Everyone's out of touch

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/03/opinion/03kris.html?incamp=article_popular_1

Read this while you can, because it may become part of the pay portion of the site after a week or so. It makes some important points about why all of those red states used to be blue states. It concludes saying that Democrats need to stop looking down their nose at religion if they want to get any of these votes.

Political parties in this country are drawn along very classist lines, despite how imaginary the distinctions might be. I have a hard time picturing how this country will turn around and start having sensible religious debate, but I think an election like this is at least getting people to talk about things. People are passionate and paying attention, maybe we can now get them to actually have rational discussions.Sites like Factcheck are going to still keep updating, so it's a start.

It may seem like trying to console myself after Bush won, but in a sense, winning or not winning the election is less important than getting people away from the tv and interested in what's going on in the country and the world.

I voted, dammit

The most crushingly depressing news of the election is that there was no increase in the youth vote from 2000. CNN last night said that about 17% of the vote was 18-24(25?) year olds, which was exactly the same as 2000. Having read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72", I should have known better, but still, fuck you, youth of America.

Voter Information

This isn't exactly apathetic, and might actually be seen as proactive, but I console myself with the fact that this won't reach anyone who might actually be affected by the information.

First things first. For any claim made by Bush, Kerry, or members of their administration or campaign, respectively, check these sites: Spinsanity and Factcheck. These are very informative, nonpartisan websites devoted to checking out all the claims that politicians make. They go after Kerry just as much as Bush. They're the best online resources I know of for anti-spin.

Slashdot has been posting a lot of interesting political stories. You can see them all at politics.slashdot.org. One really important subject that Slashdot focuses on is electronic voting. Electronic voting is already a huge scandal, it's just that no one has noticed it yet. With the election so close, these machines are going to be the subject of endless debate once we start hearing about this year's round of voter scandals. And speaking of which, Slashdot also has a lot of interesting links to stories on the BBC about voter intimidation and 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Florida.

So yeah, what all of this means is that I'm going to be TRASHED on election night. Everyone get drunk and riot. Do your duty as a citizen, burn down your local Wal-Mart!