Quick Shots - 02/May/2016

'The Lobster'

It's rare that I quit on a film but I just couldn't finish this critically acclaimed work. It's surreal and interesting as a premise but it has a few moments of genuinely gratuitous violence - which is utterly unlike the gratuitous violence of say, 'The Avengers: Age of Ultron' - which I'm sure is an attempt to recapture Luis Bunuel's work but I just wanted to groan. It's a funny film because it's odd, but at certain points it leaves you cold.

Anyway I just thought I'd mention it in passing. Lately I can't finish films if I'm not hooked into it. I've lost the discipline and gumption to go through to the end of a film I'm not enjoying.

Zero Hedge Exposed

The dudes who are the Tyler Durdens at Zero Hedge got revealed this week.

Working at Zero Hedge was also exhausting, Lokey said, and typically involved early morning starts and writing as many as 15 posts a day of as many as 1,500 words each. The work didn't stop on the weekends, either. Text messages exchanged between Lokey and Ivandjiiski, screen shots of which were provided by the latter, paint the picture of a work environment that ranged from exhilarating to exasperating. 

For instance, Lokey says he's "scared to even ask for an hour off," while Ivandjiiski replies that "if you ever need time off for whatever reason, never hesitate to just ask." In February, Lokey says, "I love this company and this website," and tells Ivandjiiski "you saved my life," expressing thanks for the job. 

By April 2 - the day Lokey left Zero Hedge-their relationship had deteriorated significantly, according to the messages provided by Ivandjiiski. 

"I can't be a 24-hour cheerleader for Hezbollah, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Trump anymore. It' s wrong. Period. I know it gets you views now, but it will kill your brand over the long run," Lokey texted Ivandjiiski. "This isn't a revolution. It's a joke."

It would seem that way. Nobody can be a total stoic as the Tyler Durden from 'Fight Club' demands. That's why it's a movie. More interestingly, it's nice that the political bias of Zero Hedge got explained. While I enjoy the site, it's always made me wonder just where they're coming from to be so Pro-Putin even in the depths of the Ukraine crisis. Now I realise it's their editorial policy. That makes it easier to digest as flaks being flaks. 

Bitcoin Mastermind Outs Himself

This was news today. Satoshi Nakamoto does not exist - it's actually an Aussie by the name of Craig Wright. 

The BBC said Wright gave technical proof supporting his claim to using Bitcoins known to be owned by Bitcoin's creator. It said prominent members of the Bitcoin community had also confirmed Wright's claim and said Wright repeated the claim to The Economist and GQ. 

"I was the main part of it, but other people helped me," the BBC quoted Wright as saying. 

The Economist however said it was not entirely convinced.
"Our conclusion is that Mr Wright could well be Mr Nakamoto, but that important questions remain," it said. "Indeed, it may never be possible to establish beyond reasonable doubt who really created bitcoin." 

Despite its use initially being restricted to tech insiders, Bitcoin has steadily gained popularity, with mainstream banks and the Australian Stock Exchange considering adopting its "blockchain" public ledger model for managing transactions.

At this point in time, it's hard to know if finding the inventor is all that significant. The genie is clearly out of the bottle. 

"Obama, Out"

It's still a bit early for President Barack Obama to be signing off, but he did have his final White House Correspondent's dinner where he put on his stand up comedy routine. He's still got 6months until the election day in November. He's not quite the full lame duck just yet so you hope he's not signing off like he did at the end. 

It does make me think of the last year of Dubya's Presidency and it is quite the contrast. As much as Carl Icahn and Zero Hedge are talking up another GFC, the market seem to be calm. This time in 2008 was like a daily grind downwards in all the markets with teeth-gnashing angst in the papers everyday. I guess we'll know where we really are around July-August. 

In the mean time, I guess we're watching the final year of a fairly good Presidency. Jeez time flies. 

View From The Couch - 16/Feb/2016

It's Only Breakfast Television

One of the more bizarre spectacles this week is the saga of Sam Armytage of Sunrise who is beset by some serious sledging from a serious TV journalist (which of course might be an oxymoron but we'll fly by that for now) Virginia Haussegger. It started when Kristin Davis of 'Sex and the City' fame came to speak on behalf of the UNHCR (noble cause that it is ) and somehow ended up in a frivolous skit with Armytage. Which, of crows was so awful it turned into a media thing, and Armytage was canned from her hosting job for the actual lunch where Davis was going to say her serious piece. And out of nowhere came a stinging critique of Armytage's skit, courtesy of Virginia Haussegger whereby she dressed down the breakfast morning host for not being a serious enough human being.

Since then it's been twitter barbs at six paces. I don't get the media fascination with this thing.
The only reason I know it happened is because I read the Haussegger column, which did seem like a reasonable protestation. from the headlines, I've also noted that Armytage thought it was bullying. I wouldn't have put it that way - it is more hectoring than bullying. But then I do wonder just how much you can expect out of a show like Sunrise?

The most depressing thing of all might just be how obsessed the media is about itself. There's a whole world of stuff going out there and we count on the media to be covering it, and what we get instead is this really quite trivial brouhaha that won't come anywhere near solving anything to do with refugees or protecting human rights. It's just this morass of dross, the Sargasso Sea of Stupid.

A Bush In The Hand Is Worse Than Two Stones

Just ask the Iraqis. They just don't want another Bush in the White House.

Hashim al-Bayati, a 62-year-old civil engineer who frequents the cafe most weeks, is relieved it looks unlikely to be another Bush, with Jeb Bush finishing fourth in New Hampshire.

"We are fed up with the Bush family, come on. No more Bushes, please," he said. He recalled George H.W. Bush's "betrayal" when he urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War in 1991 but then did not support them. The death toll reached the tens of thousands. 

"Unfortunately they cheated us," Mr Bayati said, adding George W. Bush was even more damaging in his handling of the fallout from the 2003 invasion. He says he has little faith that any president will improve things for Iraq.

They're probably right. Iraq remains the one big goat that is not going to get un-fucked. What's curious are the voices that do want another Bush:

Mr Ashir feels the biggest mistake of US policy was not the 2003 invasion, but what came after, including the 2011 withdrawal of troops. 

"Obama left Iraq to destruction under the pretext that he doesn't want to be involved in wars, but it's a mission that should be finished," he said. "The Democratic Party didn't do anything for Iraq, at least the Republicans have an obvious policy." 

Hillary Clinton, given her tenure as secretary of state, would be "disastrous" for Iraq, Mr Ashir said. 

But Saad Mohammed Ikabi, 43, sitting a few feet away, disagrees. "She has the experience, she was a minister," he said. "We need someone with experience, and she also has a husband who is an expert." 

