China's new slave empire (PETER HITCHENS, 27th September 2008, Daily Mail)
These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.
Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.
Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.
We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire.
Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope.
We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren't in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him.
By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush.
The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away.
I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.
Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.
It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow starvation.
Syria: 17 killed, 14 wounded in car bomb explosion in Damascus (ALBERT AJI and BASSEM MROUE, 9/27/08, Associated Press)
The explosion knocked down part of a 13-foot high wall surrounding a security complex that houses several buildings in the Sidi Kadad area. Hours after the morning explosion, traffic returned to normal on the highway, but dozens of plainclothes Syrian police lined the road. [...]Saturday's bombing is the deadliest in more than decade. On New Year's Eve 1997, a bomb went off aboard a public bus in Damascus, killing 12 people and wounding dozens. Syria blamed Israel for the bombing, though Israel denied the charge.
The last major explosion to strike Damascus was in February when a car bomb killed the commander of Lebanon's Shiite militant Hezbollah group, Imad Mughniyeh. Hezbollah and its top ally, Iran, blamed Israel for the assassination, but Israel denied any involvement.
Last month, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Suleiman, a senior military officer close to President Bashar Assad, was assassinated by a sniper on a yacht at a beach resort in the northern port city of Tartous.
Syria has long been on Washington's list of states supporting terrorism, and the Bush administration has sought to isolate the Assad regime for its support of Hezbollah guerrillas and radical Palestinian groups. Its attempts intensified after the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, which many in Lebanon blame on Syria. Damascus has denied involvement.
Syria also has long been accused of allowing Muslim militants to use its territory to cross into Iraq, where they take part in attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces.
"The reason that Syria has been late in providing additional information (is) that our interlocutor has been assassinated in Syria," Mohammed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the IAEA board in a meeting Thursday, according to a recording obtained by the French news agency.ElBaradei did not name the liaison, but AFP speculated that he might be Mohammed Sleiman, the chief of security for Syrian President Bashar Assad and the country's liaison with the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon. He was assassinated last month.
WHY THE BAILOUT?: THE CASE BUSH HASN'T MADE (BRUCE BARTLETT, September 27, 2008, NY Post)
The basic problem is that the financial sector faces systemic risk in a way that no other industry does: By its nature, it is a house of cards that can collapse at a moment's notice.Bush, lawmakers say deal on bailout is near (David R. Sands and Sean Lengell, September 27, 2008, Washington Times)Let me explain.
First, the vast bulk of the nation's money supply is in the form of bank deposits, not currency and coin. No bank on earth could pay even a fraction of its depositors if they all demanded all their funds in cash immediately. This is called a run on the bank (and is very familiar to anyone who has ever watched "It's a Wonderful Life").
During the Great Depression, such runs forced hundreds of banks to close. At the time, there was no system for protecting bank deposits - so a vast amount of money literally disappeared in the process. The nation's money supply contracted by about a third between 1929 and 1933.
As a general proposition, a one-third decline in the money supply would, in the aggregate, lead to about a one-third decline in the prices of all goods and services. If that could happen quickly and easily, changes in the money supply would have no effect on the real economy.
But that's not the case, of course. Businesses resist selling goods for less then they paid for them, workers resist cuts in their pay, and so on - leading to an economic depression.
Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue sounded a note of rising optimism Saturday as President Bush and leading congressional negotiators said talks for the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan were back on track and a deal could be cut before the international markets open late Sunday.Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. traveled to Capitol Hill to huddle with top Democratic and Republican lawmakers, just hours after President Bush in his weekly radio address said he was "confident that we will pass a bill to protect the financial security of every American very soon."
In a possible signal that a deal was close, the House Rules Committee began drafting guidelines for a debate and vote that could take place as early as Sunday, which would send the bill to the Senate for final passage Monday.
Marathon becomes brawl (John P. Avlon, September 27, 2008, Politico)
In boxing, like politics, the candidate who controls the center of the ring — and forces his opponent to fight with his back against the ropes — is best positioned to win.John McCain started fighting for the center in the first moments of the debate — using his opening statement to offer best wishes to the newly hospitalized Ted Kennedy (usually the subject of Republican attacks, not accolades), and then repeatedly stressing his decades-long bipartisan record to distance himself from the Bush administration.
