7 October 2004

Elections

Tomorrow is the Australian Federal Election. It is weird how there are some topics that none of the parties seem to have been bringing up during the election. In particular, they don't seem to be mentioning about how John Howard lied about the children overboard scandal last election (if he didn't lie, then he intentionally kept himself uninformed which is possibly even worse). This was a case where information was suppressed until just after the election had finished. If the information had been made public, it could have changed the result of the election.

Hopefully by the end of Saturday we won't have a Prime Minister who isn't a spamer and telemarketer.

Jamin: from what those articles say, Michael Moore was offering incentives for people to vote — not incentives to vote for a particular candidate. While I agree that the latter is bad, why is encouraging people to vote bad?

In the Australian elections, I've received a postal vote application from my current MP. While I think it would be better if the applications were sent out by the AEC, I don't think there is anything wrong with encouraging people to vote in this way.

Also, even if you don't consider yourself a Bush supporter, the people who manage the websites you referenced certainly are. If you want to accuse someone of being a propagandist, perhaps you should choose some less obviously biased news sources.

Hub: there is a preference to get Thunderbird to check all IMAP folders for new messages. It just isn't exposed in the UI. Instructions for turning it on can be found here.