TWO DIMENSIONAL = SKINNY = RACISM!:

Obama's a better symbol than president: On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama - the image, the idea. (MARK STEYN, 10/31/08, OC Register)

In Tokyo last week, over 1,000 people signed a new petition asking the Japanese government to permit marriages between human beings and cartoon characters. "I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world," explained Taichi Takashita. "Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorize marriage with a two-dimensional character?"

Get back to me on that Tuesday night. We'll know by then whether an entire constitutional republic has decided to contract marriage with a two-dimensional character and to attempt to take up residence in the two-dimensional world. For many of his supporters, Barack Obama is an idea. He offers "hope, not fear." "Hope" of what? "Hope" of "change." OK, but "change" to what? Ah, well, there you go again, getting all hung up on three-dimensional reality, when we've moved way beyond that.

Mr. Steyn is going to end up in PC Court again.....

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A SWELL GUY IF YOU IGNORE THE STALINISM?:

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Terkel Dies at 96 (CARYN ROUSSEAU, October 31, 2008, The Associated Press)

For his oral histories, he interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."

He would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: "Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."

Terkel also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities _ that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class."

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

"It was those loners _ argumentative ones, deceptively quite ones, the talkers and the walkers _ who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch and Go."

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place, and would go looking for it in Chicago.

"People were never put down," Terkel recalled in the 1995 book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961." "The stories were about little aspects of their lives. There was no audience and no canned laughter. ... It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life."

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

Antipathy towards activists? Do we really honor a social historian by sweeping his history under the rug? Even if that's what he sought to do himself, Talking to Himself (Scott McLemee, 11/14/07, Inside Higher Ed)

In his first autobiography, Terkel noted that he had concealed some things. “There is a private domain on which I’ll not trespass,” as he put it 30 years ago, “nor does it, I feel, matter very much to others.” But the problem with either of his tellings of his own story is that the reader is rushed past some very important matters in his public life. I will come back to that narrative blindspot in due course. [...]

Terkel is a good storyteller, and it is a life full of raw material.. But there are points when his gifts as a performer (to use a word that subsumes his activity in front of the typewriter as well as the microphone) permit him to avoid as much as he expresses. When Talking to Myself appeared 30 years ago, Terkel’s way of discussing McCarthyism was rather jaunty. C’est la vie! How how lucky he was to have been blacklisted! Otherwise, think of the wonderful opportunities he might have missed. He might have ended up respectable and dull.

As the critic John Leonard pointed out at the time, however, that element of jokiness rang false. It seemed to be avoiding engagement with memories of what to have been a painful experience. In the new memoir, it sounds as if Terkel halfway concedes the validity of that point. Almost in so many words:

“I was fading fast,” he recalls. “During the blacklist, you’re not working for a time, you start thinking maybe you ain’t got something you thought you had. I knew my work troubles were for political reasons, but the situation seemed somewhat hopeless. There’s something that’s interesting psychologically, moments when you feel self-doubt: that is, was your talent there to begin with? Maybe you’re not that good....”

Terkel also admits that having the FBI show up at your door was hardly very pleasant. And then the jokey tone returns.Why, he’s afraid that his wife may have been rude to the agents, at times — and that could be embarrassing.....

So the wall of reserve comes down, for a moment, only to go right back up again. No doubt this is a matter of both generational style and personal temperament – of being the product of an era when discussing your troubles was considered bad form, especially for a man. Let alone one whose nickname reflected an enthusiasm for James T. Farrell’s trilogy of novels about a tough Irish working-class kid named Studs Lonigan.

But the reticence goes deeper than that. To get some perspective, we might have a look at an incident in the life of Terkel’s fictional namesake. I’m thinking of a scene near the end of the final novel in Farrell’s series. Studs Lonigan is close to the end of his days — about to succumb, at an early age, to illness and a hard life. It is the early part of the Depression. He’s hanging out with some friends when they see a demonstration. They watch people march by, carrying banners and placards with slogans:

DOWN WITH THE HOOVER WALL STREET GOVERNMENT
We Want Bread Not Bullets
DEFEND THE SOVIET UNION

The sight of a Communist rally has a complicated effect on Lonigan. He barely has words to express it. He has a sense of his own life being deep in a rut — indeed, almost over — while the lyrics of their revolutionary anthem proclaims that “a better world’s in birth.” They seem not just angry but happy. It is a strangely affecting moment, perhaps charged with the author’s own complex feelings. (Farrell himself did not join the party, but was sympathetic to it through the mid-1930s, after which he switched allegiance to Leon Trotsky’s following for a dozen years before settling into a kind of Cold War liberalism.)

So a reader of the novel gets a sense of the ambivalence that one guy named Studs feels upon encountering the Communist movement. But anyone looking for a comparable moment of insight in Terkel’s memoirs will have no such luck.

Now, it is possible that Studs Terkel was never a member of the Communist Party. But someone who mentions, as Terkel does, that he worked in left-wing theater groups, raised money for the Soviet-American Friendship Committee, and supported Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948 (the last gasp of any serious Communist influence in American political life) was fully integrated into its support network.

He had a relationship of some kind with the party – even if, for whatever reason, he was not a member. Most people who joined in the 1930s and ‘40s were in and out within a few weeks. (The problem of retention was a source of much grief to Communist leaders.) But Terkel’s references suggest a serious and long-term involvement, whatever his formal status may have been.

All things considered, it’s perhaps surprising that he is even as candid as he allows himself to be about his activism. But the lack of any clear sense of when he became affiliated with the movement, and why (and when he parted ways with it, and why) leaves the reader with only a vague sense of what must have been a profound fact of the man’s life.

At one point, Touch and Go quotes the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman: “Once a person joins a group, a demonstration, or a union, they’re a different person.” Terkel endorses the sentiment. “You become stronger as a result,” he adds, “no matter what the outcome.” Unfortunately Terkel leaves this only at the level of general advice, rather than showing how it applied in his own experience. [...]

Terkel was close to the Communist movement during the phase known as the Popular Front – when it abandoned the preposterously belligerent slogan “Towards a Soviet America” for the altogether more palatable catchphrase “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” Its artists and writers and musicians tried to work in popular idioms. As good disciplined cadres, they would still read Stalin’s pamphlets; but they knew that radical doctrine, as such, would only get you just so far.

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THEY KNOW WHO THE 2012 COMPETITION IS:

Palin aide: She's just like Jeb (Joe Follick, October 29, 2008, Herald Tribune)

In an online interview with the original Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox, one of McCain’s top aides – Nicolle Wallace – said Sarah Palin reminds her of former Gov. Jeb Bush.

Wallace, nee Devenish, worked for Bush in the late 1990s.

“Sarah Palin reminds me a lot of Jeb Bush, who was very hands on. He was always in direct contact, email-wise, with reporters. He'd often get back to them before I'd get back to them. She's like that. She's very hands on. Reminds me of my time working for Jeb Bush. She doesn't like a lot of bureaucracy. She gets on her email and deals directly with press and the staff and it's very, very impressive. Very appealing.”

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THOUGH WE RECALL HIM AS WITHOUT BLEMISH...:

Poll: Obama leads McCain by one point in battleground states (Mike Sunnucks, 10/31/08, Phoenix Business Journal)

A Halloween Day poll shows John McCain trailing Barack Obama by one point in the “toss-up” states that could decide Tuesday’s presidential election.

The George Washington University Battleground Poll gives Obama and running mate Joe Biden 47 percent, with 46 percent for McCain and running mate Sarah Palin in those states and 4 percent undecided. [...]

The Obama campaign also announced Friday it would run home-stretch advertisements in Arizona (McCain’s home state) and two other traditional “red states” — Georgia and North Dakota — in the last days of the campaign.

...Ronald Reagan rightly took some heat for heading to MN to try and win 50 states at the end of the 1984 campaign, rather than helping to win some congressional seats. But he had the race sewn up and could afford to mess around. Were the Unicorn Rider to biff it on Tuesday you can guarantee that folks will point at this overextension and ask why he didn't focus on the more winnable states.

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JUST WAIT'LL THE UNICORN RIDER IS PRESIDENT...:

'US strikes' on Pakistan villages (BBC, 10/31/08)

More than 20 people have been killed in two suspected US missile attacks in northwest Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, security officials said.

About 15, including an al-Qaeda leader, were killed in an attack near the village of Mirali, North Waziristan.

In a second attack, seven people were killed in South Waziristan.

...and we start attacking jihadi even if they're in Pakistan.

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SOAK THE MIDDLE CLASS:

News To Obama: The OECD Says The United States Has The Most Progressive Tax System (Scott A. Hodge, 10/29/08, Tax Foundation)

Barack Obama's admission that his policies would "spread the wealth around" has ignited a nationwide discussion of how progressive the tax system should be and how it should be used to redistribute income among Americans. Obama has been very successful in bolstering the conventional wisdom that the U.S. tax system does not place a significant enough burden on wealthier households and places too much of a burden on the "middle class."

But a new study on inequality by researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris reveals that when it comes to household taxes (income taxes and employee social security contributions) the U.S. "has the most progressive tax system and collects the largest share of taxes from the richest 10% of the population." As Column 1 in the table below shows, the U.S. tax system is far more progressive—meaning pro-poor—than similar systems in countries most Americans identify with high taxes, such as France and Sweden.

Even after accounting for the fact that the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. have one of the highest shares of market income among OECD nations, our tax system is second only to Ireland in terms of its progressivity for households.

The table also shows that the U.S. collects more household tax revenue from the top 10 percent of households than any other country and extracts the most from that income group relative to their share of the nation's income.

The Right likes to gripe a lot about spending, but you'll never reduce it so long as it's mostly rich folks' money.

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AS MUCH AS THEY'D LIKE TO BLAME W OR ACORN OR SARAH OR WHOEVER...:

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll (Rasmussen Reports, October 31, 2008)

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Obama's tax cut promise to his current lead in the polls. Thirty-one percent (31%) of voters now believe that their taxes will go down if Obama is elected. Only 11% believe that will happen if McCain wins (see crosstabs). Obama has made remarkable progress on this issue in recent months. In August, only 9% believed Obama would cut their taxes.

...the McCain campaign has no one but themselves to blame for that number. Running on a piece of legislation rather than a simple mantra--like "cut taxes for 95% of Americans"--just doesn't cut the mustard.

One does enjoy though the repudiation here of the idea that the Reagan formula doesn't work anymore. The Unicorn Rider is running on Reaganomics. The Other Brother and I were talking the other day and noted that if you knew nothing of the two men except what you see in NH tv ads, you'd think Senator Obama was a rightwing Republican.

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A PEOPLE THAT THINKS THEMSELVES A NATION IS ONE:

Kurdistan Would Welcome U.S. Troops Without Pact (Congressional Quarterly, 10/31/08)

The president of Iraqi Kurdistan said Friday that his semi-autonomous region would welcome U.S. troops if Iraq and the United States cannot finalize an agreement governing U.S. troops in Iraq after 2008.

“If the United States requests, I am confident the Kurdish regional parliament and people of the Kurdistan region . . . would welcome that,” Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Barzani said he hopes that the two countries do conclude a status of forces agreement to govern the future U.S. troop presence beyond the Dec. 31 expiration of a U.N. mandate. And despite expressing doubts about whether the Iraqi parliament will approve the draft accord, Barzani gave it a strong endorsement.

“This agreement is better than any other alternative available,” he said through a translator, saying its approval by Iraqis was still possible.

While the practical implications of basing U.S. troops in Kurdistan are not clear, the mere discussion of it could strengthen perceptions of Kurdish autonomy.

There's plenty of time to decide whether there will be a Sunnistan in Iraq, but there won't be a Kurdistan.

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DOES HE READ THE MAGAZINE?:

CVS slashes generic drug costs, escalates price war: Using the products as loss leaders, the drugstore giant will sell 90-day supplies of more than 400 medications for $9.99 and offer discounts for cash-paying patients at its in-store medical clinics. (Lisa Girion and Andrea Chang, 10/31/08, LA Times)

One of the nation's largest drugstore chains ratcheted up a price war Thursday, offering deep discounts on generic prescriptions amid national concern about the spiraling cost of healthcare.

Drugstore giant CVS Caremark Corp. announced it would sell 90-day supplies of more than 400 medications for $9.99 and offer discounts for cash-paying patients at its in-store medical clinics.

The price war was unleashed by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the country's largest retailer, a few years ago. Since then, many grocery stores have followed suit.

The price competition makes generic drugs just about the only healthcare bill that isn't escalating. The lower prices provide a measure of relief to consumers who are struggling with rising health insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses or have lost coverage altogether.

Now savvy shoppers can buy many prescriptions for less than laundry detergent, face cream or a pound of deli meat.

The U.S. Economy at Risk for Deflation: The U.S. economy has all the ingredients—slowing job and wage growth, slack consumer demand—for a deflationary cycle, without strong financial markets to cushion the blow (James Cooper, 10/31/08, Business Week)

When policymakers at the Federal Reserve voted to slash interest rates at their Oct. 28-29 meeting, it's a good bet the threat of deflation played a role in the decision. That concern is bound to get more attention in coming months as inflation begins to fall amid a progressively weaker economy and the financial crisis. Deflation is an economic disease caused by a sustained drop in overall demand and falling prices that forces businesses to cut prices ever deeper. It was last seen in the U.S. in the 1930s and in Japan in the 1990s, when the inflation rate fell to zero and then turned negative for several years.

Deflation is a nasty situation that can give central bankers palpitations. It's especially onerous for borrowers. Because prices are falling, people who already owe money have to pay back loans in dollars that will buy more goods than the dollars they borrowed. For new loans, it raises the real, or inflation-adjusted, cost of credit, the opposite of what monetary policy needs to do to combat falling demand. Plus, in the effort to boost spending, policymakers cannot cut the target rate below zero. At that point, negative inflation can keep the real rate high enough to restrict economic growth.

Actually, his BW colleague, Chris Farrell, has explained why this is and has been a deflationary epoch. The Roots of Deflation (Chris Farrell, MAY 14, 2004, Business Week):

"The world is shifting from an era of structural inflation to one of deflation, in which prices for most manufactured goods and tradable services fall rather than rise," observed Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan's former vice-finance minister. Chief Executive Jack Welch got it right several years ago when he ran General Electric: "Inflation has yielded to deflation as the shaping economic force."

Of course in the current environment you can almost hear the sound of Wall Street veterans scoffing. They are fond of quoting the legendary investor John Templeton, "The four most expensive words in the English language are 'this time is different.'" They've been burned by too many new eras, new economies, and revolutionary transformations. Inflation is the economic condition we know.

Many baby boomers and Wall Street traders remember when inflation reached double-digit levels in the 1970s, peaking at over 14% in 1980. Inflation was eventually contained through a combination of factors, including a tough anti-inflation battle waged by the Fed under the leadership of Paul Volcker and his successor Alan Greenspan. The consumer price index averaged 7% in the '70s, 5.5% in the '80s, 3% in the '90s, and 2.5% in the early 2000s. The odds of another bout of double-digit 1970s-style inflation are remote. Still, now that the economy is picking up steam and the job market is getting better, the widespread expectation is for resurgence in inflation. Rising prices are such an embedded part of our society that we all assume inflation is the economy's natural state.

Yet every once in a great while the established economic order is overthrown. Within a span of decades, technological changes, organizational upheavals, and new ways of thinking transform economies. From the 1760s to 1830s, steam engines, textile mills, and the Enlightenment produced the Industrial Revolution. The years 1880 to 1930 were shaped by the spread of electric power, mass production, and mass democracy.

This time is different. Or maybe I should say, it's back to the future. From 1776 to 1965, America's overall price level was essentially flat. Inflationary flare-ups were mostly associated with major wars until the post World War II era. These inflationary conflagrations were quickly extinguished in the aftermath of war. The rest of the time stable to falling prices dominated, especially in the latter part of the 19th century, the last time there was a tightly integrated global economy.

It's sometimes obvious when a historic divide is crossed. The 1929 stock market crash. The 1973 oil shock. Far more often, "change creeps upon us incrementally, punctuated by upheavals that, often as not, are rationalized as part of business as usual," said the late, legendary financier Leon Levy. "Only later do we realize that the world has been turned on its head." Levy called these events "a tap on the shoulder." Deflation may have taken a lot of people by surprise in 2003, but the price trend didn't emerge overnight. It had been building for years, a secular undertow to all the cyclical twists and turns in the economy. There were many deflation taps on the shoulder.

Among the most important were the chairmanship of two inflation hawks at the Federal Board: Volcker and Greenspan; the rise of retailing giant Wal-Mart and its low everyday price strategy; the commercial embrace of the Internet, an inherently deflationary technology; a falling price level in Japan in the late 1990s; the vicious global price cutting wars that erupted following the financial collapse of Asia's emerging markets; China transforming itself into the developing world's leading economic juggernaut; and Corporate America's outsourcing high-pay, high-skill white-collar and skilled jobs to low-pay, well-educated workers in developing nations like India, China, and Malaysia.

The emergence of deflation as the dominant price trend will dramatically impact businesses, workers, investors, the government, and the economy over the next several decades. "Of all the recording devices that can reveal to an historian the fundamental movements of an economy, monetary phenomena are without doubt the most sensitive," wrote the French historian Marc Bloch. "But to recognize their importance as symptoms would do them less than full justice. They have been and are, in their turn, causes. They are something like a seismograph, which not only measures the movements of the earth but sometimes provokes them."

Deflation, like inflation before it, is taking on a momentum of its own. The promise of a fast growing deflationary economy is enormous. But so are the pit falls for everyone from the worker on the factory floor to the CEO of a major multinational corporation to the head of the Federal Reserve Board.

Deflation in America reflects fundamental changes on the economy's supply side. At the same time, a new international monetary system has evolved that contains a bias toward lower prices. Deflation is built on three fundamental changes dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s: (1) the embrace of market capitalism at home and abroad; (2) the spread of information technologies; and, most importantly for understanding the economy of the next half-century, (3) the triumph of the financier. None of these factors is new, but what is surprising is how powerfully each change has informed and reinforced the other.

So, when central bankers reacted to the aberrational spike in oil prices as if it were indicative of systemic inflation they "raise[d] the real, or inflation-adjusted, cost of credit." This was particularly unfortunate because it cranked up the cost of adjustable rate loans far beyond what the money being borrowed was worth.

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THE DEVIL WEARS PARKA:

Northern Star Rising (Eugene Robinson, October 31, 2008, Washington Post)

My view of Sarah Palin has changed in the two months since John McCain named her as his running mate. I'm guessing that McCain's view of Palin may be changing, too, and not entirely in a good way.

I thought Palin was a lightweight; she's not. I thought she was an ingenue; she is, but only as long as her claws are sheathed. I thought she was bewildered and star-struck at her sudden elevation to national prominence; if she ever was, she isn't anymore. I thought she was nothing but raw political talent and unrealistic ambition; it turns out that she has impressive political skills. I thought she was destined to become nothing more than a historical footnote; I now think that Democrats underestimate her at their peril.

At this point, only McCain's most loyal lieutenants could have been surprised when Palin told ABC's Elizabeth Vargas that she's already looking beyond Tuesday's election toward her own political future. Asked whether she would just pack it in and go back to Alaska if she and McCain lose, Palin replied: "I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we've taken . . . I'm not doing this for naught."

No, she's doing it for Sarah -- and doing it increasingly well.

The recent sniping by neocons and McCain aides and the anti-Palin ad from the Obama camp come about two weeks too late--the pro-Palin backlash is in full swing.

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WHILE IT'S A HOPEFUL SIGN THAT HIS AIDES SAY HE'S LYING...:

Mood Shift Against Free Trade Puts Republicans on Defensive (GREG HITT and BRAD HAYNES, 10/31/08, Wall Street Journal)

From Oregon to Georgia to upstate New York, skepticism about the benefits of free trade is rippling through campaigns for several House and Senate seats, many of them races where Democrats are running strong. Lawmakers elected on promises to slow down on trade could find it hard to walk back from those pledges once in office -- particularly if labor unions and other Democratic constituencies critical of the Bush and Clinton Administrations' open trade policies keep a focus on the issue.

President Bush's efforts to win passage of trade deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia stalled after trade concerns helped to put Democrats in charge of the House and Senate in 2006.

Most Democrats don't call for blatant protectionist measures such as steep tariffs, or a return to import quotas such as those that governed automotive trade in the 1980s. Instead, Democrats, starting with Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, talk about the need for trade to be fair, and insist that trading partners be required to meet higher standards for environmental controls and workers' rights to unionize.

Republican candidate Sen. John McCain is a free trader and has surrounded himself with like-minded advisers such as Stanford University economist John Taylor. Mr. Taylor headed international economic policy in President Bush's first-term Treasury Department and is a candidate to be Treasury Secretary should Mr. McCain win the White House.

Other McCain economic advisers, such as former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, are longstanding proponents of open markets.

Sen. Obama has hedged his bets on trade.

...a President Obama might well face a Congress without enough Republicans to pass new Fre Trade agreements. Recall that it was the GOP that gave Bill Clinton this key component of his legacy.

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AFTER ALL, WHICH OF US DOESN'T WORK AND DINE WITH TERRORISTS?:

The PLO's Professor (Philip Klein, 10.31.08, American Spectator)

Liberals have defended Khalidi as a "respected academic," and amid all of the political noise and accusations flying back and forth between the two camps, it's easy to see how some voters would tune out when conservatives refer to him as a former "PLO spokesman." But without engaging in the semantic debate over what word should be applied to his complex and long-standing relationship with the terrorist group, a TAS analysis of contemporaneous news accounts dating back to the 1970s as well a look at Khalidi's own writings leave no doubt that a close relationship existed.

While living in Lebanon from the early 1970s through 1983 (where the PLO was based at the time), Khalidi was frequently cited in the press as being close to the organization, and he even used the word "we" while speaking on the group's behalf. He was described as a "director" of Wafa, the PLO's official news agency, and he thanked Arafat for research assistance in the preface of one of his books. In 1991, Khalidi was part of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace talks with Israel -- by his own account, he did so at the request of the PLO.

Before delving into the details, it's worth entertaining the legitimate question of why Khalidi's background and writings should raise concerns about Obama himself.

The L.A. Times story from April about their relationship answers this question quite clearly. Not only did Obama know Khalidi, but the professor was his "friend and frequent dinner companion" who Obama was close enough to that he attended the 2003 going away party thrown when Khalidi was moving to New York.

In his toast, Obama went out of his way to thank Khalidi (and his wife Mona) for "consistent reminders of my own blind spots and own biases," and he added that the conversation they engaged in was necessary around "this entire world." Given that America is on the cusp of electing Obama, a man of little experience about whom very little is known, it is perfectly fair to learn more about Khalidi, whose viewpoints Obama thought the whole world needed to hear.

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COINHERENCE:

Saving the Universe Darkly: a review of Donnie Darko (2001), Written and Directed by Richard Kelly (Art Livingston, Gilbert)

Sometimes an artist, if he possesses enough artistic integrity, can create something more true than his conscious beliefs could anticipate. Oscar Wilde made a habit of writing morality fables completely contradicting his decadent aestheticism. Donnie Darko is a prime example of profound theological vision lurking beneath surface confusion. Director Richard Kelly's audio track on the CD version actually trivializes his own creation, and he seems oblivious. One hopes it stems from modesty, but I can't detect it. Most curious.

The tale is as complex and as simple as a Charles Williams novel, which this story remarkably resembles. A viewer could (just) possibly interpret it as the psychotic delusions of a teenaged paranoid schizophrenic, one who sees visions of a six-foot rabbit who tells him to perform such acts as destroying his school's water pipes and planting an ax into the skull of the school mascot's statue, while writing on the ground, "They made me do it." Frankly, if I were Donnie, I would like the credit myself. Well, could be just a story about a nutty kid. But nowhere as interesting as the alternative interpretation, internally consistent, that a highly disturbed young man has become the genuine conduit for saving the universe.

This reading of the action so enriches the meaning that, after my fourth viewing of the movie, it continues to reveal new insights. But one must accept the plot on its own terms by not coming to it with preconceived notions of how a time travel story usually plays out. This requires a little information so as to get oriented: an airline engine inexplicably falls on Donnie's bedroom and he wakes on a golf course, where he begins having visions of Frank (the bunny rabbit from Hell). What unfolds is that somehow an unstable tangent universe has been created, and Donnie gains access to understanding what is happening and realizes that, unless someone (Donnie himself) can permit a portal for the disappearance of that world, our universe will be destroyed. Oh, we even get an explanation for Frank that is plausible in the context of the story.

What we have then is a profound understanding of a basic Christian concept, to which St. Paul refers when calling the Church "the Body of Christ," and Charles Williams extends to all creation in his concept of Coinherence--all being interrelated and interlocking as each part depends on all the other parts. I cannot see how Kelly could have put it there by accident.

It's been our experience that it isn't uncommon for an artist to stumble into telling the One Story accidentally.

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EVENTUALLY THE FAR RIGHT BLENDS INTO THE LEFT:

Why White Supremacists Support Barack Obama: How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would. (David Peisner, 10/31/08, Esquire)

"The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who's in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person--more dangerous than Bush. Obama, according to his book, Dreams Of My Father, is a racist and I have no problem with black racists. I’ve got the quote right here: 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s white race.' The problem with Obama is he’s being dishonest about his racial views. I’d respect him if he’d just come out and say, 'Yeah, I’m a black racist.' I don’t hate black people. I just think it’s in the best interest of the races to be separated as much as possible. See, I’m a leftist. I’m not a rightist. I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person." [...]

