back from the future...again There's so much other crap going on at the moment--evangelical scandals, international death sentences, that pesky midterm election, etc--that no one seems to have noticed what's happening in Nicaragua. Today is election day there, and it looks like our old friend Daniel Ortega might just be voted back into office. He's tried to come back from the dead before--most recently in 2001--but he's never been this close. How the guy can continue to gain actual electoral support by trotting out pseudo-Marxist platitudes like "poverty is going to disappear in Nicaragua by us loving each other and practicing solidarity" is utterly beyond me, and yet it seems to work, at least in the short-term. I guess the other choices today aren't much better, but Ortega is a pretty known quantity. Very mysterious. He says he's reformed his authoritarian ways; no more midnight disappearances or reeducation camps. I'm not at all convinced that it's worth finding out whether or not that's true, but I suppose it isn't up to me.  ¶ 7:42 AM