[UPDATE: It looks like George Osborna has a habit of sitting in first class while paying only for standard class.]

Over in the UK, the conservative government has been pushing ‘austerity measures’, by which it means of course not austerity for their oligarchs but for ordinary people. The contempt that the global ruling classes feel for the public is usually discreetly hidden but, just as in the US, on occasion the mask drops, revealing the real face. [Read more…]

Living in Ohio, I am sick of hearing that we are a crucial swing state and that “no Republican has even won the presidency without winning Ohio”. [Read more…]

In a detailed analysis, Lyle Denniston writes that yesterday’s 2-1 ruling by a US federal appeals court (the Second Circuit Court of New York) that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional is a major advance for equal rights. [Read more…]

For reasons that I cannot comprehend, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is seen as a sage observer of the world whose insights are worth paying attention to, by people whom you would think should know better. [Read more…]

I wrote in an earlier post today on national gerrymandering of electoral districts and how the redistricting process that occurs following each census results in the winners of the most recent election controlling the process and gerrymandering the electoral boundaries to entrench a bias in their favor for future elections. [Read more…]

While most of the attention focuses on the presidential race, over at the Princeton Election Consortium Sam Wang has an interesting analysis of the data on the relationship of the national vote for the two major parties in each biennial election to the number of seats that they ended up holding in the House of Representatives. [Read more…]