things

It's a purple country



No, it's a bloated monster (geography weighted to population size)



Well how about something fun to read: "Hunter S Thompson is not regarded as one of world journalism's easier subjects:"

"I remember Bush as a kind of a butt-boy for the smart people. This was in the late 1970s, when he was in his drunken-fool period. He couldn't handle liquor. He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub," Thompson adds, "then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away.

[...]

Thompson, 67, who is a friend of Benicio Del Toro, Bob Dylan and Johnny Depp, and the only one of that illustrious quartet who openly uses a spittoon, clears his throat and expectorates into the receptacle below his desk. His chair is surrounded by work spaces on three sides, like a mission-control centre. Across the living-room, the huge television set, which is never turned off, is showing highlights of a football game from Seattle. Stuck to the screen is a yellowed piece of paper that reads: "No music + Bad TV = Bad Mood + No Pages."
I met John Kerry in a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a spiked fence on to the White House lawn."

[...]

Watching Bush face Kerry, Thompson says, "I almost felt sorry for him until I heard somebody call him 'Mr President', and then I felt ashamed. You know what? I find myself talking almost with nostalgia about Nixon," adds Thompson who, as a reporter, established a curiously affable relationship with the late president.

"Was Nixon somebody you could engage with, on any level?"

"On one level - football. Nixon understood football. Politically he was adroit, and a sound analyst. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a liberal. And that's saying something, when I think what I wrote in his obituary."

Elsewhere, How the world sees Bush's victory (Christian Science Monitor)

And from Daily Kos: Still Missing the Big Picture (on the completion of a 20-year theocratic coup)