CBC projects Conservative government (Andrew Davidson, 10/14/08, CBC News)
Canadians have re-elected Stephen Harper's Conservatives, but it is still unclear whether the party will gain enough seats across the country to form a majority government, CBC News projects.The Tories' fortunes were buoyed early in the evening by surprising gains in Atlantic Canada, especially in New Brunswick, despite the party being shut out in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Meanwhile in Ontario, early returns suggested vote-splitting was cutting into Liberal support in the party's traditional heartland.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and the Canadian Press both projected Tuesday night that the Conservatives would return to Parliament with at least 142 seats, up from 127 seats they held when the last Parliament was dissolved in September. A party needs 155 seats for a majority."I'm very delighted we've been given a second mandate," Conservative senator and campaign co-chair Marjory Lebreton told CTV. "I'm very optimistic about what's going to happen the rest of the night."
The big loser was Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion, whose party looked set for its worst showing in at least 20 years and who was now expected to either resign or face a challenge to his leadership.
"I think Dion will resign," said University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman. "It's Conservative gains, Liberal losses, and the Liberals look very weak."
With the global freezing-up of credit markets last month and the collapse of stock prices, the economy emerged as the most important issue in the election. Harper campaigned as having kept the worst of the crisis out of Canada. He was also helped by splits on the left between three rival parties.
In some ways, the campaign here was overshadowed by the electioneering underway in the United States. One of the debates here took place on the same night as the American vice presidential debate, which is believed to have attracted more Canadian viewers and interest.
"A lot of our citizens pay more attention to what's happening in your election than to ours," Wiseman said.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=c88cdfa3-d98c-427c-9dd1-ee0d123c47e9)
National Review Crackup! (Timothy Noah, Oct. 14, 2008, Slate)
[Rich Lowry] on NRO, says there was nothing to resign from because it was a temporary gig and the guy he was subbing for was now back in the saddle. The writer, Steyn, had been otherwise engaged on account of being prosecuted for hate speech in Canada over a McLean's article that predicted dire consequences from Muslim immigration throughout Europe. On Oct. 10, Steyn beat the rap (his article was found not to "rise … to the level of hatred and contempt," which sounds to me like a backhanded insult; click here for the decision) and was therefore once again available to write for NR's back page.
Obama FAQs (Occidental College)
Barack Obama attended Occidental College from fall 1979 through spring 1981 and then transferred to Columbia University in New York. He is not a graduate of Occidental, however, the Occidental College bylaws state that anyone who completes at least eight courses of undergraduate work (or a year of graduate studies) is eligible for alumni status.
Can Obama Reform Healthcare? (Trudy Lieberman, October 27, 2008, The Nation)
During the campaign Barack Obama has talked about healthcare on and off--more on during the primary campaign, when Hillary Clinton pushed him about whether people should be required to buy insurance; more off when healthcare has been eclipsed as a red-hot issue, such as during the financial crisis. When he has talked about healthcare, his oratory has been short on details and punctuated by twin themes: a call for universal coverage and for reducing the average family's insurance premium by $2,500. Obama has consistently stuck to those points, even though there has been little media examination of what they really mean and, more important, whether they are achievable.For starters, Obama's plan is not a true universal health insurance model like the ones found in the rest of the developed world, a point many people do not understand because the word "universal" has been so misused in the campaign by candidates as well as the media. In the national health insurance systems of other countries, citizens are entitled to healthcare as a basic right, and everyone pays taxes to fund the services they receive. Those systems are universal and accountable to the public, not to shareholders of private companies, which is the case in the United States. Medical costs are more tightly controlled, and most of those truly universal systems deliver better care at far less cost than the US system. Obama has repeatedly rejected an immediate shift to such a system, generally called "single payer" in America; in an August town hall meeting in Albuquerque, he said, "Given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs, you've got a whole system of institutions that have been set up." When a voter asked, "Why not single payer?" Obama replied that people don't have time to wait for such a truly universal plan: "They need relief now. So my attitude is, let's build up the system we got, let's make it more efficient. We may over time--as we make the system more efficient and everybody's covered--decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively."