"White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals--basically a continuation of the last eight years of Emperor Bush. Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women--when usually negroes who have 'made it' immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize--that’s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it’s good for all racially minded folks. Besides, America cares nothing for the interests of the white American worker, while having a love affair with just about every non-white on planet Earth. It’d be poetic justice to have a non-white as titular chief over this decaying modern Sodom and Gomorrah."

His support for abortion is another reason for the Applied Darwinists to want him elected. One need look no farther than the question of which candidate will kill black babies to understand non-traditional support for the Democrat this year.

MORE:
Loathing Sarah Palin: The Two Months Hate of feminists. (Joseph Epstein, 10/27/2008, Weekly Standard)

The liberal women I know--and most of the women I seem to know are liberal--loathe Sarah Palin. They don't merely dislike her, the way one tends to dislike politicians whose views are not one's own, they actively detest her. When her name comes up--and it is they who tend to bring it up--their complexions take on a slightly purplish tinge, their eyes cross in rage. "Moron" is their most frequently used noun, though "idiot" comes up a fair number of times; "that woman" is yet another choice. A wide variety of adjectives, differing only slightly in their violence, usually precede these epithets. [...]

Strongly liberal women get most agitated over the issue--though of course to them it is no issue but a long since resolved matter--of abortion. Abortion, to be sure, is the great third-rail subject in American politics. But when a male politician is against abortion, these women can write that off as the ignorance of a standard politician, if not himself a Christian fundamentalist, then another Republican cynically going after the fundamentalist vote. A woman not in favor of abortion is something quite different.

And it is all the more strikingly different when the same woman not only holds this opinion on abortion but acts on it and knowingly bears a child with Down syndrome, a child that most liberal women would have thought reason required aborting. What else, after all, is abortion for?

A few months ago Vanity Fair ran an article about the discovery that the playwright Arthur Miller, with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, 40 or so years ago had a Down syndrome son. Miller promptly clapped the boy into an institution--according to the article, not a first class one either--and never saw the child again. Most people would have taken this for a heartless act, one should have thought, especially on the part of a man known for excoriating the putative cruelties of capitalism and the endless barbarities of his own country's governments, whether Democratic or Republican. Yet, so far as one can tell, Arthur Miller's treatment of his own child has not put the least dent in his reputation, while Sarah Palin's having, keeping, and loving her Down syndrome child is somehow, by the standard of the liberal woman of our day, not so secretly thought the act of an obviously backward and ignorant woman, an affront to womanhood. "Her greatest hypocrisy," proclaimed Wendy Doniger, one of the leading feminist lights at the University of Chicago, "is her pretense that she is a woman."

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TAKE OFF:

Flight of the Conchords: 'Love is like a piece of tape' (Robert Cushman, 10/27/08, National Post)

It hurts to come late to a cult. The natural impulse is to take out one's frustration on the object that's being venerated. But with Flight of the Conchords, there's no chance. This show is wonderful.

For those who don't know, which I'm fondly hoping means most people over 30, the Flight of the Conchords come from New Zealand and they're a band, and I can't help it if that sentence looks ungrammatical. Seems like all the good plural band-names were taken. Anyway, Flight aren't that plural, as there are only two of them. One, the taller and broader and clumsier of the two, is called Jemaine, and he's played by Jemaine Clement. The more compact of the two, marginally more competent especially at dealing with girl-friends, is Bret, played by Bret McKenzie. (The way he pronounces it, it sounds like Brit, and that's not just me, because some non-New Zealanders on the show hear it that way too, and get confused.) So, yes, the actors have the same names as their characters. They explain this at some length in the show's trailer, which is in heavy rotation on the Comedy Network, and is unique among that station's ads in that it actually makes you want to watch the product it's plugging. (Most make you run screaming from the very idea.) Jemaine and Bret hawk their wares with exactly the kind of casual downbeat solemnity that they project in the show itself. Jemaine grins. Bret smirks. They're self-deprecating even when self-promoting.

MORE:
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-AUDIO: Flight of the Conchords: Hilariously Deadpan (David Dye, 8/31/07, NPR: World Cafe)

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FAITH OR TRIBE?:

McCain wins easily among Americans in Israel (Jewish Telegraph, 10/30/2008)

American voters in Israel supported John McCain over Barack Obama by a margin of more than 3 to 1.

According to a poll by the nonpartisan Votefromisrael.org, 76.3 percent said they had voted for McCain for U.S. president, while 23.7 percent chose Obama.

Young Jews More Likely To Vote GOP Than Their Elders
McCain Draws Support from Orthodox and Russians (Brett Lieberman, Oct 30, 2008, The Forward)

That survey, compiled from the monthly averages of Gallup’s daily tracking polls, including interviews with more than 500 Jewish registered voters each month, found that while 74% of Jews aged 55 and over were supporting Obama, only 67% of those under 35 said they’d vote for the Democratic nominee.

“It’s counter intuitive,” said Lydia Saad, Gallup’s senior editor.

But this finding does fit into other data showing that younger Jews are trending conservative politically. A study of the 2004 Jewish vote by the Solomon Project, an effort to record Jews’ civic involvement, found younger voters were slightly more likely than older Jews to support Republican George W. Bush over Democrat John Kerry. That analysis found 23% of voters under 30 voted for Bush, compared to 20% of those ages 45 to 60 and 17% among the 60-plus crowd.

This finding doesn’t come as much of a surprise to voters like Zach Hanover, a 19-year-old sophomore at The George Washington University who plans to vote for McCain when he casts his first ballot. Hanover, an Orthodox Jew reared in Memphis, where his father, a Democrat, would drag him to rallies with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, said his decision to be a Republican was an easy one.

“I just made a bullet list — abortion, taxes, spending, size of government — almost word for word it was the Republican platform,” said Hanover, adding that the traditional values he shares as an Orthodox Jew fit well with the values embraced by the GOP. “If you look at the biblical liturgy, the Judaic religion is about life.”

The religion requires a Republican vote, the ethnicity doesn't.

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CRANK UP THE VCR:

Don’t trust anyone who’s over 30 Rock (Kat Angus and Jen McDonnell, 10/29/08, Canwest News Service)

After weeks of watching Tina Fey conquer the world with her Sarah Palin impersonation, we finally get a fresh episode of her NBC sitcom, 30 Rock tonight. In celebration of the third season premiere, we're counting down the Top 10 moments from this consistently hilarious, woefully low-rated show.

The entire Fireworks episode, but this line in particular:

Tracy Jordan: Dr. Spacemen, when they check my DNA, will it tell me what diseases I might get, or help me to remember my ATM PIN code?

Dr. Leo Spaceman: Absolutely. Science is whatever we want it to be.

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THE NEXT CONTRACT (repost due to technical difficulties):

The GOP's Road Back (Peter Wehner, October 27, 2008, Washington Post)

[B]arack Obama is, in important ways, a testimony to the conservative disposition of the country. He resists the label "liberal" as if it were lethal (which it is in presidential politics) and has praised President Ronald Reagan for "delivering the right message at the right time" regarding the size of government and regulations.

Obama has tacked right since winning the Democratic nomination. He repeats often that he favors tax cuts for almost everyone. He stresses that he is against a government-run health-care system and supports charter schools and merit pay. He has professed a newfound attachment to the Second Amendment, terrorist surveillance, offshore drilling and applying the death penalty for rape of a child. He speaks about lowering the number of abortions rather than highlighting his plans to eliminate restrictions on them. Obama trumpets his willingness to engage in cross-border strikes in Pakistan and has toughened his views on meeting with dictators such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

An Obama victory, then, would be a partisan, rather than an ideological, win.

But saying that conservatism is in better shape than the GOP is not to say it doesn't face challenges. It would be silly and self-defeating for Republicans to repudiate conservatism's core principles of a strong national defense, limited government, constitutionalism and protection for unborn children. Yet it would be shortsighted to believe that the issues that worked more than a quarter-century ago will carry the day.

People forget that Reagan was a creative intellectual figure; facing "stagflation," he introduced supply-side economics. In the aftermath of Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he argued that rollback rather than containment was the way to win the Cold War. A deeply principled conservative, he crafted innovative policies to meet the demands of his time.

Conservatives are in a similar position today. Issues such as welfare and crime, which helped conservatism achieve dominance, are not as potent as they were. And while taxes and spending remain important, stagnant wages and middle-class anxieties, the housing and credit crisis, health care, immigration, energy, and the environment also command domestic attention. Conservatives need to convince the public that they have a compelling agenda to address these issues.

It is also a mistake to focus just on America, consider that Canadian New Zealander, and British conservative parties, the Australian liberal party, and even French and German conservative parties have all remade themselves in recent years along Thatcherite/Third Way lines and have assumed or are on the verge of governing power. However, in the case of Britain, Australia, and America in 2000 and maybe America again on Tuesday, they have done so at the expense of Thatcherite opponents suffering from exhaustion. There seems to be some sense in which the adoption of First Way (capitalist) methods to achieve Second Way (welfare state) ends leads to a kind of nervous breakdown over time on the part of whichever sort of party--Left or Right--embraces the Third Way. Thus, just as the Tories eventually ditched Margaret Thatcher herself, Bill Clinton's successors and Tony Blair's have more or less reverted to the Second Way and George W. Bush's to the First. However, as the rise of David Cameron demonstrates, and the intentional opacity of the Unicorn Rider confirms, some time in the wilderness can help a party reconcile itself -- at least for public consumption -- to the need to ditch the old ways.

As much as Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush have accomplished over the last sixteen years, a good bit remains to be done and that unfinished business provides the roadmap for Republican resurrection.

In essence, what the Third Way (as we define it anyway) does is to recognize that the First Wayers are correct that wealth is created most effectively where freer markets obtain, but also to recognize that the uncertainties associated with such freedom lead to unacceptable insecurity for many people and that, therefore, government must guarantee a sufficient safety net (the Second Way). In fact, all of human history really just boils down to the competing impulses towards freedom (male) and security (female) and that governing philosophy that best satisfies both is most likely to be successful politically. Happily, it appears that real world success follows that political success.

So here are a set of proposals that the Republican Party can converge around. Each requires that conservatives accept that the underlying policy is going to endure irrespective of their ideological opposition to it but affords them an opportunity to achieve the policy in a manner that vindicates their own core principles:

(1) Personal Social Security Accounts:

The fight against government guaranteed retirement funding ended when Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole saved the Second Way version of SS. The remaining question is how best to pay for the program. The basic Third Way insight is that, given the fact that most people pay into the program for forty or fifty years, and that over that long a period of time a stock market fund has a higher return than the interest the federal government can collect on the money, it makes sense to allow people to buy stocks with the money they're paying in.

George W. Bush was obviously unsuccessful in convincing Senate Democrats of the wisdom of this reform in 1995, but he won two elections running on it and there remains sufficient hysteria over the pending collapse of SS that it is a viable issue to run on.

It will be argued that Democrats will simply squash it again. But it ought to be possible to build in enough incentives to win over the votes for passage. These would include: maintaining the current SS guarantee for anyone whose account is underfunded on retirement; means-testing, with a forfeit of the account payout for those above a certain measure of wealth; federal funding of the accounts for the unemployed, disabled, etc. As the generation that survived the Depression and ushered in the New Deal dies off and is replaced by older folks who have had mutual funds, IRAs and 401ks for decades, resistance to this sort of reform from within the Democratic Party will diminish.

It will be objected that the credit crunch and wild market swings make this a sub-optimal time to propose putting the nation's entire retirement egg into the market basket. But reports on the minimal withdrawals from current private programs are tracking with our earlier experiences after the '87 crash, the S&L crisis, and the post-911 drop. The hoi polloi seem to be a lot harder to panic out of the markets than the best and the brightest. Republicans ought not underestimate people's capacity to see beyond today's tribulation to tomorrow's payoff.

(2) Paul O'Neill Child Accounts:

The former Treasury Secretary's specific proposal called for a federal deposit of $2,000 at birth and then $2,000 per year until age 18 that would be put in a rather conservative stock index to be drawn upon starting at age 65. When he proposed it three years ago and anticipated an annual return of 6% such an account was estimated to grow to $1,013,326 over such a timeframe.

(3) Universal Health Savings Accounts:

The key insight here is twofold: (1) people like the idea that every citizen will have medical coverage; but, (2) it's mostly stupid for them to have comprehensive coverage throughout their lifetimes since we're generally healthy when young but then consume a massive amount of healthcare when old.

HSAs provide a way--like the O'Neill accounts--to sock away and make money during those healthy years so that you have a lot of it for the dying time. Universality in this instance need not require a federal contribution from birth to retirement. Employee/employee contributions could be required.

(4) Personal Unemployment Accounts:

Chile has already experimented with such a system, but basically you and your employer would pay into an account that you'd then be able to draw on if you were fired or quit your job.

Taken together, this set of accounts provides the social security net that the Second Way demands, but does so in a way that utilizes First Way principles, investment in free markets and a transfer of power away from the State and bureaucrats to the individual.

(5) Tax Reform:

There are as many plans for tax reform as there are tax payers (lower mine, lower yours, raise his) but there are two broad conservative principles can guide a broader reform plan: first, shift away from taxing income to taxing consumption generally; and, concurrently, tax eternalities specifically via Pigovian taxes.

The ideas here, that the tax code should encourage savings rather than consumption and should force people to bear the costs of their behavior upon society are well-suited to a Puritan Nation and the latter forms the basis for an:

(6) Energy Policy:

As part of the wider tax reform the GOP would propose vastly increasing the tax on gasoline. Not only would this tend to drive down consumption and liberate us from dependence on oil produced by enemyregimes, it would make gas expensive enough that alternative energy sources were made viable and would foster innovation. At the same time, it would not have government picking and choosing which innovative ideas to fund.

(7) Free Trade Reform:

The chief obstacle to obtaining the next round of free trade agreements is not, as the Right would have it, labor or environmentalists, or Europeans, or Democrats or whoever, but the agriculture subsidies that farm state Republicans have been only too happy to defend and maintain over the years.

Developing nations quite correctly point to this assistance that our federal government provides to our farmers and asks why they should be expected to ask their people to compete against us on a playing field that we've slanted in our favor. Phasing out ag subsidies would allow us to come to the trade table with cleaner hands and, at this point in the nation's history, is pretty much just Welfare Reform for the wealthy. Farmer Brown is long gone.

(8) Immigration Reform:

This is the most bitter point of contention that the GOP needs to get past in house, or it is not going to be a successful party at the national level. Polls consistently show that Americans are not anti-immigrant so much as they are anti-illegality. They are reasonably unbothered by the presence within our borders of twelve million illegal aliens, but quite bothered that they came illegally.

The solution is easy enough, though it will be unacceptable to those who are genuinely anti-immigrant (which would only provide clarity anyway): the current immigration system needs to be reformed in such a manner that it allows nearly all of those who seek to come to America to do so by going through a few legal channels. (Those barred could include criminals, political undesirables, etc.) Obviously some program would have to be implemented to legally document those who are already here. Providing a few visible though pointless hoops for them to jump through would quell some of the anger on the Right, but none of the steps should be too onerous or arduous.

(9) Campaign Finance Reform:

We need only look at the current campaign, between two candidates who we were assured would run an exemplary race, to see that the system leaves a lot to be desired. Republicans are quite properly repelled by the notion of public financing and object to current limitations on free speech, but have been largely silent about how they'd improve a system that, let's be honest, makes us all feel contempt for the processes of our own democracy. There is a clear conservative interest in cleaning up a system that is widely seen as corrupting and that fosters disregard for the Republic itself.

This seems to be an area where attempts to regulate the system have made matters worse, because all they've done is force donors and candidates to disguise what they're about without removing any money or the apparent influence of money from the equation. A set of reforms that restricted all political contributions to individuals only, that removed limits on contributions, that required immediate public reporting of all contributions and that required broadcasters to provide set airtime to candidates would not necessarily solve a lot of problems, but it might streamline the system a bit and make it more aboveboard.

(10) Line Item Veto Constitutional Amendment

The ability of the Executive to remove the discrete tax and spending provisions that campaign contributors and lobbyists currently spend money to get inserted in bills is another way to clean up the system. The Court having held it unconstitutional after the GOP passed it last time, it must now be revived via amendment to the Constitution.

There are certainly other items that the GOP can reorganize itself around, but those would appear to address many of people's main concerns right now. And the important thing is that it is more a reorganizing effort than a rethinking effort. These ideas have been percolating and really just await the sort of concerted enunciation and repetition that Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush brought to prior successful Republican campaigns. The party isn't out of ideas, just out of breath. A legislator, like John McCain or Bob Dole, isn't generally who you look to for an agenda and for a sweeping vision of governance. They're who you have hammer out the details and make the compromises to put the plans into effect. They need to be on board, but not necessarily steering the ship. The next GOP agenda will be better carried by a strong executive voice at the RNC, by talk radio hosts and columnists, and by whichever one of the excellent group of governors we nominate next time.

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VOTE LIKE A SWEDE:

US election watch: The case for McCain: As Americans everywhere prepare to go to the polls, Swedish politician Mathias Sundin - who spent a month this summer working as a volunteer for John McCain - explains why he’s rooting for the Republican candidate. (Mathias Sundin, 10/30/08, The Local)

For me as a Swede, the issues which affect Sweden and the rest of the world mean the most to me: free trade, foreign policy, and economic policy. And of course who the candidates are as people is also important.

Free trade has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to lift themselves out of poverty, and has also benefited western economies like Sweden and the United States. Obviously, it involves increased competition which can result in some people losing their jobs. But if you have a dynamic economy, like America has had for many years, people eventually get new jobs.

Sweden is a small, export dependent country. The world’s largest economies need to continue to support free trade, both for Sweden’s sake and for the sake of the world’s poor. McCain has long been a diehard supporter of free trade, while Barack Obama’s rhetoric, unfortunately, has been strongly against free trade.

McCain also has an idea he calls the “League of Democracies”. It would be a forum for cooperation among the world’s democracies. It could, for example, take action on occasions when the UN isn’t working or can’t fulfill its mission of halting genocides.

The UN’s agenda is often hindered by dictators. The world’s democracies are by no means all saints either, but they do have public opinion to consider and in general democracies act morally more often than dictators.

As a Swede, I think that it’s important that the US not leave Iraq too soon. This is a unique opportunity to build the world’s first democratic Arab country. Withdrawing troops to quickly would put this endeavor at risk. I understand that Americans are tired of the war, but both the United States and the world at large would benefit from a democratic Iraq.

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FIFTH?:

Viswanathan Anand retains world chess title (Reuters, Oct 30, 2008)

Indian chess Grand Master Viswanathan Anand successfully defended his world title on Wednesday by defeating Russian Vladimir Kramnik in a match-play series in Bonn, Germany.

The 38-year-old former world number one won by 6.5-4.5 after a draw in the penultimate round to take an unassailable lead in the 12-match contest, the World Chess Federation website (www.fide.com) said.

Anand, currently world number five, regained the world title he won in Mexico last year where he edged out defending champion Kramnik by one point.

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BAT SCAT CRAZY:

Erica Jong Tells Italians Obama Loss 'Will Spark the Second American Civil War. Blood Will Run in the Streets' (Jason Horowitz, October 30, 2008, NY Observer)

Here's a translation of Jong's more spirited quotes to the Milan-based Corriere, as selected by [Christian] Rocca [...

"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."

"My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."

"After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia…"

"If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."

"Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act."

Anyone else find it curious that none of these stories on the first 100 days of Magic so much as mention Democrats rolling back the Police State and releasing the political prisoners?

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AND INDEPENDENTS WONDER WHY NO ONE TAKES THEM SERIOUSLY?:

President Obama: We Still Don’t Know Who He Really Is (Mort Kondracke, 10/30/08, Real Clear Politics)

After 22 months that he’s been campaigning, after thousands of speeches, dozens of debates and reams of position papers, it’s still not clear if he is a pragmatic post-partisan unifier or a populist liberal ideologue.

Some conservatives think he’s further out than that — a dangerous radical who really is a pal of unrepentant former Weatherman Bill Ayers and a disciple of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — but the evidence for that from his campaign behavior is next to nonexistent.

But as Obama delivered his “closing argument” this week, beginning Monday in Canton, Ohio, it remained impossible to tell how far left Obama will tilt on economics or how energetically he will reach out to Republicans.

Obama’s appeal to independents (like me) has always been in lines like this one from Canton: “Understand, if we want to get through this [economic] crisis, we need to get beyond the old ideological debates and divides between left and right.

“We don’t need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government — a more competent government, a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans.”

It’s pretty clear that, under Obama, the size of government will grow.

The fact that utter pabulum like that, which Mortimer knows isn't even true, appeals to his sort is just embarrassing. But it is the case that to the extent the Unicorn Rider has been able to stay a blank he's allowed people to fill in the person they wish he was.

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SCHAUDENFREUDE ON 'ROIDS:

The next new chant: 'No we can't' (Todd Domke, October 30, 2008, Boston Globe)

My crystal ball channels future TV shows, like this one from Jan. 20, 2009. . . [...]

Obama: "I promised hope. I hope you'll let me change my promises."

Audience: "Yes, you can!"

Obama: "Since we're broke, I don't think we can afford an expedition to Mars. Do you?"

Audience: "No, we can't!"

Obama: "Congress just voted for another $300 billion of stimulus, so we can't afford most of my new spending programs."

Audience: "No, we can't!"

Obama: "We can't afford to cut taxes for 95, or even 5, percent of Americans."

Audience: "No, we can't!"

Obama: "We can't afford to hire you folks for government jobs."

(Dead silence)

Obama: "Just kidding."

Audience: "Yay!"

Brokaw: "Chris, it seems like he's inaugurating a new era of humor and humility. Obama might enjoy a longer honeymoon than any president since George Washington."

Matthews: "Yes. And shouldn't we end the two-term limit for presidents? I don't think we can get enough of this guy in just eight years."

Obama: "Not since Franklin Roosevelt, who needed four terms, has a president faced such a challenge. But with hope and a change in promises, we cannot fail."

Audience: "No, we can't!"

Andrea: "I'm turning around to interview Joe Biden. Mr. Vice President, I see that David Axelrod has taken the duct tape off your mouth. What do you think of the inaugural address?"

Joe Biden: "Mark my words, when our enemies test the mettle of this young, inexperienced president in a totally gratuitous crisis, they will be surprised. He is no longer a politician. He's a magician."

Okay now, we're among and we promise not to let your secret out, but doesn't a part of you want him to win just because it will be so hilarious watching all their gonfalon bubbles get pricked?

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WE MAY NOT HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THE REAL MARGIN IS...:

FOX News Poll: Obama's Edge Over McCain Narrows (Dana Blanton, 10/30/08, FOXNews.com)

As the candidates make their closing arguments before the election, the race has tightened with Barack Obama now leading John McCain by 47 percent to 44 percent among likely voters, according to a FOX News poll released Thursday. Last week Obama led by 49-40 percent among likely voters.

...but there's certainly a sense that as push gets closer to shove the momentum is with Maverick/Palin.

BTW: has anyone, besides The Wife, noticed that if you look at it quickly Obama Biden looks like Osama Bin Laden.

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WE SHOULD HAVE STARTED THIS GLOBAL WARMING YEARS AGO:

First NH snowfall officially recorded (Union Leader, 10/30/08)

New Hampshire has officially started its snowfall tally for the 2008-09 season with 1.8 inches of snow recorded overnight in Jefferson, according to the National Weather Service.

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FEAR THE FUTURE:

At Rallies of Faithful, Contrasts in Red and Blue (MARK LEIBOVICH, 10/30/08, NY Times)

Supporters of Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. often look like Benetton-colored billboards, decked out for their candidates in Obama-Biden hats, T-shirts and buttons. Supporters of Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin like logo merchandise, too, but tend more toward pompoms (yes, pompoms), homemade signs (“Pitbulls 4 Freedom”), flag pins and chest paint.

There is more dancing at Democratic rallies, more shouting out at Republican ones. They chant “Yes, we can” (or “Sí, se puede”) at Obama and Biden rallies, “U.S.A.” and “Drill, baby, drill” at McCain and Palin rallies; the D’s bounce to blaring folk-rock and Motown (Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder) and the R’s counter with country-pop (including Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”) and arena rock ( AC/DC).

Democratic rallygoers seem more worried about Ms. Palin than about Mr. McCain.

In audience volume, age and enthusiasm, Ms. Palin’s rallies have more in common with Mr. Obama’s than with Mr. McCain’s. Fans often crush toward Mr. Obama and Ms. Palin after they are finished speaking, clicking cellphone cameras over their heads. [...]

There is an edge at Obama rallies, but it is less of frustration, more of fear.

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.3% IS A BOOKKEEPING ERROR:

Stocks open sharply higher after GDP report (Martin Zimmerman, October 30, 2008, LA Times)

Stocks jumped on Wall Street today as a government report showed the U.S. economy contracted less than expected in the third quarter and overseas markets rallied on hopes that coordinated efforts are beginning to stem the global credit crisis. [...]

Investors appeared to shrug off the government's report that the U.S. economy shrank by a less-than-expected 0.3% in the third quarter. Economists had expected the nation's gross domestic product to contract by 0.5% as consumers reined in spending.

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IF THIS IS HOW HE SPENDS HIS OWN MONEY...:

A week after his last money plea, Obama asks everyone for another $5 (Andrew Malcolm, 10/30/08, LA Times: Top of the Ticket)

It seems like only a week ago that The Ticket was whining about Barack Obama whining that after raising $605 million through September to buy the presidency, he was asking all of us one last time for just $10 more for some reason.

And we figured out that, October money aside, he'd have to spend $12.5 million a day just to unload September's haul by Nov. 4.

The Democrat is already outspending the Republican by three Political button for bitter gun ownerand four-to-one, which if it was the other way around would surely be unconscionable.