In a corner near the windows Mohamed Jobouri Mahdi, with cropped grey hair, wearing a faded brown leather jacket, described her as a "classy lady". 

"But most Iraqis prefer the Republicans rather than the Democrats," said the 51-year-old policeman. "We like the powerful, not the smooth."

I think that's called incorrigible.

Quick Shots -19/Apr/2014

What I Lie Awake Thinking

I was thinking in my half-waking sleep dream mode this morning that the world's free market could be understood very clearly as this giant chaotic mass of fear and greed. The bears and bulls are exactly that, animal spirits of fear for the market and greed for the market. It then occurred to me that Karl Marx could see the logical ramification of this capitalist system as a giant train wreck and that somehow human beings with our superior rational intellect would want to add rationality in to the mix.

Of course the communist experiment of the Twentieth Century ended up being mostly fear: fear of Stalin, fear of Mao; fear of counter-revolutionaries; fear of freedom and the corrupting influence of capitalism and so on. But you look at something like the post-Soviet economy of Russia and it is clear that the logical outcome of capitalism is the kind of oligarchic Kleptocracy and all that inequality that comes with such structures. China has similarly headed straight to the income inequality and disparity between the oligarchs and the ever-suffering peasants.

The most worrying aspect of free market capitalism isn't even this disparity in income or the mis-valuing of labour or the reification of money or the degradation of government and public finnances or the emergence of these oligarchs. It's that the more we commit to it, the more extreme our reliance becomes, upon a system that is essentially held up by our collective fear and greed. Think about the fact that we are 72hours away from starvation and riots. All that fear and greed has taken us to the ledge and here we are thinking this is the best deal going on how to distribute goods and services.

I'm not about to go become a communist but you'll pardon me if some mornings I think to myself there must be a much better way than what we've got.

Is QE Really Working?

This is what makes me ponder each and every day. It seems that the most successful thing Quantitative Easing has done is shore up the prices of equities and risk assets. The second most successful thing it has done is gone out of the first world into emerging markets in the carry trade - which is another way of saying it didn't really go to the places in the economy for which it was intended. This is disturbing because the ramification of this is that the economies that most propped up asset prices did so by shipping inflation out to the emerging markets.

I don't know about you, but I imagine this is having an effect on commodity prices because frankly, you can't print that much money and not have inflation showing up somewhere.  It sure hasn't been appearing in America or Australia or the UK, but lately the price of food staples have gone up steadily. The last time this happened it prompted the Arab Spring so we may be headed for even more instability around the globe.

Just to make things a little tricky, Bernanke's successor Yellen has announced the taper will progress at a constant rate and this is sending investment money back to America, but you have to wonder if the emerging markets are going to be able to handle the drop in liquidity and the rise in commodity prices for food staples.

Then there is the little issue of moral hazards associated with the bail outs. It seems the people who benefited the most from QE and TARP and all the socialised losses governments have taken on around the world as debt (and bad debt at that), were not the people on 'main street' as they are called but the top echelon of the wealthy. Not the 1%, but in fact the top 0.1% have made the most wealth out of this exercise. If you lost your house and job in the GFC, I think you'd be entitled to feel quite duped by all of this stuff. The data coming out of the USA saying there's a recovery going on seems to betray the fact that a lot o the jobs created since the GFC are lower in value than the jobs lost. If the Fed and the US Government worked so hard for this outcome, then surely there's a problem in reflexively thinking that the bail outs were a success. Thus,  seven years on from when the GFC started to happen, we should be asking just who is benefiting from all this Quantitative Easing?

Ukraine, The Ugly

It's one of those situations that won't go away. Russia has essentially taken the opportunity of the instability to annex Crimea back into Russia. While there has been much tub thumping condemnation of Russia by the first world, it seems the other nations in the BRICS have tacitly moved behind Russia. NATO i making noises about moving troops in to Ukraine while the interim government in Kiev has declared the Russia-sympathisers as terrorists. You can see that this is not going to go in any direction of pretty.

Putin and his government have been saying this week that Ukraine is on the brink of a civil war. They may well be heading in that direction right now. All the while I'm a little curious as to what exactly the Obama Administration thinks it is going to accomplish in Ukraine. There is a growing bit of incredulity every time the White House announces it's going to send a ship through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. This lone vessel encountered (or rather, got buzzed by) a Russian jet that came within 1000yeards.

It's enough to make you wonder if Obama and Putin want to repreise the Cuban missile crisis. Unlike Kennedy ad Khrushchev who had to work through elaborate diplomatic channels. Obama and Putin have been on the phone 6 times with very little to show for it. Putin being an ex-KGB man makes it immensely difficult to read, let alone game for advantage, while Obama has a record of drawing lines in the sand and letting people walk all over them.  If all of this ends up as a hot war in Ukraine with NATO troops on the ground, I think that would be the day things have gone incredibly wrong.

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Mar/2014

Why So Quiet?

Oh boy. I've just spent a week in snot hell and cough purgatory. This series of 'flus I've been hit with one after another has just flayed me and slain me. it sucks to be laid out like this. The number of days one loses to this sort of thing makes one a little more than cranky.

Anyway, I'm slowly on the mend and I am merely in cough purgatory right now.

I Crane, You Crane, We All Crane Our Necks For Ukraine

All that rubber necking and neck-craning is about Ukraine and Crimea this week. It's a weird story in that none of the participants are attractive and all of them could be accused of having ugly agendas. Underneath all of the rhetorical flourishes is a country that's basically going backward with neglect and I do have a few things to say about this because like the Baltic states, Ukraine is probably owed something a bit more from the West than mere lip service. I won't go into the horrible history of collectivisation in Ukraine under Stalin, which preceded the horrors of the German invasion, followed by the USSR sitting on the country like so much exploitative deadweight, and this was followed by the post-Soviet disintegration of what little economy existed in the place. Oh, and let's not forget Chernobyl which also sits somewhere in that time line. For a nation of 50-odd million folks, it's hardly had the sort of self-determination that other nations have had. It has arguably had much less than Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary - and we know how those states fared under the Soviets.

And so this nation is cleft into two. The Ukrainians desperately want to join the West. The ethnic Russians want to stay close to Mother Russia. But the economy of Ukraine is a basket case. It is going to run out of its foreign reserves at some point this year and when it does it's going to default. So the West would prefer not to have to let Ukraine into its club at the EU, having struggled through the issues of staving off Greece and the rest of the PIIGS defaulting on their bonds. Germany has been particularly conciliatory towards Russia because it buys gas from Russia as well as a fairly obvious desire not to have to bail out an impending financial crisis in Ukraine. After all, why adopt a stray dog with rabies?

