Voting in Iraq: Just as rigged as American elections - now with danger free of charge

<DayOneAnnotation> January 29, 2005. This is the first recovered post from the blog that became Freedomedia. The closing line — "I'm hoping to turn this into a Vlog soon" — was the seed of everything that followed: the videoblogging, the protest coverage, 226 days in federal prison, and this site. [Josh to rewrite this annotation in his own voice] </DayOneAnnotation> So this Iraq elections thing has been puzzling me for some time now and I was finally able to track down the answers that I was looking for. With such a big election coming up, it’d seem like we’d be hearing more about the platforms of the parties in Iraq and the candidates running and I couldn’t figure out what was up. Turns out most of the candidates are anonymous as there is a perception it’s too dangerous to reveal your identity and maybe it is, several Iraqi candidates were killed last week. One of the candidates plans to privatize Iraqi’s oil and give half the shares to the families of Iraq had this to say: “Our challenge is to convince Iraqis that they’re going to be rich,” Ahmad Barrak said, during an upscale soiree for his party at Baghdad University. “This will give all Iraqis shares in the country. We can convince Iraqis that they’re a part of this country.” http://www.gnn.tv/articles/article.php?id=1105 It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of the election - but what might be more interesting will be how different Fox portrays the results as compared to Al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN. I’m hoping to turn this into a Vlog soon, but for now just trying to get the discipline to write something in here as often as possible will be a good start.