Obama and his health advisers propose to make the system more efficient and cover everybody by enhancing the country's so-called public-private partnership. In effect, the Obama plan, by offering subsidies to those who are uninsured, would deliver more business to companies already profiting handsomely from the peculiarly American system of health insurance. If his plan survives the legislative process and all works according to his policy prescriptions, somehow the country will get closer to universal coverage. Millions of people, however, will still be left out--unable to qualify for the public programs yet also unable to afford the ever increasing premiums of private ones. The exact number was a matter of contention during the primaries.
(1) Kramnik,Vladimir - Anand,Vishwanathan [D14] (FIDE World Chess Championship Bonn, Germany (1), 14.10.2008)
Hopes Quickly Fade For a Postpartisan Era (GERALD F. SEIB, 10/14/08, Wall Street Journal)
Idealists once looked at this presidential campaign, between two candidates who fancy themselves as free of conventional party ties, and thought it might produce the election that finally pulls Washington out of the deep rut of partisan divisiveness it fell into in the 1990s.Today, three weeks before Election Day, it sure doesn't look that way.
Instead, partisan animosity is growing rather than waning. Democrats charge, essentially, that the McCain campaign is engaging in character assassination against their candidate, Barack Obama. The Republican National Committee says it is spending $2 million to beef up security at campaign offices because of acts of vandalism and "violent intimidation tactics" by Obama supporters. Campaign rallies are turning ugly; charges of racism are starting to appear.
Pollster Peter Hart has found some startling new evidence of high tensions. In surveying voters over the weekend, Mr. Hart found that more than a third of each candidate's supporters say they have grown to "detest" either John McCain or Sen. Obama so deeply that they would have a hard time accepting the one they don't support as president.
Sorry, Dad, I Was Sacked (Christopher Buckley, 10/14/08, The Daily Beast)
The mail (as we used to call it in pre-cyber times) at the Beast has been running I’d say at about 7-to-1 in favor. This would seem to indicate that you (the Beast reader) are largely pro-Obama.As for the mail flooding into National Review Online—that’s been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.
I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn’t want to put NR in an awkward position.
Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land.
Oil falls below $80 on demand, recession concerns (Matthew Robinson, 10/14/08, Reuters)
U.S. crude traded down $1.60 to $79.59 a barrel in choppy trade by 2:07 p.m. EDT, after hitting $84.83 earlier as commodities and stock markets rose on moves by governments to rescue banks gave investors a brief respite.
...they sent us a widget so you can watch it here:
Sweet!
Our review of the BBC original is here, but it contains spoilers, so beware.
Republican rallies: the myth of a crazed mob: The liberal media’s depiction of McCain supporters as a Weimar-like gang of rednecks shows their own fear of the white working class. (Sean Collins, 10/14/08, Spiked)
[T]hese fears are not expressions of reasonable concerns about Obama’s security: as Obama himself notes, he has presidential-like security, and the odds of anything happening remain extremely low (although, of course, it is always a possibility, as with any candidate). Instead, his supporters’ worries really represent their fears of the white working-class population. The Democrats – once seen as the party of the mass of working people – are cut off from, and suspicious of, what once was their base of support. Rather than living among the working class and representing its interests, they are distant and live in fear of it.Even the criticisms of McCain and Palin for using inflammatory rhetoric that could ultimately result in violence are, at bottom, condemnations of the working class. Critics are essentially saying: don’t McCain and Palin know that they are playing with a dangerous group that is easily led to violence? Liberals know that the idea that Obama is a terrorist is absurd, that most people don’t believe it to be true, and even that the McCain campaign is not explicitly saying such a thing. But some of them worry that there is a mob out there that is stupid enough to take McCain’s and Palin’s criticisms of Obama as a cue to become violent.