Still, from the Ukrainian point of view, you can understand that they want to join the West, join NATO, rid themselves of Russian influence. The youth protesting in Kiev clearly want to join the EU so they can leave Ukraine and go live in Paris or London with an EU passport. And can one really blame them? And you can just hear them asking, why won't the Americans come rescue us?

Just why won't the Americans come and rescue them? The truth, is always historic. The Baltic States hoped beyond hope that the West would come rescue them from the yoke of the Soviets and that never happened during the Cold War for obvious nuclear reasons. The eastern marches beyond Poland are really distant places. It's no place to be sending armies and every field rests upon the legacies of Napoleon and Hitler's marches deep into Russia. You wouldn't try it if you've war-gamed it, and if you've war-gamed it, you'll know how hard that distance gets. So the Baltic States and Ukraine sit just outside the embrace of Europe, a sort of grey zone that fades from a civilised, cultured Europe into something more blunt, crude and Rus.

Naturally, the Obama Administration has threatened Putin with harsh language (much like Hans Blix in Team America threatens to do) and it's had about as much effect as you can imagine. The Americans have no stomach for a war, they certainly have no stomach for a nuclear exchange with Russia and so they keep wagging their index finger on the grand stage. A Lithuanian tells me this is appeasement and the best thing Obama can do is to just nuke Crimea.

"Just nuke it!" he said.

"What about Mutually Assured Destruction?" I asked.

"What you don't understand is that this isn't the 1960s any more. All those Russian missiles are rusted in their silos. They can't fly. The Americans can just blow them up and they won't come back with anything!"

I share this, just so you know how the people from the Grey zone of the Eastern marches feel about all this. It's very simple. To them, only a nuked Russian is a good Russian.

Obama might look like he's losing this diplomatic stoush, but that's the point. There's no winning on the Eastern Marches against the Russians and at least this way, American casualties are limited. Shame about all those Ukrainians.

4K TV - Not Enough Content, Too Much Detail

Somewhere along the way I forgot to post this, but while we're on the subject of Russians I thought of this.The gab this week is that 4k TV is too soon and not likely to reward Australian consumers because there's simply no 4k content around. they would be correct. Nobody is broadcasting 4k (it's hard enough getting1080p content regularly) and Blu-Ray isn't coming out on 4k until later this year. You can't download 4k content for the sheer size of the files and so 4k TV is just not well-endowed right now.

But there are unlikely things about the 4kTV format that's quite surprising.

I was watching a 4kTV broadcast a little while ago in a shop. It was during Wimbledon and they were showing women's tennis. Now, I've watched a lot of tennis in my lifetime so I can tell you if I'm seeing more or not. On screen at the Sony store, I was watching Maria Sharapova return serve, crouched, racquet at the ready, bouncing around on the balls of her feet, and white panties peeping from under the short skirt, which is the classic pervy shot you get in women's tennis.

And here's the thing. 4k TV is so good I could see her dimpled cellulite on the back of her thighs.

And I thought to myself, do I really need this much detail?

One Of Our Submarines

Without a doubt the weirdest sequence of news this week was the disappearance of flight MH370. It went from a straight up, "plane is missing, must have crashed" narrative to a convoluted narrative of mobile phone calls and engine pings to satellites to radar readings, hours after the plane went off view. they still don't know what happened or where the plane is, and if it crashed somewhere int he South Indian Ocean, it might never be found because the depths there can go down to 7000m.

It's all a little creepy because all kinds of scenarios have been tossed around including 2 stolen passports and a possible politically motivated hijacking, but the bottom line is that plane has gone missing with a big load of people, and nobody can explain it well.  In the absence of any kind of solid explanation all kinds of theories have flourished and they have been perversely interesting if only because the Malaysian Authorities have looked totally hapless in their search for this plane.

One thing is for sure. From here on in, this story is only going to get weirder and weirder.

Protesting Abbott

The March in March thing came and went and lots of people went and marched against the misgovernment of Tony Abbott. Being sick as a dog I missed it entirely, which is a bit of pattern with me. I think the last time there was a big protest thing against APEC, I was sick in bed and watched the whole thing from the couch. Anyway, I'm actually not a good protester type. I'm liable to do something crazy and who knows where that would land me? So it's good to watch it far away from where the adrenaline could drive me to lunacy. :)

Jokes aside, it seems the placards presented at the marches have offended a number of people saying they're much worse than 'Ditch the Witch' levelled at Julia Gillard. There are several thing that need to be said about that.

1. Not a single Federal ALP member was photographed making speeches next to a sign like this. It's not so much that the sign said 'Ditch the Witch', it's that Tony Abbott was willing to be photographed with such a sign, lending it credibility with his office of Opposition Leader.

2. It's hard to take serious the offense taken by people who are looking to take offence. I mean, really. Those complainers are being wowsers, and nobody respects a wowser.

3. Yes, Tony is copping worse insults than than did Julia but that's because he's doing worse than Julia - That's why the sobriquets are worse. Live with it. Tony does.

Ian Roberts, Champion Of Causes

Ian Roberts has been a remarkable man. Having competed at the top level in his sport - a very macho sport at that - he came out as gay. He then turned to acting, and he's gone to NIDA and pushed ahead bravely with that. This month, he's basically come out and said he is brain damaged, and that this damage was a result of all the concussions he suffered as a Rugby League player.

Even Matty "Bring-back-the-biff" Johns has recanted his denial of the concussion issue. In the face of the frank, unapologetic moral authority of Ian Roberts' admission, what else can any sensible man do but put down the gauntlets and arms? It's a landmark moment in a sport that's been in denial about concussions for the last three years, if not the last 3 decades. Not only has Roberts forced the sport once to confront gender issues, he has now forced it to confront the occupational hazard of playing Rugby League.

He has to be one of the bravest people around. I am in awe.

China, Defaults, 2014

This week a solar company called Chaori defaulted on its bonds in Shanghai. The remarkable bit might have been that the Chinese government let it happen, because up until now, they've defended all these dodgy-bond moments by swooping in and making sure the bonds were paid out. This time, they simply let the company default. Ouch.

Get ready, there are going to be a whole bunch of these. The Chinese Communist Party narrative is that they're going to let some of these companies default so that it sends a bit of realism back to the investors. If you think such a process can be controlled, then good luck. I think we're beginning to see where China's over-reach is going to bring down markets. This could get ugly folks.

Generation Change

The ALP's Gen-X Crew

The Herald was making the point today that the ALP have gone Gen-X with their choice of frontbench. When you think about it, Bill Shorten is 46 going on 47 so that puts him at the older range of Gen-X, and Tanya Plibersek at 44, it's true that the ALP have indeed gone Gen-X. I have a late Boomer friend who tells me that all this demographic stuff is just a construct not worthy of analysis, except I've been writing here under the banner of 'Gen-X View Of The Universe' for a good 5 years now. It obviously means something.