The only effective canned line of the debate also reflected this centrist theme ("It's hard to reach across the aisle from that far on the left") — while also taking a clean shot at Obama's liberal Senate voting record.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, might be the first candidate in modern political history to run from the center in the party primary and then move to the left in the general election.
Obama's rise as the inspirational post-partisan candidate ("there are no red states, there are no blue states, there is only the United States") was what kept him from being labeled the left's anti-Iraq protest candidate. He won in places like Iowa because he was the non-polarizing alternative to Hillary Clinton's establishment candidacy.
But since winning the nomination, Obama has spent more time trying to grow the Democratic Party rolls from the ground up, rather than trying to win independent and centrist voters over to a larger common cause. This was evident again in last night's debate.
Elections are won by the candidate who connects with moderates and the middle class.
The Debate: The Prime Minister and the President (David Ignatius, 9/26/08, Post Partisan)
Barack Obama was running for prime minister and head of government in Friday night’s debate. He spoke with the precision of a parliamentary debater during question time. He had a three-point program for everything, but he didn’t deliver many memorable lines or offer the grace notes of leadership. When asked point-blank for his stand on the bailout plan, Obama gave a judicious non-answer: “We haven’t seen the language yet.”John McCain was running for president and head of state. He was channeling Ronald Reagan, with all his talk about the evils of federal spending and government meddling with the health care system. He seemed almost to be emphasizing his age and gravitas.
MORE:
Advantage: experience (Chicago Tribune, September 27, 2008)
As the debate shifted to national security issues, McCain demonstrated why many voters see this as a strong area for him. He's been involved for decades in deciding whether the U.S. engages militarily in hot spots such as Somalia, Lebanon and Bosnia—and it shows. His cautious words about the careful use of power indirectly addressed the fear of some Americans that he'd be a trigger-happy president. Similarly, Obama's pledge to add troops in Afghanistan and his forceful language on terrorist breeding grounds in Pakistan addressed the fear of other Americans that he'd be a weak commander in chief.On Iraq, Obama spoke repeatedly about his opposition to initiating that war. But he didn't directly respond to McCain's key points—that a surge-enabled victory in Iraq will leave this country with a stable ally in a bad neighborhood, and that the next president has to decide not whether to enter Iraq but how to leave in a way that best serves America. Obama gamely noted that he had chosen Sen. Joe Biden, a specialist in foreign affairs, as his vice presidential candidate.
The bulk of Friday night's debate took place on the turf McCain knows best: foreign affairs and military endeavors. That showed. Obama spoke capably on one topic after another; McCain, who has traveled to numerous crisis locales and joined in more foreign policy debates, spoke with more fluency and experience.
As one TV talking head said afterward, McCain spent the night on offense; Obama found himself playing more defense.
I know Ali and senator: you are no Ali.For whatever reason (I think there are several, personal and strategic), you either don’t know how to or can’t be a closer. You can’t finish with the kind of flurry that drops your foe to the canvas. You didn’t do it to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at least Friday night here at Ole Miss, you didn’t do it to Sen. John McCain.
But here’s the question: Is a devastating puncher who we want in a president? Is that who we want in our next president?
Well, maybe not. Maybe we’ve had enough pugnacity for a while. Maybe George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have given pugnacity a bad name. Maybe voters want a more peaceable style. Maybe right now they want an open hand, not another closed fist.
That’s the only reason I can think of why most of my colleagues (and, apparently, judging from the instant polls of viewers) decided that Obama had “won’” the debate here in Oxford.
On debating points--and if campaigns are boxing--McCain won. He was the sneering aggressor. He had Obama backpedaling for much of the night on foreign policy. Obama, for his part, missed several chances to counterattack, especially on the economy. Obama’s answers were strewn with annoying “ums” and “ahs” as he played for time to calibrate the least-damaging response.
If it had been a VFW convention, John McCain would have won last night's debate in a walk. He'd been there. Knew the pain of a defeated American army. Knew Kissinger almost before Kissinger knew English. Knew Eisenhower had composed a resignation letter in case the Normandy invasion had failed. Knew about Ike's resignation letter even though it never existed: Eisenhower wrote a letter accepting all the blame in case the invasion failed, but made no reference whatsoever to resigning.But who cares? When it helped him and when it didn't, McCain provided the better theater in last night's debate.
More importantly, McCain punched and Barack Obama counter-punched through much of their first debate.