...just think how fast he'll blow through yours.....

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IT'S RARE THAT WE KNOW SO PRECISELY WHERE A RACE TURNED AND WHY....:

Don't Let the Polls Affect Your Vote: They were wrong in 2000 and 2004 (KARL ROVE, 10/30/08, Wall Street Journal)

I recall, too, the media's screwup in 2004, when exit-polling data leaked in the afternoon. It showed President Bush losing Pennsylvania by 17 points, New Hampshire by 18, behind among white males in Florida, and projected South Carolina and Colorado too close to call. It looked like the GOP would be wiped out.

Bob Shrum famously became the first to congratulate Sen. John Kerry by addressing him as "President Kerry." Commentators let the exit polls color their coverage for hours until their certainty was undone by actual vote tallies.

Polls have proliferated this year in part because it is much easier for journalists to devote the limited space in their papers or on TV to the horse-race aspect of the election rather than its substance. And I admit, I've aided and abetted this process.

In the campaign's final week, though, the candidates can offer little new substance, so attention turns to the political landscape, and there's no question Mr. McCain is in a difficult place.

The last national poll that showed Mr. McCain ahead came out Sept. 25 and the 232 polls since then have all shown Mr. Obama leading. Only one time in the past 14 presidential elections has a candidate won the popular vote and the Electoral College after trailing in the Gallup Poll the week before the election: Ronald Reagan in 1980.

But the question that matters is the margin. If Mr. McCain is down by 3%, his task is doable, if difficult. If he's down by 9%, his task is essentially impossible. In truth, however, no one knows for sure what kind of polling deficit is insurmountable or even which poll is correct. All of us should act with the proper understanding that nothing is yet decided.

....but even if Senator McCain wins September 25th will be seen as the day that made his victory difficult. If he loses, it will have been that day that cost him the election.

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AFTER 14 YEARS, THE DEMOCRATS OWE MOLLOCH A LOT OF SACRIFICES...:

Democrats Vie to Shape an Obama Legislative Agenda: Advisers, House Caucuses Jockey for Input Should Senator Win the Presidency; Tensions Over How Fast to Move on Big Issues (JONATHAN WEISMAN, 10/30/08, Wall Street Journal)

Sen. Obama's economic brain trust dialed in two weeks ago to a conference call with the candidate to discuss how the Wall Street bailout was working when a split emerged over how hard the government should lean on the banks. Some advisers said it would be politically and economically disastrous if the billions of taxpayer dollars injected into ailing financial institutions just sat in vaults. Robert Rubin, who served as President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary between stints on Wall Street, pushed back. Leaving the money in the banks would help stabilize them and prevent further turmoil in the credit markets, even if the money wasn't loaned out, the Citigroup Inc. executive said.

On Capitol Hill, three main factions are emerging with very different advice.

The first group, led by "old bull" liberals, wants to move fast on big-ticket issues such as universal health care and weaning the nation off Middle Eastern oil and on regulatory and labor issues, such as allowing unions to organize by getting would-be members to sign cards backing collective bargaining instead of submitting to secret ballots. [...]

A second faction of more-conservative Democrats is focusing on fiscal discipline. With this fiscal year's deficit potentially approaching $1 trillion, these Democrats say the money for Sen. Obama's ambitious agenda simply isn't there. One of the first acts of the next Congress should be approving a bipartisan commission to tackle the deficit and the growth of entitlements, such as Medicare and Medicaid, argue the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who say they will have the numbers to make the demands. [...]

The third group of Democrats could be labeled the middle-ground pragmatists. They embrace the activist agenda but are wary about going too far too fast. This camp, which includes the party's top congressional leadership, argues that Sen. Obama should move quickly on a few items with proven bipartisan support -- an economic-stimulus package, an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program funded with a tobacco-tax increase, and funding for federal stem-cell research. They would then regroup and build bipartisan support for the new president's bigger-ticket items -- health care, energy, education and regulatory changes.

...but polls show that stem cell research isn't a leading issue for most people and only a minority support lifting the Bush restrictions on embryo stem cells. But these sorts of pro-Death measures are probably the one thing they could move on quickly, so folks like Doug Kmiec would have done little more than help feed the maw.

The biggest problem Democrats would face is that their nominee has, quite wisely, run on nothing, so the different chambers of Congress and the various factions within the Party would be unconstrained by any mandate or agenda. Consider the contrast to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who both came to office with discrete sets of action items that left Congress with no question about what it was expected to deliver.

Of course, John McCain has run like a legislator too -- with a couple of areas in which he'd like to pass new laws, but no concise and coherent outline of his minimal conditions for such bills -- so no matter who wins on Tuesday power is going to shift from the White House to the Hill and the American people aren't exactly big fans of the legislative process these days. Nor does the modern press do even an adequate, nevermind competent, job covering law-making. If nothing else, Congress is ill-suited to the 24-hour news cycle. For 24 of the last 28 years we've had bigger than life figures running Washington -- both because of their own personalities and because of the way their opponents demonize them -- but the next four years are, almost inevitably, going to be like George H. W. Bush's term, where the presidency itself seemed to shrink.

MORE:
Dems get ready to rule (Michael Sandler, 10/28/08, The Hill)

[D]emocrats could quickly push forward with legislation allowing labor unions to organize without secret-ballot elections and a bill expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

Other possibilities include the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would overturn a Supreme Court decision restricting equal pay lawsuits; a measure that would narrow the role of a “supervisor” for collective bargaining purposes; and a mandate for paid sick leave for companies with 15 or more employees who work at least 30 hours a week — all left over from the last Congress.

“I think they want to strike while the iron’s hot and grab everything they can,” said Marc Freedman, director of labor law policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. [...]

Having the numbers to move legislation on a partisan basis carries risk. Democrats and Obama, if elected, would shoulder the blame for anything that passes. That reality could prompt leadership to postpone visceral debates on issues with greater political consequences, such as dealing with illegal immigrants.

If that's everything they can grab, the activists are going to be seething.

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THE ONE'S WITH THE DICTATOR, THE OTHER WITH THE dEMOCRATS:

McCain tilts towards Taiwan, Obama may favor China (Ralph Jennings, Oct 30, 2008, Reuters)

Republican presidential candidate John McCain would seek to defend Taiwan and play hard ball with China if he comes to office, but Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama would further sideline Taipei as he courts Beijing.

Analysts say neither candidate would radically change today's status quo, but the former World War Two commander McCain is seen favoring Taiwan, which Americans of his generation called "Free China" but which now struggles for an international voice.

Holy Cripes, that John McCain really is ancient!

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MAKING TOM EAGLETON LOOK LIKE A SAVVY PICK:

Hidin' Biden: Reining In a Voluble No. 2 (Karen Tumulty, 10/29/08, TIME)

Anyone who has watched Joe Biden over 35 years in the Senate might have a little bit of trouble recognizing the guy who is running to be Barack Obama's Vice President. Oh, yes, he looks like the same fellow. But traveling with Biden during this campaign has sometimes been like reporting on a politician packaged in shrink-wrap. While his windy, off-point pontification was the stuff of legend among his Senate colleagues, Biden is now leashed to a teleprompter even when he is talking in a high school gym that is three-quarters empty. The exposure hound who in recent years appeared more often than any other guest on the Sunday talk shows is a virtual stranger to the small band of reporters on his plane — less accessible than even Sarah Palin is to her traveling pack of bloodhounds. And Biden keeps to a schedule that provides a minimum of off-the-cuff encounters with voters, except across a rope line. See Joe Biden's defining moments here.

The campaign's caution is understandable.

While Sarah Palin leads the McCain comeback, Joe Biden is in the witness protection program.

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THREADING THE NEEDLE:

Pennsylvania Hope for McCain (Mason Dixon/NBC, October 30th, 2008)

Obama 47, McCain 43, Undecided 9

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DUCK...DUCK...COOKED GOOSE:

Syrian haven for killers, then and now (Rafael Medoff, 10/29/08, THE JERUSALEM POST)

During the 1948 War of Independence, there were so many Nazi fugitives in the Syrian army, including a number of commanding officers, that when the Hagana (soon to become the IDF) defeated the Arab forces in Haifa, its terms for a truce included a provision that "European Nazis will be delivered to [the British] military [authorities]." [...]

IN THE aftermath of the US war against Saddam Hussein's regime, there were media reports that some Iraqi war criminals had found shelter in Syria. More recently, evidence has emerged of al-Qaida forces finding haven in Syria. US officials have estimated that 90 percent of foreign terrorists entering Iraq are arriving via the "uncontrolled gateway" of the Iraq-Syria border.

Yet the American response to Syria's shelter-the-killers policy, then and now, has reflected a certain ambivalence.

After World War II, the US declined to use economic or diplomatic pressure to secure Syria's surrender of Nazi war criminals for prosecution. Improving American relations with the Arab world was considered a higher priority than bringing Alois Brunner and company to justice.

In our own time, although US troops have in some isolated instances crossed into Syrian territory while chasing terrorists, there had never been a large-scale raid comparable to this week's, nor one involving aircraft.

And while the Bush administration has designated Syria a sponsor of terrorism and imposed the requisite sanctions, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and her aides recently met with Syrian officials to seek a "thaw" in relations.

Does this week's US air raid demonstrate a rejection of the "thaw" approach or does it simply reflect the latest bump in an ongoing tug of war within the administration over how to deal with Syria?

The likelihood is that President Bush is less liberated by his own lame-duck status than by that of the Israeli government, where no one can really prevail upon him to lay off their ally.

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EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSION:

Obama and the Politics of Crowds: The masses greeting the candidate on the trail are a sign of great unease (FOUAD AJAMI, 10/30/08, Wall Street Journal)

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.

From Elias Canetti again: "But the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it. . . . Only the growth of the crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private burdens."

The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat -- by now unthinkable to the devotees -- will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won't be solved by a leader's magic.

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THE LOVING SON:

McCain's Best Argument (Quin Hillyer, 10.30.08, American Spectator)

[H]ere is why John McCain should be the next president of the United States:

There is something special about this country. The United States is exceptional. We are blessed by the good Lord, and in turn we have done more, far more, than any other people to spread freedom across the globe, and prosperity across the globe, and human rights across this great good Earth. We are a particularly good people -- and John McCain understands all this and believes it with every fiber of his being, down to his very marrow, in a way that is deeply spiritual in nature. There is nothing fake about McCain's belief in American Exceptionalism. His belief in this is as genuine, and as deeply felt, as is a son's love for his father. He will defend this country, fight for this country, with every last breath in his body.

And McCain has a record of making the right calls, again and again, when it comes to securing the American national interest around the world. He was right to back Ronald Reagan to the hilt in the greatest foreign challenge of the past 60 years, namely the victorious effort to win the Cold War despite the strenuous and at times vicious opposition of the American Left. But he was right to oppose Reagan when Reagan, with all good intentions, decided to station Marines in Lebanon. McCain broke with his entire party, and warned that the Marines would be sitting ducks, and voted against the deployment. Tragically, McCain was right: More than 200 Americans died in Lebanon in a suicide truck bombing about a month after McCain's warning.

McCain was right -- and Joe Biden wrong -- to support the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in 1991. McCain was right to support intervention in Kosovo later that decade: It worked. He was right to support a stronger military and greater numbers of personnel when Bill Clinton was cutting it. He was right to fight against wasteful weapons systems, and against corruption in military contracting. He was right to right a specific boondoggle involving an Air Force tanker; he brought corruption to light (the perpetrators both in the Air Force and at the contractor went to jail) and saved the public $6 billion.

McCain was right to say that Saddam Hussein could be overthrown fairly quickly, with little loss of American life. He was right to say that Hussein was a terrible threat. But he was right, very early on, well before anybody else in the Senate, to say that it would take more troops and a different strategy to secure the peace after we had won the war. He broke with President Bush to say so, way back in 2003, and he was right.

John McCain has suffered for his country in a way only a tiny slice of the population ever has. The story is well known -- not just that he suffered in Vietcong captivity, but that he turned down early release in a profound expression of solidarity with his fellow prisoners. Yet McCain had the grace, when the time was right, to hold out an olive branch to the Vietnamese a couple of decades later when they showed a movement toward greater economic freedom.

John McCain is committed to reaching beyond party labels. Whether always right or wrong to do so, he really cares about doing what he thinks is right no matter whose political ox is gored. Barack Obama may talk a bipartisan game, but he never has actually played on that field. The reality, meanwhile, is that sometimes it helps conservative ends to work with people from the other party. Ronald Reagan knew this.

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HERE'S YOUR TRAIN, WHAT'S YOUR HURRY?:

Bite the bullet on fast trains: Californians should approve a ballot measure for a bullet train – despite financial storms. (The Monitor's Editorial Board, October 30, 2008, CS Monitor)

Americans who have ridden bullet trains in Europe or Asia return home scratching their heads. If only the US had such trains. In many ways, they beat flying and driving, and use much less energy. By approving a ballot measure Nov. 4, Californians can lead the nation to its first world-class fast train – if critics don't derail them.

In July, a Field Poll found that 56 percent of likely voters in the state supported a $10 billion bond measure to help pay for a bullet train that could whisk passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 2-1/2 hours (a driving distance of about 400 miles).

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ALMOST-FAMOUS PUMPKIN CHEESECAKE (ELIZABETH PUDWILL, 10/30/08, Houston Chronicle)

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted (divided use)

2 1/2 cups graham-cracker crumbs

2 3/4 cups sugar (divided use)

1 teaspoon plus a pinch salt (divided use)

2 pounds cream cheese, room temperature

1/4 cup sour cream

1 (15-ounce) can pure pumpkin

6 large eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

2 cups sweetened whipped cream or whipped topping

1/3 cup toasted pecans, roughly chopped

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 325 degrees.

Brush a 10-inch springform pan with some of the butter. Stir remaining butter into crumbs with 1/4 cup sugar and pinch salt. Press mixture into bottom and up sides of pan, packing it tightly and evenly. Bake until golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes.

Cool on a rack, then wrap outside of springform pan with foil and place in a roasting pan.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, beat cream cheese with a mixer until smooth. Add remaining 2 1/2 cups sugar and beat until just light, scraping down sides of bowl and beaters as needed. Beat in the sour cream, then add pumpkin, eggs, vanilla, 1 teaspoon salt, cinnamon, ginger and cloves and beat until just combined. Pour into cooled crust.

Without pulling rack out, gently place roasting pan in oven and pour boiling water into roasting pan until it comes about halfway up side of springform pan. Bake until outside of cheesecake sets but center is still loose, about 1 hour 45 minutes. Turn off oven and open door briefly to let out some heat. Leave cheesecake in oven for 1 more hour, then carefully remove from roasting pan and cool on a rack. Run a knife around edges of springform pan, cover and refrigerate at least 8 hours or overnight.

Bring cheesecake to room temperature 30 minutes before serving. Unlock and remove springform ring. To finish, place a dollop of whipped cream on each slice and sprinkle with toasted pecans.

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FORGET THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS...:

Twilight Struggle: In its closing days, the Bush administration escalates the war on terror. (Eli Lake, 10/28/08, The New Republic)

We have entered a new phase in the war on terror. In July, according to three administration sources, the Bush administration formally gave the military new power to strike terrorist safe havens outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Before then, a military strike in a country like Syria or Pakistan would have required President Bush's personal approval. Now, those kinds of strikes in the region can occur at the discretion of the incoming commander of Central Command (Centcomm), General David Petraeus. One intelligence source described the order as institutionalizing the "Chicago Way," an allusion to Sean Connery's famous soliloquy about bringing a gun to a knife fight.

The new order could pave the way for direct action in Kenya, Mali, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen--all places where the American intelligence believe al Qaeda has a significant presence, but can no longer count on the indigenous security services to act. In the parlance of the Cold War, Petraeus will now have the authority to fight a regional "dirty war." When queried about the order from July, deputy spokesman for the National Security Council Ben Chang offered no comment.

Strikes within Iran could be justified by the order, since senior al Qaeda leaders such as Saif al Adel are believed to have used that country as a base for aiding the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda affiliates in Iraqi Kurdistan. [...]

[W]ith the clock winding down on the administration, it has a greater appetite for racking up victories against al Qaeda--and less worries about any residual political consequences from striking. Roger Cressey, a former deputy to Richard Clarke in the Clinton and Bush administrations, says, "[W]ith the administration in the final weeks, the bar for military operations will be lowered because the downsides for the president are minimal."

The big mystery now is whether the next administration will dismantle this policy or permit Petraeus to follow it to fruition. Obama has said nothing about Sunday's strikes in Syria (a silence that has rightly earned him taunting from the McCain campaign).

...and let the Chairman of the Board explain what W's policy in Syria should be:

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WE WANT THE REVEREND WRIGHT!:

Day 17: IBD/TIPP Tracking Poll (IBD, 10/29/08)

The race tightened again to 3 points Wednesday, a margin IBD/TIPP has shown for six days and to which other polls appear to be migrating. For example, the Rasmussen and Gallup polls, each of which had Obama up 5 points two days ago, now have him at 3.

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SHUT UP, YOU RACIST, HE EXPLAINED:

Rendell spokesman says GOP has `Jim Crow' attitude (The Times Leader, 10/28/08)

The head of the county bureau of elections hasn’t encountered any suspected voter registration fraud, but allegations in other parts of Pennsylvania have sparked a lawsuit and a verbal exchange between a state official and the Republican Party.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party filed a lawsuit to assure the vote count is accurate – a move that Gov. Ed Rendell’s press secretary described as a “Jim Crow attitude.”

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RIGHT BACK TO THE WINNING TEMPLATE:

Win or Lose, Many See Palin as Future of Party (KATE ZERNIKE and MONICA DAVEY, 10/29/08, NY Times)

“She’s dynamite,” said Morton C. Blackwell, who was President Ronald Reagan’s liaison to the conservative movement. Mr. Blackwell described vying to get close to Ms. Palin at a fund-raiser in Virginia, lamenting that he could get only within four feet.

“I made a major effort to position myself at this reception,” he said, adding that he is eager to sit down with her after the election to discuss the future. Asked if the weeks of unflattering revelations and damaging interviews had tarnished her among conservatives, he replied, “Not a bit.”

Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative group, called it a “top order of business” to determine Ms. Palin’s future role. “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proven that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years,” Mr. Bozell said. “No matter what she decides to do, there will be a small mother lode of financial support behind her.”

The presidential campaign has allowed Ms. Palin to develop as a candidate, and to make many useful connections as she travels the country. On the campaign, she has become close to people with extensive experience in Republican politics, including Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann, two foreign policy conservatives.

She has received extensive policy tutorials and been briefed on foreign policy almost daily. Aides say she has taken particular interest in Pakistan and Israel and in causes of Islamic extremism, which she has related to the economic despair that plagues parts of Alaska.

People loyal to her say Ms. Palin is well aware of the political job in front of her. One aide said she had “gotten on the offensive,” pushing to include more policy in her speeches. “It’s important for her personally, for how she’s perceived, to ensure that she gets to show her depth.”

In a development that could be telling whether or not she ends up as vice president, she has also been asserting her independence from the McCain campaign. She disagreed publicly with the decision to pull out of Michigan and questioned the use of automated calls and the decision not to bring up Senator Barack Obama’s relationship with his controversial former pastor. She said she would release her medical records after the campaign declared she would not, and has in the past week even wandered over to talk to reporters who travel with her, sending staff members scurrying to cut off conversations.

Ms. Palin’s rallies have drawn many times more supporters than Mr. McCain’s, with people waving eager signs: “Palin Power,” “Iowa is Palin Country,” “Super Sarah,” “You betcha!”

After watching John McCain run the same sort of campaign that Bob Dole did, you can bank on the GOP returning to its winning formula of nominating an Evangelical governor. As it happens, we have three excellent choices for 2012: Jeb, Sarah, and Bobby Jindal.

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PREVIEWING 2012:

The Messiah and the Hockey Mom (Chidanand Rajghatta, 10/29/08, Times of India)

When the man some are jokingly calling the "messiah" arrived shortly after 5 p.m, the place erupted. Although the sound bites were familiar to anyone who'd switched on a TV lately, they cheered his every line with gusto. The passion that coursed through the multi-hued crowd had all the energy of an Indian crowd in the final moments of a Twenty20 game.

Hanging back some twenty paces from the lectern, collegiate Emily Jamison, majoring in social work at the university, listened intently. She wore a white t-shirt that said "NoBama" in red and blue letters, and cut an incongruously sullen figure in the largely rapturous crowd. "He's got no substance. All he says is change, change, change...but he doesn't mean it," she said, after half-an-hour of soaring eloquence had brought the crowd to its feet.

Amy Gwaltney, a second year media major shooting pictures of the event for the college yearbook, didn't think much of the crowd either. There's as much energy in Sarah Palin campaign meetings, she said. She'd just come from one at Roanoke across the state and Palin packed an equally energetic crowd. They wore red, blue, and white gear in three aisles so they could form the word USA.

White, Jamison and Gwaltney defy the pattern in the so-called "real America" -- shorthand for conservative strongholds -- where the young collegiate crowd is typically pro-Obama, while white moms are for Palin. Oh, did we mention that the messiah and the hockey mom are beginning to define this election to the exclusion of the two older white men who are their running mates? Barack Obama and Sarah Palin may face-off directly in 2012 on current form and fortitude of their respective constituencies.

It's likely that only a surprisingly robust President McCain or a belly-hungry Jeb Bush can deny Ms Palin the GOP's nomination in 2012, but the more interesting question is whether Barack Obama can defy the half-century trend of the Democratic Party and follow in Adlai's footsteps if he loses on Tuesday. Al Gore won in 2000 and he couldn't get a second bite at the apple, but the Unicorn Rider might be able to Mau-Mau his way to a second nomination.

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STUBBORNLY CLINGING BELOW 50%:

Undecideds Should Break for McCain (Dick Morris, 10/29/08, Real Clear Politics)

[A]s Obama surged into a more or less permanent lead in October, animated by the financial crisis, he has assumed many of the characteristics of an incumbent. Every voter asks himself one question before he or she casts a ballot: Do I want to vote for Obama? His uniqueness, charisma and assertive program have so dominated the dialogue that the election is now a referendum on Obama.

As Obama has oscillated, moving somewhat above or somewhat below 50 percent in all the October polls, his election likely hangs in the balance. If he falls short of 50 percent in these circumstances, a majority of the voters can be said to have rejected him. Likely a disproportionate number of the undecideds will vote for McCain.

But don't write Obama off. His candidacy strikes such enthusiasm among young and minority voters that there is still a chance that a massive turnout will deliver the race to the Democrats. None of the polling organizations has any experience with -- or model for -- so massive a turnout, especially among voters notorious for staying at home. But the primaries proved that these young and minority voters will not stay home this time, but will vote for Obama. The effect of this increased vote is hard to calculate, but it may be enough to offset the undecideds who will vote for McCain.

But the basic point, one week before Election Day, is that even if Obama clings to a four- or five-point lead over McCain in the polling, the election is not over. The question is not so much how large his lead is over the Republican, but whether or not he is topping 50 percent. As long as the polling leaves him below that mark, he is vulnerable and could well lose.

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INHERIT THE WINDBAGS:

What McCain Defectors See in Obama (Madison Powers, 10/29/08, CQ)

The defectors are a mixed lot, but all represent some brand of recognizably conservative thought. Some like Doug Kmiec, Andrew Sullivan, and Ken Adelman are probably conservatives by anyone’s definition, while others are cut partly from an older mold. They bear some resemblance to the moderate Republicanism of the Rockefeller era, but the issues of their time are not the same.

Also, there are the venerable Republican names of Goldwater, Buckley, and Eisenhower who have signed on to Obama’s cause, and while no single one perhaps meets all litmus tests some true believers might want in a conservative, there is an unmistakable family of conservative ideas represented. These include a commitment to greater fiscal responsibility, a distaste for foreign interventionism, and a principled Burkean resistance to aggressive programs of social experimentation.

Odd, though perhaps revealing, to get that last bit exactly backwards.

If you lay out Senator Obama's positions and those of the past few Republican presidential nominees--from Reagan onwards--you'll find more similarities than differences. Indeed, if all you knew of the Unicorn Rider was what you see in 30 second ads you might think he was a Republican: every single ad here in NH is about how he will cut taxes and John McCain will raise them.

He's hawkish on Afghanistan and Pakistan and never mentions Iraq anymore. Though, as a practical matter, he's--probably correctly--more identified with the isolationism/Realism of an Eisenhower, Nixon or Ford than the democratic crusading impulse of a Reagan or Bush.

He's more of a Reagan or Dole on Social Security than a Clinton or Bush, but John McCain hasn't run on personal accounts either. And whatever he may think privately about things like Welfare Reform, 401ks, HSAs, housing vouchers, NCLB school vouchers, etc., he's very careful not not to attack them.

His economic advisers--Paul Volcker, Warren Buffet, Robert Rubin--are more classically conservative than the modern Supply-Side Right. And Austan Goolsbee trails along behind him assuring people that any protectionist noises he makes are just fodder for the unions and don't reflect his actual views.

In fact, the only real difference is precisely that he's the most extreme supporter of aggressive social experimentation to be nominated for president during this era. On matters of abortion, infanticide, gay "rights," infant stem cells, euthanasia, etc. he is consistently and radically Pro-Death and opposed to Western/Judeo-Christian civilization. Edmund Burke would have no trouble recognizing the Jacobin in at least this aspect of Mr. Obama's politics.