You can blame the McCain camp for many things, including running a lacklustre campaign that has very little to say about the key issues of our time, such as the financial crisis. You can also say that McCain’s decision to ‘go negative’ and attack Obama’s character smacks of desperation (if this was such an important issue, why wait until the last few weeks to bring it up?). But it’s not true, as many have suggested, that he and Palin seek to incite violence against Obama. Yes, Palin does use the word ‘terrorist’ when she tells her line about Obama and Ayres, but there’s a very long way from that to saying ‘Obama is an Islamic terrorist’.
At the beginning of the week many wondered how the Obama campaign would defend itself from the McCain attacks. In the event, they did not have to answer direct challenges, because all of the focus was on the Republican rallies. With allies from the media, they have managed to depict any McCain and Palin reference to Ayres or Obama’s qualifications in general as being tantamount to inciting violence. But in reality, the Obama campaign and its supporters are the ones who have incited fears – fears of a dangerous, reckless white working class. This may work to get their man elected in November, but it comes at the price of further alienating a group that is sceptical about, if not outright hostile, to the Democrats. Thus the Democrats may find that they win the election battle, but, in doing so, they have damaged their chances of winning the governing war.
New Hands Detonate ‘Doctor Atomic’ (MATTHEW GUREWITSCH, 10/12/08, NY Times)
In its prior incarnation, available on an Opus Arte DVD drawn from the Amsterdam performances, “Doctor Atomic” was vintage Sellars. On a virtually bare stage the chorus would charge to the footlights, harangue the audience, then disperse with ferocious intensity. There were passages of the patented Sellars semaphore: big, jagged physical gestures externalizing emotions already seismic in the score. And dancers, flung into motion by Lucinda Childs, tore through the action, signifying — what? Subatomic particles whizzing through infinite or infinitesimal space?“The dancers were the weather,” Mr. Sellars said. “I can’t bring the wind, the precipitation into the theater.”
Without changing their nondescript costumes, they also doubled as laboratory scientists, performing intricate mechanical operations at high speed. And at a climactic moment they stood in for the Pueblo Indians of the area, stamping the earth in the summer sun to prompt their buried ancestors to release life-giving rain. This was in counterpoint to the general’s panic at the threat of electrical storms that might turn the experiment into a fiasco. But how many viewers could unravel these cross-references?
Ms. Woolcock’s imagination feeds less on big ideas than on concrete detail, as in her film of “Klinghoffer.” In the story that made headlines everywhere, Palestinian terrorists hijack the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro, murder an invalid American tourist and toss his corpse overboard in his wheelchair. In Mr. Sellars’s hands this played as ritual. Ms. Woolcock’s film reinvented the action as docudrama, losing some splendid choral music in the process. It was said back then that the producers had insisted on reducing the running time.
“No,” Ms. Woolcock said, “I was the ax murderer there. The choruses are beautiful, but I simply didn’t know what to do with them. They had no narrative function. In film, storytelling is imperative. You can’t stop, dream, ruminate. You need the story to keep going.”
Though she brought that same ax to the bargaining table for “Doctor Atomic,” Mr. Adams did not accommodate her this time. “I’m truthfully very glad,” she said. “I’ve found solutions to things I found troublesome.”
If the imperative in film is to move the story, different types of theater have different imperatives. Ms. Woolcock has no use for plodding realism. “I hate sitting in the middle of a row,” she said, “watching a three-piece sitting-room set with people shouting, pretending to be real.”
In preparation for “Doctor Atomic,” she said, she began attending opera only last year. “I spent several months in London and New York watching every opera they put on, just to see how to get people on and off the stage,” she added. “I had to learn about stagecraft.”
She found that opera at its most retro — the Met’s Cecil B. DeMille-style “Aida,” for instance — had huge appeal. “Opera demands such a leap of faith,” she said, “such a surrender to the hallucinogenic.” Which, in turn, opens up room for dreaming.
