Where do Republicans want to move if Obama wins?

I’ve already been hearing the same sentiment from my liberal and progressive friends that I heard in 2000 and again in 2004: they’re going to want to move to Canada if McCain wins the 2008 presidential election.

So I got to wondering, where would right-wing conservatives and fundamentalists want to move if Obama wins the election?

Canada, of course, is out, and I doubt many Republicans would want to emigrate to Mexico or Latin America, what with, you know, all the illegal immigrants there.

Up until a year ago, John Howard’s Australia would have a certain allure, except for that distasteful practice of compulsory voting. Come on now, every Republican knows that the government shouldn’t force people to vote. That’s way too much big government. Government should only prevent certain people from voting.

So where could all the forlorn Republicans go? Where would they feel most welcome, most at home with Obama in the White House?

The answer is clear.

Russia.

Hippies and peaceniks used to be shouted down with “Go back to Russia.” But now, Russia seems to be the neo-conservative’s dream state. Consider how Russia stacks up against Republican priorities:

  • Dominated by the interests of gas and oil monopolies? Check.
  • A mainstream media with absolutely no teeth? Check.
  • Not afraid to invade its neighbors? Check.
  • A robust program of domestic surveillance in the name of national security? Check.

Wow, Russia has it all. And I don’t think they have global warming over there either. What a bonus.

I’d be heartbroken of course to see Republicans forsake the tattered shreds of a Democratic America, but I would try to carry on without them. Knowing they’re safe and happy in the warm, judoed arms of Putin and friends would give me some small measure of relief.

RSS is Forever

One of the interesting features of Twitter is that you can delete a “tweet” you’ve written and it will retroactively disappear from any of your followers’ lists of tweets. This is different from RSS, where, once an RSS reader has collected the post data from a feed, the excerpt (or entire post) in the RSS reader takes on a life of its own, independent of the original blog post. So if you make any revisions to your original post after various readers have been “pinged,” then chances are those changes will not be reflected in the RSS feeds.

Case in point, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, posted a link to and some comments about a “news report” on how Barack Obama spends hours practicing gazing into the future pose. The only trouble was, this story, which Cowen appears to have taken at face value, was originally from The Onion. I read Tyler’s post on Google Reader, and when I tried to follow the story back to the Marginal Revolution site, I discovered Tyler had deleted the post, presumably because he realized his mistake. Here, below, is the only evidence that the post ever existed, a screen shot of the Marginal Revolution feed in my Google Reader.

Marginal Revolution Screen Capture

This vanishing post brings up some interesting questions for the age of blogging. When is it necessary to delete a post entirely, versus tacking on an addendum? Why not let an erroneous post stay live, but let the follow-up comments sort through any corrections that need to be made, preserving the original post as a kind of historical document (much as Wikipedia archives every version of a Wiki entry as part of the entry’s “history”)?

The vanishing post also highlights the fact that in the digital age, nothing is ever “lost.” As numerous politicians have discovered, even something as seemingly ephemeral as a text message is preserved in some corporation’s database, subject to subpoena. Come to think of it, I’m sure even Twitter has a copy of those tweets I deleted…