If, God forbid, foreign policy had to be the deciding factor in choosing between Barack Obama and John McCain, then last night's terrible showing by Obama would make me a Ralph Nader voter in a heartbeat. Obama's performance was nothing short of pathetic, and only a Democratic-leaning analysts and voters with blinders on could suggest that Obama won the debate. More important, he utterly blew a chance to draw a stark contrast with John McCain on America's approach to the world.
Last ditch bid to stave off fresh bank panic: World waits for US bail-out decision (Ruth Sunderland and James Robinson, 9/27/08,
The Observer)
...to explain how irresponsible the Right is being. They're as afraid of acting like the superpower we are in the financial field as Democrats are in fields of fire. W summed the situation up with typical concision in the White House meeting the other day: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”
MORE:
Lending deep-freeze: Tight lending in focus as a key measure reaches highest level ever (David Goldman and Catherine Clifford, 9/26/08, CNNMoney.com)
"Things have frozen over again," said Steve Van Order, chief fixed income strategist with Calvert Funds. "Banks are nervous about lending to each other, and the commercial paper market has come to a standstill."Market gauges of lending showed higher prices for loans between banks. When lending tightens in this way, businesses and consumers have to pay more for loans, such as mortgages, or can't get them at all.
For instance, one gauge that banks use to determine lending rates rose to an all-time high. The difference between the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and the Overnight Index Swaps rose to an unprecedented 2.08%. The Libor-OIS "spread," or difference between the two rates, measures how much cash is available for lending between banks. The higher the spread, the lower availability of cash for lending.
Another lending measure was just below a 26-year high. The "TED spread" - the difference between three-month Libor, what banks pay to borrow money for three months, and the three-month Treasury borrowing rates - was at 2.94% after hitting 3.37% Thursday, the widest margin for that measure since 1982. Just a three weeks ago, the TED spread was at 1.04%.
With loads of troubled assets on their balance sheets, banks are hesitant to take on more loans if the risk of default is high. Furthermore, when banks need to write down those assets, they have less cash on hand to issue loans. That stops the financial system's gears from turning, in turn hurting customers who need a loan to finance a home, a car or tuition.
"The interbank lending markets are clogged up, because there is a freeze-up in the pipes that normally carry funding from central banks to banks to customers," Van Order explained.
Legendary Actor Paul Newman Dies at Age 83: Paul Newman, superstar who personified cool onscreen, dies at 83 after battling cancer ( (The Associated Press, 9/26/08)
He got his start in theater and on television during the 1950s, and went on to become one of the world's most enduring and popular film stars, a legend held in awe by his peers. He was nominated for Oscars 10 times, winning one regular award and two honorary ones, and had major roles in more than 50 motion pictures, including "Exodus," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Verdict," "The Sting" and "Absence of Malice."Newman worked with some of the greatest directors of the past half century, from Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston to Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. His co-stars included Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and, most famously, Robert Redford, his sidekick in "Butch Cassidy" and "The Sting."
MORE:
-WIKIPEDIA: Paul Newman
-FILMOGRAPHY: Paul Newman (IMDB)
Paul Newman Dies at 83 (ALJEAN HARMETZ, September 27, 2008, NY Times)
Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home near Westport, Conn. He was 83.The cause was cancer, said Jeff Sanderson of Chasen & Company, Mr. Newman’s publicist.
If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.
He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless. Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into craggy, charismatic old age.
It's flip to say that the first half of Paul Newman's career shows how little acting can count for in the movies, while the second half shows how it can count for everything. The Newman of "The Long Hot Summer," "The Hustler," "Hud" and "Cool Hand Luke" was certainly an actor, and the Newman of "Slap Shot," "Fort Apache the Bronx," "Absence of Malice," "Blaze" and "Twilight" is by God a movie star. But pare down the exaggeration and you arrive at a kernel of truth. Had Paul Newman not made the change in his acting that began with 1977's "Slap Shot," made the conscious decision to delve deeper into himself and see what surprises might be waiting there, he might have spent his later screen career as a charming memento of the gorgeous and cocky smartass he started out as. Newman must have recognized that, and in the roles of the late '70s and early '80s, he found a way out. It's easy to look at those performances as the finest vintage of a dependable old pro. I'd argue that they are as exploratory and revelatory and, in their most daring moments, as naked as the work of Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr. and Nicolas Cage, the finest actors of their generation.
