DATELINE: San Diego, California
We’ve been on the road a lot in the last few days. We have traversed phenomenally barren terrain – but it has been both beautiful, and diverse. From pebble-strewn, cactus-speckled beige expanses, to ranging sand dunes, to mountainous rock-piles, the south west has been a geological wonderland, all laid out beneath cloudless [...]

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DATELINE: Fort Stockton, Texas
Some fun facts about Texas: it was a Republic between 1836 and 1845. It only joined the Union on the conditions that it could secede whenever it felt like it, and that it could divide itself into five smaller states whenever it felt like it, like some kind of constitutional Hydra. These [...]

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DATELINE: Fort Stockton, Texas
The latest election news is that John McCain has just beaten Mitt Romney in Florida’s Republican primary, which is the last election until next week’s Elephantine Tuesday, when 22 states vote at once – the biggest day in the history of American primaries. Here’s what McCain’s Floridian coalition of the willing looked [...]

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DATELINE: Houston, Texas

Obama cleaned up in South Carolina last night. Most of the mainstream media’s talking heads will spend the next week prattling on about the significance of the black turn-out, and whether Obama’s success will be replicated in states with smaller African American communities. Please ignore this prattling.
“It’s not about colour, it’s generational” said [...]

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DATELINE: Tallahassee, Florida
In our unstinting quest to unearth at least one Republican during this trip, we made south from beautiful, ghostly Savannah, Georgia, hoping to see John McCain speak on Monday afternoon in Jacksonville, Florida (Florida’s hugely important primary is on 29 January). The dour, flyover-scarred city is the largest in the United States, and [...]

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