okay, what the hell country am I living in?

(I picked this up from quinn's blog.)

I didn't know that "Protect Our Civil Liberties" was such a dangerous statement.

another article, with a more Republican slant, reporting the same event, with some more details

I was especially struck by the description of the group of people that made sure that Bush couldn't see these people. What was going through their minds? What twisted sense of loyalty or of offense caused them to think that this was necessary?

(My wife points out that I don't know that Kerry--or his security--aren't doing the same things. This is true. However, I find it hard to believe that he would...for two reasons. First, he doesn't have the authority. Second, he'd be crucified by the press. Third, I think that he has more respect for the law and its principles than that.)

That said, if I do find out that Kerry has done something similar, I may start planning to finish my PhD remotely...from, say, Canada. Which, as I can attest, is also less than perfect from a civil liberties point of view...but it's better than this.)

an interesting problem with IRV and funding

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/national/17runoff.htm

This is an interesting problem. I hadn't really thought much about the fact that giving people the ability to vote for > 1 person for a position might encourage cooperative campaigning (although I like that) and I certainly hadn't thought about the financing aspect.

The most straightforward solution would be to make campaigns completely publically financed, which is a solution that I kind of like anyway. But given my failure of imagination up to this point, I wonder what else I'm missing.

(The more subtle potential problem that the article doesn't mention is that co-campaigning could be used by one candidate to strengthen a candidate that he hopes to be a spoiler candidate for the other. But I suspect that "spoiling" doesn't work as well in a multiple-vote system.)