 and jolly interesting it is too. Plotted on a graph it looks like this:

The huge increase between 1992 and 1993, just at the end of Bush Snr's term of office coincided with a change in methods used to collect income data (see the footnotes for this chart). Also the figures in the 2003 document are apparently for pre-tax income, a conclusion that I drew by comparison with other tables of Gini data (see this pre and post-tax Gini chart). As I've mentioned before while pre-tax inequalities are bad, post tax ones tend to be even worse due to the steady elimination of progressive income taxation by successive Republican governments. Unfortunately I haven't been able to dig up any post-tax (disposable income) based Gini figures which would probably be the most interesting ones to evaluate what if any role the Bush tax cuts have had on income distribution.

I did managed to locate an analysis for 2002 that shows computations of the Gini coefficient when various adjustments to total income are made including taxes, deductions, benefits paid, etc. Table 2 of this document indicates that in 2002 the Gini coefficient starts out at 0.448 when considering gross income not including capital gains. After adjusting for things like capital gains, taxes, social security payments and taxes, federal and state taxes the Gini ratio rises to 0.487. Then it goes on to adjust for the value of received benefits like medicaid, medicare, free school lunches, and the benefit from an increase in home equity. These factors all serve to decrease the Gini coefficient to a final value of 0.40.

So clearly calculating the Gini coefficient is complicated and its going to take some hard work to produce concrete figures that indicate what exactly government policy has done to the inequality of income distribution. However, variances for calculation method aside, what you should do is take a look at Gini figures world wide. Basically is 0.4 or 0.5 or whatever good, bad or indifferent? Kim Scipes did just this in his article "International Income Inequality: Whither the United States?", so did the World Bank, and even the CIA. You can even get a map of global Gini values.

Issues with absolute measurement aside (most figures are actually based on gross income since that's the only data available) when you look at these tables you see something interesting. Relative to the rest of the world the USA is basically doing about as well as your average eastern European country, but better than your average Latin American country. Compared to the rest of the "developed world" the USA is usually lagging far behind at the back of the pack. Indeed based on distribution of income on a per family basis, Scipes concludes that we're doing about as well as sub-Saharan Africa and only Latin America and the Caribbean are doing worse than us at divvying up the income. Indeed if you consider the CIA world factbook figures then out of the 112 nations listed the USA comes 69th right inbetween Ghana and Turkmenistan. And that's using the 1997 Gini index value of 40.8. If we're actually at 45 or worse now then we'd be 84th position between Kenya and Costa Rica.

Clearly, if our income distribution inequality is getting worse then either we are entering into some new and undiscovered state of developed country with solid economy and happy populace, or we are actually pushing the envelope of stability with inequality and increasingly disgruntled populace. I know which I would choose and I think its only a matter of time before the cracks that have been plastered over by the veneer of media whitewash will begin tearing wide open. Clearly given the still virtually deadlocked state of our political system we haven't reached that point yet, but perhaps as many are predicting, four more years of Bushanomics will be precisely that impitous to produce that "socially corrosive and economically dysfunctional" state that will lead to, well, rioting in the streets Latin America style...

Monday, October 11, 2004

How would Jesus vote?

Paul Ford over at Ftrain makes the argument that Evangelical Christians should vote for Kerry for the sake of the USA, and just as Jesus would want them to. He uses interesting logic, but when judgement day is coming anything is worth a try!

Sunday, October 10, 2004

Bulge-gate: Is he or isn't he?

Well, you tell me. Do you think that Bush is wearing some kind of external communications device during the first debate and second debate or not? isbushwired.com asks the same question, but predicatably the Republican party is "laughing off" such questions about the "Bush bulge".

Perhaps I can stake a claim to be first to label this whole affair "bulge-gate"? Probably not, but its worth a try.

Saturday, October 09, 2004

Dumb and Dumber

This news is breaking kind of late, almost two years actually. However should it come as a surprise that 11% of Americans couldn't actually locate America on a map? Or that 87% couldn't locate Iraq - a country that they were soon to go to war with? Or that 49% of Americans couldn't locate New York?

You can get all the details here or even take the geosurvey quiz yourself.

The best excuse ever

Courtesy of tonight's second Presidential debate the people of America now have the best excuse ever for pretending they never received an email. All they need do is tell the sender "I'm sorry, I must have logged into the wrong Internet". That's because tonight George Bush, leader of the "free" world indicated there was a plurality of Internets when talking about that vicious rumour "that's going around on the Internets" regarding a draft.

I guess he was just trying to out do Gore who only "took the initiative" for one Internet. Bush clearly swung into winning position by that old dictum "If something's worth doing, its worth doing twice".

Friday, October 01, 2004

Sick of scapegoating

Is anyone else sick of George Bush using the armed forces as scapegoats for his miserable failure in Iraq? He's always going on about how they deserve better than what Kerry can offer, and how Kerry is insulting their courage of being in harms way. Sure they are in harms way, but you know the million or so people who have (mostly) voluntarily put themselves in harms way owe it to the commander-in-chief for deciding where harms way is. There is absolutely no diminishing their sacrifice if they die or are wounded in harms way in the name of our country.

