This picture is incredible – I haven’t done the maths to work out if it’s actually the claimed “1474 megapixels”, but it’s a highly detailed panoramic photo of the Obama inauguration. You can zoom from the whole scene in close enough to clearly see what each member of the crowd is doing, and guess [...]

I love it:

Take a moment to marvel at the subtlety and correct spelling of US presidential campaigning: link.

McCain debate simulator (somewhat amusing): link
Palin Whitehouse simulator (very amusing): link

A couple of sites I find provide really good US election coverage:

Electoral Vote – summarises the likely electoral college based on up to date polling in each state (remember that the US system is mostly a winner-takes-all state-based one) – this is far more useful than the national polls.  Also has a good summary every [...]

No matter how often I read this statistic, I still find it somewhat startling:
A vast majority of the nation, 73 percent of the country, disapproves of the job President George W. Bush is doing. No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating, not even President Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate.
In other words, [...]

FYI, Mike Huckabee, potential Republican presidential candidate and by extension potential President of the United States, has this to say about creationism (and the fact that he believes in it):
If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that’s fine. I’ll accept that.  I just don’t happen to think that I [...]

This is an interesting development in the US – an appellate court has ruled that it is legal to ’swap’ votes, and also to facilitate the swapping of votes.
The idea emerged in the 2000 presidential election campaign – supporters of third-party candidate Ralph Nader and supporters of Al Gore would strategically swap votes to maximise [...]

Once again, the spin of the week goes to The Australian (link) – this time for Dennis Shanahan’s effort in portraying polls showing an electoral massacre for the Government as “good news” for Mr Howard and Co. As Peter Brent puts it:
Never before in the history of opinion polls have such diabolical numbers for [...]

This proposal about reform of the way the board of the national broadcaster is composed is very welcome news – both in the context of ensuring that there is at least one relatively neutral and unbiased source of news and current affairs in the country, and more broadly for the fact that a political party [...]

The Electoral Commission has finally referred the matter of the Exclusive Brethren cult’s involvement in the funding of pro-Government election ads at the last election to the Australian Federal Police.   A company linked to the cult spent more on pro-Government, anti-Greens advertising than the Australian Conservation Foundation or the Wilderness Society spent on their ads.  [...]

Is the government doomed to repeat the lesson Paul Keating and the ALP received in 1996? This article is certainly cause for reflection: a summary of the major newspapers’ views on the parties leading into the 96 election.
For instance, The Australian (which didn’t back either side, oh how times have changed) noted
There is a [...]

It sounds very much like we will be having a federal election in November, which is no great surprise. It’s interesting to reflect for a moment on why the hell we have a system in which one side may choose when the election is to take place anyway.
If you’ve moved since the last [...]

Just when Mr Rudd looked to have Labor in the perfect position for the Federal election later this year, a report in the Australian today contains ominous signs that, far from being the long awaited anti-Howard many people imagine, Rudd’s vision for Australia might in fact be a hideous centre-right Blairite “new” Labor state (the [...]

Slowly but surely, the 2006 US election result is catching up with the Bush administration. The steps taken by the Democrat-controlled Congress and Senate are – so far – not as spectacular as the many excesses of the pre-2006 period where Bush enjoyed almost unquestioning support from Republican dominated houses. However, the administration’s [...]