He used to joke that his epitaph would read, "Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."It was self-deprecation with a hint of truth: an impossibly handsome, blue-eyed film god, Paul Newman carried his good looks like both a gift and a curse, and it was when he went beyond them -- into roles as a callous womanizer or a self-involved failure or, later in his career, as an aging and rueful rebel -- that he showed he was also a fine actor.
The irony was that those roles were the farthest from what he was in real life. When he was dying, film critic Shawn Levy, who was working on a biography of Newman, wrote of him, "Funny, upright, smart, brave, moral, talented, faithful, honest, manly, wise, humble."
Annoyed by the public's fascination with his resemblance to a Roman statue, particularly his Windex-blue eyes, Newman often chose offbeat character roles. In the 1950s and '60s, he helped define the American anti-hero and became identified with the charming misfits, cads and con men in film classics such as "The Hustler," "Hud," "Cool Hand Luke" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."Newman's poker-game look in "The Sting" -- cunning, watchful, removed, amused, confident, alert -- summed up his power as a person and actor, said Stewart Stern, a screenwriter and longtime friend.
"You never see the whole deck, there's always some card somewhere he may or may not play," Stern said. "Maybe he doesn't even have it."
Newman claimed his success came less from natural talent than from hard work, luck and the tenacity of a terrier.
"Acting," he once said, "is really nothing but exploring certain facets of your own personality trying to become someone else." In early films, he said he tried to make himself fit the character but later aimed "to make the character come to me."
Brooding and sinewy, with luminous blue eyes and a husky voice, Newman resembled a preppy Greek God in his earliest screen roles. He quickly rebelled against conventional casting that tried to turn him into a pretty-boy alternative to Marlon Brando and James Dean. He became known as an introspective and nonconformist performer -- a perfect anti-hero idol for the socially rebellious 1960s and 1970s.In many of Newman's best films -- "The Hustler," "Hud," "Harper," "Cool Hand Luke," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Sting," "Slap Shot," "The Verdict," "Nobody's Fool" and "The Color of Money" (for which he won the Oscar) -- he played amoral rats, genial louts, self-destructive idealists, drunkards and has-beens. Some of his characters redeem themselves by being defeated or killed, and others just continue bumming along.
Newman hated to see his characters triumph on charm alone. No one, he said, would pay money to see such a beautiful man win the woman and save the day. Off-screen, he mocked his sex-symbol status and said that his personality was closest to the vulgar, second-rate hockey coach he played in "Slap Shot" (1977). His approach likely saved his career as he matured into a disciplined performer, one of the most enduring and polished of screen stars.
When Paul Newman turned 70, I asked him about the pros and cons of aging. "What's difficult about getting old," he said, with that gravelly voice that set in in his 60s, "is remembering the way things used to be. There were such things as loyalty. The community hadn't disintegrated. The individual had not been deified at the expense of everything around him. I don't think that's just an old codger, you know, wishing for the old days. Goddam, they were better. There was a lot of ugliness, but there was a lot more grace." Newman, a modest man, would have been embarrassed to be told that he exemplified that grace, both on screen, where in his prime he played heels whom everyone fell in love with, and off, where his generosity, professionalism and decency were legendary.
He initially tried to play down concerns about his health after reports that he was having cancer treatment in New York. This year he pulled out of directing a Connecticut stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men because of unspecified health problems. He later issued a statement that said he was "doing nicely".But AE Hotchner, who helped create the successful Newman's Own food company in 1982, confirmed in June that the actor had been ill for 18 months. "It's a form of cancer, and he's dealing with it. Paul is a fighter," Hotchner told the Associated Press.
In August, the US press reported that Newman had finished chemotherapy and told his family he wanted to die at home. The former chain smoker is said to have developed lung cancer.
With Paul Newman gone maybe only Clint Eastwood, five years his junior, is left of a generation of movie stars who defied the years to become and remain icons of the cinema screen.You don't have to be much of an actor to become a film star - looks and personality often do it for you --but you have to be a very good one to remain a star and Newman was an extremely fine actor.
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck.