It is perfectly possible to discredit those who decided the location, timing and even caused the existance of the harm they are put in the way of. No it wont make our troops feel any better, it will sow seeds of doubt in their minds. But the people in the armed forces are trained to follow orders, they are trained to kill following those orders and they are trained to expect and deal with casualties of war regardless of the reason or justification.

So at least give the troops the decency of the respect they deserve and allow them to hear and think whatever they want about the war but still do their job. Don't use their feelings as an excuse to keep doing the wrong thing. The "fog of war" is a well documented and widely accepted concept - mistakes happen in war and people die. Civilians die by accident or as "acceptable collateral damage", friendly forces kill each other by accident, and tactical errors by commanding officers lead to unecessary and futile carnage in the execution of "victory". All these are facts of war and we cannot let failure to recognize and publicly admit the harsh realities of warfare prevent us from doing the right thing and electing the right President.

If America could face these realities and stop scapegoating the instruments of war instead of the surgeons wielding them then perhaps we, as a nation would go to war less often or perhaps even never again?

Not letting the media decide

I stayed up late last night looking at numerous news web sites to see what they said on the debate. I read and read and read. By 2am PST, more than six hours after the debate finished there was no mainstream media news site saying anything decisive about who won the debate or not. Now call me cynical, but could this be because "the wrong man" won?

I noticed that by midnight all the online polls at NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN showed that voters thought Kerry won by a wide margin. Yes I know that on-line polls are not scientific, far from it in fact, but I do believe that Republicans are likely to be rushing to vote online as much, if not more so than the non-Republicans.

However I don't even need a poll to tell me who won the debate, it was obvious. As an Anyone But Bush Again supporter I was ready for Kerry to suck. The liberal media and liberal pundits had all briefed us to expect a cocky holier-than-thou Bush to soundbite, mislead, mispeak, grin, smirk and gurn (you'll have to look that up) his way to victory. Furthermore we expected Kerry to sputter, waffle, blunder and generally slither to defeat. We were ready to concede the ABBA candidate was just the lesser of two evils, that he was a compromise and they we'd hold our noses on November 2nd and vote for him just because there was no one else with a chance of defeating Bush.

So when neither of these happened and in fact Kerry managed to put Bush on the defensive we were pleasantly surprised. It was Bush who ended up sputtering, crawling, and generally sounding like a broken, broken, broken record. You can't win a Presidential debate by repeating "being President is hard" twenty two times, and that's because he didn't win. Furthermore after the event all the Bush team could come up with as positive spin was "Bush clearly won because he showed he has a heart". Excuse me? We're not electing a bleedin empath here. We want someone who'll do the right thing in the first place and not have us feeling so bad we want to hit the analyst's couch for some heart warming apple pie platitudes to make everything better. That seems to be Bush's solution for Iraq - "Don't tell the troops its a SNAFU quagmire, how will that make them feel?"

What I did read later on in the night, and hear on the news was the mainstream media saying words to the effect of "its not clear who won, that will be decided in the week to come as the media decides". Excuse me, when the media decides? Who gives a f**k what the media thinks, the media isn't voting. How about just polling the twenty million or so people who watched the debate and let them decide?

Well decide they did - the Gallup poll gives it 53 to 37% to Kerry which is a stunning result considering how evenly split the voters are supposed to be. 19% of Bush voters declared Kerry the winner and 11% declared a draw. Only 3% of Kerry voters gave it to Bush, and 4% were undecided. The ABC News poll gave it 45 to 36% to Kerry.

So why is it when I survey the headlines of mainstream news sites I don't see any of them leading with public opinion that Bush lost the debate? All I see is "Bush, Kerry spar in first debate" (ABC News), "Bush, Kerry clash over history, allies" (NBC), "War Center Stage At Debate" (CBS), "Post Debate, Candidates Hit Trail Again" (FoxNews), and "Debating the first debate" (CNN).

But interestingly it does look as though even the hardened Republican boosters, Fox News are now starting to report US and even world opinion that Kerry won, albeit in an AP story linked too from their debate page. Other stories are popping up on the rest of the mainstream media as the post debate zeitgeist becomes undeniable, Kerry won. But still, they aren't shouting about it. Like it or not, isn't the first debate the single most important event of this election since Kerry was selected? Isn't Kerry's surprise performance and convincing win in public opinion worth some serious column inches?

Oy. Two words: media bias.

Now don't get me wrong, this is actually how I think such an event should be reported. But ultimately its the knowledge that their reaction if it had gone the other way would have been very different. Think about it, what if the ABBA voters worst fears were realized, wouldn't the mainstream media be leading with "Bush crushes Kerry" all day, all week and all the way to November 2nd? Wouldn't we be getting endless talking heads giving a blow by blow account of each Bush comment and how he wiped the floor with that Frenchie loving Kerry? Instead when Kerry wins we get "Well, er, it appears as if voters think Kerry won, but it hasn't made any difference to the voting preferences so who cares, lets move swiftly along to a story about a cat stuck up a tree in BFE..."

Lets hope that Edwards and Kerry can continue their romp to a 4-nil victory in the debates so we won't have to sample any irrational exuberance over a Bush debating victory.