When we consider then what sorts of Republicans are supporting Mr. Obama we would, as Mr. Powers says, expect to find the old Eastern Establishment, secular Darwinist Right. Contrary to Mr. Powers, these issues are pretty much the same and Rockefeller money funded the more openly eugenic experimentation of the early/mid 20th Century. That's not, of course, to say that every "conservative" backing Mr. Obama is doing so because he'd increase abortion and fund it for "the poor," but it is fair to say that they are at least unbothered by the prospect. In fact, even the ostensibly pro-life Doug Kmiec was willing to forgo Communion in order to back Barack Obama.

This is why so many of the converts cite the choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate. The choice drove home the reality that the GOP is and is going to stay the party of the religious. They were hoping for a Joe Lieberman, Colin Powell, Mitt Romney, or Tom Ridge who are indifferent to or supportive of abortion.

Over time this is likely to be a more permanent divide and is certain to impact the Democratic Party more heavily than the Republican. After all, Darwinism is a marginal belief in America while Christianity is central. Eventually one would expect to see the parties divide along more clearly secular vs religious lines and the Democratic hold on entire tribes loosen, a process that will be accelerated by the recognition that intellectual elites support the Democrats in no small part because of "population control."

MORE:
Infanticide candidate for president (Nat Hentoff, Apr. 29, 2008, Sac Bee)

n abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama -- in the Illinois Senate -- also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

As a longtime columnist, John Leo has written of this form of fatal discrimination, these "mistakes" during an abortion, once born, cannot be "killed or allowed to die simply because they are unwanted."

Furthermore, as "National Right to Life News" (April issue) included in its account of Obama's actual votes on abortion, he "voted to kill a bill that would have required an abortionist to notify at least one parent before performing an abortion on a minor girl from another state."

These are conspiracies -- and that's the word -- by pro-abortion extremists to transport a minor girl across state lines from where she lives, unbeknownst to her parents. This assumes that a minor fully understands the consequences of that irredeemable act.

As I was researching this presidential candidate's views on the unilateral "choice" that takes another's life, I heard on the radio what Obama said during a Johnstown, Pa., town hall meeting on March 29 as he was discussing the continuing dangers of exposure to HIV/AIDS infections: "When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include -- which should include abstinence education and teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include -- it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I've got two daughters, 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals.

"But if they make a mistake," Obama continued, "I don't want them punished with a baby."

Among my children and grandchildren are two daughters and three granddaughters; and when I hear anyone, including a presidential candidate, equate having a baby as punishment, I realize with particular force the impact that the millions of legal abortions in this country have had on respect for human life.

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NOTHING QUITE LIKE AN AMERICAN RECESSION:

Durable goods rise by largest since June (The Associated Press, October 29, 2008)

Orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods posted an unexpectedly strong showing in September -- the largest gain in three months -- on a surge in demand for airplanes and autos, government data showed Wednesday.

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GIVEN THAT THE LEGACY IS COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM AT HOME AND DEMOCRATIZATION ABROAD...:

Brace yourselves - George Bush will soon be free to do just what he wants: The raid on Syria is a dark portent. The current president has three long, unaccountable months to cement his legacy (Jonathan Freedland, 10/29/08, The Guardian)

We are about to enter the twilight zone, that strange black hole in political time and space that appears no more than once every four years. It is known as the period of transition, and it starts a week from today, the time when the United States has not one president but two. One will be the president-elect, the other George Bush, in power for 12 more weeks in which he can do pretty much whatever he likes. Not only will he never again have to face voters, he won't even have to worry about damaging the prospects of his own party and its standard bearer (as if he has not damaged those enough already). From November 5 to January 20, he will exercise the freest, most unaccountable form of power the democratic world has to offer.

How Bush might use it is a question that gained new force at the weekend, when US forces crossed the Iraqi border into Syria to kill Abu Ghadiya, a man they said had been funnelling "foreign fighters" allied to al-Qaida into Iraq. That American move has touched off a round of intense head-scratching around the world, as foreign ministers and analysts ask each other the time-honoured diplomatic query: what did they mean by that? To which they add the post-Nov 4 question: and what does it tell us about how Bush plans to use his final days in the White House?

...there are two groups of people who should be scared about the coming months: Ba'athists and nativists.

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MY HOMEYS:

Being at Home with Our Homelessness: Why we're happier knowing our happiness is inseparable from our misery. (Peter Augustine Lawler, October 27, 2008, Culture 11)

According to Alexis de Tocqueville (writing in the 1830s), the Americans have characteristically never made the error of believing either Locke or Darwin teaches the whole truth. The Americans’ religion, most of all, causes them not to understand themselves as merely self-interested individuals or playthings of some impersonal process. The Americans, semi-consciously, reconcile individual liberty and personal happiness by understanding themselves in different ways at different times. They understand themselves as free individuals insofar as they restlessly work in pursuit of the material conditions of happiness, but they find happiness by using what they’ve acquired as parents, children, friends, citizens, creatures, and as men and women (as opposed to abstracted or sexless individuals). It’s as religious, familial, and political beings, Tocqueville explains, that the Americans are happy. Tocqueville’s fear was that the Americans’ restless pursuit would erode, over time, the Americans’ experience of the real point of that pursuit.

It’s surely true that most Americans experience themselves much more consistently as free individuals today than in Tocqueville’s time. Our pursuits of egalitarian justice and prosperity have been turned enduring friendships into networking alliances, scattered families, and disconnected people from the binding, dutiful experience of being parts of communities. Americans are no longer united by the affirmation of a common religious morality.

The American desire to combine individual liberty with social happiness has tended to seem to become much more self-indulgent. We want all the warmth and emotional security of family without any of its suffocating demands or constraints. We want the benefits of faith and patriotism without really subordinating ourselves to God and country as dutiful creatures or citizens. And so we’re easily suckered by self-help books that say that happiness is compatible with individual autonomy, and that my relations with others won’t suffer when I focus on my own happiness in the right “12 step” way.

We Americans don’t listen to the Freudians who claim that we’re not even supposed to be happy, that we have no choice but to subordinate our personal enjoyment to the reality that we need to live in civilization. The theorist of our Sixties — Herbert Marcuse — told us that Freud used to be right, but not anymore. Technology’s conquest of scarcity means that there’s no long any need for repression, and we’re all free for the art of living the happy or polymorphously erotic life. Our libertarians even tell us that the conquest of scarcity opens us to an unlimited menu of choice concerning individual happiness. More than ever, it seems that anyone who isn’t happy can only blame himself.

But the truth is that we now have an especially hard time choosing what will make us happy. We don’t want to be lonely, but we don’t want love to turn us into suckers. We’re all too aware that it would be dangerous for us to feel to securely happy; my anxiety reminds me that other people are unreliable and nature doesn’t care about me at all. Studies show that people who are somewhat depressed predicted the future better than those who are happy and well adjusted.

We, naturally enough, want the benefits without the burdens of being happy. We expect way too much from far too little from ourselves, and so, in some ways, we’re more lonely and whiny than ever. But that conclusion doesn’t seem completely fair: the downside of freeing ourselves from nature, to some extent, is that each particular life seems more contingent on more on his or hers own than ever. Life is easier or happier because we have more, but it’s tougher or more anxious because each of us is all too aware of the insecurity of what we have. We certainly not self-indulgent in the sense of living carefree in the moment; we’re stuck with being more obsessed with our individual futures than ever. We don’t experience ourselves as living in a time when scarcity has been conquered; we moved, more than ever, by the scarcity of time. [...]

The Christian thinker Pascal criticized the modern pursuit of happiness at its very beginning. We’re really diverting ourselves from what we really know. Modern restlessness — the frenzied conquest of nature — is, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed, best explained by our modern inability to live well with our mortality or to articulate the truth about our misery without God. If we were born only to happy, Solzhenitysn explained, we wouldn’t have been born to die. That doesn’t mean we weren’t born to happy, but we can only be happy by assuming the responsibilities that accompany what we can’t help but know. Darwin and Marx, whatever their differences, both have nothing to say about the distinctive and dignified experiences of the only being open to the truth about his or her own being. We are the only animal, as Tocqueville and Pascal say, who can experience him- or herself as existing contingently and momentary between two abysses.

The modern error, from the perspective of both the premodern philosophers and the Christians, is the belief that we haven’t been given the inner resources to live well with what we know. The being open to the truth couldn’t be either a mind or a body, but a rational, relational, conscious (which means knowing with others), willful, and loving being. The erotic being who wonders, Percy explains, necessarily wanders — or is to some extent alienated from the rest of natural existence. The joys of knowing and loving are inseparable from our alienation. That means there’s a natural explanation for both our singular joy and intractable alienation: We human animals have been given natural, personal capabilities not given to the other animals.

It makes us happier to be able to understand why human happiness is inseparable from human misery in this world. We can see — even from the perspective of happiness — why it’s better to be a dislocated human than a contented chimp. We have every reason to be grateful for who we are, and, contrary to Hobbes and Locke, we should be all about living well with — rather than incessantly negating — what we’ve been given by nature. There’s a natural foundation for personal significance — personal love and freedom — that opens us to the possibility of a personal God.

Human happiness may depend on being “at home with our homelessness.”

When we moved this Summer I had 70 crates of books and, sadly, about 65 remain packed until we can have book shelves built. Within the unpacked crates is my copy of Mr. Lawler's fine book Homeless and At Home in America, which I'd read but not yet reviewed. He's one of our very favorite essayists and if you check the links we've collected you'll see why.

Reading this essay and the one below, by Mitchell Kalpakgian, seems an especially god remedy to the angst and agita of the current election. Someone is going to be sorely disappointed on Tuesday--either you or the guy next to you--and it seems not unlikely to be us religious conservatives.

If this should prove to be the case, it is possible to see why people of faith might feel estranged from a country that has elected the most pro-Death president in its history. Recall how Robert P. George and the First Things symposium declared democracy at an end in 1996, because of the way the Court was ignoring fundamental human liberty in favor of the culture of death. And it will indeed be vitally important for conservatives to gird up their loins and fight an administration and congress that may well seek to reverse the progress we've made out of the abyss over recent years. But, at the same time, we need only look to the derangement of the Left over the last 8 to 14 (to 28?) years in order to see what we must avoid.

While it is an entirely predictable effect of the Rationalist condition that the Left should be discombobulated by the failure of reality to conform to the apparent power of their ideas, just look at all of the good that their breakdown has prevented them from even noticing, nevermind celebrating. Despite the current correction, American and global wealth is at undreamt of high levels. The academic performance of even those students we had the lowest expectations of is improving and the entire nation is dedicated to improving it further. Abortion is down. Homelessness is down. Life expectancies are rising and from record high rates. Almost uniquely within the developed world we have a rising population. We have transformed health care in Africa. We have, either directly or indirectly, contributed to the liberation of or liberalization in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Liberia, Sudan, Libya, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, Indonesia, Mongolia, India, Georgia, Kosovo, etc., etc., etc....all of this coming within two decades of our having left the Soviet Empire in the dustbin of history. And on and on. But because these things have not been achieved in accord with the vision they have of how they should have been done--and by whom--the Left has alternately moped and raged its way across a decade. One of the most noticeable aspects of what has been a pretty good run for America and the world has been the miserableness of the Left.

It is incumbent on the Right to avoid such a fate. After all, our theology doesn't afford us the "luxury" of imagining that the world must yield to our wants and wishes. When we consider ourselves to be estranged from our lives just because they aren't going exactly as we'd like them to we are, in some sense, denying Creation. And were to snarl and snipe our way through an Obama presidency we would be elevating Caesar above God in ways that ought to shame us.

Even setting aside the fact that Bill Clinton's 90s were themselves a rather good stretch and that we have ample reason to be hopeful that the coming years will be good for America and the world as well, it is a threshhold mistake for us to follow the Left in believing that life can not be good just because we think the political results are bad. Though we can never rest in a society that hasn't yet recognized the truth that Cardinal Egan speaks below, neither can we slip into the slough of despond when we recognize the truth that Mr. Lawler reminds us of:

[T]he other view [of Americanization] is the view of Chesterton, which is: America is a home for the homeless, that the great thing about America is the romance of the citizen – everyone can find a home here. The amazing thing is that all you have to do to become an American is agree with a certain doctrine. So Chesterton compares America to the Catholic church. Any race, gender, whatever, class, background, make no difference, as long as you accept the
doctrine. That’s the Catholic view, and that’s also the American view – race, gender, whatever, don’t make any difference, as long as you accept the doctrine. So there’s something profoundly at-home about Americans because Americans begin with the premise of the irreplaceable, personal significance of every human being.

In other words, America is based on a very corny view of the Declaration of Independence that’s basically consistent with Thomism and all that. So in a certain way what saves America from utter relativism is this doctrine. And so you look at America carefully and the Americans who are most at home are the ones who believe this doctrine is compatible with their religion, and so they’re particularly at home because they’re at home with their homelessness. That is, they’re at home as citizens while recognizing that citizenship doesn’t
capture everything they are. And so it turns out that the best Dads, the best citizens, the people who have the most kids and the most stable family life in America are the ones who take citizenship seriously and who take their religion seriously. So from a certain point of view this book shows that there’s some truth to Heidegger,
some truth to Chesterton, but the view that Christianity is incompatible with patriotism – Christians are always resident aliens and all that – this does seem to be very out-of-touch with the reality of America.

If it is natural for those who don't genuinely believe in American ideals to be easily alienated, it is thoroughly unnatural for we who believe devoutly to succumb to similar despair. What, after all, is an unwelcome election result or an inept politician or even an unfortunate law or two in comparison to your family, your friends, your neighbors, your community, your relationship with God?

I had two people tell me remarkably similar stories this weekend abut being at social events and having people launch into tirades about religion or conservatives or both. One had a friend say: "I'm sure I'm offending you, but...." To which they responded, bewildered: "What? But you don't care?" We can pity the folk who behave (misbehave) in this manner, but we must not react by aping them. The impulse to vent must be subordinated to the values of friendship, citizenship, comity, and, yes, love. Where it is inexplicable to the Bright that anyone could differ with them, it is doctrine to us that people will disagree, even on the most fundamental issues. Where it is unimaginable to them that Reason could have yielded up an erroneous answer, it is obvious to us that Fallen Man is prone to mistake, oneself no less than another. Where they seem to think that spilling enough bile will act as a solvent to disagreements, we know such divisions to be part of the human predicament and the proper response to be an attempt at understanding, not an intellectual bludgeoning.

I've been absurdly fortunate in life and not at all unfortunate in politics. My first vote was cast for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and since then my preference has prevailed more often than not. But in 1992 we were living in Chicago and I walked out of the polling place facing the seemingly dire prospect that, despite my vote, Bill Clinton, Carol Mosely-Braun, and Dan Rostenkowski would be announced as winners later that night. Woe the Republic, eh? Well, last night our eldest asked what the best decade of the 20th Century was. And there's really only one honest response to that question: the 1990s.

A good many of us may feel a tad homeless as we walk out of the polling place on Tuesday, but we'll emerge into the sunlight (or snow here) very much at home. And there's every possibility that we'll be more at home in the months and years to come than those who vote differently. America is rather more resilient than we're prone to imagine in our darkest moments and politics means rather less than we're wont to recognize in the midst of a campaign. Think about what truly matters and be happy. Life is awfully good.

MORE:
The Theology of Pleasure (Mitchell Kalpakgian, October 2008, New Oxford Review)

The experience of the goodness of the natural pleasures of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, as well as the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional pleasures of the soul, reveals God as the Author of inexhaustible joy who created man for happiness in all its fullness, inspiring man to sing with David in Psalm 23, "Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows."

A man wakes in the morning and enjoys the exercise of walking, jogging, or biking, experiencing the beauty of the day, the serenity of dawn. He returns home to refresh his body with a bath or shower and then proceeds to regale himself with the tastes and smells of a hearty breakfast. These preparations of the body provide energy and strength to perform the day's work, whether it is using one's body or mind, skill, or other talents in performing labors of duty or love. In the midst of daily toil, human interaction -- conversation, laughter -- can punctuate the day and lift the spirits. The noon meal offers a different selection of foods to nourish the body and soul, offering the anticipation of a new pleasure, perhaps in the company of congenial friends who add the liveliness of mirth to the relish of the meal. As the afternoon hours follow, the end of the workday awaits with its accompanying rewards: a clear conscience in doing an honest day's labor, relaxation at home, or recreation in the pursuit of a favorite hobby. Looking forward to dinner with the entire family at home offers the best of company, and perhaps one's favorite meal. The pleasure of conversation with a spouse, the enjoyment of playing with children, the delight of hearing one's favorite music, the stimulation of a good book, and maybe the surprise of a friendly letter in the day's mail add to the various joys of the day and provide a sense of the fullness of happiness that is possible on the best of days. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, "No man can live without pleasure," and God, in His infinite goodness, has created a world with plentiful sources of joy and happiness for all people.

In the course of a year, a person may enjoy the varied pleasures of the four seasons -- from skating, skiing, and snowboarding in winter to fishing, swimming, and boating in summer. Each year brings its festive holidays and religious celebrations. Birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, weddings, and baptisms also fill the calendar with commemorative social occasions that rejoice the spirit and keep one in love with life. This multiplicity of pleasures during the various stages of the year illustrates the truth that life always offers some special joy to look forward to.

A life of happiness is not only the enjoyment of the present moment but also the anticipation of some later source of joy that awaits its proper time. The child who revels in play, the young couple who fall in love, the parents who rejoice in the births of their children, the grandparents who behold the happiness of their children's children -- the goodness of life is experienced in the fullness of our time. God in His wisdom prepares His gifts of pleasure according to the seasons of life and according to the stages of man. As Solomon observes, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven" (Eccl. 3:1). God does not leave man empty-handed as he progresses through life, but always provides occasions of hope in familiar pleasures and newfound joys. [...]

Spiritual pleasures as well accompany intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. The quintessence of spiritual happiness is the enjoyment of peace, the peace that Christ offers when He utters, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you" (Jn. 14:27). As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions, "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find peace in you." Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ also explains the way to true peace: "True peace of heart can be found only by resisting the passions, not by yielding to them," and "True peace dwells only in the heart of the humble." This peace that passes all understanding comes only to he who prepares his heart and soul to receive God: "Christ will come to you, and impart his consolations to you if you prepare a worthy dwelling for him in your heart." Just as the bride adorns and beautifies herself in anticipation of the coming of the bridegroom, the soul too must purify itself and possess a clean and contrite heart to welcome the visitation of the Divine Spouse. The soul as bride prepares itself by controlling the passions, by exerting patience in enduring adversities, and by cultivating humility, recollection, silence, and purity of heart. As Christ speaks to the disciple in à Kempis's spiritual masterpiece, "My peace is with the humble and gentle of heart, and depends on great patience." The soul that retains the virtue of faith believes that God will keep His promises just as the bride awaits her bridegroom; she trusts his word and her heart leaps at the sound of his voice. Christ too always comes if the soul believes and trusts: "Where is your faith? Stand firm, and persevere. Be courageous and patient, and help will come to you in due time. Wait patiently for Me, and I myself will come and heal you."

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SO, LET'S SEE IF WE HAVE THIS STRAIGHT...:

McCain campaign accuses L.A. Times of 'suppressing' Obama video : The Times says its promise to a source prevents the paper from posting the video, which shows Barack Obama praising Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi at a 2003 banquet. The story first appeared in April. (By a Times staff writer, October 28, 2008, LA Times)

John McCain's presidential campaign today accused the Los Angeles Times of "intentionally suppressing" a videotape it obtained of a 2003 banquet where then-state Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian scholar and activist. The Times first reported on the videotape in an April 2008 story about Obama's ties with Palestinians and Jews as he navigated the politics of Chicago. [...]

The Times today issued a statement about its decision not to post the tape.

"The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it," said the newspaper's editor, Russ Stanton. "The Times keeps its promises to sources."

...on the one hand the press maintains that its obligation to publish that which is newsworthy is so weighty that it even trumps national security and the possibility that lives would be endangered, but, on the other hand, now asks us to accept that a paper's promise is more important than newsworthiness? So, unless my math is screwy, they place self-interest above the national interest and human life? No?

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DOES ANYONE ELSE FIND IT PECULIAR...:

Worse Than Fascists: Christian Political Group 'The Family' Openly Reveres Hitler: Did you know that the National Prayer Breakfast is sponsored by a shadowy cabal of elite Christian fundamentalists? Jeff Sharlet's new book, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," offers a rare glimpse of this remarkable network, which is known variously as the Family, the Fellowship and the International Foundation. (Lindsay Beyerstein, 6/12/08, AlterNet)

AlterNet writer Lindsay Beyerstein recently sat down with Jeff Sharlet at a Brooklyn coffee shop to discuss the Family.

Lindsay Beyerstein What is the Family?

Jeff Sharlet: It's an international network of evangelical activists in government, military and business. The Family is dedicated to this idea that Christianity has gotten it all wrong for two thousand years by focusing on the poor, the suffering and the weak.

The Family says that instead, what Christians should do is minister to the up-and-out -- as opposed to the down-and-out -- to those that are already powerful. Because if they can win those people for Christ, they win the whole deal. That's what this network is dedicated to. It includes nonprofit organizations, it includes think tanks, it includes various ministries. [...]

Lindsay Beyerstein: What kind of empire do they envision?

Jeff Sharlet: They envision the empire that we have. Doug Coe says, "We work with power where we can and build new power where we can't." Usually they can work within power. Rob Shank, another Christian right activist in Washington, says, "The Family is into living with what is."

In the immediate postwar era, they were talking about Christian D-Day and Washington as the world's Christian capital. And World War Three, they were very excited about that, all full-steam ahead. But they sort of subsided and were subsumed into the American Cold War project, which ended up becoming an imperial project.

Lindsay Beyerstein: What did the Family have to do with a B-movie called "The Blob"?

Jeff Sharlet: The best illustration of the Family's involvement in the Cold War was something that I stumbled on by accident: The 1958 film "The Blob." It began at the 1957 National Prayer Breakfast. "The Blob" was a famous horror movie that was a metaphor for Communism. This is their imagination of how Communism spread. At the time, the American imagination couldn't grasp ideology, so it had to be an actual goo that globs more and more people and grows and becomes expansive. As I recall, they have to blow up the town at the end. The logic of "The Blob" is that we must destroy the village in order to save it. That's the logic of Vietnam.

The project actually began at the National Prayer Breakfast. This filmmaker who had been making fundamentalist films, Irvin "Shorty" Yeaworth, was on the lookout for someone to make this film. (The writer) Kate Phillips was a B-movie sci-fi actress. Not a Christian Right person; (she was) there as a guest of a friend of hers. She's there at the breakfast and they become friends. They end up making this movie.

The Blob and I: Was the 1958 horror flick created to advance the agenda of a Christian fundamentalist cabal close to the dark heart of American power? (Rudy Nelson, Books & Culture)

All my alarm systems go off at once. I freely admit I'm no expert on the finer points of religion and politics inside the beltway. But as the crazy circumstances of life would have it, there's a lot of firsthand knowledge about The Blob in my memory bank. I was present at the creation. During the summer of 1957, my wife Shirley and I and our two young sons were in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania for the studio and location shooting of the film, when I was involved in revisions of the script.

Sharlet's full answer to Lindsay's question about The Blob is a litany of misinformation, one incorrect fact after another. So I now know I'll have to check into his book. Our town library doesn't have it, as it turns out, nor does the local independent bookstore. I even come up empty at Barnes and Noble. But I want the book in a hurry, so I resort to Amazon. When the package arrives, the first impression on opening it is weird. The book jacket is designed to look like an old-timey family Bible.

I note, with some dismay, that there's an entire 23-page chapter titled "The Blob." What on earth can Sharlet say about the movie that will fill 23 pages—especially when what he thinks he knows is all wrong? As I read, I find that The Blob is mentioned only in the chapter's first two pages and in its concluding sentence. Then why the title? That seems like a good question, but I set it aside. First I need to know whether the record in the book is any more accurate than the interview.

It is not.

Like the interview, the book pinpoints the 1957 National Prayer Breakfast as the time and place of the film's birth. Strike one. The film had been under discussion for over a year. In fact, quite by accident, I attended an exploratory conference at Valley Forge Films in the spring of 1956 when a delightful raconteur named Irv Millgate was present to pitch a film idea. He had with him a small container with a gelatinous mass of silicone. His goal was to see whether he could interest the company in doing a film that would, so to speak, have this stuff as its main character. I don't recall that anyone actually used the word "blob," but I do clearly recall the tactile sensation of the silicone ball that was passed around the table.

Strike two: The film's director, Irvin "Shorty" Yeaworth, is identified as an "evangelical minister." An understandable mistake. Shorty was a junior. It was his father, the Reverend Irvin Shortess Yeaworth, who was a Presbyterian clergyman in West Philadelphia.

Both the interview and the book claim that a woman named Kate Phillips was the writer. Wrong. Her contribution to the film was minimal. Ted Simonson was the writer, and by the time Kate Phillips was brought on the scene, supposedly to add some professional polishing, the screenplay was well underway. But this too is an understandable error. With her experience as both a Hollywood actress and screenwriter, Ms. Phillips was named writer in the finished film credits along with Simonson, at the insistence of the executive producer (not Yeaworth). He reasoned that the input of a professional among this bunch of amateurs might make the film more salable to a major studio. So Sharlet gets a pass on this one.

Back to the interview: Sharlet says, "As I recall, they have to blow up the town at the end. The logic of The Blob is that we must destroy the village in order to save it. That's the logic of Vietnam." Bad mistake. As any blobster could confirm, the teenagers in the film, led by Steve McQueen in his first screen role, actually save the town when they realize that freezing the creature with CO2 fire extinguishers is the only answer and collect enough of them to do the job. Nothing was blown up. The monstrous mass from outer space was cut into sections and dropped over the Arctic ice cap. Strike three.