Believe It or Not, Bailout Won’t Substantially Expand the Deficit (Phil Izzo, 9/26/08, WSJ: Real Time Economics)
In congressional testimony earlier this week, Peter Orszag, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, told lawmakers that the program should be treated on net-expected-cost basis. The cost wouldn’t be recorded as gross outlays, but as “the purchase cost minus the expected value of any estimated future earnings from holding those assets and the proceeds from the eventual sale of them.” Since the value of the assets will be set by what the government pays, the program should at least be budget neutral in the near term. That approach would be similar to the current budgetary treatment of other programs such as student loans or lending to farmers.The program does still have to be funded, and that likely means debt issuance from the Treasury. The government will have to borrow to buy the assets, but it’s no different than borrowing to buy anything else. Once the purchase is done, the buyer owns something that has value and can liquidated. Of course, right now those assets don’t have a market, but Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke expect that to change.
The program could even mean less issuance of government debt over the long term. “The TARP is being used to purchase assets which are intended to be sold or held to maturity,” said Michael Feroli of J.P. Morgan Chase. “As these assets are sold or mature in 2010 and following years, they will reduce the need for Treasury issuance, as funding inflows from running down the TARP portfolio defray other funding needs.”
Daredevil Crosses English Channel On Rocket-Propelled Wing (Associated Press, 9/26/08)
A Swiss daredevil crossed the English Channel strapped to a homemade jet-propelled wing Friday, parachuting into a field near the white cliffs of Dover after a 10-minute solo flight.Yves Rossy leapt from a plane at more than 8,800 feet (2,500 meters), fired up his jets and made the 22-mile (35-kilometer) trip from Calais in France. Mr. Rossy passed over a thin strip of land in front of South Foreland lighthouse, looped over onlookers and opened his parachute, his wings still strapped to his back.
Nevermind the me-tooism problem Mr. Obama had, having to check the name on the bracelet makes it look a bit gimmicky, no?
The Bradley Effect (WILLIAM SAFIRE, 9/28/08, NY Times Magazine)
The root of the phrase is in the campaign for the governorship of California in 1982. Surveys up to and including exit polls reported that Tom Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, was well ahead of George Deukmejian, the Republican. But the popular mayor lost by 1.2 points. How could that happen? Speculation ranged from inaccurate sampling, to last-minute mind-changes, to latent racism, to freely lying voters, to the reluctance of those being polled to admitting a preference that may be socially unacceptable — anti-black — in talking to interviewers.Those impressed with the Bradley effect (put “so-called” in front if you dispute it) point to a series of polling surprises in races between candidates of different races. In 1989, David Dinkins won the New York mayoralty with a two-point margin after polls gave him a double-digit lead; on the same day, Douglas Wilder, who had been ahead by 15 points in the pre-election weeks, squeaked through to win the governorship of Virginia by less than 7,000 votes.
“My lesson was learned in 1978,” says Tully Plesser, the veteran Republican pollster telling me about that year’s Massachusetts race for senator. “Late polling for the Republican incumbent Senator Edward Brooke had him nearly 8 points ahead of Democrat Paul Tsongas, and Tsongas was elected by a 10-point margin.”
Is there such a thing as “the so-called Bradley effect”? Some on the right think so: Wesley Pruden in his column in The Washington Times defines it as “the phenomenon of black candidates to register significantly better in public-opinion polls than on Election Day.” Others differ. Daniel Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, issued a lengthy scholarly study last month of what he calls the “Wilder effect” and concludes that it was significant “only through the early 1990s” and “disappeared swiftly at about the time that welfare reform silenced one critical, racialized issue.”
Wait — there’s another linguistic wrinkle. Martin Peretz argues in The New Republic that all the talk about the Bradley effect has an impact on the race, which he has named “the Bradley-Effect Effect,” which “actually benefits Obama. Is it so crazy to think working-class voters will react to the racism charge by going out of their way to prove it false?”
Washington’s Invisible Hand (DAVID LEONHARDT, 9/28/08, NY Times Magazine)
[A]nyone trying to understand the causal chain — how the end of Glass-Steagall led to the end of Lehman Brothers — will have a hard time doing so. To many banking experts, the reason is simple enough: namely, that the law didn’t really do much to create the current crisis. It is a handy scapegoat, since it’s easily the biggest piece of financial deregulation in recent decades. But one act of deregulation, even a big one, and the absence of other, good regulations aren’t the same thing. The nursemaid of the current crisis isn’t so much what Washington did, in other words, as what it didn’t do.The point of Gramm-Leach-Bliley was to tear down the wall, built by Glass-Steagall, separating banks that did risky investing from those that did basic lending. (The mingling of those two helped create a cascade of bank failures during the Depression.) Thus were born Citigroup, Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase, behemoths that owned bank branches, bought and sold stocks and shepherded corporate mergers.