What could it mean?

The Generation X politician in Australia would have arrived at Tertiary education after the AUS was disintegrated by the likes of Peter Costello and Tony Abbott in 1983, Interestingly enough, Julia Gillard was the last President of the AUS when it collapsed in 1983. If you anted a model to the fractious politics of the Julia Gillard Prime Mininster-ship, you would have found it in the demise of the Australian Union of Students, with the same cast of late Baby Boomers thrashing and trashing institutions to make their political mark. What's scary is that they're still around aplenty in the Liberal and National party ranks, and they probably still don't think much of indulging in that sort of ratbag behaviour. This explains the histrionic opposition style Tony Abbott chose to work with - because it is the method he used in his youth to destroy the AUS , headed up by Julia Gillard. Worse still, it worked again, so that may be why he's so convinced he has some kind of mandate.

The demise of the AUS and the years where there was no student lobby until the NUS got up in the late 1980s allowed HECS to be brought in. Unlike the Baby Boomers, most of the Gen-X politician would have had to pay HECS. When they say education and the opportunities it affords are important, they know what they are saying. All these things are intimately entwined.

If there is one thing that I do think is encouraging about the Gen X ALP politicos is that they are of the generation that had to put back together the NUS and have the experience of rebuilding institutions. If the ALP under Rudd-Gillard looked positively fractured, then I think the current group might be able to start from scratch and build a proper agenda that suits the time. As I wrote the other day, I'm feeling fairly optimistic about the Shorten-Plibersek team, much more so than I felt about the Rudd-Gillard team when they first rose to the level of Opposition leader and deputy back in 2006. They're not perfect human beings and they will make their mistakes. I just don't think they're as fractious and crazy as the generation of politicians who were forged in the dying days of the AUS.

Right now, the Coalition are the party of the Baby Boomers much more than Gen-X or Gen-Y by dint of the ageing population and makeup of the Liberal and National Party demographic. The fissure hasn't been more stark than any other time since Mark Latham as late Baby Boomer was taking on John Howard who was born before the Boomers. That fissure sort of leaves the current ALP firmly in the Gen-X camp with the hope of picking up a big portion of support from Gen-Y.  The question then is whether Gen-X+Gen-Y interest is a big enough voting constituency to overcome the Baby Boomers' interests in their twilight years.

Demographically speaking, Gen-X is small and shorter than either the Boomers before or the Gen-Y that follows. That being the case the duo may never make it. And if they did, they may be seen off by a Gen-Y politician. Consider the American experience. Bill Clinton was the first Boomer President, who was followed by George W. Bush who was followed by Barack Obama, all of whom are Boomers. All three Presidents won two terms, so the Baby Boomer reign will last 24years. If a Gen-X candidate won 2 terms after Obama, the next election after that will likely see a pair of Gen-Y candidates. It's entirely possible there will never be a Gen X President of the United States.

Similarly, I don't see any Gen-Xers knocking on the door in the Coalition ranks. If Abbott is replaced for some reason, it's possible the leadership reverts to Malcolm Turnbull or goes to Joe Hockey - both of whom are Boomers. The longer the Coalition stay in power, the less chance there will be of a government of Gen-Xers in Australia.

So when you look at it through the demographic filter, that's what we have with Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek: The one and only shot at Gen-X forming Government in Australia.

Forgetting Romnesia?

Mr. Romney's Ready For His Close Up, Mr. Spielberg

Here's something interesting out at the Economist about how the republicans are scapegoating Mitt Romney after his defeat.

Yet fair or unfair, the trashing of Mr Romney should be welcomed, because it shows signs of reflection among those now vying to lead the party. Mr Romney faces two main charges. First, he allowed the Republicans to be seen as a party of the rich. Second, he seemed to scorn social mobility. Exhibit A for both charges is the moment when Mr Romney was secretly filmed at a dinner with donors asserting that 47% of Americans are Democratic voters “no matter what” because they are dependent on government largesse, pay no federal income tax and are thus deaf to arguments about low taxes or personal responsibility.

In recent days, a string of grandees have singled out those comments for attack. Mitch Daniels, the outgoing governor of Indiana, calls the 47% incident a “self-inflicted fatal blow”, compounded shortly after the election when Mr Romney blamed defeat on voters greedy for government “gifts”. Ted Cruz, a senator-elect from Texas, claims (rather implausibly) that the 47% comments—rather than Republican hostility to immigration—explain Mr Romney’s dire showing among Latinos. Mr Romney’s running-mate, Paul Ryan, has let it be known that he “seethed” about his boss’s blunder.

The 47% incident pretty much sums up Romney campaign at this point in history, now that it's all said and done. It was a colossal 'blunder' - or moment of frankness - because the Democrats were working pretty hard to paint Romney as a plutocrat, and he essentially served up his own credo to be put in stocks and be pelted.

This all got me to be thinking about the Obama Campaign's campaign director Jim Messina and how he drew from a wide range of sources for his plan. The most inttersting bit in is that he consulted none other than Steven Spielberg:

Messina spent time with filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who briefed him on what messages got the attention of audience, and reportedly had input into a advertisement against Mitt Romney that highlighted his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm that he co-founded.

"Romney had run on this business record of, 'I'm a manager, I know how to turn things around'. And the Obama strategy over the summer was to turn that positive into a negative by running these ads in states like Ohio, talking about Romney's record at Bain Capital - outsourcing, jobs, laying off workers," Mr Freedman said.

While the negative ad was slammed and described as many commentators as unsuccessful, Mr Freedman said the campaign against the Republican challenger, who was at that time still pre-occupied with the primary, ultimately appeared to be effective in the swing states.

Obviously that bit stuck in my mind for months because it shows that in going for the jugular, they picked the mind of the man who was most attuned to putting an emotive message across, and the advice was decisive. When you consider the Republicans got Clint Eastwood to turn up at their convention to talk to a chair, you get the feeling that the Republicans were more than a little behind in how messages are put out to the public. The Democrats were making ads with Spielberg's input to get the nuance exactly right while the Republicans were essentially waving symbols around - "Look, we got Clint Eastwood who used to be Dirty Harry!". The level of abstraction and sophistication is so low it beggars belief.

It was certainly an interesting moment in history because the Democratic machine was coming at them with what can only be described as 'applied Marshall McLuhan Communication Theory' and the Republicans were essentially doing things that weren't far removed from semaphore and cave paintings. Even if you don't take into account the demographic shift going against the white establishment, you seriously wonder if the Republicans are going to be able to get their heads around this problem, because it's not just who you talk to, but it's how you talk to them and what you tell them in order to persuade them.