But these inaccuracies are minor compared to the most egregiously mistaken claim of all—that the blob was intended as a metaphor for communism. When Lindsey Beyerstein asks what the Family had to do with The Blob, Sharlet replies: "This is their imagination of how Communism spread. At the time, the American imagination couldn't grasp ideology, so it had to be an actual goo that globs more and more people and grows and becomes expansive." No, no, no. In fact, the motive behind the company's involvement in the production was totally commercial, the universally recognized capitalistic one of making some money. The company badly needed money, and someone had discovered that there'd rarely been a monster movie that had failed at the box office. Bottom of the ninth. Three outs. Game over.

In my experience of working on the movie, I was not aware of one single stray reference to anything remotely connected with communism. Not at the initial story conference, not throughout the shooting schedule. As "Third Assistant Director in Charge of Daily Script Revision" (a string of important-sounding words to describe a responsibility that finally didn't rate a screen credit), I was in daily contact with the writer and the director. If communism had been on anyone's mind, I would have known.

...when the Left insists that the Right deserves all the credit for defeating the Evil Empire?

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SWITCHING TO ANOTHER BUSINESS MODEL THEY DON'T GET:

Christian Science Monitor to End Print Edition (Howard Kurtz, 10/28/08, Washington Post)

The money-losing paper announced today that it will stop publishing next April, except for a weekly edition, and shift entirely to the Internet. [...]

The Web site is drawing 1.5 million unique visitors a month, which isn't bad, but Yemma says he must boost that if the brand is to survive. "There's no magic bullet," he says. "You just have to do high-quality journalism and post constantly."

We used to post their stuff more often, but their lawyers contacted us and insisted that we never use more than two paragraphs. They're the only folks ever to do so. Seems self-defeating to discourage circulation of your stuff on the Internet.

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THANKS, AL QAEDA...:

Beneath US-Pakistani tension, a new cooperation: Joint efforts include setting up coordination centers along the Afghan-Pakistani border. (Mark Sappenfield, 10/29/08, The Christian Science Monitor )

Two weeks ago, insurgents in Pakistan lobbed mortars at US forces in Afghanistan. When the Americans alerted the Pakistani Army, its response was unambiguous. Not only could the US fire back, but Pakistani soldiers acted as spotters.

It is one small example of how Pakistan is starting to cooperate more with the US and Afghanistan in fighting the insurgency in its tribal areas. Attempts to find solutions jointly are being made across a wide spectrum, from the opening of border coordination centers shared by the three nations' armies to talks among tribal leaders.

...for bombing them into co-operating with us.

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THE NATIONAL FUNGIBLE LEAGUE:

Cassel improving as substitute for injured Brady (Howard Ullman, October 28, 2008, AP)

Matt Cassel lofted a very Brady-like pass just over the defender and into the arms of Kevin Faulk at the edge of the end zone.

The placement was perfect. The touchdown capped a Patriots comeback. The quarterback did what his teammates knew he could do. [...]

The Patriots are 5-2 and back in first place in the AFC East, tied with Buffalo. In Brady's first two seasons as a starter, they were 3-4 after seven games.

Brady has 28 comeback victories in seven seasons in games in which the Patriots trailed or were tied in the fourth quarter. Sunday's was Cassel's first, but he did go 4-for-4 for 49 yards on the decisive drive. [...]

Cassel succeeded Sunday despite a rash of injuries to key offensive players.

Running backs Sammy Morris, LaMont Jordan and Laurence Maroney and starting right tackle Nick Kaczur were sidelined. Regular right guard Stephen Neal saw limited action in his second game after missing the first five following shoulder and knee injuries.

Cassel showed an ability to run when his protection broke down or he didn't spot open receivers.

"Matt saved us on a few of those," Belichick said.

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LEANERS:

Undecided voters may already have decided, study suggests (Brian Nosek, 10/28/08, University of Virginia )

[University of Virginia psychology professor Brian] Nosek and colleagues Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard University and Tony Greenwald of the University of Washington developed the Implicit Association Test to assess mental associations that may be different than what people know or say about themselves.

A dozen years of research and hundreds of published studies suggest that people have implicit belief systems that may contradict their declared beliefs. These implicit beliefs can affect actions, such as how they vote at the moment it comes time to explicitly decide.

The research team operates "Project Implicit," a publicly accessible research and education Web site (www.implicit.harvard.edu at which visitors can complete the Implicit Association Test to measure their own implicit associations. The test is available for a variety of topics, including an "Obama-McCain" task that was developed for the U.S. presidential election.

In its 10 years of existence, about 7 million people have completed tests at the Web site, including more than 25,000 who have tested their implicit preferences regarding presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.

In the latter project, being conducted by Nosek, Greenwald and Colin Smith, a U.Va. graduate student, almost 15 percent of the participants (about 4,000 people) declared themselves as undecided between voting for Obama or McCain. However, many of these same participants show an implicit preference for Obama or McCain despite their explicit indecision.

"Undecided voters may have decided implicitly before they know that they have explicitly," Nosek said. U.S. undecided voters, on average, reported feeling slightly warmer toward Obama than McCain, but they implicitly showed a slight preference for McCain over Obama.

The test is interesting but in a creepy kind of Parallax View way.

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DERIVATIVES ARE A FUNCTION OF A ROOMFULL OF SMART PEOPLE:

Bill Kristol: Reagan Revolution Isn't Over: The leading neoconservative talks about the GOP, Obama, the financial meltdown, and why it pays to be a contrarian in politics and the market (Maria Bartiromo , 10/28/08, Business Week)

In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan attacked Sarah Palin, saying that, among other things, she is a symptom of the vulgarization of American politics. You fired back with a Times column saying most of the recent mistakes of American public policy were brought to us by highly educated and sophisticated elites. What were those mistakes, and would you include the invasion of Iraq as one of them?

No on Iraq, but the mistakes include all kinds of policies that were pushed by faculties at Harvard and Yale and that turned out not to be so good for the country. But the thing I had most in mind was the financial crisis. I mean, an awful lot of incredibly smart and well-educated people invented very fancy financial instruments that they didn't fully understand, and that put a lot of ordinary people's savings at risk. It wasn't Main Street that invented mortgage-backed securities or decided that financial firms could be leveraged at 50 to 1. The public isn't always as knowledgeable as it could be, but generally speaking, the American public has a pretty good track record of using common sense. And I would say intellectuals and elites have a less good track record because they fall in love with various fads.

It's interesting that Barack Obama keeps talking about spreading the wealth, and yet sometimes he comes across as an elitist.

He is very much a product of Harvard Law School…and that's fine. But I do think he believes that if he gets the really smart guys in a room in Washington or New York, they can sort of retool the American economy. I don't think he has that fundamental, I would call it a Hayekian belief—after Friedrich Hayek, the great Austrian economist—in the limits of central planning, the limits of very smart people's abilities to figure things out. I do think Obama is instinctively very much a government-knows-best guy.

Who has ever advocated government "spreading the wealth" besides intellectual elites?

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STILL PRESIDENT:

Analysts Question Timing of Syria Raid (Ali Gharib, 10/28/08, IPS)

A cross-border raid into Syria by U.S. forces in Iraq, and a subsequent stonewalling by U.S. officials unwilling to divulge details, has led to rampant speculation among U.S. analysts about the origins and meaning of the attack.

"So the question is: Why?" wrote geo-strategic analyst and journalist Helena Cobban on her blog, wondering if the raid could have been pulled off without explicit permission from the highest levels of the President George W. Bush administration.

"So why now at the end of the Bush administration, with Washington trying to play nice with Damascus and tensions easing throughout the region, would U.S. forces stage such a gambit?" echoed Borzou Daragahi on the Babylon and Beyond blog at the Los Angeles Times website.

To ask the question is to answer it: it's to stop State from playing footsie with the Ba'athists; take advantage of Israel's electoral confusion; and disrupt the field for the next administration. Well done, W, but aim higher.

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THEY DON'T MAKE INFLATION LIKE THEY USED TO:

Wal-Mart To Sell Google's G1 Phones At Discount Starting Wed (Dow Jones, 10/27/08)

Wal-Mart Inc. (WMT) will start selling the G1 phone at a discounted price starting Wednesday, a Wal-Mart spokesman confirmed Monday night.

Wal-Mart will carry the Google Inc. (GOOG) G1 phone, sold through Deutsche Telekom AG's (DT) T-Mobile USA, in 550 Wal-Mart stores at the reduced price of $ 148.88 for new customers, or existing customers eligible for an upgrade, who sign up for a two-year agreement, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien said.

Consumers interested in purchasing the T-Mobile G1 can save $31.11 at Wal-Mart as opposed to buying through T-Mobile, which sells the device for $179.99.

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FOR SOME PEOPLE "BURST BUBBLE" MEANS "RECORD INCREASE IN VALUE":

LA/OC home values still up 71% under Bush (Jon Lansner, 10/28/08, ocregister.com)

* LA/OC home values are still up 70.6% since Bush took office in January 2001. By the way, at one point, local prices were up 147% (September 2006) under Republican Bush.

* That handily beats President’s Clinton era (Jan. 1993-Jan. 2001), when local prices rose only 31%. For those who wonder: Local prices must fall another 27% by January 2009 for Bush and Democrat Clinton to tie!

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HOW CAN THEY HOPE TO COMPREHEND THE COUNTRY THEY COVER?:

...when they work in such a partisan fish bowl?

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THAT STUBBORN 50% CEILING:

Gallup Daily: Presidential Race Narrows Slightly (Gallup, 10/28/08)

The gap between Barack Obama and John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Saturday through Monday has narrowed slightly, and Obama is now at 49% of the vote to 47% for McCain among likely voters using Gallup's traditional model...

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FORTUNATELY, THE FRENCH ARE TOUGH?:

Sources: Sarkozy views Obama stance on Iran as 'utterly immature' (Barak Ravid, 10/28/08, Israel News)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is very critical of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's positions on Iran, according to reports that have reached Israel's government.

Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate's stance on Iran as "utterly immature" and comprised of "formulations empty of all content." [...]

[A]ccording to the senior Israeli source, Sarkozy fears that Obama might "arrogantly" ignore the other members of this front and open a direct dialogue with Iran without preconditions.

Following their July meeting, Sarkozy repeatedly expressed disappointment with Obama's positions on Iran, concluding that they were "not crystallized, and therefore many issues remain open," the Israeli source said. Advisors to the French president who held separate meetings with Obama's advisors came away with similar impressions and expressed similar disappointment.

What, no thrill running up their legs?

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NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO...:

Wendy’s offers Halloween candy alternative: free Frosty (Nancy Luna, 10/28/08, OC Register)

The burger chain is selling booklets that contain a coupon good for one free Jr. Frosty. Each booklet cost $1 and contains 10 coupons.

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JUST KEEPS WINNING:

Judge defines detainees as enemy combatants: Ruling takes a first step in resolving the fate of terrorism suspects held without charge at Guantanamo Bay. (The Associated Press, October 28, 2008)

Al Qaeda or Taliban supporters who directly assisted in hostile acts against the United States or its allies can be held without charge as enemy combatants, a federal judge ruled Monday. [...]

In Monday's order, [U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ] reached back to the Pentagon's September 2004 definition.

"Happily, happily, there is a definition that was crafted by the executive and blessed by the Congress," Leon said.

He pointed to the 2004 standard, defining an enemy combatant as an individual who was part of supporting Al Qaeda, Taliban or other associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the U.S. or its coalition partners.

The definition includes anyone who committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy forces.

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IS THAT A SERIOUS QUESTION?

The Republicans' dirty secret... torture (Johann Hari, 10/28/08, The Independent)

So what will be left of the Republican Party after next week's US election? The answer lies in the sands of Florida, where the sunshine-state Republicans have nominated an unrepentant torturer as their candidate for Congress. They view his readiness to torture an innocent Iraqi not as a source of shame, but as his prime qualification for office. This is American conservatism in the dying days of Bush – and it points out the direction that Sarah Palin would like to take it in 2012. [...]

There are no recorded instances of getting useable intelligence from torture – but even if in some freak instance after you have tortured a thousand Yahiyas you finally did, would it outweigh the damage of handing al Qaeda a thousand new recruits, vindicating Bin Laden's hate-talk and breaching the most basic moral codes?

After being water-boarded for less than three minutes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, operational leader of al Qaeda at the time of 9-11, couldn't wait to give us useable intelligence. Has there ever been a basic moral code that would forfeit thousands or tens of thousands of innocent lives for those three minutes? Morality forbids the use of torture as punishment, not as a means of interrogating the enemy.

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DIMING OUT THE LEFT:

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IT'S THE QUEEREST THING....:

Social conservatives fight for control of Republican Party: The right flank is positioning to change the GOP's leadership and direction -- even if John McCain wins the presidency. Some moderates fear such a shift would alienate more voters. (Peter Wallsten, October 28, 2008, LA Times)

The social conservatives and moderates who together boosted the Republican Party to dominance have begun a tense battle over the future of the GOP, with social conservatives already moving to seize control of the party's machinery and some vowing to limit John McCain's influence, even if he wins the presidency.

...when Ronald Reagan, the GOP Senate class of 1980, the Republican revolutionaries of 1994, and W established GOP dominance all we ever heard was that they were social conservative extremists. But now the neocons and the MSM want us to believe that the secret to their success was that they were selling moderation?

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THERE IS NO MORE SOBERING MOMENT IN LIFE...:

Just Look (Edward Cardinal Egan, October 23, 2008, Archdiocese of New York)

The picture on this page is an untouched photograph of a being that has been within its mother for 20 weeks. Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully.

Have you any doubt that it is a human being?

If you do not have any such doubt, have you any doubt that it is an innocent human being?

If you have no doubt about this either, have you any doubt that the authorities in a civilized society are duty-bound to protect this innocent human being if anyone were to wish to kill it?

If your answer to this last query is negative, that is, if you have no doubt that the authorities in a civilized society would be duty-bound to protect this innocent human being if someone were to wish to kill it, I would suggest—even insist—that there is not a lot more to be said about the issue of abortion in our society. It is wrong, and it cannot—must not—be tolerated.

But you might protest that all of this is too easy. Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a “human being” is, what a “person” is, what it means to be “living,” and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us “Roe v. Wade” address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining “human being,” defining “person,” defining “living,” and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who “chooses” to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.

...than when you see the ultrasound of your first kid and can't think of him as an it any longer.

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HERE'S ALL I KNOW ABOUT AN OBAMA VICTORY...:

Countdown to the Obama Rapture: Watch as the press corps battles its performance anxiety! (Jack Shafer, Oct. 27, 2008, Slate)

The windows of this mind-set are provided by Slate's Jacob Weisberg, for whom the Obama election is a national referendum on racism; the New York Times' Nicholas D. Kristof, for whom an Obama presidency is an opportunity to "rebrand" our nation and "find a path to restore America's global influence"; E.J. Dionne, who sees an Obama presidency as representing a chance to "rekindle the sense of possibility and transformation" in American life; and a swooning Andrew Sullivan, who almost a year ago speculated that Obama might be "that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about." For Chris Matthews, of course, the Obama candidacy is a "thrill" going up his leg, one that will arc over his torso and detonate his head in the event of a victory.

The leading Obama cheerleader among the commentariat is Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, whose "erection of the heart" for the candidate has no match. Alter sees the presidential election as a world referendum on the United States and "the common sense and decency of the American people." Obama symbolizes hope over fear, and his election would produce an "Obama Dividend" that would "blow the minds of people in the Middle East and other regions, and help restore American prestige." Obama, Alter continues, "knows how to think big, elevate the debate and transport the public to a new place."

Such overwriting leaves Alter little acreage upon which to build a monument if his candidate wins, but the problem isn't Alter's alone. Even political reporters who have scrubbed from their copy any evidence of Obama lust face the same Nov. 5 dilemma as the commentariat. How do you pack all the Obama touch points—healing, hope, change, civility, the second coming of Camelot, post-boomer politician, inspirer of youth, great uniter, world president, and so on—into one story without sounding hagiographic? Isn't that what the commemorative issue of People magazine is for? Then again, how do you write about Obama's victory without looping in the touch points? Hence the performance anxiety.

...if there aren't three ponies in our driveway on November 5th, he's gonna have to answer to my kids....

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REGARDLESS OF WHO WINS...:

Is Sarah Palin preparing for 2012? (ROGER SIMON, 10/28/08, Politico)

Sarah Palin may soon be free. Soon, she may not have the millstone of John McCain around her neck. And she can begin her race for president in 2012.

Some are already talking about it. In careful terms. If John McCain loses next week, Sarah Palin “has absolutely earned a right to run in 2012,” says Greg Mueller, who was a senior aide in the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes. Mueller says Palin has given conservatives “hope” and “something to believe in.”

And even if the McCain-Palin ticket does win on Nov. 4 — and Mueller says it could — “if McCain decides to serve for just one term, Sarah Palin as the economic populist and traditional American values candidates will be very appealing by the time we get to 2012.”

...she's the person most likely to be taking the oath of office in January 2013. Maverick is old; Democrats don't get re-elected; and Jeb is the only Republican who'd outrank her in the primaries.

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WHERE ARE BILL,TRENT AND NEWT WHEN WE NEED THEM?:

Taking stock of the parties (Richard Rahn, October 28, 2008, Washington Times)

[O]ver the last quarter of a century when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, the stock market rose by an average of about 20 percent per year. When the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the stock market only rose at an average annual rate of 6.9 percent for the Dow Jones and a tepid 5.1 percent for the Standard and Poor 500.

When one party controlled one house and the other party controlled the other house of Congress, the growth in the stock market was significantly less than when the Republicans controlled both houses (15.6 percent for the Dow Jones and 12.7 percent for the S&P), but significantly more than when the Democrats controlled both houses.

There is a natural tendency for people to focus on the party of the president who is in power; but, in fact, the Congress is far more important to markets because it decides how to, and how much to, tax and spend. Some Democrats will try to argue that this is merely random variation, but the averages are sufficiently disparate to compensate for the small sample size (the last 25 years).

The Democrats have controlled 10 years, the Republicans 11 years, and in five years they shared control. [...]

The responsiveness of the markets to the party in control in Congress has been consistent with the shifts back and forth between the parties. When the Democrats and Republicans each controlled one house in the 1983-87 period, the S&P rose at an annual rate of 19.5 percent. When the Democrats controlled both houses during the 1987-95 period, the S&P rose at annual rate of 10.8 percent, and again when they controlled both houses from 2007 to the present, the S&P dropped at a 20.4 percent annual rate.

The Republicans controlled both houses from 1995-2001 when the S&P rose at annual rate of 29.9 percent, and again from 2003-2007 when the S&P rose at annual rate of 14.0 percent. During the 2001-2003 period, the control of the Senate shifted back and forth between the Republicans and Democrats, neither party having sustained control, and the S&P dropped at an annual rate of 14.6 percent for those two years (which also coincided with the Sept. 11, 2001, aftermath).

The optimum appears to be a Democratic resident with a Republican Congress.

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KEEP PROMOTING THEM, WE'LL KILL MORE:

US, Pakistan mission on target (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 10/28/08, Asia Times)

Militant sources have confirmed to Asia Times Online that Moroccan Khalid Habib, the head of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, was killed last week in a missile attack by an unmanned US Predator drone in the South Waziristan tribal area. [...]

With Khalid dead, the next likely target is veteran Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose suspected bases in North Waziristan have been targeted on several occasions. Jalaluddin is the spiritual leader of the Haqqani network and a legendary figure of the Afghan mujahideen's struggle against the Soviets during the 1980s. Several of his family and aides have been killed in the attacks, but both Jalaluddin and his son Sirajuddin remain at large, possibly even in urban areas in Pakistan.

Former Afghan premier Gulbuddin Hekmatyar could also be on the hit list. He is a former friend of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and had been contacted by Kabul through intermediaries over the possibility of initiating dialogue with the Taliban.

However, he refuses to become involved in any back-channel discussions for peace until all foreign troops leave Afghanistan, although he did assure Karzai that once the foreigners left, he would work with his administration in the political mainstream.

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VOTE UNICORN RIDER, SO GRANDMA CAN STOP KNITTING!:

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A MAN NOT TO BE RECKONED WITH:

Obama's fans in Europe are in for a big surprise (John Vinocur, October 27, 2008, International Herald Tribune)

The question of Europe really hearing all that Obama says goes to other issues. I haven't found any research that would support the theory, but my guess is also that Europeans have only the faintest idea that Obama accepts the death penalty and won't fight for gun control, two eternal American sins as seen from abroad.

Soft power? Europe loves the notion (which rationalizes its low defense budgets) and tends to assign a virtue it sees in itself to Obama. Yet here's how the Democrat came out, in his last debate with McCain, on a centrally soft concern - education:

"It probably has more to do with our economic future than anything and that means it has a national security implication because there never has been a nation on Earth that saw its economy decline and continued to maintain its primacy as a military power. So we've got to get our education system right."

On Iran, there is little indication that European public opinion is listening closely either when Obama says, "We'll never take the military option off the table." Or on Georgia and Ukraine, when Obama insists that they must be given plans for NATO membership "immediately." Or on Afghanistan when he complains that some NATO countries, like Germany, are present there but not sharing the missions with the most murderous risks.

This also goes in part for Iraq. It would be Obama's America alone that has to make the decisions. When asked four years ago about French and German criticism of the Iraq war, Joe Biden, Obama's running mate, caricatured European leaders telling him they would have done things better:

"Blah blah blah, international cooperation," he mocked. "Give me a break, huh."

The Europeans are hoping for a President Obama precisely because they don't take him seriously and expect to be able to roll him. But allowing them to do so would immolate his presidency at home, so he'd have to act exaggeratedly tough just to prove himself to them and us. He'd have to out-Reagan Reagan and out-W W, which would be infinitely amusing.

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THE PRO-PALIN BACKLASH BEGINS:

Both sides of aisle rip MSNBC (Paul Bond, Oct 27, 2008, Hollywood Reporter)

[Writer-producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat], and others seemed especially critical of the way MSNBC -- and other media -- has attacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin while demeaning her supporters.

"We should stop the demonizing," she said, adding that Democrats have been worse than Republicans as far as personal attacks on candidates are concerned. "It diminishes us," she said of her fellow Democrats.

Bloodworth-Thomason even suggested a defense of Palin and her supporters should be written into TV programming, just as she went out of her way to portray Southern women as smart in her hit TV show "Designing Women."

Misunderstanding Sarah: Media reaction to Gov. Palin shows ignorance of evangelicalism. (A Christianity Today editorial, 10/28/2008)

[T]wo sex- and gender-related questions caught our attention. First, reactions to news of Bristol Palin's out-of-wedlock pregnancy: liberal pundits gleefully announced that this was going to seriously undermine Governor Palin's standing with the Republican Party's evangelical base. Any informed evangelical watcher or evangelical believer could have told them that this is a non-issue.

It is a non-issue because John Newton's famous line, "I once was lost but now I'm found," defines the evangelical ethos. We specialize in troubled lives. Stories of transformation from sin and degradation to righteousness and wholeness frame the way evangelicals see life. From the slave-trading Newton to the White House "hatchet man" Chuck Colson, God saves people from their slavery to sin and uses them to restore others. Indeed, those of us who never did anything particularly shocking sometimes have trouble fitting in.

Evangelical pews are full of people whose family lives are untidy. [...]

The second media reaction that caught our attention was liberal puzzlement over conservatives who believe that only men should lead churches and marriages, yet who would not hesitate to have a woman a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Richard Land told Christianity Today that such concerns are asinine. The president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission compares the Palins to the Thatcher household: Dennis was head of the family, while Maggie ran the government. Land subscribes to the Baptist Faith and Message, which teaches that ecclesiastical and marital leadership are male territory. But Land is married to a strong woman, a professional with a Ph.D.
This will only accelerate as neocons and McCain staff try to blame the election result on Ms Palin, specifically, and Christianity, generally.

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A WAR WOULD BE PREFERABLE...:

The strike that shattered US-Syria ties (Sami Moubayed, 10/29/08, Slate)

The US broke its silence on the incident on Tuesday, claiming that top al-Qaeda operative Abu Ghadiyah was targeted and killed during what is being described in Western media as a pre-emptive strike. The Associated Press, quoting an unnamed US military official, reported that Ghadiyah was about to carry out an attack in Iraq. Ghadiyah, whose real name is Badran Turki Hishan Al Mazidih, is the leader a prolific network that moves foreign al-Qaeda fighters into underground resistance factions in war-torn Iraq.

The attack came days after a top US commander in Iraq told reporters that US troops bolstering their presence on the Syrian border, which he called an "uncontrolled" gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

The unconfirmed details and unquestionable tragedy of the raid have left once-promising US-Syria ties in tatters. Top officials in Damascus have blasted the "cowboy" tactics of US forces, and Syrian public opinion has become vociferously anti-American.

The so-called "massacre" won't lead to war between the US and Syria, but it marks an important turning point in a turbulent and unpredictable relationship that stretches back some 60 years.

...but blowing up any emerging relationship, combined with the possible return of Bibi in Israel, is excellent news on the Western front of the WoT.

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WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE BLOT YOU CAN SEE WHATEVER YOU WANT:

Obama And Iran (Reihan Salam 10.27.08, Forbes)

So what can the next president do? The most important step would be to launch a comprehensive campaign on behalf of Iranian political prisoners and independent labor unions and student groups.

