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.
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Toasted Pumpkin Seeds Recipe (Elise.com)
* One medium sized pumpkin
* Salt
* Olive oilMethod
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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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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'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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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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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."
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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%.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.”
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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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)
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 HooperAs 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.
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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.