They can scapegoat Mitt Romney all they like, but it seems to me they had much deeper problems than Mitt Romney being a gaff-prone plutocrat.

Obama Wins

Not Even Close

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="510"] Keep Calm[/caption]

For some weeks we've been hearing that the race was neck and neck and that the popular vote reflected a deeply divided America. Of course, I've been following Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com for a long while and it's been clear for some time that Obama's actually been ahead.

The little dip you see is after the first debate where Romney beat Obama, but even then the electoral college count never went below 285.

[caption id="attachment_5208" align="aligncenter" width="378"] Nate Silver's tracking of polls[/caption]

As you can see in the third graph, the popular vote was tight, but then that's been what most pundits have been focusing on, saying it's neck and neck. If anything, Nate Silver's charts clearly show that Romney was doing a bang up job securing his base without making any headway into the crucial swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

That brings me to this bit in this coverage here:

The Republican failure to topple a president who was perceived as weak and divisive is expected to provoke a blood letting in the party.

The battle lines between those who say the party became too moderate and those who believe it is too radical are already drawn.

"If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn't conservative enough I'm going to go nuts. We're not losing 95% of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we're not being hard-ass enough, " the Republican senator Lindsey Graham told Politico, last week.

That's really interesting right there. If the Republicans thought they were in it since the moment they nominated Romney, then they were very misguided; and the reason they were misguided is because they took the popular vote to be more important than what the distribution of the electoral colleges were going to be.

It's surprising that these people who are in a political party and therefore should understand how the election works, should have looked at the numbers Nate Silver was looking at. Silver had Obama beating Romney in a fluctuating zone of 59%-91%. Amazingly, some people thought Silver was pumping for the Democrats but right now as of this writing, Obama has 302 of the college votes, which means Silver has been as accurate as he was last time in 2008.

Which leads me to the point. How can these Republican types even be in politics if they don't understand how their own system works? It's not the raw popular vote. It's how the votes are distributed across electorates that matters.

Which leads me to the next thing in the live coverage that got my interest:

If you want to get a strong feel for the demographic current underlying this election I strongly recommend Ron Brownstein from the National Journal who has been reminding readers for months that this will be the last election that the Republicans can attempt to win with a majority of white votes alone. It was a big risk that Obama took when he decided to embrace gay marriage, push back hard on efforts to restrict abortion and contraception (including a very public stoush with the Catholic Church) offer up a partial amnesty to young illegal immigrants and effectively concede non-college educated white men to the GOP. Instead of a coherent national message, the Obama campaign has stitched together a rainbow coalition.

So far tonight, it is looking like the risk paid off.

That's a really interesting point about the demographic right there. It goes hand in hand with Bill O'Reilly - he of the awful, awful, awful, spin-ful Fox News - having a whine about the death of the White Establishment. The 2008 election was a watershed because there were more urban voters than rural voters for the first time. This time, it became the election that could not be won by appealing to the White voters' racism alone.

And so the Republican Party clearly is at at the crossroads. They've got the wrong end of the demographic and going harder to the right and more conservative and more ideological is not going to get it done for them in coming elections. The curiosity now is how long they are going to persist with their dalliance with the irrational, Ayn-Rand-ist, racist, retrograde, ignorant and fearful Tea Party.

Judging from the number of Senate seats lost by Tea Party, it seems clear that the Tea Party is not going to come out of the 2012 election with any amount of credibility within the Republican Party. This is where it gets interesting. Fox News was already denouncing the Tea Party blaming them for Romney's loss - which is ironic because they're the very same people who gave so much air time to these crazies. Fox News may have successfully polarised the electorate through misinformation and propagandeering and generally misrepresenting arguments; but this has not translated one bit in to votes that mattered. If the way the swing states voted for Obama is any representation, then it is clear the biggest disservice done to the Republican Party might have been the blatant partisan-ship of Fox News. And if the demographic shift says anything, it is clear that Fox News' own viewership is a shrinking demographic. I wonder how Rupert likes the sting in that tail.

UPDATE: Obama finished up with Florida, winning 332 electoral votes in the end.

News That's Fit To Punt - 23/Jun/2011

Champion climate change denier Lord Monckton likened Professor Ross Garnaut to the Nazis over night.

The climate sceptic Christopher Monckton has accused Ross Garnaut of having a ''fascist point of view'' because the adviser to the government on climate change said he accepted that on ''the balance of probabilities'' mainstream global warming scientists were right. In an address to the American Freedom Alliance aired on Seven News last night, Lord Monckton used PowerPoint slides decorated with swastikas and put on a mock German accent as he quoted experts from around the world who he claimed ''accepted the authority'' of climate scientists without question. After quoting Professor Garnaut, who he said was an ''eco-fascist'', Lord Monckton said ''Heil Hitler''.

Well, there's Godwin's law in action for you. I guess Lord Monckton is finding it harder to convince his listening public that he is on the right side of the argument against overwhelming evidence. All the cherry picking of his stats and facts isn't enough, he has to call his opponents fascist Nazis.

Last I looked, I notice that he's some kind of lord with peerage with a distinct laissez faire view on the changing environment and its impact on the economy. I told you he was an idiot. Of course Tony Abbott denounced the statement but he's still willing to share the stage with this man because deep down (in whatever shallow depth he can call depth) Tony's a climate change denier as well. I guess it's a good sign that at least he can make the proper distinction to see likening Professor Ross Garnaut to Nazis is beyond the pail.

Here's another article on the matter:

Liberal MP and climate-change supporter Malcolm Turnbull said Lord Monckton was a "sensationalist" and he didn't think Professor Garnaut would lose any sleep over the matter.

"He is increasingly a rather sick, vaudeville character who makes more and more outlandish charges in order to get attention for himself," Mr Turnbull told Sky News.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the comments were "offensive and grossly inappropriate" but the decision to attend the conference lay with Mr Abbott.

Labor backbencher Michelle Rowland was less reserved. "The fact that Tony Abbott aligns himself so closely with Lord Monckton is absolutely repugnant," she said.

Greens leader Bob Brown said he believed in free speech but there were limits. He said Mr Abbott should ‘‘reconsider’’ his attendance and called on AMEC to take action. "I think the mining hosts of Mr Monckton should demand an apology before their sponsorship of his trip continues," Senator Brown said.

And so it goes. Anyway, I think this just about disqualifies Monckton from being taken seriously but Andrew Forest seems to think he's worth inviting. Why is it that it's always these super rich fat cats that have the money to throw around who get behind these kinds of crackpots? As for Tony Abbott, even if he decided not to go, he's not convincing anybody that he *isn't* a climate change denier, so he may as well go and we'd all be secure in the knowledge that he has head firmly in the sand on this issue.

