Juan Cole

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Saturday morning, 2.8 million registered voters in Libya went to the polls to choose a parliament for the first time since 1965. One woman standing in line to vote said she was filled with ‘indescribable joy’ at this opportunity to participate in democracy. A Reuters correspondent tweets about tears in the eyes of women voters; […]

Libya goes to the polls on Saturday for the first time since 1965. Since in that 1965 election parties were banned, and since King Idris’s establishment tampered with the ballots, it wasn’t an election very much like the one to be held on Saturday. There is a sense in which this election is unprecedented in […]

Only about one third of Americans have passports, and if it weren’t for the post- September 11 requirement that one travel to Canada and Mexico on a passport, it would no doubt be an even smaller proportion. (Hence the high number of passports in states with large Latino populations). But take Latinos out of the […]

Andrew Kaczynski points out at Buzzfeed that in a 2010 interview, Mitt Romney compared his Massachusetts universal health insurance plan to that of President Obama, listing positive similarities and negative differences. He cited as a good similarity the individual mandate, in which everyone is willy-nilly made part of the pool, reducing costs, which also allows […]

Offshore account: Something that a gentleman creates, puts in his wife’s name, and carefully hides when he goes into politics because good breeding forbids him to utter obscenities in public. Frerrorist: (on the model of ‘frenemy’ or friend/enemy): Person with whom you are friends, who belongs to an organization that deploys violence against the civilians […]

Courtesy Jamiol’s World