But what else do those firms have in common today? They weren’t the ones that imploded, at least not first. While hardly unscathed, some of them are emerging as survivors amidst the wreckage. The first fatalities were firms that didn’t change all that much in the wake of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Until their dying day, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were both classic investment banks.
They got in trouble by making a series of risky new bets while Washington did nothing new to stand in the way.
McCain's fantasy league of democracies (Derrick Z. Jackson, September 27, 2008, Boston Globe)
[T]here was a curious moment in this first debate that was a boomerang on that tactic, for anyone with the least bit of memory about the last 7 1/2 years. McCain said he would put pressure on Iran by forming a league of democracies, a group of nations with whom we share interests, ideals, and values.A league of democracies? McCain was fortunate that Obama did not walk all over that one.
McCain's Republican Party, under President Bush, did everything it could in these last two terms to tell the world that we were in our own league.
Beyond Ideology, a Generational Clash (ALESSANDRA STANLEY, 9/27/08, NY Times)
Mr. Obama was not particularly warm or amusing; at times he was stiff and almost pedantic. But all he had to do was look presidential, and that was not such a stretch. Mr. McCain had the harder task of persuading leery voters that he can lead the future because he is so much part of the past.
MORE:
‘Senator McCain Is Absolutely Right…’: Barack Obama plays Mr. Nice Guy — and loses — in the first debate. (Byron York, 9/27/08, National Review)
A candidate determined to appear congenial might do that once, or even twice, but Obama did it eight times:“I think Senator McCain’s absolutely right that we need more responsibility…”
“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the earmarks process has been abused…”
“He’s also right that oftentimes lobbyists and special interests are the ones that are introducing these…requests…”
“John mentioned the fact that business taxes on paper are high in this country, and he’s absolutely right…”
“John is right we have to make cuts…”
“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families…”
“John — you’re absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say…”
“Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran…” [...]
But Obama’s problem wasn’t just saying “John is right” too many times. He also let McCain control the discussion even when — especially when — the conversation turned to issues that play to Obama’s strength. The debate was scheduled to focus entirely on foreign policy and national security, but for obvious reasons moderator Jim Lehrer devoted the first half-hour to the current financial crisis. Polls show Obama with a pretty big lead on economic issues, and yet McCain was able to turn the discussion — ostensibly about the $700 billion bailout proposal — into an extended examination of federal spending and earmarks, two issues about which McCain has strong feelings and a good record. When McCain pointed out that Obama had asked for $932 million in earmarks — “nearly a million dollars a day for every day that he’s been in the United States Senate” — Obama answered weakly that yes, the process has been abused, “which is why I suspended any requests for my home state, whether it was for senior centers or what have you, until we cleaned it up.” Not his best moment.
When the debate came around to the topic of the evening, McCain outshone Obama on topics like Russia and Pakistan while hitting him over and over for his comments, made in earlier Democratic debates, that he would meet Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without precondition.” On Iraq, the two men fought to a draw, with McCain arguing that Obama was wrong on the surge and Obama arguing that McCain was wrong on the war. It seems unlikely they will change anyone’s mind about that.
The bottom line was that Obama did well enough, but McCain did better.
Harper edges closer to majority: Liberal support bleeding to Conservatives, NDP; Bloc surging in Quebec (TONDA MACCHARLES, 9/27/08, Toronto Star)
The Conservatives have a tenuous grasp on a majority government, while the Liberals and New Democrats are in a dead heat for second place, a new poll shows.The survey, conducted for the Toronto Star by Angus Reid Strategies, found that 40 per cent of Canadians would vote Conservative if an election were held tomorrow.
The Liberals under Stéphane Dion continue to drop, losing core supporters to the Tories as well as to the other parties. For the first time in the campaign, the Liberals and New Democrats, under Jack Layton, are tied at 21 per cent support. The Greens register 7 per cent support nationally.
There are several stories in the poll, which plumbed the views of 1,508 Canadians at the end of the third week of the campaign for the Oct. 14 election. In fact, the horse race is becoming an issue itself: The poll suggests Canadians are now seriously weighing what a majority Conservative government under Harper would mean.