Out Of Afghanistan

No, that's not a new Meryl Streep movie. It's President Obama laying down a plan for a draw down from Afghanistan.

The US will pull 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the next northern summer, sooner than previously anticipated.

The first 10,000 troops will leave this year, starting next month.

The drawdown was announced today by US President Barack Obama, 18 months after he ordered the so-called “surge” in troop numbers in a bid to defeat al-Qaeda and Taliban forces and hasten an end to the conflict.

I guess discretion really is the better part of valor. Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, it is arguable that the main mission to Afghanistan has been fulfilled. The rest of worrying about how the polity of Afghanistan survives - or not as the case may be- can be decoupled from the cipher that started at 9/11.

Doubtless it's going to leave everything in the lurch over in Kabul but in many ways it's probably for the best if the Allies  pull out. Maybe Afghanis will be able to put together a proper government for once. I doubt it, but it's worth trying after 10 years of war.

Peter Parker Dies

Spidey's dead, long live Spiderman, apparently.

In the comic, Parker is killed by his nemesis the Green Goblin, dying in the arms of Mary Jane following a valiant battle.

Writer Brian Michael Bendis told USA Today that he wrote the story "with tears in my eyes like a big baby".

"I went upstairs to my wife, and I go, 'I am so embarrassed. I think I've literally been crying for 45 minutes.' I've had real things happen in my life I didn't cry about, and yet I'm crying about this," said the author.

According to Marvel.com, the death of Peter Parker sets the stage for the upcoming debut of an all-new Spider-Man.

"We've never seen a world without Spider-Man, a world without Peter Parker, so his death is a significant event for the Ultimate Comics Universe and we're going to see how quickly it changes everything," said Marvel Entertainment editor-in-chief Axel Alonso.

“But Peter’s death doesn’t signal the end .... it’s the start of one of the most ambitious stories you’ve ever read in comics.”

I note this with interest because when the writers of 'Star Trek Generations' reported a similar lancunae of emotion after they wrote the death of Captain Kirk. I remember thinking, if you're going to cry about it and get all emotional about it, why do it? I guess some of these beloved characters need to find an end, much as Robin Hood or King Arthur in 'Le Morte  d'Arthur'; the dying bit is all part of the tapestry of life-likeness of the fiction. Otherwise the fiction is one long denial of death and that''s never really going to be a mature kind of fiction. It may even be why comic books are seen to be such low level fiction.

In which case it makes sense to kill off these characters. A good death is always better than a bad life in fiction. Sequels suck because authorial voices invariably get sentimentally attached to their characters and so they become impervious to the risks and obstacles. This is typified by the ennui of Bond movies after successfully changing actors. I'm not sure I'm comfortable that Peter Parker dies, but within that discomfort is a sense that maybe, just maybe, the spiderman comic book can rise to art. It would be interesting to see.

Mars Direct Is Back

Spacefreak Moment For Mr. Obama

Back in the day when this blog's predecessor was the 'Spacefreaks Weblog', and shared writers - yes it wasn't just me writing stuff - the big topic in 2004 was whether the space program should be looking to Mars or not and whether the Shuttle program should be continued in light of the Columbia disaster. There are a lot of pros and cons to both these ideas but the most important thing to come out of those discussions was how direct flight to Mars was probably going to yield far more knowledge than space stations and shuttle programs whose operations were always limited in scope.

So it's good to find today that President Obama has scrapped the Lunar missions for a Mars mission.

US President Barack Obama says he is aiming to send US astronauts into Mars orbit in the mid-2030s as he seeks to quell protests over his earlier space policies.

"By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crew missions beyond the moon into deep space," Obama told an audience at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

"So, we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to earth, and a landing on Mars will follow."

Obama, who was accompanied on his trip by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, vowed he was "100 per cent committed" to NASA's mission as he sought to set a new course for future US space travel.

The US president was making a whirlwind trip to the heart of the US space industry after he was hit with stinging criticism for dropping the costly Constellation project which had aimed to put Americans back on the moon.

"We should attempt a return to the surface of the moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say, pretty bluntly here, we've been there before. Buzz has been there," Obama said.

"There's a lot more of space to explore and a lot more to learn when we do," the president said, as he unveiled a plan to increase NASA's budget by $US6 billion ($6.4 billion) over the next five years.

His plan includes ramping up "robotic exploration of the solar system, including a probe of the sun's atmosphere, new scouting missions to Mars and other destinations, and an advanced telescope to follow Hubble", he said.

"As president, I believe that space exploration is not a luxury, it's not an afterthought in America's quest for a brighter future. It is an essential part of that quest," he said at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

"I am 100 per cent committed to the mission of NASA and its future."

Which is great. Back when George W Bush put forward his space project, the feeling was overwhelmingly, "why are we going back to the moon? Why are we wasting our money re-doing that trip?" At least this plan makes sense.

That being said I do sort of wonder what he means by "...new spacecraft designed..." The beauty of the Mars Direct plan is that it doesn't really need too much new in the way of new spacecraft.

Ask Questions... Never

Shoot To Kill

I found this in the economist. It's an interesting insight into the contradictory demands placed upon a commander in chief.

After more than a year in power, Mr Obama has still not figured out what to do with terrorist suspects captured on foreign soil. He has not yet fulfilled his promise to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay because he does not know what to do with the remaining inmates. Some are deemed too dangerous to release, but cannot easily be prosecuted. In some cases, evidence was obtained by coercion; in others, through intelligence sources that the administration does not want revealed in court. Mr Obama will not rule out holding them indefinitely without charge, but he knows this makes America look bad. He does not want to add to the problem by bringing more foreign jihadists into American custody. Instead, American forces are either killing them or letting less squeamish allies detain them.

In September, for example, America tracked down a much-wanted terrorist in Somalia. Saleh Ali Nabhan was accused of helping to blow up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and was thought to have been the main liaison between al-Qaeda and its Somali ally, al-Shabab. Had he been captured and questioned, he could have been a mine of useful intelligence. But there is no functioning Somali government to hand him over to, so American helicopters vaporised him. This seems to be the rule, not the exception. A recent Washington Post investigation of Mr Obama’s war against al-Qaeda leaders abroad found “dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions” by American forces.

Suspected terrorists caught on American soil are of course taken into American custody. But those caught in Iraq are swiftly handed over to the Iraqis. Those spotted in Pakistan are detained by the Pakistanis—as several senior Taliban commanders were in recent weeks, thanks in part to American intelligence. America maintains a prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, but this will be turned over to the Afghans by the end of the year. None of these countries has a reputation for comfortable cells and polite jailers. In short, it is far from clear that Mr Obama’s policies have led to gentler treatment for terrorist suspects abroad. The opposite may be true. Hence the howls of anguish from human-rights activists who once thought Mr Obama was their man. Hence, also, the urgent need for a coherent detainee policy.

