Rav Casley Gera

The Economist’s spoken word edition has no truck with any of this “bleeping” nonsense. (Skip to 1:30)

“He hasn’t called him a crook!”

We’re now supposed to believe that Obama is at best insufficiently appalled at Blagoyevich’s behaviour - which, let’s not forget, is still legally unproven - and at worst implicated in it, because he uses calm language. And talk-show guests talk openly about Obama’s camp “admitting whatever it’s done”, apparently without feeling the need to admit that so far there’s not a shred of evidence Obama’s camp were involved with Blagojevich in anything other than entirely standard ways.

I can’t think of a more perfect example of how the desperate need to fill 24 hours of news a day has maddened America’s political culture. Not exactly news, I know, but I’m still frequently shocked.

“This is nothing to do with Obama. But some people are going to try to make people think this has something to do with Obama. So this is bad news for Obama. What is the Obama camp going to do about this bad news?”

US Media FAIL.

September 2008: David Foster Wallace commits suicide. Mere weeks later, Axl Rose reappears from relative obscurity with the long-awaited Chinese Democracy.

Coincidence?

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals.

 Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value” …the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus. [emphasis added]

Robert Nozick, “Why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?”

Now, look. Like much that comes out of the Cato Institute, this twenty-two-year-old essay contains its fair share of gleeful left-baiting. But this is a salient point. Bloggers, journalists and authors declares the intellectual* the new aristocrat, with over-educated millennials able to work the way they want, in fascinating fields, achieve social status and wealth, and still have time left over for surfing. But is this borne out by the evidence, or is it - as I suspect - mostly clever kids’ wish-fulfilment?

The brilliant PhD candidate who struggles to get funding; the intelligent, thoughtful young journalist who chafes at the tabloid leanings of his paper; the idealistic young lawyer who rails against his profession’s less ethical habits, or its disinterest in work/life balance. All the stuff of alientated twentysomething cliche. Can’t all of this be summed up, quite neatly, in the realisation Nozick describes above?

*Also known by the handy new phrase “knowledge worker,” which is essentially an attempt to replace “intellectual” with something that doesn’t scare off employers.

Washington Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders has admitted that he was the one who stood up and yelled “tyrant!” at U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey during a speech in which Mukasey later fainted. At a black-tie dinner on Nov. 20, the AG defended the Bush administration’s war on terror. Sanders, who said he felt compelled to voice his disagreement with those policies, said he had already left the event before Mukasey’s collapse, and did not learn of it until the next day. 

Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn’t require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job. The fantasies of perfection of replaced by the fantasies of utter failure. So I finally get to work on it. Now it would have been simpler for me, and for the publisher, and for the author, if I had sat down and spent four or five hours on the manuscript right off the bat. If only I had been able to give myself permission to do an imperfect job right at the outset. Is there anyway we can bring that about?

You have to get in the habit of forcing yourself to analyze, at the time you accept a task, to consider the costs and befits of doing a less than perfect job. You need to ask the questions: how useful would a perfect job be here? How much more useful than a merely adequate job? Or even a half-assed job? And you need to ask the questions: what is the probability that I will really do anything like a remotely perfect job on this? And you need to ask: what difference will it make to me, whether I do or not?

John Perry, “Procrastination as Perfectionism”

There’s surely some truth in this. The slow descent from great intentions to panicked cobbling-together is a depressingly regular hallmark of my life. But I’m not constantly getting into trouble. Actually, the results are usually pretty good. So why not aim to do an adequate job, get it out of the way, and get out of there, right from the start?

Those frightening people who tend to have half a task done, halfway through the alloted time; who never seem to have that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they think about things they have to do; they’re not superhuman. They just understand that, for most things, good enough is just that - good enough. But millions of us - particularly, I’ll wager, over-educated knowledge-worker types - create a vision of genius that haunts us until we’re unable to actually get anything done.

"US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama points on his way to board his campaign plane in Columbia, Missouri, October 31, 2008"

Well, yes. He clearly is pointing. This superb photo series of Obama’s campaign is only slightly impaired by the ponderous captions.

I don’t remember many people singing “God Save the Queen” in May 1997.

