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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Newsflash: Democracy Works
Ah, what a relief tonight is. The tension of twelve years of Republican rule is draining away. My shoulders feel lighter.
The House has gone Democratic. Writing such a sentence is, for me, rather like saying "the moon has gone purple" or "the Pacific has decided to relocate to a small cottage in the Dordogne." The House has not been controled by Democrats, you see, the whole time I've lived in America. The old folks do speak of the days when it was once that way, but all I've known is this parliament of utter idiocy, a chamber of Rush Limbaugh look-alikes who believe earth science is a myth, the UN is a tool of Satan, and other such only-in-the-heartland inanities. These are the people who impeached Clinton for his sexcapades but rushed to help W upend the Bill of Rights, who went home and fired a gun into a watermelon to "prove" the Clintons killed Vince Foster but refused to read the Patriot Act or stick up for the Geneva Convention. These were oily men -- and they were very much men, to a man -- who decimated public television, gerrymandered Texas, made political capital out of a woman with no brain, and covered up for a lascivious paedophile.
It was they who filled the national agenda, who controled the news cycles, who decided which topics were worthy of our legislative attention. They were permitted to think themselves the best and the brightest, beyond reproach. If American life has felt a lot like Alice Through the Looking Glass this past decade--and it has--that has been thanks in no small part to the rapacious, ugly, wilfully ignorant GOP House.
And now, at the press of several million buttons, look what we have. A House with a comfortable Democratic majority. The first female Speaker in history, and a San Franciscan to boot. Imagine it: Nancy Pelosi is soon to be third in line for the presidency. One can only hope for those two gentlemen ahead of her to choke on pretzels or ingest large amounts of cardiac-arresting lard sometime early in January. But that won't even be neccessary. Pelosi will have done her job if the sky doesn't fall. So many Americans have been led by their leaders to associate Democrats with terrorism that they will be forced to rethink their world views the moment it becomes clear that the new speaker does not intend to present Osama Bin Laden with the Congressional Medal of Honor.
For the first time since 9/11, the pendulum has swung back. I was really worried for a few years there that it never would again. Delay's gerrymandering was intended to give the GOP a lock on the House for a generation. The Dems seemed to be doing the best they could to help him every two years, playing a constant tug of war with the jaws of victory for the prize of defeat. Most troubling of all was the potential for mass-hacking of voting machines, of some emergency election-flipping virus lurking in the hard drives of these paperless devices manufacturered by GOP contributors. Did we even live in a democracy any more? Until last night, it was a fair question. Now for the first time in the voting machine era we have significant proof of a legitimate election: the fall of the ruling party. As I write, the Dems look set to take the Senate too, with vote counts in Montana and Virginia falling their way. An entire Democratic Congress to drag America out of the looking glass and into the 21st century? That really is a beautiful purple moon.
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