Solana Larsen is managing editor of Global Voices Online. She was an editor with openDemocracy for 5 years and headed the New York office. She now sits on the board of openDemocracyUSA. Solana has contributes regularly to Danish national radio and other media, and has been a collaborator in numerous global internet activism projects. In 2006, she founded the Danish-Puerto Rican Society.

Recent articles

Today in my inbox, I have an email from Color of Change asking me to sign an open letter to the McCain/Palin campaign asking them to stop being racially divisive. They've teamed up with Brave New Films in distributing this video collage of racial attacks and media hype.

If we are to believe the media right now, Gov. Palin and Senator McCain are getting the extremists to creep out of the shadows to hurl racial epiphets at Senator Obama.

Am I the only one who can't help noticing it's the same examples being used over and over?

A quick aside: I wonder if a presidential candidate has ever graced so many t-shirts as Obama has.

Certainly in New York City, his face is on shirts at street stalls and wholesale retailers everywhere. Yesterday, on Union Square in Manhattan, I saw a shirt for sale that said "Obama is the New Black" ($20). More than a political figure, he seems to have become a fashion statement. John McCain? Not so much.

Palin, on the other hand, was pictured on a t-shirt at a stall near the Obama one, wearing a bathing suit and a sash. The words beneath her torso: "mysongynist". After 5 weeks in the media spotlight, I'm surprised not to have seen more Palin shirts. They must still be saving the best ones for Halloween.

Photo by Ed Yourdon on Flickr, Creative Commons license.

I know most people have moved on from the silly claim that Sarah Palin can see Russia from her backyard - but in case you're wondering 'wait, can she really?' (the U.S. media still seem to be wondering) - check out this amusing post from American expat Erik Rassmussen who has used a distance calculator and a google map to estimate just how physically impossible it would be:

"To see Russia from Juneau, you’d have to go up 330,715.1 meters. That’s almost the 350 km altitude of the International Space Station."

Thanks to the blogger volunteers at Voices without Votes for aggregating this blog post, along with hundreds of other's from around the world. The US elections really do look different through the eyes of outsiders.

The international press may be on the fence when it comes to calling last night's winner in the vice presidential debate, but the New York right-wing tabloids have an unsurprisingly clear favorite.

I just spent the morning reading the New York Sun's total endorsement and celebration of Sarah Palin's performance ("Pitbull Sarah Shows her Bite") with the exception of a couple of less fortunate statements, including "How long have I been at this? Like, 5 weeks?" A group of hockey moms the newspaper had assembled to watch the debate, also saw Palin as the winner, although at least one of them still planned to vote for Obama.

New York's Daily News also cheered ("Pitt bull Sarah battles Biden and even takes a few chomps out of him") to an extent that made you wonder if they would have run the same headline no matter how the candidates had actually fared. Even their own online poll of readers is suggesting that Biden, not Palin, won. To their credit, the Daily News, as so many other newspaper and websites also ran a story pointing out which candidates lied about what.

It's pretty tragic that the first thing everyone looks for at the end of each debate is a list of lies and inanccuracies by candidates. Even if a candidate were trying to tell the truth it must be challenging considering the degree to which their own opinions veer on different issues, depending on the public climate. New York Times lists "check points" in the debate (in their awesome interactive video service), FactCheck.org crunch some numbers, and the Democratic Party's McCain "Lie Counter is is currently at "103".

Getting anywhere near The Big Tent is a hectic experience. There are several degrees of credentials, bracelets for backstage, dozens of smiling volunteers, free massages by Google, and free burritos and beer. This isn't where the politicians are speaking (although many visit). This is where the bloggers are convened with their power plugs, wifi, and laptops galore, writing I'm-not-sure-what yet, because I haven't had a chance to read it.

The Big Tent is ordinarily a parking lot, but now has an enormous two-story tent erected on it. The panel I spoke on was upstairs from the bloggers. The panels are back to back. Mine was organized by the Better World Campaign of the UN Foundation, and was primarily about a new poll they have published that says Americans care about foreign policy. The fact that this would be news, is sort of astonishing to me. But there is some scientific method to help establish the fact that this has changed in the past year. I always wonder whether people just respond according to what they happened to see on the news the night before.

I spoke about the work my colleagues Amira, John, Jillian and many others from Global Voices are doing on Voices without Votes, a website sponsored by Reuters where we are tracking non-American responses to the US presidential election and foreign policy. I personally, think Americans tend to focus too much on what foreign policy means for themselves (and how people perceive them), and not enough on what it means for citizens in other countries. The questions I got during the panel reinforced my sense of this.

Let me paraphrase: Do non-American bloggers say that America doesn't accomplish it's foreign policy goals? What do bloggers in the Middle East say about American women?

In other words, what does the rest of the world think about America. Well, I don't know. I think most of the time they too, are thinking more about themselves, and interpreting world events according to what makes sense in their own hemispheres and blogospheres. Please visit Voices without Votes to see the many, many different things bloggers around the world are saying. Unlike pollsters, we don't pretend to speak on behalf of entire populations or the world - but we do hope to give a taste of what foreign opinion and reasoning looks like.