For John McCain, who is seen as too eager to go for the military option first, this would be a good way to present a kinder and gentler face to the world. Because Barack Obama has been critical of the Bush Administration for being too hawkish, there is a danger that he might be seen as too accommodating. What better way to disabuse Tehran of the notion that an Obama White House will be weak than to use his bully pulpit and extraordinary international popularity to stand up for human rights in Iran? Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union could champion Iranian workers just as Lane Kirkland championed Solidarity in Poland. Obama could turn the pro-democracy intellectual Akbar Ganji, who refused to meet George W. Bush as an act of protest against the Iraq War, into a figure as celebrated as Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela, and a rallying point for Iran's democratic opposition.

Many Obamaphiles think of their man as the left's answer to Ronald Reagan, a charismatic figure who can change the direction of the country for the better. What better way for Obama to take up the Reagan mantle than to help sweep Iran's evil regime into the dustbin of history? That would be an accomplishment even die-hard conservatives couldn't help but admire.

Instead he's offered to meet their crazy president without any pre-conditions.

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SWEATING BALLOTS:

Colo. Dems worry about getting voters to turn out (STEVEN K. PAULSON, 10/27/08, The Associated Press)

Some Colorado Democrats are starting to sweat after the state released numbers showing that mail ballots and early voting in key counties are not what they expected. [...]

Mike Melanson, campaign manager for Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall, said he's worried that Democratic voters have become complacent because polls show their candidates ahead. He said if voters wait until later in the week to mail their ballots, those ballots might not get to county clerks before the deadline at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

"We have seen people in record numbers request ballots, and we're encouraged by that, but we're seeing a lot of folks sitting on them," Melanson said.

Non-voters don't vote.

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IF IT WERE "HOLLOWED" INSTEAD:

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WHICH IS WHY THE A380 IS TOAST:

Labour facing revolt on Heathrow expansion plans (David Millward, 27 Oct 2008, Daily Telegraph)

Ten backbenchers have signed a Commons motion calling for the runway plan to be scrapped, and the unease is shared by a at least one member of the Cabinet.

So far one junior minister, Ann Keen – who represents a west London constituency - has publicly declared her opposition to expanding the airport.

Others are known to share her misgivings more Labour MPs are expected to sign the motion.

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COULD BE A FUN WEEK:

IBD/TIPP Tracking Poll: Day Fifteen (Investor's Business Daily, October 27, 2008

After seesawing between 3.2 and 3.9 points over the weekend, Obama's lead slipped to 2.8 Monday. Battleground also has Obama up 3, and other polls have tightened, including Rasmussen, Zogby and Gallup to 5.

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STILL WINNABLE:

Gallup Daily: Race Stable With Obama Leading (Gallup, 10/27/08)

Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Friday through Sunday finds Barack Obama with a five percentage point lead over John McCain, 50% to 45%, in the presidential preferences of likely voters using Gallup's traditional model.

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll (Rasmussen Reports, October 27, 2008)

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows Barack Obama attracting 51% of the vote while John McCain earns 46%. Obama’s five-point advantage is down from an eight-point lead yesterday but up a point from the lead he held a week ago. With today’s results, Obama has been ahead by four-to-eight points every single day for 32 straight days (see trends).

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SO MUCH FOR THE MOST NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN EVER:

Obama, McCain Two of the Best-Liked Candidates (Jeffrey M. Jones, 10/24/08, Gallup)

Barack Obama (61%) and John McCain (57%) each received favorable ratings near 60% among likely voters in the most recent USA Today/Gallup poll.

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WILLIAM WARLEY WASN'T IN THIS FAR OVER HIS HEAD:

Barack Obama, Forever Sizing Up (JODI KANTOR, 10/26/08, NY Times)

Just 47 years old and only four years into a national political career, he has never run anything larger than his campaign. He began his run for president while he was still getting lost in Washington, a city he does not yet know well. His promises are as vast as his résumé is short, and some of his pledges are competing ones: progressive rule and centrist red-blue fusion; wholesale transformation and down-to-earth pragmatism.

Mr. Obama’s ambition and confidence have long confounded critics and annoyed rivals. In 2006, the still-new United States senator appeared before Washington’s elite at the spring dinner of the storied Gridiron Club, and as tradition dictated, roasted himself. He ticked off the evidence of his popularity: the Democratic convention speech that had won him national celebrity, the best-selling books, the magazine covers.

“Really, what else is there to do?” he said in mock innocence. “Well, I guess I could pass a law or something.”

Not bloody likely.

Here's another choice bit:

In 2004, Mr. Obama gained sudden fame and fortune: his convention speech drew a nationwide standing ovation, he won a Senate seat, and he signed a multimillion-dollar book contract. Flush with cash for the first time, he made two financial decisions that cast doubt on his reputation as an anti-corruption crusader. He set up a blind trust for his investments, but sloppily so, managing to put thousands of dollars into a biotech company that was developing a drug to treat avian flu just as he pushed for federal financing to battle the disease.

And he allowed Antoin Rezko, a developer and longtime donor, to acquire and sell him land next to the dream house Mr. Obama was buying in Chicago, even though Mr. Rezko’s name was already cropping up in newspaper articles about corruption.

After all, which of us doesn't own anti-avian flu stock?

Or, how about this:

Critics have used the Rezko incident to question Mr. Obama’s reputation as a reformer, to argue he has few core beliefs. They cite a proposal he made in the Senate for stringent reporting requirements concerning nuclear plant leaks, which he then softened after Republican colleagues and energy executives complained. The bill died in committee. Or the time he joined a bipartisan coalition on immigration reform but backed away when labor groups protested. That legislation collapsed, too.

“He folded like a cheap suit,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and a close ally of Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival.

Most of all, his critics point to his “present” votes in the Illinois Legislature, in which he did not choose sides, avoiding difficult matters like trying juveniles as adults. At least 36 times (out of thousands of votes) Mr. Obama was the only senator to vote “present,” or one of just a few.

Even some of Mr. Obama’s friends call him unusually opaque. After hashing out a question with him, “you may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” said Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia and a former adviser to Palestinian diplomatic delegations. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

But defenders say that Mr. Obama’s reticence is as intellectual as it is tactical.

Yup, that's what Americans look for in their presidents, opacity and indecision.

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WERE THEIR COSTS HALVED?:

Refining loses its lustre (Chris Stanton, October 27. 2008, The National)

Moody’s Investors Service, the global credit rating firm, changed its outlook for the world’s refining sector from “stable” to “negative” on Friday, citing slowing world demand for oil products and a forecasted glut of spare refining capacity.

“While cyclicality is built into our refining outlooks, the move to a negative outlook stems from demand changes that appear to be structural and enduring,” said Andrew Oram, a senior credit officer for Moody’s.

That is bad news for the UAE, which is in the midst of expanding its refinery at Ruwais and studying the feasibility of building a refinery in Fujairah. Together, the two export-orientated projects would add 617,000 barrels per day (bpd) to the country’s current refining capacity of 628,000 bpd.

Moody’s predicted refiners would now on average earn US$10 (Dh36.76) for every barrel of crude oil they converted into usable products like diesel and jet fuel, compared with an average of close to $20 earlier this year.

The downturn marks the end of a long boom period for refiners that began in 2003 as world demand for diesel and other products took off, said Raja Kiwan, an analyst for PFC Energy who is based in Dubai.

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REMEMBER HOW POOR WE ALL WERE IN 2004?:

September new home sales rise by 2.7% (The Associated Press, October 27, 2008)

Sales of new single-family homes rose by 2.7 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 464,000 homes, Commerce said. Economists had expected sales would drop from the August level.

The median price of a new home sold in September declined by 9.1 percent from a year ago to $218,400, the lowest price level since September 2004, a period when home prices were rising rapidly as the country experienced a five-year housing boom.

The surprising increase in September sales still left them 33.1 percent below the level of a year ago as the country is battered by the worst slump in housing in decades.

A correction isn't a burst bubble.

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THOSE WHO CAN NOT JUDGE YOUNG TALENT...:

Stimulus in Pinstripes: Never mind the economy. The Yankees see no choice but to spend their way out of their current predicament. How much for Manny? (Will Leitch, Oct 26, 2008, New York Magazine)

At the end of September, the Yankees re-signed general manager Brian Cashman to a three-year deal that will reportedly pay him $2 million a season (as much as backup catcher Jose Molina, if you’re curious). Cashman, a lifelong Yankees employee who started as an intern, was rumored to be considering jobs elsewhere but returned, in part because leaving now would brand him in the press as a failure, the balding short guy who’s always shaking hands at press conferences with men he’s just made absurdly rich but will never ultimately bring a title back to the Bronx. The pattern started with Mike Mussina in November 2000 and has since included Carl Pavano, Randy Johnson, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Kei Igawa, and, of course, Alex Rodriguez.

What’s interesting about Cashman is that one senses he resents simply shelling out Steinbrenner Bucks to whichever hot new free agent happens to call. Cashman is close friends with Red Sox general manager wunderkind Theo Epstein, who has built the Red Sox into the envy of professional sports. He has done this by investing in the farm system and recognizing that leveraging seasons five years away for an ungallant gallop toward an unlikely postseason today is exactly what landed the Yankees in trouble. Epstein has the payroll, sure, but he runs the team as if he didn’t. The Red Sox featured five players 30 or younger in Game 7 of the ALCS, most of whom are under team control for the next several seasons. That’s the smart way to run a team. Cashman would love to do it.

Two problems. One: Cashman works for the Steinbrenners, who, using the same kind of logic that turned the Knicks into a horror show, consider a season without a World Series title worthy of the racks. But two, and more important: Cashman had his chance. Before last season, Cashman talked about keeping payroll down, trusting his young players, letting the next generation of Yankees take over … essentially acting like Epstein. (Or, for that matter, how the Yankees acted in the early nineties, when a recently reinstated and chastened George Steinbrenner held on to prospects like Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera.) Cashman had his plan in place. He didn’t need a $200 million payroll to field a winning team.

Except, of course, he did. Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy were supposed to be rotation anchors; each imploded, leaving gaping holes filled by the likes of Brian Bruney, Darrell Rasner, Kei Igawa, and Sidney Ponson. (And later, ahead of Cashman’s timetable, Joba Chamberlain.) Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera dropped off dramatically, adding more credence to the notion that Yankees prospects are always of greater perceived value to the Yankees than to any other team in baseball. And those acquisitions signed earlier in the decade to back-loaded contracts? They did what aging players do: They got gimpy (Johnny Damon), declined (Jason Giambi), or both (Jorge Posada). Cashman’s grand reconstruction project ended with the Yankees’ failing to make the postseason for the first time in fourteen years.

Which brings us to this off-season. The Yankees are dropping several huge contracts: Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte, Bobby Abreu (who has implied he’d like to return come back, but probably not at a discount), Ivan Rodriguez, and (finally!) Carl Pavano. Pettitte is expected to return, and Mussina might retire, but the rest of those guys are gone, leaving holes at first base, corner outfield, and possibly catcher. (Jorge Posada being healthy for opening day is far from a certainty.) Sure, they could have filled two of those spots with current Rays (and former Yankees minor leaguers) Carlos Peña and Dioner Navarro. But they let them go. And the rotation is a mess of busted options; Chamberlain and Chien-Ming Wang are penciled in, but they come with glaring question marks themselves. (Adjusting to a full-time spot and recovering from injury, respectively. Oh, and don’t let Joba drive the bullpen car.) The Yankees are further away from a playoff spot right now than they were going into 2008. Cashman’s plan hasn’t worked.

So the Yankees, to steal a phrase, are going to have to spend, baby, spend. The only way out of this mess is to do what got them into it. The free-agent market is loaded this year with exactly what the Yankees need in the short term. On a fantasy shopping list, Mark Teixeira would look gorgeous at first base. Orlando Hudson could push Cano into a utility role. C. C. Sabathia, Ben Sheets, and old tormentor Derek Lowe would be all too willing to cash in and head to the Bronx. If the Yankees are feeling particularly frisky, they could even bring Washington Heights’ Manny Ramirez back home. All of these are options. They’ll probably even take one or two of them. The problem is that, to solve all the Yankees’ short-term problems, they have to do almost all of them.

This, obviously, is not what is best for the long-term health of the Yankees franchise. Ideally, they’d resist overpaying for “name” players and promote from within. But the young players just aren’t there and game-ready; Cashman hasn’t fixed that problem yet. There is no time for that. There’s a new stadium opening, the team has fallen behind the Red Sox and the Rays (and the Blue Jays are closing), and Yankees fans are unlikely to tolerate missing another postseason. Sure, it’ll leave the team hamstrung with awful Pavano-esque contracts in a few years. But they might have no choice, unless they want to throw Kennedy and Hughes to the wolves again. And hey, fans, wouldn’t it be fun to see Manny in pinstripes? It’d certainly drive the papers nuts.

...are condemned to buy old.

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IT'S THE ANTI-PERVERSION PARTY:

What's A Perverse Voter To Do?: Vote McCain to advance top liberal initiatives and the Democratic Party; vote Obama for the health of the GOP and the vindication of Bush. (Jonathan Rauch, 10/25/08, National Journal)

Suppose, then, that you are a perverse voter and in 2008 you want to...

* Give liberals two historic policy victories. Vote for: John McCain.

For liberals, climate change and health care are the overarching priorities of our era. (Good-government types would add entitlement reform, but who cares about them?) Like Social Security and immigration -- only, if anything, more so -- global warming and health care are too large and too politically sensitive to handle on a one-party basis. Both parties must have their fingerprints on any major reform.

If Obama wins, Democrats will be inclined to ram through legislation on their own terms. If so, they would likely fare no better than President Clinton did with one-party health reform in 1993, or President Bush did with one-party Social Security reform in 2005.

If they did manage to enact something without Republican support, chances are it would be unpopular, short-lived, or both. The Republican half of the country would have no stake in making the reform succeed, and the Democratic half would be blamed for whatever went wrong.

To get a new brain, a zombie party usually needs to lose power.

McCain is running on carbon-emissions limits that are not much different from what Democrats want, and his health plan's focus on reducing costs nicely complements the Democrats' focus on expanding coverage. Put him in the White House, and bipartisan action on both fronts is all but guaranteed. Big winners: liberals.

* Restore the Republican Party's health. Vote for: Barack Obama.

What was most telling about McCain's surprise choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was not the Alaska governor's own qualities or the gamble that McCain took in choosing her; it was the Republican base's uncritically adoring reaction. Republicans who might once have wondered where a potential president stands on major issues found it more than enough to know that Palin is a pro-life hockey mom who makes liberals angry and can field dress a moose.

Palinmania was the clearest indication yet, though not the only one, that the GOP is a zombie party. Unable to articulate any coherent or workable governing philosophy, it mindlessly pushes cultural hot buttons, repeats hardwired tropes ("cut taxes cut taxes cut taxes"), nurses tribal resentments, and ostracizes independent thinkers (including, for quite a while, McCain).

Not that the GOP doesn't need some re-focusing, but what the Beltway types can never seem to grasp is that defending the culture is a governing philosophy, indeed the philosophy of the majority. And what the Left wants to do is destroy the culture in order to make people dependent on the State.

Republican leaders--Sarah Palin, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Mitch Daniels?--will spend the next couple years dragging the party back to the compassionate conservatism that provides social security without exacerbating statism: SS reform; universal health care based around HSAs; personalized unemployment insurance; etc.

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ONLY THE VOTERS AND THE ADVERTISERS LIKE HER:

Palin won't go away: If you imagine she's going to settle for quiet obscurity in Alaska after the election, think again (Jonathan Freedland, 10/23/08, guardian.co.uk)

Here are just some of the reasons why she would begin out in front. First, whatever the rest of America thinks of her, she has clearly excited the Republican base – and they are the people who vote in Republican primaries.

Second, she has powerful backers among one faction at least of the conservative intelligensia, namely the men who marked her out as McCain's VP in the first place. They don't mind her obviously limited curiosity or qualifications: they see a willing vehicle for their own ambitions, a woman who has the single quality that no politician can learn or acquire – star power. Besides, she can use the next four years to mug up on, you know, facts and things.

Third, there will be a wave of anger in a post-defeat Republican party and much of it will be directed at the "Washington establishment" types who sided with Barack Obama (from Colin Powell downwards) or at least criticised McCain (such as former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan). Palin will be a perfect receptacle for this anger, because she is the reason so many elite conservatives have broken with McCain.

Her chief problem will be visibility. Alaska is very far away: how can she stay in people's minds, especially in the minds of the media, think-tankers and donors who she would need to start building a campaign operation?

She's ratings gold--tv, radio, and print will trip over themselves to cover her. Just watch what she gets offered for her book.

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DOES THE CREDIT CRUNCH MAKE HIM NOT McGOVERN?:

The Next New Deal: The huge opportunities—and huge risks—of a possible Obama administration. (John Heilemann, Oct 26, 2008, New York Magazine)

It requires no prodigious feat of memory, of course, to see how this dream could come a cropper. Back in 1993, Bill Clinton surfed into Washington on a similar wave of enthusiasm and expectation. Democrats then, too, controlled both the upper and lower chambers on Capitol Hill. The party’s agenda was bold, ambitious, far-reaching. And then everything fell to pieces. In something like a heartbeat, Clinton’s reputation as a Third Way centrist was reduced to rubble. The degree of Democratic political malpractice was so severe that it enabled the GOP, in 1994, to snatch the reins of the House and Senate simultaneously for the first time in four decades. [...]

Late in the afternoon on the second day of the Democratic National Convention, several dozen contemporaries of Obama’s from Harvard Law School more than twenty years ago gathered in a private room at the Denver Ritz-Carlton for a cocktail party–cum–reunion. The mood was warm and convivial but sober in every sense. There was no high-fiving, no backslapping, no whooping or hollering. The bartender reported that he’d never served so few drinks at an open bar; Pellegrino was the only beverage in short supply.

That Obama’s impending coronation as the Democratic nominee occasioned no boisterous celebration on the part of some of his oldest friends was a function of many factors—their Harvardian, type-A tightassedness not least among them. But for some, a deeper source of reserve was a stubborn sense of doubt: not over whether Obama was equipped to be president but whether he could do, would do, what it took to capture the prize. “I was scared,” says one Obama classmate and Democratic activist. “A friend of mine, a big supporter of his all along, wrote me an e-mail that said, ‘Oh, my God, he is McGovern!’ ”

But then came the fall of Lehman, the implosion of AIG, and the constriction of the global credit markets—and the race began to turn. By the end of last week, Obama had assumed a commanding lead in almost every significant national poll. [...]

For Obama, doing the converse—widening the margin, running up the score—is more than a matter of political pride. The scale of his victory will determine the size and scope of the mandate that he can legitimately claim. If Obama racks up the totals currently projected by FiveThirtyEight’s resident numbers guru, Nate Silver, his Election Night tally will be impressive indeed: 52.2 percent of the popular vote (making him the first Democrat to break 50 since Jimmy Carter) and 354 electoral votes (a modest landslide). But equally critical in terms of governing will be another metric: the length of Obama’s coattails when it comes to the House and Senate.

Nobody understands this better than Obama—and so he has been applying ample pressure on the relevant players. “Obama has said to me, ‘If you guys don’t pick up a significant number of seats, it will be far more difficult for me to accomplish the kind of change America needs,’ ” Chuck Schumer tells me. “And he’s right. If we don’t, he would probably have to limit his proposals, let alone what he could reasonably expect to pass.”

For the second election cycle in a row, Schumer is at the helm of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Two years ago, he was widely credited for the party’s success in recapturing control of the upper chamber. Today, his eyes are firmly fixed on a grander prize: picking up the nine seats that Democrats would need to get them to 60, a filibusterproof majority.

On a recent Sunday, I drove out with Schumer to the annual bivalve festival in Oyster Bay, where I watched him both schmooze the crowd and chomp on an ear of corn with equally obscene gusto. When I asked him to rate his party’s prospects of reaching the magic number, Schumer cited—what else?—FiveThirtyEight: “They said there’s an over 50 percent chance that we pick up seven seats, 40 percent that we pick up eight, and 30 that we pick up nine, and that’s probably about accurate.”

Though 60 is Schumer’s holy grail, he contended that getting to 58 or 59 would be almost as good. “Every seat in the Senate makes a difference,” he said. “On an issue like taxes where the Republicans are all locked in together, like the Bush tax cuts, you might need 60. But on an issue where you can pick off one or two, like the Iraq war, you don’t. There are a large number, fifteen or twenty, of what I call traditional conservatives: John Warner, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Dick Lugar, Johnny Isakson, Bob Corker. I think they went along with the hard right for the past eight years grudgingly, because they felt the hard right had the upper hand. But if we get to 57, 58, 59, they’re going to smell the coffee. They’re going to be more pliable than before, more open to our arguments.”

On the House side, Rahm Emanuel radiates a similar brio about the Democrats’ outlook for November. Emanuel ran the party’s Congressional Campaign Committee for 2006, and although he’s graduated to chairman of the caucus, he remains neck-deep in data concerning competitive House contests. “North of 20 and less than 30,” is how Emanuel answers when I ask how many seats he expects his side to gain. “Yesterday I would have said 22, today I’m at 26. The way things are going, I need to keep opening up a bigger band.”

If Emanuel and Schumer are right in their estimations of what’s likely to play out on Election Day, the Democrats will enjoy commanding majorities in the next Congress. So commanding that the temptation will be nearly overwhelming in some quarters to declare 2008 a realigning election: the end of the Reagan-Bush era, the start of the Obama epoch.

It’s worth pointing out that the postulated Democratic numbers for 2009–11—57 to 59 seats in the Senate, 253 to 263 in the House—aren’t all that different from those that obtained in the doomstruck 1993–95 session. [...]

Obama advisers make no bones about why they see all this as essential: Given the unusually crisis-plagued environment into which Obama will be stepping, he will want to move quickly, especially when it comes to selecting his Cabinet. Almost certain to come first, perhaps within days, will be his economic and national-security teams. And with those choices, they say, he will want to send a message of centrism and bi-partisanship. It’s conceivable that Obama will ask Bob Gates to stay on as Defense secretary; Chuck Hagel, too, might find a place high in the administration. But although there has been chatter that Obama might also retain Hank Paulson at the Treasury, the inside betting is on a Larry Summers encore. “They’re gonna want somebody who knows the building, knows the economy, has been confirmed before and been advising them on economics,” says the former Clinton aide. “I’d be flabbergasted if they chose somebody else.”

Once the Cabinet is in place, Obama will turn to congressional relations, and here too the contrast with Clinton is likely to be pronounced. From the get-go, WJC and the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate were at loggerheads. The old bulls regarded him as an outsider, an interloper, a president elected with just 43 percent of the vote—as someone to be pushed around. They informed him in no uncertain terms that they wouldn’t help him pass his promised package of political reforms. They pressured him (along with his wife) to put health-care reform ahead of welfare reform, a fateful blunder.

But Obama has no inbuilt animosity toward the congressional leadership. Sure, he vowed to transform Washington, but he did not run against it. He is surrounded by people—Emanuel, Podesta, former Tom Daschle aide Pete Rouse, and Daschle himself, who stands a reasonable chance of being Obama’s White House chief of staff—steeped in the legislative culture and masters of the legislative arena.

Not that dealing with a pair of institutions led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will be any kind of picnic. “They’re incredibly weak leaders running a Congress with 12 percent approval ratings,” one Democratic think-tank maven says. “They’re not people with much of a record of, you know, actually getting things done.” Making matters worse, Obama will be hounded constantly by the old-school liberal interest groups, with all their bottled-up desires and demands. The unions, the health-care groups, the teachers, and so on: Everyone will have their hand out.

It's natural to focus on the hash that Bill Clinton made of the Democrat majorities, but at least he was re-elected himself. The prior four Democrats to win the presidency couldn't get re-elected. In a conservative country a Democratic presidential victory -- with the exception of FDR's -- is just a way of hitting the pause button.

N.B.: Making Tom Daschle, another legislator, his chief of staff would be disastrous. He needs a strong executive to run his presidency for him, since he probably can't.

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IF THERE WERE A BETTER IDEA WE'D BE DOING IT:

The Robot Proxy War: Bush's man-hunting machines—and Obama's. (William Saletan, Oct. 27, 2008, Slate)

In less than three months, Barack Obama will be president of the United States. How will he change our border war in Pakistan? Not much. We'll keep fighting insurgents there the way we're fighting them today: with aerial killing machines.

Last year, Obama declared that under his presidency, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." John McCain criticized Obama's policy as rash, suggesting it would undermine the Pakistani government. The United States should try covert action in Pakistan "before we declare that we're going to bomb the daylights out of them," said McCain. A month ago, in their first debate, McCain again condemned Obama's position, arguing that the next president should "work with the Pakistani government," not "attack them."

Today, the New York Times reports what's actually going on along the Pakistani border. The report, based on interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials, exposes the Obama-McCain debate as a charade. We're already getting actionable intelligence about terrorist targets in Pakistan. We're already blasting them. And the Pakistani government is working with us to facilitate these attacks. The covert action, the cooperation, and the aerial assaults aren't competing options. They're the same thing.

This is another one where Sarah Palin was right and Maverick wrong.

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YOU SOMETIMES SEE PEOPLE WEARING "I'M WITH STUPID" T-SHIRTS...:

Call It 'The Obama Effect': Why undecided voters will swing to McCain. (Arnon A. Mishkin, 10/27/2008, Weekly Standard)

McCain should win a larger share of undecided voters than Obama, but it has little to do with race.

With Obama outspending McCain by upwards of 4 to 1, getting enormous traction with newspaper editorial boards, generating the enthusiasm to bring out crowds measured in the tens of thousands, and with Palin treated as more of a punch line than a candidate by the press--it seems likely that if voters are not ready to tell a pollster that they are with Obama, they are unlikely to get there.

