Voting with your feet
We've already had one letter from an American blogospherian over at Atrios asking about immigration to the Great White North.
(See this guide and this commentary with its broad collection of excellent links and a questionaire on the idea)
This official government questionaire will help you figure out if you qualify as a skilled worker

While I heartily encourage all red-state (Jesusland) progressives to move to Canada, I think the best all around solution (barring a sudden epidemic of common sense among red state voters) would be for them to mover to Maine, Michigan or Vermont and demand seccession and entrance to Canadian Confederation.

Provinces dammit, not states! PROVINCES!! 

Well apparently it was fixed

don't belive me, check out the numbers

I must share this admirable concession one with you

Adam Felber concedes the election with admirable grace:
"I concede that I overestimated the intelligence of the American people. Though the people disagree with the President on almost every issue, you saw fit to vote for him. I never saw that coming. That's really special. And I mean "special" in the sense that we use it to describe those kids who ride the short school bus and find ways to injure themselves while eating pudding with rubber spoons. That kind of special.
I concede that I misjudged the power of hate. That's pretty powerful stuff, and I didn't see it. So let me take a moment to congratulate the President's strategists: Putting the gay marriage amendments on the ballot in various swing states like Ohio... well, that was just genius................"

What happens next

For my blue state friends and progressive and liberal bloggers trapped in the red zone, Slate has kindly published this timely and handy guide on How to Move to Canada

My suggestion is that Paul Martin ought to pick up the phone tomorrow and offer Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine a chance to join our Confederation as a single province. Next year we'll extend the same offer to Massachusetts and Minnesota,then Rhode Island, then Connecticut, Wisconsin and finally New York. Secession and assimilation into Confederation will have to be done slowly, a state or two at a time to allow them to get used to the shock of universal health care, properly run elections and currency that comes in more than two colors.

After being glued to election coverage on CNN and the internet(s) all day, I went to work the night shift at the paper. Our late Tokyo edition goes out at midnight and Ohio was still tied. I got home at 1:30 and turned on the TV and did what any sensible intelligent politically-aware individual anywhere in the world does the night of a U.S. presidential election -- I drank a half a bottle of irish whisky before the ice cubes could melt and muttered obscenities to myself while I watched the good guys concede "for the good of the country" so that the "healing could begin." Then I went to bed and tried not to cry myself to sleep.

Please tell me the fix was in
Tell me it was the Diebold machines, tell me it was missing absentee ballots in Florida, tell it was voter intimidation and disenfranchisement, tell me it was little green men from the planet Zorgo using a mind control ray. Tell me the election was rigged, because the alternative is just too depressing to contemplate.

The U.S. presidential election saw a record turnout of about 60 percent of eligible voters, nearly 115 million. This means that unless the polls were rigged, 59 million Americans are stunningly ignorant, easily-led, bloodthirsty reactionaries who believe God talks to George W. Bush.

This means that fear, superstition, knee-jerk flag waving, intolerence and blind faith trump reason, science and egalitarianism in public discourse and politics in America.

I'm a Canadian that lives in Tokyo. For me the Bush presidency has been like have a belligerent drunken hillbilly for a next door neighbor. He sits on the porch in his undershirt, spitting tobacco juice on your driveway while he cleans his gun collection and lets his pack of hounds dump on your lawn. The whole neighbourhood hates and fears him.
After four years of this a "for sale" sign goes up next door and you're overjoyed. A few weeks later, a guy comes to your door and says he's thinking seriously of buying the hillbilly's house. You chat and he seems like a decent, reasonable person. You begin to hope. Then a few days later, with a "yeehaw" the hillbilly sets fire to the sign and tells you he's decided to stay after all and proceed to tell you that you better take that durn fence down and move it closer to your house before he gets mad.

Election day is upon us - let the lawsuits begin

I am a lonely visitor.
I came too late to cause a stir,
Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.

I hardly slept the night you wept
Our secret's safe and still well kept
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got
Soul.

Traffic cops are all color blind.
People steal from their own kind.
Evening comes to early for a stroll.
Down neon streets the streaker streaks.
The speaker speaks, but the truth still leaks,
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got it,
Soul.

The podium rocks in the crowded waves.
The speaker talks of the beautiful saves
That went down long before he played this role
For the hotel queens and the magazines,
Test tube genes and slot machines
Where even Richard Nixon got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got it,
Soul.

Hospitals have made him cry,
But there's always a free way in his eye,
Though his beach just got to crowded for his stroll.
Roads stretch out like healthy veins,
And wild gift horses strain the reins,
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got
Soul.
I am a lonely visitor.
I came to late to cause a stir,
Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.

