KalahariLog

One of my Motswana friends pointed out further reasons why Botha was intensley disliked in Botswana. He was responsible for several raids of South African troops inside Botswana. For example, in 1985 twelve people suspected of fighting the apartheid government were killed in Gaborone by South African troops that had just come over the border. Many other raids followed and eventually some South African commandos were captured and put on trial in Botsawana. There is an article about this in the Botswana Government paper, the Daily News. By the way, the number of local papers here is quite impressive. There are at least twenty different papers, mostly weeklies but also a few daily papers.

That's one disadvantage of having your capital within 20 minute drive from the border (still better than the situation until 1966 when the capital was outside the country altogether)! I read somewhere that Ottawa was chosen as the capital of Canada because it was the farthest town from the US border. The 2006 elections in the US remind me of 2004 when a map appeared showing the blue states as United States of Canada and the red states as Dumbf**kistan. When the northeastern US states join Canada, hopefully Ottawa will be sufficiently far from the border.

I voted by fax yesterday. It was not easy, as I tried to fax several times during the day using both numbers that Pima County had provided. Eventually, at around 5pm my time (9am Tucson time) I was successful. I imagine at 9am somebody finally showed up at the County Registrar's office and put paper in the fax machine. I've been trying to follow the national situation, reading the election covereage in the NYT, WashingtonPost, NPR and Meet The Press podcasts and it's not easy to actually figure out what the situation is. People keep writing/saying that "the Democrats needs to gain 6 seats in the Senate in order to gain majority". This doesn't sound that hard in theory, until one finds out that there are only 15 current Republican seats in play (out of the 55 held by Republicans). In that case, the Democrats have to upset 40% of these races. And that's, of course, asuming that the Democrats hold on to the 18 seats that they currently hold in the Senate that are also up for grabs. Thus, in order to gain control of the Senate, the Democrats need to win 24 out of 33 races which means that they must win 72% of all the Senatorial races. Now these numbers (upset 40% of the republicans and/or win 72% of the total races) sound much much tougher!