Yeah, that would be a problem. Just what do you do with people who are not in the enemy regular army, who are motivated an skilled to do guerrilla warfare or suicide bombing, and are capable of organising cells to do this stuff? You can't try them in a civil court, they're not technically POWs, they're a danger and menace to the civilised world and you have people screaming human rights at you back home. Best to just blow them away and let God sort them all out - which is essentially us, devolving to the level they're on, because that's about the ethical and moral sophistication they're coming with as they attack the western world.

But it's that Nietszchean problem of staring into the darkness until the darkness stares back at you. If you traffic in the assassinations of these leaders, then how long before they start using assassinations as their modus operandii? This isn't just a problem for Obama alone (or his predecessor GW Bush for that matter), this is a problem for the entire civilised world in dealing with those who would choose such a tactic to weaken us through the binding agents of our very civilisation.

When camp X-Ray was created in Guantanamo back in the early part of this decade, it struck me as almost fiendishly funny how the Bush administration created a sort of legal lacuna into which they bracketed the whole problem and tried to keep it out of civillian courts in the USA. Was this right? I didn't and still don' t think so - but you had to hand it to Rummy and Wolfy for coming up with such a unique *space*, just to deal with the unique problem.

The quick answer I guess, is that fighting such a foe is going to demand that we adapt ourselves either ethically, - that is to say developing a proper legal frame work to tackle such *suspects*/*perpetrators - or compromise ourselves from our moral frame work by doing a deal with the metaphorical devil. So far, the latter option has won over the former, and it doesn't say anything good about our civilisation.

The states dealing with the problem need a sort of Geneva Convention to cover guerrilla combatants and Terror cell combatants, on which they can all agree, rather than trying to reach for the higher moral ground. After all the water is rising way too fast.

Obama's Melting Cool?

I Guess Icebergs Have Melting Moments Too

Heres' an interesting article summing up Obama's challenges ahead this year. This is the bit I like:

White House officials and allies brush off any notion that this new sense of unease is meaningful. The only true test, they say, will be results. Obama still might win major health care reform legislation this year that could be the most important new government program in decades. He has a fighting chance to pass regulations on greenhouse gases, in the form of a “cap and trade” mechanism, through the Senate. And Obama continues to press hard, if with no clear progress, for a breakthrough in the Middle East.

“It’s the third quarter, he’s down by a point, and he’s got his best player on the bench – what really is going to be important is the fall,” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic observer.

“If he gets what’s perceived to be some kind of a major health care thing, gets the climate bill through, if the economy recovers, then we’ll all say he had a hell of a summer. Conversely, if the thing falls apart, we’ll say that by July the 19th we could tell the thing was going bad.”

White House Deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer dismissed the suggestion that Obama should be expected to succeed effortlessly – or that he’s on a path toward failure on any of these varied fronts.

“Obama and his team have been down this road dozens of times and been declared dead many times and always succeeded,” he said. “No one gets rich betting against Barack Obama.”

No one gets rich betting against Barack Obama indeed. I guess I'm yet to be unimpressed by his Presidency so count me amongst those betting with Obama, not against.

Just thought I'd quickly share that gem remark with you all.

Obama Gets Frank With Africa

Tell It Like It Is, Prez!

Africa is one of those conundrums that has been around for all of my life. Ever since I can remember, there's been calls for aid, donations, and more aid and more donations and even more aid and donations. Part of the dynamic has been a product of history where the European and North American nations keep sending guilt money for perceived historic wrongs. The problem is, all that money that's been spent on Africa has amounted to the Africa of today, and it's not exactly what you might call a success.

There are corrupt governments, military juntas, tribal wars and countless causes for violence, poverty, injustice and chaos. When you sit there an tally up the money spent, it just doesn't make sense. If we'd kept that money, imagine what we might have done with it? And as uncharitable as that sounds, it's just as confounding when you sit and contemplate how fucked up the dark continent has become.

So, in this light, when an American President with an African heritage steps up to deliver a speech, it's time for some home truths.

BARACK OBAMA delivered the most challenging speech by an American leader in Africa for decades when he castigated the continent's leadership for creating a culture of "brutality and bribery".

Adopting a tone his white predecessors never dared employ, the US President told Africa it could no longer blame the West for all its woes.

"Yes, a colonial map that made little sense, bred conflict, and the West has often approached Africa as a patron, rather than a partner," he told Ghanaian MPs on Saturday. "But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the past decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants."

Seeking to jolt Africa's politicians out of a complacent belief that his shared ancestry with them would soften his rhetoric, Mr Obama spoke with withering directness. Condemning tyrannical leaders who "enrich themselves" amid chronic poverty, he promised fresh "partnerships" only with states that were well governed.

For the kleptocrats and autocrats who still sprinkle the continent, he had a simple message: enough is enough.

"No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery," he said. "That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end."

Traditional "strongman" rulers must give way to "strong institutions" if they are to benefit from future Western assistance, he said. "We have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don't.

"Development depends on good governance, and that is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many countries. That's the change which can unlock African potential, but that is a responsibility which must be met by Africans. Africa's future is up to Africans."

It's unpopular to say it, but the Geldof/Bono line of activism where  more aid is requested without any accountability for how the aid is used has to be questioned. I know it seems improbable, but it is distinctly possible that that very aid has caused more problems for Africa.

It's not even tough love. It's being very frank, and it's a necessary step in achieving real change. A lot of people who have an interest in the aid organs will disagree, but the fact is, they haven't managed to rid Africa of the sort of poverty and famine that ends up on TV in a call for more donations.

Some years ago in Tokyo, I was watching a program where they showed an MRI machine donated to an African township by the Japanese Foreign Affairs Department. The machine ran according to its spec for 20 years. Then it broke down, long past its projected life time. The people of the township asked, "why have the Japanese stopped supporting us?"

Thus, the show turned on inviting a Foreign Affairs spokes person to be grilled by a panel, and the grilling boiled down to "why aren't we looking after these people more?"

His response was very simple: "we honestly thought that country would move on in the intervening 20 years and be able to supply its own MRI machines."

You should have seen the expression of the panelists trying to make the spokesperson feel guilty. 20 years is a long time.It was the time it took for Japan to recover from the devastation of WWII and start exporting cars to the world. It was the time it took for South Korea to go from military rule to democracy to economic powerhouse. It's not like it's impossible, and yet the thing about Africa is the endless cycle of abject poverty and senseless violence and getting more aid out of our collective conscience.