-"Campaigner" by Neil Young

Why I like Canada better than our neighbour to the south reason #726

Sensible laws designed with Peace, Order and Good Government in mind instead of fear-mongering to stop progress toward Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Everything you want to know about Sumo

One nation, one people, one leader

Billmon at the whisky bar has the best take on the new bush loyalty oath I've seen so far

"John Kerry - Superhero"
the rude pundit tell it like it is - Kerry (wounded three times in Vietnam, hockey player, Harley rider) is ten times tougher than Bush (cheerleader, choker on pretzels, inept bicyclist)

Man's best friend
A photo of a dog doing what any dog does when it sees a bush

Scared enough yet?

My kids will be going to their Halloween party as a pirate and a fairy princess - pics to come on 31st, but for the costume-challenged among you, consider these scary costumes

Dubya shows what a class act he really is
Here's what the leader of the free world really thinks of you

Spiritual leader of the moment: Jon Stewart

Our spiritual leader of the moment is one funny funny monkey

The boy who cried wolf
This is real attack dog campaign advertising. Is is the best the republicans can do? (Ooooh scary puppies, nice doggie, nice doggie, go chase that congresscritter) It looks like a Greenpeace ad! Check out the truth from the pack themselves

this just in
BULLETIN
KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSMENT; DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH "THE SYPHILLIS PRESIDENT"

"Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis," the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."

Thompson, long known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts, went on to denounce Ralph Nader as "a worthless Judas Goat with no moral compass."

"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next President of the United States."

HST - Bush-Cheney worse than Nixon

The Good Doctor Thompson, one of our spiritual leaders here in the woodshed, has profferred his opinion on things political from which we quote:

"If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd."

"Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him."

"You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs."

In your ear
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
TOM WAITS
Real Gone
Sony Music Japan, 2,520 yen

He's been a beatnik piano balladeer, a channeler of Kurt Weill, a Dadaist antirock star and now a human beatbox and protest singer. Tom Waits has never been content to sit still creatively, and the latest effort in his 30-year career, Real Gone, continues to push the artistic envelope.
Waits barks, grunts, sputters, hisses and growls out a backbeat that clangs and booms like a trash can hurled down a fire escape on the abrasive, but compelling opening track "Top of the Hill." Just try to get it out of your head.

In many ways Real Gone picks up where 1999's Mule Variations left off, with Waits eschewing the piano for sparse blues and R&B guitar riffs, sheet metal percussion and sinister, often apocalyptic images to accompany his vocal rhythms.

Waits refers to his most recent work as "cubist funk" and songs like "Metropolitan Glide" and "Shake It" have a raw groove that gets into your bones. Others, like the quasi Afrobeat of "Sins of the Father" haunt the mind.

"Grim reapers or grand weepers" is how collaborator Kathleen Brennan classifies her husband's songs and Real Gone has plenty of both. "Green Grass"--a love song from a dead man urging his lover, "Lay your head where my heart used to be. Hold the earth above me. Lay down in the green grass. Remember when you loved me."--may be one of the saddest songs Waits has ever written, and they don't get any more grim-reaperish than "Dead and Lovely"

A spoken-word piece, "Circus," mines the familiar Waits enthusiasm for colorfully named dead-enders like "Horse Face Ethel" and "Poodle Murphy," who would "like to hammer this ring into a bullet."

But there's a new sort of song for Waits on Real Gone. "Day After Tomorrow" is a letter from a soldier who is coming home from war and Waits' first clearly political song, reportedly inspired by fears of a draft.

Waits is still the best lyricist this side of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, reeling off lines like "Night is falling like a bloody axe" and "Black cellophane sky at midnight" that paint a dark, gritty vision of a broken-down world. Real Gone is a shattered stained-glass window in a burned-out church.

His rusty-barbed-wire-and-whisky voice was never made for radio, but anyone who doesn't appreciate Waits as one of the most emotional, evocative singers around may as well stay in the shallows with the boy bands and Britney Spears. Real Gone is way out there in the deep water, where you can't see the bottom.

MARK KNOPFLER
Shangri-La
Universal Music, 2,600 yen

Mark Knopfler continues making movies with his fourth post-Dire Straits solo album, Shangri-La, his most narrative yet.

There are biographical tales about McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, boxer Sonny Liston, skiffle king Lonnie Donegan and Elvis Presley, a murder mystery, a look inside a strip club, a fisherman's lament and even a fugitive's "Postcards from Paraguay"

It wouldn't be a Knopfler album without some love songs, and we get two here, the simple waltz-time "All that Matters" and the downcast "Whoop De Doo" ("If I'm over the moon, it's because I'm over you").

While Knopfler's extended staccato guitar solos used to be one of the highlights of any Dire Straits album, he is considerably more restrained these days, opting for a warm, layered sound, while still providing some great chunky country-blues rhythms and jazzy riffs

Neal Stephenson vs. William Gibson
Regular readers will know that I admire both of these writers and for good reasons. Check out Mr. Gibson's blog - he's pretty political and have a look at this interview with Neal Stephenson in which he outlines his extremely destructive clashes with Gibson