But the phenomenon of undecided voters' breaking for McCain need not be called the "Bradley effect." Call it the "Bloomberg effect"--where after $100 million of spending, his mayoral challenger was able to capture essentially all of the 10 point undecided vote. Or call it the "Clinton effect"--where almost all the undecided vote swung away from the popular incumbent and went to Bob Dole. Or call it the "Reagan effect"--where even during the Republican 1980 primaries, voters were apparently reluctant to say they were going to vote for the "elderly washed up actor" and he got the preponderance of the undecided vote.

They all amount to essentially the same pattern. Call it "the Social Effect." Where there is a perception that there is a "socially acceptable" choice, respondents who do not articulate it, are likely not to agree with it. Are they lying? Or just genuinely torn about taking that route or another? I am not going to psychoanalyze what is going on in their heads, but in the end, the pattern tends to be that those undecided voters vote against that "socially acceptable" choice.

In fact, we saw a preview of this during the Democratic primaries this year. Typically, Hillary Clinton won substantial majorities of all late deciders (those who decided in the last three days of the primary)--i.e. Obama tended to lose the "undecided vote."

...seldom wearing one that says, "I'm Stupid"

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HEY, POT, YOU'RE BLACK:

ROMNEY ANTI-PALIN (The Prowler, 10/27/08, American Spectator)

Former Mitt Romney presidential campaign staffers, some of whom are currently working for Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin's bid for the White House, have been involved in spreading ant-Palin spin to reporters, seeking to diminish her standing after the election. "Sarah Palin is a lightweight, she won't be the first, not even the third, person people will think of when it comes to 2012," says one former Romney aide, now working for McCain-Palin. "The only serious candidate ready to challenge to lead the Republican Party is Mitt Romney. He's in charge on November 5th."

Romney has kept a low profile nationally since being denied the vice presidential nomination. He is currently traveling for the National Republican Congressional Committee in support of some House members, and has attended events for a handful of other House members who have sought his support, but he has traveled little for the McCain-Palin ticket. "He said the only time he'd travel for us is if we assured him that national cameras would be there," says a McCain campaign communications aide. "He's traveled to Nevada and a couple other states for us. That's about it."

Should McCain-Palin not win next week, Romney is expected to mount another presidential run, though it isn't clear that he has handled himself particularly well since losing the nomination.

Mr. Romney couldn't even win re-election as governor, got buried by a senator in his 70s during the presidential, and is maybe the only MA pol ever to lose the NH primary. He's a non-starter for 2012.

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LET'S FACE IT...:

Senator helped fund organization that rejects 'racist' Israel's existence (Aaron Klein, 10/26/08, South Florida Sun-Sentinel)

The board of a nonprofit organization on which Sen. Barack Obama served as a paid director alongside a confessed domestic terrorist granted funding to a controversial Arab group that mourns the establishment of Israel as a "catastrophe" and supports intense immigration reform, including providing drivers licenses and education to illegal aliens.

The co-founder of the Arab group in question, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, also has held a fundraiser for Obama. Khalidi is a harsh critic of Israel, has made statements supportive of Palestinian terror and reportedly has worked on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group.

In 2001, the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that describes itself as a group helping the disadvantaged, provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, for which Khalidi's wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the AAAN for $35,000 in 2002.

...no one is voting for Barack Obama because they think it will be good for Israel.

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ARMING THE OUTPOSTS OF THE ANGLOSPHERE ISN'T PROLIFERATION:

Widespread fallout from India-US pact (Brad Glosserman and Bates Gill, 10/28/08, Asia Times)

More profoundly, many European officials and defense specialists see the US-India deal as part of a broader effort to reshape the Asian balance of power. Many of them believe the agreement is an attempt to forge a new relationship with a regional power that ultimately aims at balancing China. The perception that Washington is willing to use the NPT as a pawn in a geostrategic game undermines US leadership and diminishes the status of the NPT. Rather than serving as the cornerstone of the global nonproliferation order, the NPT now looks like just another item in a great power's diplomatic toolkit.

The only justification for transnational institutions -- like the World Trade Organization -- is that they are mere tools in our kit.

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ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS:

Anand,Vishwanathan - Kramnik,Vladimir (FIDE World Chess Championship Bonn, Germany (9), 26.10.2008)
World Chess championship: Anand a step closer to the title (Times of India, 27 Oct 2008)

World Champion Viswanathan Anand took another step forward to retain the world crown by taking another draw with challenger Vladim

Anand retained his 3-points lead following the draw with white pieces and is now just a draw away from retaining the crown he won last year in Mexico. The scoreline now stands at 6-3 in Anand's favour with three more games to go.

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• Anglosphere 1:
• Anand En Fuego:
• India's Great Chess Hope

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IF WAGES AREN'T RISING/PRODUCTIVITY FALLING, THERE IS NO INFLATION THREAT:

Financial woes push Fed to eye interest rate cut: Drop would be lowest since '04 (Jeannine Aversa, 10/27/08, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

So far, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues haven't been able to break the vicious cycle, despite hefty rate reductions and a flurry of unprecedented steps aimed at getting credit flowing more freely again.

Mr. Bernanke says he'll use all tools to battle the crisis.

To that end, Fed policymakers are widely expected to lower the central bank's key interest rate at the conclusion of a two-day meeting Wednesday - their last session before the November elections.

Investors and some economists predict that the central bank will drop the rate by half a percentage point to 1 percent. If that happens, it would mark the lowest rate since the summer of 2004. Others, however, think the rate will be cut by a smaller, quarter-point to 1.25 percent.

In turn, rates on home equity, certain credit cards and other floating-rate loans tied to commercial banks' prime rate should drop by a corresponding amount.

A half-point reduction would leave the prime rate at 4 percent; a quarter-point cut would drop the rate to 4.25 percent. Either way, the prime rate would be the lowest in more than four years.

The Fed hopes that lower rates will spur people and businesses to spend again, helping to brace the wobbly economy.

"I think it would be a good faith psychological move," said Richard Yamarone, economist at Argus Research.

With the cost of everything dropping, 4% is usurious,

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• Will the Fed go below 1%

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IT ALL COMES DOWN TO...:

Democracy's beacon (Arnold Beichman, October 27, 2008, Washington Times)

"Decadence begins," wrote the French thinker, Denis de Rougemont, "when people no longer ask, 'What are we going to do?' but rather ask, 'What is going to happen to us?' "

...Freedom vs. Security.

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COUNTRY BOY

Mystery writer Hillerman dies at 83: His novels offered vivid descriptions of Indian rituals and the Navajo reservation. His heroes struggled to bridge the divide between Anglo society and the Dineh people. (Bruce Desilva, 10/26/08, The Associated Press)

Lt. Joe Leaphorn, introduced in "The Blessing Way" in 1970, was an experienced police officer who understood, but did not share, his people's traditional belief in a rich spirit world. Officer Jim Chee, introduced in "People of Darkness" in 1978, was a younger officer studying to become a "hathaali" -- Navajo for "shaman."

Together, they struggled daily to bridge the cultural divide between the dominant Anglo society and the impoverished people who call themselves the Dineh.

Hillerman's commercial breakthrough was "Skinwalkers," published in 1987 -- the first time he put both characters and their divergent world views in the same book. It sold 430,000 hardcover copies, paving the way for "A Thief of Time," which made several best seller lists. In all, he wrote 18 books in the Navajo series, the most recent titled "The Shape Shifter."

Each is characterized by an unadorned writing style, intricate plotting, memorable characterization and vivid descriptions of Indian rituals and of the vast plateau of the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners region of the Southwest.

The most acclaimed of them, including "Talking God" and "The Coyote Waits," are subtle explorations of human nature and the conflict between cultural assimilation and the pull of the old ways.

"I want Americans to stop thinking of Navajos as primitive persons, to understand that they are sophisticated and complicated," Hillerman once said.

Occasionally, he was accused of exploiting his knowledge of Navajo culture for personal gain, but in 1987, the Navajo Tribal Council honored him with its Special Friend of the Dineh award. He took greater pride in that, he often said, than in the many awards bestowed by his peers, including the Golden Spur Award from Western Writers of America and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, which elected him its president.

Hollywood was less kind to Hillerman. Its adaptation of his 1981 novel, "Dark Wind," with Lou Diamond Phillips and Fred Ward regrettably cast as Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, was a bomb.

Tony Hillerman, novelist, dies at 83 (Marilyn Stasio, October 27, 2008, NY Times)

Hillerman's evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers. But although the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with a purpose, he often said, and that purpose was to instill in his readers a respect for Indian culture. The plots of his stories, while steeped in contemporary crime and its consequences, were invariably instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals for a soldier returned from a foreign war to incest taboos for a proper clan marriage.

"It's always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures," Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. "I think it's important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways." [...]

Joe Leaphorn, seasoned and a bit cynical, has a logical mind and a passion for order that reflects his upbringing in the Navajo Way. His code of behavior is dictated by a belief in the ordered, harmonious patterns of life that link man to the natural world. But he is not a fundamentalist in terms of religion; the grizzled skeptic is the holder of a master's degree in anthropology.

Younger and more idealistic than his pragmatic fellow police officer, Jim Chee seeks a more spiritual connection to Navajo tradition. Over the course of several books, he studies to become a hataalii, a singer or medicine man. This ambition often creates friction between the religious faith he professes and the secular rules of criminal justice he is sworn to uphold. Chee first appears in "People of Darkness," Hillerman's fifth novel, as a counterpoint to Leaphorn's cynicism.

Leaphorn and Chee appear in separate novels of Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police series , each novel challenging them with a crime that seems to be entangled in the spirit world yet at the same time starkly rooted in the modern reservation life Hillerman knew so well.

In "Skinwalkers" (1986), Hillerman first brought Leaphorn and Chee together on the same case to offer a fascinating interplay of two different representatives of Navajo culture. In "Skinwalkers," the police officers investigate three murders on the reservation linked only by pellets of bone associated with the murder weapons. Is this an indication that the murders are the work of skinwalkers, witches who can fly and take the shapes of dogs, wolves or other animals? Leaphorn hates witchcraft and holds superstition, unemployment and whisky responsible for much of the suffering endured by his people. But Chee knows the power of forces the science of the white man cannot explain. The detectives blend their special views of the world to solve the case.

In addition to his complex heroes, Hillerman also wrote compassionately and with intimate knowledge of a great range of clansmen from the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes, people with whom he felt a deep affinity because he grew up among those very much like them. "When I met the Navajo I now so often write about, I recognized kindred spirits," he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1986. "Country boys. Folks among whom I felt at ease."

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SINCE AYATOLLAH KHAMENEI OPPOSED HIM FROM THE BEGINNING...:

Iran president's 'exhaustion' stirs speculation over next election: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ill due to overwork, says an associate. Observers downplay rumors that the president, who has many foes within Iran's ruling circle, is being forced out. (Borzou Daragahi, October 27, 2008, LA Times)

[T]he episode shows how openly the knives are out for Ahmadinejad within Iran's ruling circle. On Saturday, parliament moved to impeach pro-Ahmadinejad Interior Minister Ali Kordan, who, according to Iran's Fars News Agency, admitted submitting a fake honorary Oxford law degree as evidence of his qualifications for the job.

Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric and passion for public attention have made him a lightning rod for Western criticism of Iran's nuclear program and its staunch opposition to Israel. However, both policies remain under the purview of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the ranking cleric who is the country's ultimate authority on security and foreign policy.

A group of conservative politicians has joined with more a liberal faction known as reformists to criticize Ahmadinejad's economic policies and brash style as against Iran's interests. Iran's official inflation rate has risen to 29%. Its unemployment rate tops 10%, although independent experts say it is higher.

Ahmadinejad's allies have been walloped by the so-called pragmatic conservatives in recent local and parliamentary elections.

...there was never any chance he'd be re-elected.

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PRETTY EASY:

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds Recipe (Elise.com)

* One medium sized pumpkin
* Salt
* Olive oil

Method

1 Preheat oven to 400°F. Cut open the pumpkin and use a strong metal spoon to scoop out the insides. Separate the seeds from the stringy core. Rinse the seeds.

2 In a small saucepan, add the seeds to water, about 2 cups of water to every half cup of seeds. Add a tablespoon of salt for every cup of water. Bring to a boil. Let simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and drain.

3 Spread about a tablespoon of olive oil over the bottom of a roasting pan. Spread the seeds out over the roasting pan, all in one layer. Bake on the top rack for 20 minutes or until the seeds begin to brown. When browned to your satisfaction, remove from the oven and let the pan cool on a rack.

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POOR BIBI...:

Chance for Netanyahu as Livni talks collapse (Ben Lynfield, 27 October 2008 , Independent)

Claiming Kadima had "proven it does what is right", Ms Livni must now do battle with Mr Netanyahu, who brought the Oslo peace process to a near-halt as prime minister from 1996 to 1999. He has not softened his views since then. They are level in the personal popularity stakes but the right-wing bloc Mr Netanyahu heads is leading in the polls.

Analysts expect the campaign to focus on security. "Generally, people today understand the depth of hostility towards Israel but on the other hand, the belief in Greater Israel is over. If she can prove she is aware of the dangers but at the same time bring a secure settlement, that will help her a lot," said Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, voiced concern that Israel's political turmoil would damage the peace process. "Time is precious. The next few months could be wasted because of new elections and US elections," he said. And Hamas, which controls Gaza, called the snap elections "a slap in the face to those seeking a peace settlement".

Ms Livni served as a chief negotiator during US-sponsored peace talks, relaunched last November.

If she wins, Ms Livni will be the first Israeli woman premier since Golda Meir. She has said repeatedly she supports a Palestinian state. She believes it is in Israel's interest because annexing the West Bank Palestinian population would call into question Israel's demographic character as a Jewish state. Her opponent's likely approach is shown in Likud's campaign posters for next month's Jerusalem municipal elections. They show an earnest-looking Mr Netanyahu, and promise Likud will "safeguard Jerusalem".

Parliamentary elections had not been due until 2010. Commentators have identified 17 February as a likely date. Until then, Mr Olmert will stay in office. "It is not a happy announcement," the Prime Minister said about Ms Livni's decision.

Couldn't he have gotten a couple years in office while W was in charge?

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AND IT'LL JUST KEEP FALLING RIGHT THROUGH ELECTION DAY...:

Lundberg Survey shows gas prices dropping nearly 53 cents nationally over 2 weeks (Associated Press, October 26, 2008)

A national survey shows gas prices continue to decline, tumbling nearly 53 cents a gallon in the last two weeks.

The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline at self-serve stations was $2.78 Friday.

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WHEN EVEN PAKISTAN HAS FUN FIGHTING YOU...:

Pakistan takes town as 'corner turned' in jihadi struggle (Bruce Loudon, October 27, 2008, The Australian)

PAKISTAN claimed a major breakthrough last night in its battle against al-Qa'ida and Taliban militants, announcing the recapture after weeks of fierce fighting of a key junction town in the Bajaur Tribal Agency that is regarded as the centre of gravity for the jihadi onslaught in the country.

Senior army officers described the retaking of Loisam as a turning point in the crucial battle for Bajaur, close to the border with Afghanistan, which has frequently been mentioned as the most likely operational base for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

"The worst is over. I think we've turned the corner," Major General Tariq Khan, commander of the Frontier Corps, which has been leading the huge offensive in Bajaur, told reporters taken under escort to Loisam last night.

They're a long way from the corner, but it's significant that they're realizing how easy the fight is.

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IF MAVERICK MATCHES BOB DOLE'S TEN POINT GAIN...:

Daily Tracking Poll: McCain Inches Up on Economy, but Advantage is Still to Obama (GARY LANGER, Oct. 26, 2008, ABC News)

Head-to-head in voter preference, Obama holds a 52-45 percent lead over McCain among likely voters in interviews the last four days. Obama hasn't slipped below 50 percent support, nor McCain above 46 percent, since early September in ABC/Post polls. [...]

If some tightening in the horse race occurs this week, it wouldn't be surprising; in 1996, amid prime conditions for an incumbent re-election, Bill Clinton led by 19 points in an Oct. 27 ABC/Post poll; that closed to 11 points in the final week. Clinton won by 8.5.

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THE PERFECT LIBERAL ENVIRONMENT?:

The Conservative party wins Lithuanian federal general election (Canadian Press, 10/26/08)

The Homeland Union won both rounds of the election, including the runoff.

The commission says that with 99 per cent of the votes counted, the Homeland Union won 44 seats in the 141-member Parliament.

The governing Social Democrats won 26 seats.

The conservatives are expected to form a coalition with three smaller centre-right parties.

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THE TARGET IS IN DAMASCUS:

US helicopters attack Syrian village, say witnesses (guardian.co.uk, 26 2008)

American military helicopters have tonight attacked an area along Syria's border with Iraq, causing casualties, according to reports on Syrian state TV and from witnesses.

The Syrian foreign ministry has tonight summoned the US charge d'affaires in Damascus to protest at the raid, which took place near the Syrian border town of Abu Kamal.

If the Ba'ath is still in charge in Syria when W leaves office it will mark one of his few major failures.

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MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE LISTENED TO THE SERPENT?:

'Fear of pain' causes big rise in caesareans: Nearly a quarter of all births in Britain last year were by section - up from 9 per cent in 1980. Now a leading midwife says this is 'unacceptably high', and that women lack the confidence to have a natural birth. (Denis Campbell, 10/26/08, The Observer)

There are people who regard how a woman gives birth as a barometer of her womanliness. Some view elective caesareans as a sellout, as evidence that mothers-to-be, afraid of natural childbirth, have taken the easy option. The decision of celebrities such as Victoria Beckham and Christina Aguilera to give birth this way has led to claims that some women are 'too posh to push'.

Now one of Britain's leading midwives has reignited the debate about caesareans. In an interview with The Observer, Louise Silverton, deputy general-secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, has controversially claimed that an increasing number of women under 40 are less prepared to undergo the physical trauma of childbirth than their predecessors, a trend that is pushing up the rate of surgical deliveries.

She argued that 25 per cent of births being caesareans is an 'unacceptably high and needlessly high' figure and that those 170,000 deliveries involve dangers for both the mothers and their babies. In 1980 it was just 9 per cent. While any woman can request the procedure, NHS guidelines say there should be good clinical or psychological reasons.

Silverton believes caesareans have become too easy to obtain, especially the 66,500 procedures - 9.5 per cent - that are planned in advance. 'Society's tolerance of pain and illness has reduced significantly,' she said. 'Women are less tolerant of labour pains because they haven't developed tolerance of pain. For example, if they get period pain they will either take Nurofen or go to their GP.

'Women are trying to remove the symptoms of pregnancy as much as they can. They are seeking to control everything. Choosing to have a caesarean gives you an element of control.'

But she added: 'A caesarean is major abdominal surgery. I don't think women realise that. They see it as just another way of giving birth. They see it as easy. And they think that if they can have an elective caesarean they will have no pain because they haven't been in labour.'

While acknowledging that labour is 'unbelievably painful', Silverton pointed out that the pain is temporary, unlike back pain, gallstones or kidney stones. She also claimed that women under 40 were more likely to have an 'epidural in a way that their predecessors wouldn't'.

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ANYTHING BUT REALITY:

Swords and Sorcery Return to Syndication (BROOKS BARNES, 10/26/08, NY Times)

Before Mr. Raimi went off to turn “Spider-Man” into a multibillion-dollar movie franchise, [Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert] were credited with creating a genre of television beloved (at least for a time) around the globe: the syndicated fantasy action drama. Heavy on dragons and fire — not to mention men in lace-up leather pants and scantily clad women wielding swords — their “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” and “Xena: Warrior Princess” were both pop-culture phenomena in the mid-1990s.

Audiences eventually overdosed on the genre, largely because production companies flooded the market with copycats. At least 65 syndicated one-hour dramas arrived from 1991 to 2000, with entries like “Conan: The Adventurer,” “Highlander” and “The Adventures of Sinbad” borrowing directly from the Raimi-Tapert formula. A changing television business accelerated the genre’s death, and by 2007 there was not a single syndicated drama in production.

With the clutter cleared out — and with local television stations grappling with a sudden need for programming — Mr. Raimi and Mr. Tapert are back. Their syndicated series “Legend of the Seeker,” produced in conjunction with the Walt Disney Company’s ABC Studios, will make its debut on Nov. 1 on stations reaching about 95 percent of the country. Based on the best-selling “Sword of Truth” books by Terry Goodkind, the series combines elements of fantasy and adventure with exotic settings furnished by New Zealand. [...]

Imagine “The Lord of the Rings” Parts 1, 2 and 3 with a (much) lower budget and characters that show more skin, and you’ve got “Legend of the Seeker.”

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CAN'T FIGHT THE FED:

Housing data reinforces Obama's edge: Polling, housing data suggest Americans are voting their home values this election cycle. (Jonathan Lansner, 10/25/08, The Orange County Register)

[I] compared what states were trending for each candidate vs. how housing did in each state. I weighted my results by Electoral College votes, so we'd see the political and economic clout of the more populous states. And here's what we found:

* In the 17 states that are "solid" or "leaning" McCain, according to RealClearPolitics, my spreadsheet tells me that the weighted average home price fell 1.6 percent in a year. That's relatively strong when you note that First American LoanPerformance's overall national index, weighted in the same manner, was down 6.5 percent in the past year.

* In the 24 states plus D.C. "solid" or "leaning" toward Obama, my spreadsheet tells me that the weighted average home price fell 9.1 percent. That's significantly worse than McCain strongholds, as 13 of the 17 worst state home markets are seen by RealClearPolitics in Obama's camp.

* And those seven toss-up states? Curiously, housing performance fell right between the two candidates real estate portfolios, so to speak: weighted average losses for the too-close-to-call states ran 6.4 percent. [...]

Mark Baldassare, CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California, says "it makes perfect sense that there'd be strong correlations" between voting patterns and economic realities like home prices.

"One issue has become absolutely dominant: the economy," says Baldasarre, whose group regularly polls Californians on a host of issues. "I don't think it's about what the candidates are saying. On the economy, I'm not sure they're saying things drastically different. It's about perception."

The housing rebound alone is going t make Americans feel better about the direction of the country next year.

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PUT DOWN THE CRACK PIPE:

Diageo/Hotline Tracking Poll: The Early Line (HOTLINE, 10/26/08)

Let's Agree To Agree. In addition to leading 50-42% overall, Obama also leads men 50-42% and women 50-42%.

Okay, anyone want to take a stab at the highest % of male voters a Democrat has posted since 1980?

ANSWER

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JOE BIDEN'S LUCKY HE ISN'T AN IRANIAN SENATOR:

Top Iran minister faces impeachment (AFP, 26 Oct 2008)

Iran's parliament will move to impeach Interior Minister Ali Kordan for "dishonesty" early November after he confessed to holding a fake Oxford University degree, the ISNA news agency said on Sunday.

"Kordan will face an impeachment vote on November 4," a member of parliament's board, Hamid Reza Hajibabai, was quoted as saying.

Pressure has been mounting on Kordan to quit the cabinet post he took up in August after the prestigious British university denied awarding him any qualification through a representative, as he had claimed.

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ONE FASCINATING PECULIARITY OF AN OBAMA ELECTION...:

Left to PM: Reconsider policies if you want our support (Times of India, 26 Oct 2008)

The Left parties on Sunday virtually rejected Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's desire to work with them in future and asked him to reverse his government's economic policies. [...]

CPI Secretary D Raja said unless the Prime Minister and the Congress-led UPA government reversed its politics and get out of the Indo-US nuclear deal, it would be difficult to work with them.

He said the government should reverse its economic reforms and stop pursuing strategic ties with the US.

...is that pretty nearly the only world leaders he could meet with who aren't moving their states in the opposite political direction are Spain's Zapatero and Israel's Tzipi Livni, who may well be on her way out already, New election looms for Israel (The National, October 26. 2008)

The chances of forming a government were reduced after a powerful ultra-Orthodox party said it would not join a coalition headed by prime minister designate Ms Livni.

Major differences emerged in talks with Shas, the third largest party with 12 deputies, whose support was seen as vital in forming a viable government.

On Friday, Shas said it had failed to secure two key requirements — increased family allowances and a guarantee that the future of occupied east Jerusalem would not be negotiated in peace talks with the Palestinians.

Mr Peres asked Ms Livni on September 22 to form a new government after she was elected Kadima leader to replace the prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has resigned to battle a wave of graft allegations.

Ms Livni, a 51-year-old former Mossad agent, is seeking to become Israel’s second woman prime minister after Golda Meir, who held office from 1969 to 1974.

However, should general elections be scheduled for 2009, polls have indicated they could bring Likud and former premier Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

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THE GRAND AYATOLLAH WILL BE RELIEVING HIM OF THAT BURDEN:

Iranian president has fallen ill (AP< October 26. 2008)

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has fallen ill because of his heavy workload, a close associate told the Iranian state news agency late yesterday.

Parliament member Mohammad Ismail Kowsari, a close ally of the president, told IRNA that Ahmadinejad is feeling under the weather because of the strain of his position. [...]

In the past weeks, supporters of Mr Ahmadinejad have been discussing potential candidates for the next presidential election, implying that the sitting president is not their automatic choice.

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WHY CONSERVATISM IS THEOCONSERVATISM:

Russell Kirk & Postmodern Conservatism (Gerald J. Russello, October 23, 2008, First Things)

The problem Kirk faced, along with most conservatives, was that the Enlightenment, with its universalizing equality, secularism, and blinkered rationality, was already destroying traditional Western culture. How can a tradition be preserved if it is already dissolving into what theorist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity?”

