Stateside: Still Raining Cats And Doggerel

Bushy cat, Bushy cat, where have you been? I've been to Baghdad to visit the troops. Bushy cat, Bushy cat, why did you that? To p*** off that travelling Hillary cat. Talk about pre-emptive strike!! Just imagine if Senator Clinton had been the only polly visiting the troops on Thanksgiving Day. Is she going to make a run for the Democratic presidential nomination or what?

And is Condoleezza Rice going to be Bush's running mate? I mean, skiving off with him in their matching baseball caps and leaving his wife at home to deal with the in-laws. "We looked just like a regular couple," Bush is reported to have said of their disguise as they slipped away to Air Force One to begin George and Condie's Big Adventure.

I learned of the visit on Thanksgiving Day during a televised football game, when a sports reporter who was live in Baghdad with the troops watching the game via satellite referred to the visit and showed clips of Bush in his army jacket meeting and greeting them earlier. Bold stroke, and how can this old sourpuss possibly gripe when I've been harping on about him only hanging out with fly boys. Not that he wasn't at an airfield...

Closer to home, I was astonished by a fellow immigrant this week when he said he'd torn up the second ballot he'd been sent by mistake for the San Francisco mayoral election. He'd already voted absentee in the November election, but when he got back from overseas last week, there was another ballot waiting for him.

Although he's lived in the States for 15 years, he only recently became a citizen and this is his first local election, so he didn't realize that because nobody got 50 percent in the first round he'd have to vote again in a run-off in December. He also thought he was obliged to vote for the person representing the party he's registered with, even though local elections are non-partisan.

That's just the kind of voter confusion that justifies the implementation of instant runoff voting, don't you think?

ENDS

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