Election Blogging in the UK

A few of you might have picked up from my unusually vowel-filled spelling and odd choice of vocabulary that not everyone here at NDN is 100% American born. Let it never be said this organization is not generous in support for immigrants of all sorts. Anyway, i've been writing about the election in a few places back home in the UK, and thought i might link to them. (Full disclosure: i write these in an individual capacity, and do not speak for NDN as a whole in any sense whatsoever.) Yesterday i had a piece on the Guardian site about the whole unfortunate Kerry brouhaha. The gist of my piece was in the headline - "Kerry's gaffe was cringe-making, but the response of the Republican attack dogs shows how bankrupt the Bush administration now is." Quote:

Iraq is going to hell in a hand basket. The median American family is more than $1,000 a year worse off than it was in 2000. American health care is broken. The country is falling in the world education rankings. Global warming is going to hobble the world economy, if not end life on earth. And the Republicans really think they can win an election by attacking John Kerry? One is reminded of the tawdry fictional dictators of Huxley or Orwell, always tilting at imaginary enemies to motivate the people and bolster their crumbling regimes. There could be no more telling epitaph for the failure of conservative governance.

I'm also blogging over at the Progress blog. Progress is, basically, the British equivalent of NDN. Its what we over the pond would call a "ginger group" for the Blarite wing of the Labour Party of which i consider myself a member. Anyway, here is the latest, on the under-reported news of the Senate actually being in play following positive polls from Virginia:

Anyway, if I read the polls correctly, it is now just possible that the Democrats could win all of their competitive Senate races bar Tennessee. Doing this would take back the Senate. Is it likely? No, I think probably not. We have the turnout issue. We have the GOP's kick-ass GOTV issue. We have the Republican financial advantage issue. And we have the possibility of some other big news event coming Kerry-style and ruining another few days of the news cycle. But we must remember that if these races go into election roughly even, theory and history expect late-breaking and independent voters to go 2:1 for change.

If anyone thinks there is something about these elections my fellow limeys need to know, drop me a line........