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Operation Ohio: Looking Forward to It: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process
Commentators have long been fixated on how to measure, aggregate, and interpret ‘public opinion’. Opinion pollsters in modern democracies claim to gauge public opinion and to tell governments how they should act. Is polling dangerous because it claims to inform about democracy without involving any flesh-and-blood democratic exchange? Is public opinion good enough for democracy? Election times are a ready reminder that polls are here to stay, and that they are a resource for the worst kinds of political cynicism: an artificially crafted responsiveness to the public for the purpose of winning elections, pitting majorities against outsiders (‘wedge politics’) and cultivating short-term thinking on policies. Yet our social and political compasses are probably more reliant than ever on polls. Australian-Amerikan Election 2004: Barely registered

Eye on Mystics Among Us: The Seven Storey Paradise of Eden
Eden Monaro's Carr trouble ...
Carr is 'on the nose throughout NSW, and it's no coincidence that Mark Latham faces a challenge in the State – just as, in the days when the Liberals’ controversial Nick Greiner was Premier, it was difficult for Liberals in the State to break in to the Federal Government. Now, Liberals are frequently comparing Latham with Carr, even though they are quite different people. Indeed, it’s pretty clear they don’t even like each other. But they’re both Labor.
• Mark Juddery, from inside the crucial Eden Monaro campaign [Webdiary: Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair Election Blogjam: the final countdown]
• · Blogging Life begins at Number 40 for Tim Blair The Crystal Ball of Election 2004
• · · Australia Getting to Know Leaders Beliefs ; [David C. Cochran How Catholic are the Amerikan candidates?]
• · · · On Oct.3, Germany marked 14 years since reunification. Although the physical barrier between east and west is a thing of the past, many Germans still speak about the "Mauer im Kopf" -- the Wall in the head In Berlin today, there's very little left of the Berlin Wall ; My Escape Across the Iron Curtain - Bear Pit & Human Rights Operation Enduring Failure: Humor, like Hope and Jozef Imrich, is a very difficult thing to kill
• · · · · FRANCIS X. CLINES: Bragging, unflagging and just plain posing, their television images rain into the archives of a voracious academic project dedicated to measuring the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't advertising stratagems of the political campaign The Graduate Students Search for Signs of Intelligent Campaign Life ; [STEPHEN GREENBLATT: Have we learned something about listening to political oratory that Shakespeare's Friends, Romans, Countrymen ]
• · · · · · Elizabeth Kolbert analyzes the presidential debate Winning miscalculation; Boston A special series on how Congress is closed, for business ]
[Kurt Werner Schaechter: Britons secretly kept in postwar French camps]