It's a bit rough that President Obama said what he said, but it most probably needed to be said. Better late than never, but even better now than later.

More Thoughts On Michael Jackson

Still Mourning, Still Trying To Figure Him Out


I've been thinking about Michael Jackson a lot because I'm finding it hard to remember a time I wasn't aware somehow of his work. I imagine it would be harder for people younger than Gen-X to fathom a world where Michael Jackson wasn't around on the celebrity gossip rags or on the airwaves.

Michael Jackson made his debut at the Apollo in 1967, and rose to prominence in 1968. It's interesting to note that the rise of Michael Jackson the performer begins during the epoch of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King making his famous "I have a Dream" speech.

For 40years, there was Michael Jackson's persona in the public sphere. He's been around as long as say, Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman. That 40years is actually looking like a very long time in the public consciousness.

Consider these random facts: his arrival on the public consciousness predates the moment George Steinbrenner buys the New York Yankees by 5 years, and 7 years before the renovated stadium re-opened. He was there before the World Trade Center opened in New York City. He arrived in the year Australians chose to let the Indigenous people of Australia be counted as citizens. His arrival predates the finishing of the Sydney Opera House. The Beatles were still together, producing 'Let It Be' and 'Abbey Road'.

His arrival happened the year of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. By the time he died, the Americans were just about to pull out of Iraq's cities ahead of a draw down.

More importantly - I've been pondering this - the end of that 40 years marks the first black American President in Barack Obama. And I keep thinking that across those 40 years, I cannot deny that maybe Michael Jackson did so much to move the world's perception, to turn Reverend King's vision from a dream to an electable reality.

Let's face it, Michael Jackson was so weird, that next to him, Barack Obama looks like... a very normal man. A man so normal he'd pass as politically white. And here's the key about being thrust next to Michael Jackson: Michael Jackson and his very weirdness pushed the boundaries so far, so wide, so, out-there that we - all of us -look normal, even though we are all slightly weird in our on little ways. By the time a de-polemicised black candidate turned up, the world was ready for Obama.

I'm not saying Obama got elected because Michael Jackson directly enabled him through his weirdness in 2008. No. What I am saying is that over the many, many years in between, Michael Jackson and his entire weird persona crossed over so many borderlines that eventually he weirded us all out. not only did he weird me out, he weirded out everybody to the extent that by the the Obama came along, the weirdness he infected the world made Obama look... decidedly normal.

"What is normal anyway?" I can hear you ask, and I'd not be able to give you a workable answer. But the 'normal' in this instance would include notions of being closer to the middle of the spectrum in things such as fashion, social status positioning and even sexual orientation.

So this is what I thnk about all this: In the future, when historians look at the second half of the 20th century, they're going to have to come to terms with Michael Jackson as a cultural influence. We might think of him as 'Whacko Jacko' today, but in 100years time, people might actually come to understand him as the man who changed the cultural landscape of America for the better. There is no doubt in my mind today that we lost a giant.

Why The Economist Is Cool (Sometimes)

Maybe It's Just This Lexington Dude

Here's something very droll and funny.

A recent Pew poll showed that public opinion about Mr Obama is sharply divided along party lines. Some 88% of Democrats approve of the job that he is doing compared with only 27% of Republicans. The approval gap between the two parties is actually bigger than it was for George Bush in April 2001. Bush loyalists, led by Karl Rove, have duly over-interpreted this poll in order to soften their former boss’s reputation as America’s most divisive president. Today’s Republican base is significantly smaller than the Democratic base was in 2001, so surviving Republicans are more likely to have hard-core views. But there are nevertheless enough people out there who dislike the president to constitute a significant force in political life.

As The Economist went to press, the bestselling book in the United States was Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny”. Mr Levin frequently denounces Mr Obama on his radio show as an exponent of the second of those two qualities. The new sensation in the world of cable is Fox News’s Glenn Beck, who has already attracted 2.2m regular viewers since his show was launched in January. Mr Beck recently apologised to his viewers for saying that Mr Obama’s America is on the path to “socialism” when it is really on the march to fascism. Media Matters, a left-wing organisation that monitors the media, reports that, since the inauguration, “there have been over 3,000 references to socialism, fascism or communism” in describing the president.

Rush Limbaugh claims that he has seen an uptick in his audience since he announced that he hopes that Mr Obama fails. He has no time for the idea that all Americans should wish their president well (“We are being told that we have to hope Obama succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles…because his father was black”). Mr Limbaugh is not the ankle-grabbing type. He has also added Robert Mugabe to the list of people to whom Mr Obama can be likened.

Why are some people so angry? For all his emollient manner and talk of “post partisanship”, Mr Obama is just as much an embodiment of liberal America as Mr Bush was of conservative America—an Ivy League-educated lawyer who became a community organiser before launching a political career in one of America’s most cosmopolitan and corrupt big cities, Chicago. Mr Obama almost lost the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton because of his lack of rapport with white working-class voters. In the general election he did worse than Michael Dukakis in the Appalachian states of Kentucky and West Virginia.

Not only did the cartoon crack me up, the notion that Obama is Fascist coming from the fat, white guys on the right... I mean, come on. It's not as if the last 8 years under George W Bush was liberalism Heaven for fuck's sake.

Lexington sure makes it sound tragic, but then he has this other article that elicits a laugh too.

The writers of the Onion are unencumbered by any obvious party loyalty. To fit in, you have to hate everything around you, muses Joe Randazzo, the editor. Hence the headline that greeted Mr Obama’s election victory: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”. The Onion News Network, an online video venture, did a segment entitled “Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters to Realise How Empty Their Lives Are”. The camera showed pitiful young campaign volunteers lying comatose on a couch or wandering aimlessly through a park. “Who will take care of these people?” asked the anchor. “We really don’t know. Many have already driven away their friends and family with months of endless praise for Obama’s latest speech and constant reminders to vote,” said the breathless correspondent on the scene. “That does sound annoying,” said the anchor.

The Onion lampooned previous presidents, of course. No prizes for guessing who inspired the headline “New President Feels Nation’s Pain, Breasts”, or who regaled dinner guests with an impromptu oration on Virgil’s minor works. What sets the Onion apart, however, is that Mr Obama has not blunted its barbs at all. On the contrary, the way more serious journalists fawn over the new president offers an irresistible target. “Media Having Trouble Finding Right Angle on Obama’s Double Homicide”, the Onion reported last month. “‘I know there’s a story in there somewhere’,” said the editor of Newsweek, after Mr Obama brutally murdered a suburban couple. The Onion is better at spotting good yarns, which is why, despite the recession, it is prospering. The main threats it faces are that its staff might grow up—or that the earnest papers it parodies may go out of business.

Pretty cool.