Iraq: Sadr Movement Growing Daily - Spokesman (Qassim al-Kaabi, 9/27/08, Asharq Alawsat)
Spokesman for the Sadri Trend, Salah al-Ubaydi, told the Asharq Al-Awsat that the Sadri Trend is not a "political party consisting of figures that could change their political line or leave one political party to join another." He said that the Sadri Trend is a popular movement which is growing daily. Al-Ubaydi added that the "call by the al-Kufah Mosque Imam to refer to the voters' registration centers has boosted the registration from200,000 to well over two million persons. This explains that the Sadri Trend still exists and that its approach to the activities it performs is the approach of the opposition and armed resistance.However, the approach has now shifted to another style - the style of waiting for the results of the negotiations on the Iraqi-US agreement. Al-Ubaydi said that if the "Iraqi political parties do not reach an agreement with the Americans, we will have to review our position. We will discuss the kind of agreement reached and the results of the negotiations. We will surely give our views, and we will voice our support of the Iraqi government if it insisted on the departure the occupiers from our country. This is our condition. We will also look into the agreement in terms of whether it will be useful to the Iraqi society or not. We are not saying that we are accepting the agreement. We could give a period of grace of one to two years for the implementation of the agreement, if this is the useful thing to do."
Asked about the inaction which characterizes the Sadri bloc in the Iraqi parliament, the spokesman for the Sadri Trend said that the "reason for the inaction of the Sadri bloc is that it has no interests like the other blocs which have a specific number of cabinet portfolios or senior posts in the government. However, we made a condition which was difficult for the other parties of the parliamentary blocs to accept, namely, the departure of the occupiers. Asked about participation in the upcoming elections, al-Ubaydi said that the "Sadri Trend will support all the independent lists in which professional candidates and technocrats will run." He added that the "persons in the Sadri Trend who wish to run for the elections should participate in the independent lists and should be figures of high stature in their own community. However, persons in the Sadri Trend will not participate in the election lists that take into account courtesies and consist of public figures that have a bleak history in their own country."
Bailout progress _ Frank sees accord by Sunday (JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, 9/27/08, AP)
Lawmakers say they're making progress and hope to reach an agreement over the weekend on a $700 billion government bailout to rescue Wall Street bankers from the bad loans that threaten to derail the economy and send it into a deep and long depression.In a sign of movement, House Republicans dispatched their second-ranking leader, Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, to join the talks after their objections to an emerging compromise had brought negotiations to a standstill.
Negotiators were pushing for a deal before Asian markets open Monday.
Why Americans are more tolerant: Canadians often consider themselves to be more tolerant than their "backwards" neighbours to the south. But is this simply a myth? (Pete Vere, September 23, 2008, Western Standard)
Which brings me to the second reason the American concept of freedom of speech won me over. With free speech comes responsibility. This is not a leftist cliche, although it’s often misapplied by leftists. What this really means is that freedom of speech is every citizen’s responsibility. That’s you and me. If your neighbor says something hateful or abhorrent, speak up about it!Americans feel more secure speaking up. This is what makes them more tolerant than Canadians. Ingrained in their psychology is the belief that every individual is equal under the law, and rights and freedoms are every individual’s responsibility. Thus they might gripe about minorities, but in the end Americans accept them.
Look no further than our parallel elections. With the exception of Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s fifth party, every major party leader north of the border is a middle-aged, middle-class, mild-mannered white male. And when gender is excluded, Ms. May fits the stereotype perfectly. Yet even then she is not projected to win any seats.
In contrast, the U.S. election has produced two strong female candidates - one of whom is married to a snowmobile-racing champion from a First Nations community. One of the presidential candidates is an African-American born of a Muslim father. The other a tough-talking former Navy pilot and senior citizen who often bucks his own part
We talk about tolerance in Canada. More often than not, as our electoral choices show, Canadian tolerance is just an excuse to avoid discussing our differences. Thus Canadians stick to what’s comfortable, what’s least likely to offend the most people. We don’t want our differences to cause division and disrupt the social peace.
Americans, on the other hand, relish their differences. Tolerance is created by confronting their differences, then discovering that they share many of the same values and concerns. Americans understand, rightly, that tolerance is a product of free speech. The First Amendment allows them to get past their differences, correct misconceptions, and move on to more pressing issues.