Oh, that « Gore Vidal », rehashing old, long-forgotten battles:

‘Asked to predict who would win in ‘04, I said that, again, Bush would lose, but I was confident that in the four years between 2000 and 2004 creative propaganda and the fixing of election officials might very well be so perfected as to insure an official victory for Mr. Bush. As Representative Conyers’s report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio (www.house.gov/conyers), shows in great detail, the swing state of Ohio was carefully set up to deliver an apparent victory for Bush even though Kerry appears to have been the popular winner as well as the valedictorian-that-never-was of the Electoral College.

‘I urge would-be reformers of our politics as well as of such anachronisms as the Electoral College to read Conyers’s valuable guide on how to steal an election once you have in place the supervisor of the state’s electoral process: In this case, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who orchestrated a famous victory for those who hate democracy (a permanent but passionate minority). The Conyers Report states categorically, “With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.” In other words, the Florida 2000 scenario redux, when the chair for Bush/Cheney was also the Secretary of State. Lesson? Always plan ahead for at least four more years.’

Wonder who the 2008 Heir Apparent will be? And which state will the fix be in this time?

Today, somehow, seemed appropriately the start of summer (though summer doesn’t officially start for another week and a half). Yesterday, the heat was hot, but it didn’t feel oppressive and exhausting. Today, it felt that way — I left the house at 9.30 and the heat and humidity were already stifling, and there wasn’t the slightest breeze. It’s not quite as humid yet as I remember my first summer days in Ann Arbor in 2003 being, but maybe that’s just a function of having accliimated to the weather of southeast Michigan.

Someone told me today that we’ve had more days in the high 80s and low 90s in the past two weeks than we had the entire summer of 2004. I don’t know if that’s true, but it does feel as though the weather now is somehow (over)compensating for the unusually long winter. Still, it would have been nice to have had a few weeks of spring before slamming into the heaviness of Michigan summer.