Literalist that she is, Ms. Woolcock shows the bomb much the way the Sellars production did, as the untidy-looking gizmo it was. But lighting can transform it. In the words of the scenic designer Julian Crouch, it then becomes “something like a large moon, very shamanistic in feeling.” And the explosion — flying debris frozen in space, inspired by the harrowing sculpture of Cornelia Parker — is not literal at all.
Ms. Woolcock was struck that Oppenheimer and other scientists on the project were also great aesthetes. Unlike the original production, this one unapologetically aims for beauty. The video artist Mark Grimmer, of Fifty Nine Productions, was fascinated by the graphic panache of equations in scientific notebooks from Los Alamos. His partner in video, Leo Warner, mentioned the painterly effect of motifs from the Tewa Indians. The costumes, by Catherine Zuber, include ghostly allusions to American Indian kachina figures.
Someday, Mr. Sellars prophesied, we will know “Doctor Atomic” the way we know “Don Giovanni.” “We’ll reach a place,” he said, “where our overview includes all the years and years of reaction.”
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=88ac5a49-25ad-4ea5-a5e1-a65f3ee9152a)
Newsom becomes campaign tool for Prop. 8 backers (Erin Allday, October 14, 2008, SF Chronicle)
Gavin Newsom has always played a starring role in the same-sex marriage debate, but in recent weeks that role has turned decidedly unheroic.The mayor has become the reluctant face of the campaign opposing same-sex unions with the help of a prominent Yes-on-Proposition-8 television ad. Conservative blogs have been atwitter about Newsom last week officiating at the wedding of a lesbian teacher whose class of first-graders took a field trip to celebrate with her.
In many ways, Newsom has become the single best campaign tool for proponents of Prop. 8 - and that might have been inevitable, political experts said.
"His pictures have become the rallying cry for Prop. 8. It's unfortunate for him, and it's unfortunate for the anti-Prop. 8 campaign," said Barbara O'Connor, a professor of political communications at California State University Sacramento. [...]
Already, the pro-Prop. 8 campaign Web site is prominently displaying a reaction to Friday's wedding.
Frank Schubert, campaign co-manager of the yes campaign, writes on the Web site, "Taking children out of school for a same-sex wedding is not customary education. This is promoting same-sex marriage and indoctrinating young kids. I doubt the school has ever taken kids on a field trip to a traditional wedding."
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=ddb8ada9-56cc-45c3-b73e-4906dc0ded20)
Bring Back Rev. Wright (Tucker Carlson, 10/14/08, The Daily Beast)
The McCain campaign's attempt to tie Barack Obama to terrorist-turned-professor Bill Ayers appears to have failed. Most people still don't seem to know who Ayers is. And there still isn't evidence that the two were more than acquaintances. By the end of the week, McCain will likely have moved on to another line of attack. The obvious question is: Why not Jeremiah Wright?Unlike Ayers, the Rev. Wright indisputably was one of Obama's closest friends. Obama himself has said so. Nobody in America needs to be reminded of who Wright is. As long as you've decided to go after Obama's character and associations, Wright seems like the obvious place to start. The 30-second attack ad essentially writes itself.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=cbcc7f57-ef52-44a9-85f9-9b7e75ea5736)
India redefines ties in West Asia (Harsh V Pant, October 14, 2008, Rediff)
At a time when that region is passing through a phase of unparalleled political, economic, and social churning, India is being called upon by the international community to play a larger role in West Asian affairs. This is evident in the pressure on India to adopt a more visible role in Iraq and to use its leverage on Iran to curtail its pursuit of nuclear weapons. In a first of its kind, India was invited by the US to participate in the West Asian peace conference at Annapolis in November 2007 as a recognition of India's growing stature in the international system.The loosening of the structural constraints imposed by the Cold War has given India greater flexibility in carving its foreign policy in West Asia. The most notable change has been India's attempts to enhance its ties with Israel on the one hand and with its traditional antagonists such as Iran and Saudi Arabia on the other.
