Fruits and Votes » 2008

Planted by MSS
Planted in: Africa

BBC has received and aired a film of vote rigging underway in Zimbabwe’s recent presidential runoff election. (Available at the BBC News site, if you can get it to work. It is not working for me; I saw the item on BBC TV.)

Propagation: Seeds & scions (1)

04 July 2008

Grounds of hope

Planted by MSS
Planted in: USA

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man… those are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

–Thomas Jefferson, in his last known letter, acknowledging but declining, for ill health, an invitation to the 50th anniversary celebrations of American Independence. Ten days after writing these words, Jefferson would die, on 4th July, 1826.

May our celebrations on this 232d anniversary, and our collective and individual actions in the coming year, be worthy of Jefferson’s last words.

Propagation: Seeds & scions (1)

02 July 2008

Now I know why it’s called Fruits & Votes

Planted by MSS
Planted in: Blogging

I was having a bit of writer’s block–or more like thinker’s block–on a paper I have been working on too long. It is, of course, a paper on votes. And then there are that back pain and the sciatica I have been dealing with for almost a year now, which gets worse the more time I spend sitting in front of this electronic device, writing on votes.

So, after a frustrating day on the writing/thinking/votes business, which resulted in the worst pain I had felt in months that otherwise had seen mostly modest improvement, I decided to spend half a day a different way: on fruits. Hours doing deferred orchard maintenance–summer pruning, netting, etc.¹–and guess what? Back pain relieved more than any recent stretching or drugs could achieve. And, to top it all off, several productive hours later on writing up that section of the paper that had frustrated me the day before.

Fruits AND Votes, indeed.
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Harvesting never gets deferred. [↩]

Propagation: Seeds & scions (0)

01 July 2008

Colombian Senator detained in USA

Planted by MSS
Planted in: Colombia

As US Senator John McCain travels to Colombia, where he is expected to be greeted warmly by President Alvaro Uribe, a Colombian Senator has gotten a rather less pleasant welcome in New York.

Her name is Piedad Cordoba, and I don’t know much about her. For whatever it might be worth, there is a Wikipedia page about her career.

Given her hours-long detention and her negotiations with Farc rebels, I imagined she must have been part of Colombia’s leftist alliance. No. She is in the most mainstream of mainstream Colombian parties, even if that party is now in opposition to Uribe.

In 2006, the first party-list PR election, she was elected to the Senate with the eleventh highest preference-vote share of the seventeen Liberal candidates elected.¹ So she is in the mainstream of the mainstream.² Yet she was detained by US authorities, despite her diplomatic passport.

For Spanish readers, El Tiempo has a brief report.
__________

38,506 votes, or 2.6% of the preference votes cast for her party in the single national Senate district. By comparison, the candidate elected first, Juan Manuel LÃ³pez Cabrales, had 119,505 votes (8.2%) and the seventeenth and last winner, Cecilia Matilde LÃ³pez MontaÃ±o, had 31,657 (2.2%). [↩]
Not that her detention would have been OK were she from even some far-left party. She is an elected Senator of a democratic country. Still, it is remarkable that US authorities treated so badly a Senator from the party that has provided all but three of a US ally’s presidents since the restoration of fully competitive elections in 1974. [↩]

Propagation: Seeds & scions (3)

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