Kirk’s answer was twofold. First, he uncovered (some would say, “created”) a counter-tradition, one that rested not on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the ideological fervor of the French Revolution, or the modern vogue for limitless “rights.” Rather, it began with Edmund Burke’s defense of the lived experience of Britain as a bulwark of liberty and the protection of rights. Moreover, Kirk claimed that this tradition connected Britain and America, and included such varied figures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Henry Newman, Orestes Brownson and Benjamin Disraeli, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, John Adams and W.H. Mallock.

The second strategy was more daring. Kirk was criticized, then and later, for writing in an anachronistic style, one not suited to confronting the seemingly rationalist arguments of liberalism. In order to defend what they thought to be worth conserving, some conservatives believed that they had to engage liberalism on its own terms, in a “dialectic” mode that is foreign to the conservative language of custom and tradition. Kirk rejected this approach.

As early as the 1950s, he had become convinced that liberalism would exhaust itself because it could not inspire and sustain what he called the “moral imagination.” For conservatives to buy into its premises would seal their defeat. Something else would replace liberalism eventually, and Kirk offered a richly imaginative vision of conservatism that could survive liberal modernity’s collapse. One element of that vision was a revived respect for religious faith.

As early as 1982, in an essay for National Review, Kirk suggested that “the Post-Modern imagination stands ready to be captured. And the seemingly novel ideas and sentiments and modes [of postmodernism] may turn out, after all, to be received truths and institutions, well known to surviving conservatives.” He went so far as to state that he thought that it “may be the conservative imagination which is to guide the Post-Modern Age.”

David Hume and Thomas Jefferson accepted that Rationalism was itself irrational and, therefore, the final hope for deriving true wisdom solely by the exertion of your own mind was by the boards, but they were unbothered by this truth because the lives we live in our traditional Stupidity are quite lovely. The Post-Modernism of the Left, their minds undone by the need to accept what God has told us, embraces ugliness instead.

MORE:
-Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism (Peter Augustine Lawler, Fall 2002, First Principles)
-ESSAY: Religious Conscience and Original Sin: An Exploration of America’s Protestant Foundations (Barry Shain, Online Library of Liberty)
-ESSAY: Democracy in Vermont: Small is beautiful in the Green Mountain state (Bill Kauffman, 9/13/04, American Conservative)

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RIGHT PLACE FOR WEATHER:

The Rumble Strips perform in The Current studio (Mary Lucia, October 23, 2008, Minnesota Public Radio)

The Rumble Strips are a London based band whose music has been described as a mix of rock, soul, indie, and pop.

MORE:
-MYSPACE: The Rumble Strips
-VIDEOS: The Rumble Strips (YouTube)
-REVIEW ARCHIVES: Girls & Weather by The Rumble Strips (Metacritic)
-INTERVIEW: BBtv: Russell Porter interviews The Rumble Strips (September 5, 2008, BoingBoing)
-Artist of the Day: The Rumble Strips (ADELE BALDERSTON 10.29.07, Spin)
-SONG OF THE DAY: The Rumble Strips and a Tipsy Wake-Up Call (Christopher Porter, 11/09/07, NPR)

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RESTRIPPING THE ALTARS:

Demeaning Waugh’s hateful, beautiful novel: The new film version of Brideshead Revisited turns Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece of light satire and heavy sentiment into a hymn to a suffocatingly woolly liberalism (Tim Black, Spiked Review of Books)

The charge of pointlessness does touch upon something about this new film version. But it’s not because it has deviated too little from the novel, but too much. And it fails to challenge, to arrest one’s attention, for precisely that reason. That is, by making Catholicism appear so oppressively malignant, by counterposing it to the liberal, live-and-let-live reasonableness of Charles, it panders to the contemporary distrust of commitment, of a belief in something beyond that which exists, religious or otherwise. Or as co-writer Jeremy Brock put it, Brideshead Revisited ‘speaks directly to many of the issues that count as “current” – religious fundamentalism, class, sexual tolerance, the pursuit of individualism’ (1). Brideshead Revisited the film is simply too modern.

To transfigure Waugh’s masterpiece of light satire and heavy sentiment as a hymn to a suffocatingly woolly liberalism comes at a considerable cost. And that is why it is missing something very important. Its name is Hooper.
The Age of Hooper

As peripheral as he may seem, Hooper is central to Brideshead Revisited. He not only bookends the novel’s present, as Charles’s platoon commander, his meaning pervades it. With his ‘flat Midlands accent’, his speech peppered with ‘okey dokeys’ and ‘rightyohs’, and his ‘business experience’, he is to Charles Ryder ‘a symbol of young England’. And it is not an England with which Brideshead Revisited’s narrator is particularly enamoured. Later, while reading of the deaths of Lady Marchmain’s brothers during the First World War, Charles reflects: ‘These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures.’ This ascendant breed, borne aloft by the secular religion of commerce, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, are literally repulsive to Charles.

If the age of Hooper is fast encroaching, the philistine has his barbarian accomplice in the figure of Rex Mottram. The film reduces him to crude malevolence, a man willing to trade his wife, Julia, for a couple of Charles’s paintings. Waugh’s image is more benign, but no less damning. Belonging to the ‘harsh, acquisitive world’ so rudely intruding upon the Arcadian environs of Brideshead, he is characterised by Julia as someone so ‘absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was whole.’ His sort could not, as the allusion to Matthew Arnold intends, ‘see life whole and see it steadily’.

And it is this, the one-sidedness of his character, his inability to see life not just in its material but in its spiritual aspect, too, that Waugh, following Arnold and Forster before him, portrays as modern man’s failing. All is ratio and ceaseless activity, calculating and doing; there is no contemplation, no intellect. The Rexs of this world are not evil or malicious, then. They, like Hooper, simply lack ‘intellectual curiosity, or natural piety’. Without at least the longing for faith, the world of Hooper is incapable of grasping just how forsaken it is.

Brideshead, from the magnificence of its coffered and carved roof, the columns and entablature of the central hall, to the attached chapel, is a symbolic counterpoint. For the young Charles it’s a haven, a world of enchantment and of faith barracked against the impending spoliation at the hands of the world of Hooper. For this, not Catholicism, is the ‘whisper of doom’ that clings so darkly to the Marchmains. And so, at the very end, with the army now encamped at Brideshead, it comes to pass. Charles thinks to himself: ‘Year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended [Brideshead], year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedt sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’

So why is Hooper is so important to the vision of Brideshead Revisited? Because without him, the Marchmains, and their attendant Catholicism, lose their symbolic meaning. They appear, as they do in the film, as little more than self-imposed prisoners of their faith. But with Hooper, indeed, in the context of the ‘age of Hooper’, the meaning becomes clear. The Catholic Marchmains, ensconced in their stately refuge Brideshead, enshrine all that modernity is apt to sweep asunder.

That this refuge, always described retrospectively, is no more, lends the novel’s languor – its lyrical, swooping passages of sometimes too-purple prose – not just its power, but its meaning. For in dwelling upon those ‘spots of time’, as Wordsworth would have it, they redeem Charles from the wreckage of his grey, meaningless present. The act of invocation has a near transcendent quality. Hence ‘Brideshead’ is ‘a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted later years began to take flight’. Brideshead Revisited, like the similarly disenchanted A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, is an art of memorial, the redemption of a vanished world.

What's interesting is that the same longing animates George Orwell's Coming Up for Air, making him a reactionary against the socialism he publicly advocated.

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SOARING OVER THE SHALLOWS:

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: An Iranian-American writer looks beyond the stereotypes: a review of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran by Hooman Majd (Joseph Richard Preville, October 24, 2008, CS Monitor)

Majd shows that Iran suffers from many of the same problems as the “decadent” West: AIDS, abortion, prostitution, and alcoholism. Majd believes that many Iranian social taboos are slowly fading away as a more open and democratic Iran is emerging.

“The Ayatollah Begs to Differ” is notable for challenging the persistent stereotypes of Iran – the shrieking fundamentalists, stern clerics in black turbans, and women imprisoned in chadors. According to Majd, these are outdated symbols for lazy observers, and Iran is not portrayed as an Islamic penal colony in his three-dimensional portrait.

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A VERY NEARLY PERFECT STORY:

Homosexual Soccer Players Destroy Photo of Bella's Eduardo Verastegui in Press Conference (Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, October 23, 2008, LifeSiteNews.com)

Verastegui's support of California's Proposition 8, which would amend California’s constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman and overturn the judicial activist decision approving homosexual "marriage" in the state, is likely to have a serious impact on the voting in November. "Verastegui is very well known among Latinos for his role in 'Bella', and other telenovelas," noted Maria Ramirez of Viva la Familia.

Verastegui is also participating in advertisements in favor of California's Proposition 4, which would require parental consent for abortions for minors. Pro-lifers believe that they may narrowly win because of strong Hispanic support for the measure.

Tri Gay, which bills itself as "Mexico's Gay Soccer Selection," is composed of homosexual activists who seek to legitimize the homosexual lifestyle in Mexico. They participate in "gay" soccer tournaments including the "Gay-Lesbian World Cup," and the "World Outgames" (scheduled for 2009 in Denmark).

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LIKE BEING A BUSH VOTER AT A FACULTY PARTY:

The Opera's New Clothes: Why I walked out of Doctor Atomic. (Ron Rosenbaum, Oct. 24, 2008, Slate)

Since I had recently been to Hiroshima and am working on a book about the new face of nuclear warfare, I'd been thinking about the nuclear version of the Faustian dilemma. Especially about the phenomenon of ineradicability. Faust signs his contract with the devil—in which he agrees to give Lucifer his soul when he dies in return for being granted all earthly wishes—with a pen dipped in his own blood. But, predictably, when it comes time to carry out his part of the bargain and descend to hell, Faust cries out for a reprieve, for divine mercy.

At the end of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, when Faust's ticket to hell is about to be punched, he cries out:

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul ...

It is one of the most heart-rending pleas in literature. But no mercy is forthcoming. Faust offers to burn his books in exchange for divine mercy, because his lust for knowledge—here's the Oppenheimer parallel—the knowledge he thought the devil could bestow on him was the reason he sold his soul.

It's too late. Books can be burned, but information cannot be destroyed. Similarly, it's too late for us. Nuclear bombs can be banned, but the knowledge—the equations—required to remake them cannot be eradicated. Oppenheimer was among the first to realize this. Once the spells for conjuring up the nuclear devil had been written down, they could be erased but not eliminated, deleted but not destroyed. They had entered the world and the world had entered hell.

Exciting stuff, then: Faust, Oppenheimer.

What material for transformation into tragic operatic art! Or so one would think, until one actually sees Doctor Atomic or, as I think of it now, the Emperor's New Opera.

There is some lack of clarity in the program about the opera's authors; it was conceived by John Adams (composer of the previous contemporary-history operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, about the murder of an elderly, wheelchair-bound Jew by Palestinian terrorists) and produced for the Met by Penny Woolcock. But the libretto has largely been "written," if that's a verb you can apply to this text, by theater and opera director Peter Sellars, who has compiled an assemblage of quotes from books and documents interspersed with the work of noted poets and dialogue of provenance uncertain to me.

Adams and Sellars have chosen to focus on the days before the first Los Alamos test, less than a month before the bomb was used on Hiroshima. And on the conflicts among—and within—the atomic scientists assembled by Oppenheimer.

I was expecting something powerful and sophisticated. And the music and the sets couldn't have been more effectively dramatic.

But the libretto, the words ... They were pedestrian, speechifying, and painfully simplistic (when not embarrassingly schlocky as in the "love scenes"). Yes, it's true, opera librettos comprise their own genre. Opera lyrics are not poetry. But these ones suffer in particular from the contrast between the pretentious grandiosity of operatic treatment and the actual, disappointing content. And "singing" relentlessly dull prose does not raise it to the level of art. Instead it makes everything sound—forgive me—bombastic.

Imagine, if you will, starting at the top of this column and "singing" it, intoning it with a tuneless, stentorian, pompous affect.

Come on, try! Give it your best mock operatic treatment:

Does this ever happen to you:
You discover key forgotten elements
In over familiar fables ...

Now imagine these (admittedly pedestrian) words being performed on what looks like a multimillion-dollar set by a male chorus making dreadfully hammy gestures at one another?

No, that still doesn't capture it. To appreciate the bad poetry of this libretto, you must see how it veers from the utterly pedestrian—

[Deep operatic voice] Well how do you feel?
[Less deep operatic voice] Well, pretty excited.

—to the consciously "poetic." Not merely when the libretto uses actual poetry taken from Donne and Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, but when it give us lines like:

The hackneyed light of evening
Quarrels with the bulbs ...

Who or what is being "hackneyed" here? Sellars does not make it clear in his libretto what—if anything—he wrote and what he "appropriated." But clearly he has a career as a curator of bad poetry. His "appropriations" sound fake-profound when not merely ridiculous (the way they might not sound in context). Even Donne's "Holy Sonnet," which is magnificent, is mangled.

I found myself sitting stunned in the well-dressed opening-night crowd. Rarely an operagoer myself (I prefer poetry and drama without orchestral distractions), I'd nonetheless always respected operagoers for what I presumed to be their sophisticated taste. What amazed me was the respectful, reverent, awed look on the faces of the crowd around me. I could glimpse them most clearly when the lights came up for intermission.

Virtually all of the other faces in the audience had this somber, awed, this-is-important-art-we-are-witnessing look. A look of suffering: "We are weighed down by the terrible profundity of it all. We're in the Metropolitan Opera, for God's sake. This thing must be profound!"

But then I recalled these lines from the "love scene" between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty:

... only my fingers in your hair, only, my eyes
splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love ...

I'm sorry to have to say it, but there are an abundance of lyrics like this in the libretto, which made Doctor Atomic begin to seem like the Spinal Tap of opera. (And, yes, I get it: "Splitting the skull" is like splitting the atom! Stop cringing; it's literary! No, sorry: It's ludicrous.)

I have rarely felt so alone as I felt at that intermission. I felt like the kid in "The Emperor's New Clothes." Do words not matter in opera? It's not something I'd thought about, because opera is so often in a foreign language, which discourages close reading. But I began to wonder whether opera follows different rules: Because words are sung, do they transcend any bombastic triviality, any wounding awfulness? Do opera buffs believe words don't need to be well-chosen but are elevated to poetic heights merely by the sonorities, or snore-ities, that they are "sung" to? In Europe, they boo lustily at badly sung arias. What is one to do in America at offensively trivializing words?

In any case, the next evening as I was talking about my "Emperor's New Clothes" feeling, Julia Sheehan told me she'd recently reread the original Hans Christian Andersen fable and found an aspect of it that she (and I) had forgotten.

She'd always wondered, she said, why everyone in the fable went along with the gag and no one but the little boy spoke up and said the emperor was naked.

Well, I said, you know, conformity, peer pressure, fear of punishment, right?

Turns out there was another element: In the Andersen version, everyone was told ahead of time that the emperor's new costume was so radical and different that stupid people wouldn't even be able to see it. And nobody wanted to be considered stupid. Which reminded me of a feeling I often have at overhyped Broadway dramas about "important" subjects: The applause you hear at the end is the audience applauding itself. Just for being there at what they've been told is such an important artistic event. Stupid people wouldn't understand.

That had to be it! With the entire apparatus of cultural capital supporting the idea that it was important and profound and thus good to be there in the luxuriant rosy glow of the nation's premier opera house, their assumptions cushioned by the Met's velvet seats, how could one dissent? If you didn't think you were witnessing greatness, you marked yourself as mentally challenged.

The problem being that very few composer are similarly gifted in the literary field. It's why Gilbert and Sullivan are underestimated.

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THE SCENE THAT COMES TO MIND...:

What Have We Created?!: Obama's supporters have high expectations, and they may expect to have a voice in governing. (Howard Fineman, 11/03/08, NEWSWEEK)

Much of America may be gung-ho about putting more troops into Afghanistan, but it's not clear Obamaworld is; he could run into opposition if he seriously pursues it. On the other hand, initiating talks with Iranian and Venezuelan dictators enjoys more support on his e-mail lists than in the rest of the country. If the Democrats win bigger majorities in the House and Senate, they (if not Obama) may well be eager to exact vengeance on Republicans, or at least cram Democratic ideas down GOP throats. Obama supporters might prefer more reaching-out. As Marshall sees it, most of them want a "transpartisan" approach that jettisons the old labels. "These people feel a close, personal tie to Obama, just as conservatives did to Reagan," he says. "But if and when he starts governing, he is going to start disappointing them."

At that point, the names on those voter and e-mail lists may start talking to each other, and may start saying things that Barack Obama—and White House aides hunched over their computers—don't want to hear. That's when we'll know how "trusting" an organization it really is.

...is from The Godfather, with Kate looking down the hallway at Michael as the door closes and she realizes that nothing has changed.

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EVEN FUNNIER THAN THE PARSING...:

Fact check: Would Obama's tax rates be less than Reagan's ? (CNN, 10/24/08)

[Brian Deese, deputy economic policy director of the Obama campaign] said the campaign projects that under Obama a median-income family of four will pay an annual effective income tax rate of 4.32 percent. That number, Deese said, comes from the campaign's calculations based on projections in the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of the candidates' tax plans.

According to Tax Policy Center historical data, a rate of 4.32 would be lower than during the Reagan years, when average rates for a median-income family of four ranged from 11.79 in 1981 to 9.30 in 1988. By comparison, rates during the Bush administration have ranged from 6.71 percent in 2001 to 5.91 last year. [...]

Deese also cites Obama's proposed capital gains rate of 20 percent for families earning over $250,000. That would be lower than the 28 percent capital gains rate Reagan signed into law in 1986. Currently the top capital gains rate for taxpayers in that income group is 15 percent, according to Williams of the Tax Policy Center. [...]

The Verdict: Misleading. While Obama says that his tax rates will be lower than under Reagan, according to his economic adviser he is referring to specific rates out of the many rates in the tax system. Also, it is not clear how many taxpayers would qualify for the lowest projected income tax rates.

...is the fact that it s W who has set the minimalist tax bar, not the Gipper, but a Democrat can hardly credit the former.

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WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

Is Richard Dawkins still evolving? (Melanie Phillips, 23rd October 2008, The Spectator)

On Tuesday evening I attended the debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox at Oxford’s Natural History Museum. This was the second public encounter between the two men, but it turned out to be very different from the first. Lennox is the Oxford mathematics professor whose book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is to my mind an excoriating demolition of Dawkins’s overreach from biology into religion as expressed in his book The God Delusion -- all the more devastating because Lennox attacks him on the basis of science itself. In the first debate, which can be seen on video on this website, Dawkins was badly caught off-balance by Lennox’s argument precisely because, possibly for the first time, he was being challenged on his own chosen scientific ground.

This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said:

A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could.

Anthony Flew, the celebrated philosopher and former high priest of atheism, spectacularly changed his mind and concluded -- as set out in his book There Is A God -- that life had indeed been created by a governing and purposeful intelligence, a change of mind that occurred because he followed where the scientific evidence led him. The conversion of Flew, whose book contains a cutting critique of Dawkins’s thinking, has been dismissed with unbridled scorn by Dawkins – who now says there is a serious case for the position that Flew now adopts!

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THE FRONT-RUNNER:

To Know Her Is To Respect Her: The great Palin divide. (Fred Barnes, 11/03/2008, Weekly Standard)

Lorne Michaels is the longtime executive producer of Saturday Night Live. Sarah Palin appeared on SNL in mid-October, after which Michaels noted, "Her politics aren't my politics." But that wasn't all he said. "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated," Michaels told EW.com. "I watched the way she connected with people, and you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."

Randy Ruedrich, the Republican chairman in Alaska, is someone you might suspect would be a friend and ally of Palin. He isn't. She helped drive him off the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, criticized him publicly, and later tried to get him ousted as party chairman. Ruedrich is part of the "body count" of male politicians Palin left behind as she rose to become governor of Alaska. Yet Ruedrich says Palin is smart, very capable, and a political star.

Ruedrich isn't alone among Alaska politicians who take a cold-blooded view of Palin. Another Republican who has followed her career closely believes Palin has a ruthless streak. Yet this person, too, regards Palin as a rare talent with the skill and self-confidence to be a national political leader. And Palin's Alaska acquaintances were certain, from the moment she became John McCain's vice presidential running mate, that her acceptance speech would be a smashing success and she'd have little trouble in her debate with Joe Biden. Turned out they were right.

The Beltway Right has trouble grasping that the candidate who connects with people beats the one who connects with them.

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CHECKERS?:

NAFTA wisdom: Mexico has offered the U.S. an opportunity to hold it to its word on labor, trade and immigration. (Houston Chronicle, Oct. 23, 2008)

The nation's 44th president will be welcomed to the Oval Office by a willing and able partner in Mexico. But that country's leadership will also greet the new commander in chief with a blunt message on trade and, by inference, immigration: Don't mess with NAFTA.

The Mexicans deserve a careful hearing on this; NAFTA merits a less cavalier and more focused approach than generally shown on the presidential campaign trail. Despite the sniping of critics on both the left and right, NAFTA has brought proven benefits across North America.

Renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement on short notice would throw a "monkey wrench" into North America's economic works, Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to Washington, told the Chronicle editorial board on a Houston visit Tuesday. Sarukhan also expressed skepticism that immigration would be solved in the first 100 days of a new U.S. administration but voiced hope that a grand bargain could be retooled as soon as the second year. He called on the two countries to "play chess rather than checkers" and to think strategically on trade and immigration.

How about just not playing the dozens?

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THE BEST THING ABOUT THE NEXT GOVERNMENT...:

McCain, Obama agree on immigration (Dave Montgomery, 10/23/08, MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS)

Earlier this month, the Pew Center estimated the undocumented population at 11.9 million. From 2000 to 2004, approximately 800,000 illegal immigrants a year crossed the U.S.-Mexican border in search of work, but over the past three years, the average has fallen to 500,000 a year, Pew reported.

McCain and Obama appear to be in basic agreement on the most controversial aspect of immigration. Both advocate a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, with conditions. Those who qualify, however, would have to go to the "back of the line" behind other applicants for legal residency.

Obama would require undocumented immigrants to pay a fine and learn English. McCain would impose those requirements too, and he thinks that illegal immigrants should pay back taxes and pass a citizenship course.

Until the onset of the 2008 presidential race, McCain won accolades among pro-immigrant groups for the McCain-Kennedy bill and his support of Bush's initiatives. But some pro-immigration leaders are taking a second look after McCain, as a candidate, retooled his immigration strategy to insist on securing the U.S. borders before moving forward with legalization and other aspects of immigration reform.

...is certainly the 12 million new American citizens.

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IT'S BEEN THIRTY YEARS...:

McCain's Private Visit With Chilean Dictator Pinochet Revealed For First Time (John Dinges, 10/24/08, Huffington Post)

John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that. In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.

The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere.

According to a declassified U.S. Embassy cable secured by The Huffington Post, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism."

...has Mr. Dinges still not read Dictatorships and Double Standards? Here's a handy guide to the difference between William Ayers and Augusto Pinochet: the Left has to publicly disavow what Ayers did while the Right is proud of what the General did, save Chile from communism and make it a thriving democracy.

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THAT'S RICH:

Questions for Christopher Buckley: The Right Stuff (Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON, October 23, 2008, NY Times)

What would your father, who died at his desk, in Stamford, Conn., in February, have made of all this?

It’s very tricky to try to channel one’s dad’s ghost. Look what happened to Hamlet. But I think he would have been appalled by the Palin nomination, frankly. I don’t think he would have viewed her as presidential material.

He's not necessarily wrong, but his father and uncle basically invented Barry Goldwater who was viewed nearly identically to Governor Palin by other urban elites. All that's changed is that the family became part of the Eastern Establishment it used to loathe.

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IF IT BOTTOMS WITH PRICES THIS HIGH IT, BY DEFINITION, WASN'T A BUBBLE:

A Turn in the Housing Market? (Dennis Byrne, 10/24/08, Real Clear Politics)

Is it possible that the housing market has turned?

Blamed for just about everything bad that has happened recently to the economy, housing sales, I dare say, are showing signs of picking up. At the risk of being considered a lunatic, I say this for reasons of systematically gathered data, personal experience and common sense.

First the data, which hasn't and won't get as much attention they deserve, considering the fact that everyone has been blaming the dismal housing market for as far back as recent memory can take us. The good news is that the National Association of Realtors said sales of existing-home sales--including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops--for September jumped 5.5 percent higher over the previous month. They are1.4 percent higher than September 2007. That's the first time that sales have risen compared to a year earlier since November 2005.

Could this be a turnaround? Let's look at another NAR measure: its "pending sales of existing homes" index most forward-looking barometer of residential sales because it records a sale when a contract is signed, rather than at closing, which can be months later. In August, the latest month available, it rose 7.4 percent over July. More significantly, that's 8.8 percent higher over August 2007. These are the kinds of numbers that should be on the front page over every newspaper in the country--but they weren't.

Just another indicator of how easy the next president has it economically.

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THE AUTOPEN PRESIDENCY:

Point of No Return: Will we vote for the same soothing siren song as our enervated allies? (Mark Steyn, 10/25/08, National Review)

“People of the world,” declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people — the Barack Obamas of the day — were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – ie, the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex — voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present”, you can stand down.

Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from “community organizer” to the world’s President-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the “Now what?” questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance.

There's a really funny story this week about just how much of a figurehead even his own party expects the Unicorn Rider to be, Kennedy working on healthcare initiative (UPI, 10/24/08)

U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has been working from his sick bed with lobbyists and lawmakers to craft a bipartisan healthcare package, aides said

Kennedy's goal is to introduce a universal healt