India is no longer coy about proclaiming its gradually strengthening ties with Israel despite apprehensions in some quarters that the Arab world will not very take very kindly to these developments. On the contrary, it seems that the Arab world has reacted cautiously so far and has deepened its engagement with India for fear of losing India wholly to Israel. But the biggest test of this balancing act remains in India's management of its relations with Iran that remains the most openly hostile neighbour of Israel.
There is also a realisation in India that India's largely pro-Arab stance in the Middle East has not been adequately rewarded by the Arab world. India has received no worthwhile backing from the Arab countries in the resolution of problems it faces in its neighborhood, especially Kashmir. There have been no serious attempts by the Arab world to put pressure on Pakistan to reign in the cross-border insurgency in Kashmir. On the contrary, the Arab world has firmly stood by Pakistan using the Organisation of Islamic Conference to build support for Islamabad and the jihadi groups in Kashmir.
THE O JESSE KNOWS: JACKSON ON OBAMA'S AMERICA (AMIR TAHERI, October 14, 2008, NY Post)
[T]he Rev. Jesse] Jackson believes that, although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they'll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House."Obama is about change," Jackson told me in a wide-ranging conversation. "And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it."
Jackson warns that he isn't an Obama confidant or adviser, "just a supporter." But he adds that Obama has been "a neighbor or, better still, a member of the family." Jackson's son has been a close friend of Obama for years, and Jackson's daughter went to school with Obama's wife Michelle.
"We helped him start his career," says Jackson. "And then we were always there to help him move ahead. He is the continuation of our struggle for justice not only for the black people but also for all those who have been wronged."
Runaway Justice: Sarah and Todd Palin’s reaction to their brother-in-law is understandable, but it crossed a line. (Jim Geraghty, 10/14/08, National Review)
The following facts about Sarah Palin’s brother in-law, Mike Wooten, were confirmed by a 2005 State Police investigation:He used a Taser on his stepson.
He shot a moose without a license, violating a law he has responsibility for enforcing.
He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
He told others his father-in-law would “eat a [expletive]ing lead bullet” if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.
Wooten’s tenure with the Alaska State Police also includes a reprimand in January 2004 for negligent damage to a state vehicle; a January 2005 instruction after being accused of speeding, unsafe lane changes, following too closely and not using turn signals in his state vehicle; a June 2005 instruction regarding personal cell phone calls; an October 2005 suspension from work after getting a speeding ticket; and a November 2005 memo “to clarify duty hours, tardiness and personal business during duty time.”
At the conclusion of the 2005 investigation, the State Police concluded Wooten exhibited “a significant pattern of judgment failures,” and decided the appropriate discipline was… a ten-day suspension.After this, Palin and her husband Todd clearly made efforts to get the State Police to investigate and reinvestigate his misbehavior, and there is little doubt they wanted Wooten fired.
Reading the state special counsel’s report, one concludes that the actions of the Palins were legal and completely understandable, and yet crossed a line in their persistence.
Their reaction is entirely understandable; even if every unverified allegation is untrue, the various violations of law, police policy, and good judgment confirmed by Wooten’s superiors obviously warrants a lot more than two weeks off. Nonetheless, the actions of the Palins led to a series of high-ranking state officials contacting the state police to reopen their investigation of the guy, and the governor had to know how that would look. [...]
Palin’s intervention in the matter appears to be a unique set of circumstances; there is no evidence to suggest this is part of a sweeping and far-reaching pattern of abusing her office. If Sarah Palin responded to Wooten’s pattern of dangerous behavior in a manner that crossed an ethical boundary, her response can also be called “human.”
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=f648af1b-8cde-4da3-a995-57e7a6d5e643)