Brrrrr … it's not the Winter that's getting cold and ugly. It's politics as usual. Barack, Tiffinbox has got your back brother.

Anil Dash points to S.R. Sidarth's article in The Washigton Post.

Sidarth, as you may recall was referred to as a “macaca” by Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia in one of his campaign speeches. That didn't help him at all. He lost to the Democratic candidate, Jim Webb by a close margin of 9,000 votes.

I am not sure what a “macaca” is but based on Sidarth's article, Allen may have thought that Sidarth was an immigrant. Not that should matter, but it clearly did to Allen as he tried to play the race card in front of a largely all-White crowd.

I love Dash's ever-so-gentle warning –

“I don't mean to belabor the macaca point, and the story is much more nuanced than it seems, but I hope all the slobbering politicians, regardless of political persuasion, take away a simple lesson from this: If you fuck with Indians in America, you will lose control of both houses of Congress.”

Have South Asians finally arrived in the US political arena? Can we see more Indians running for town councils, State Senate seats or even Congress? I sure hope so.

This is a well-crafted, well-delivered editorial that makes it MUST-see television [yeah, those rare times do exist]. I confess, though, that I came upon this a few days too late [thanks to 3mew.com]

Via Jason Kottke

Meetup.com will now start charging groups that meet on a regular basis. As Jason says, this is going to kill off those casual groups altogether. Perhaps now we'll get a more reliable metric that the likes of Al Gore and Howard Dean threw around regarding their “grass-roots” constituencies. Or, hmm, were they referring to MoveOn.org? Do tell.