Electric Josh

John Ashcroft is going away, and obviously trying extremely hard to infuriate this space as he goes:

The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.

Sit and think about that. The official line from the administration is that Iraq is an integral part of the "War on Terror." Our military is, as we sit in the den, here, at this very moment, in the middle of gruelling, post-election urban combat. And they've simultaneously announced that we've already won. Now this sort of thing has happened before: the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the War of 1812 had already been settled by a Christmas Eve treaty—but in the intervening 198 years communications speeds have improved dramatically. Don't you think someone should tell the commanders in Fallujah?
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Larry Lessig wants the exit polling data made public:

The Exit Polls have done enough damage to this election. My bet is that it was incompetence at Edison/Mitofsky. But those firms owe it to this Nation to release their data totally, so that a wide range of competent statisticians can evaluate whether and where the problem was.

That would be a good start, as would more hackproof voting machines, but the more fundamental question I have is this: why in the wide, wide world of sports is there only one set of exit polls? Am I the only one who thinks that putting all of one's eggs in one basket like this is a horrible idea?
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So to start with, if you haven't read Douglas Hofstatder's Godel, Escher, Bach then you should. Go read it now. (It's only about a thousand pages. I'll wait until you're done...) Great. Now that you've read it you have the proper context to appreciate the collection of translations of Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky that the guys at boingboing have been collecting. I smile.
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