Roll Call - Who are novelists voting for?

Roll Call - Who are novelists voting for?:
Kerry by a landslide!
Great article reveals who some of the greatest contemporary American novelists are suppporting in the presidential election and lets them explain why in their own words. "Thirty-one novelists participated, with four for Bush, 24 for Kerry, and three in a category of their own. "
This is fabulous and heartening. This is a margin I can deal with. I say artists get to run the world from now on.

The New York Times > Opinion > Making Votes Count: Be Part of the Solution

The New York Times > Opinion > Making Votes Count: Be Part of the Solution
The most imminent threat:
A New York Times editorial warns that the 2004 federal electoral process may be even more problematic than 2000.

Hunting for Republicans in Paris - Registering voters on the Champs Elysees. By Elisabeth Eaves

By Elisabeth Eaves:
This brief, insightful article brings much needed news from overseas. Americans abroad are not only politically activated and overwhelmingly for Kerry in this election, they also understand the unintended, tragic consequences of American foreign policy under the Bush administration:
"What ordinary Americans living overseas want to get across is not simply that the United States is running out of allies. (If you counted allies based on majority opinion, rather than government policy, it would have almost none.) What they're also trying to say is that this steady erosion matters." It matters on a practical level, of course, because the citizens of those nominal allies may throw out their pro-U.S. governments, as Spain did earlier this year before abruptly walking out of Iraq. But it also matters on a philosophical level: When you lead the most powerful country in the world, foreigners are to some extent your constituents, whether you like it or not."
Hell, yes! It does matter, the President's tirades against "popularity" notwithstanding. Now if we could only get Americans stateside to come to the same realization, we would have real hope.

Economist J Bradford Delong on why economists are better than other social scientists

Delong is a great thinker and prodigious blogger. This is one of his funniest, most notable non-political posts: "as I watched this sequence of events, it struck me that I should be very, very glad that I was an economist: that our instinctive reaction was to think of how we could make the alternative we sought more attractive so that people wouldn't be tempted to vote-with-their-feet and exercise their right to do other things; by contrast, the sociologists' instinctive reaction was to think of how they could punish their graduate students and so effectively deprive them of the ability to vote-with-their-feet to do other things."