The election being over is… odd. Of course, there’s a transition to over-analyse and the future Obama administration to wildly speculate about. But that sense of urgency - the sense that it really is my duty, as a concerned citizen of the world, to spend an hour or so each day catching up on the latest Sarah Palin scandal / Joe the Plumber appearance / McCain campaign infighting / outrageous slur against Obama - is gone.

There is an upside - more time for pointless web crazery such as, for example, finding my-name-as-a-face:

Disapointingly dull, you may agree. But I like that it appears to have a moustache.

In other Web News, Metro’s Tom Phillips has pointed out that the forgotten (or in my case, never-on-the-radar) indie lot Johnny Boy produced a 2004 hit (ahem) that, as well as being pleasantly jangly in a sort of Retro Bar way, presciently predicts the current ongoing Collapse Of Everything:

“You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes & You Get What You Deserve”

Andrew Sullivan has a plethora of reaction from across the ’sphere, with a conservative leaning. These two really sum it up:

The analytical quote:

1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain — who took Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement — in the 2008 presidential race.

2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago’s Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago’s Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.

- Rod Dreher

The personal quote:

Nothing in my life has actually changed in the 30 minutes since it was announced Obama will be our next president. I have the same bills, the same amount of money in the bank, my dishwasher is still broken, and my 5 month old beagle won’t stop peeing on my carpet. Everything in my life is exactly the same as it was 30 minutes ago; and yet I feel as though everything is different.

I feel so much hope.  I feel so much pride. I feel like my one vote was a single drop of water in a great Tsunami of change. I feel like I was one of a million voices screaming in the night, ” I love my country and I’m taking it back!” I’m so proud of the country that I love and have so much hope in my heart that we can together heal the wounds that have been such a source of pain and anger to us all.

I know Obama isn’t going to fix the economy overnight, I know he won’t be able to provide healthcare to all Americans by February ‘09. I know Obama isn’t a Messiah who four years from now will have turned this country into a fabled utopia. But I also know Obama will make moral decisions. I know Obama will try to unite where others try to divide. I know Obama will help to make America the beacon of hope it once was to others. I know that at 27 years of age, I witnessed one of the most important and hopefully glorious chapters in American history.

I know hope.

- Anonymous Daily Dish reader

What with all the fuss about the election for the office of what law blogs call POTUS, it’s easy to forget that today is also the day, not only of hundreds of US Senate and House of Representative races, but thousands more elections to state legislatures and of hundreds of elected judges, sheriffs and city commissioners across America. The world’s largest developed country really is an experiment in local democracy.

And, of course, there are hundreds of state and city referenda on particular issues. These vary from the vastly important to the - well, less so. This list of LA Times endorsements gives you the idea. You probably know about Proposition 8, the measure to amend California’s constitution to ban gay marriage (LA Times says: “No”). But what about Prop 5, introducing new drug rehabilitation agencies (LA Times: also “no”)? Or Prop 2, on the size of battery-hen cages (also, interestingly, “no”)?

The Guardian sums up some of the other, wackier, ballots out there. As well as waking up tomorrow in a world with a black US President-elect, we may be in a world where Colorado’s state constitution defines life as beginning at birth. I look forward to reading the coroner’s reports on the thousands of miscarriages that must take place in Colorado every year…

Dear God, it’s finally here.

It’s worth recalling just how absurdly action-packed this two-year campaign has been. The First Lady Candidate vs the ambitious young black senator. The earliest-ever primaries. The shock in Iowa, Hillary’s tears. The Michigan-Florida farrago, which saw the term “Democratic Rules Committee” enter water-cooler vocabulary. John McCain’s campaign out of money, written off, and then reborn in New Hampshire. Guliani’s Florida gamble. Rev. Wright and “A More Perfect Union”. Bill Clinton’s “fairytale”. “Clean and articulate”. The pit bull, Katie Couric, Tina Fey and Joe the Plumber (say it ain’t so, Joe!). The dramatic Powell endorsement. Then - just as it all seems to be over - Obama’s grandmother dies the day before the election. You couldn’t make it up.

I’m 28, British, and have only been watching elections closely since the Bush era began. But surely this has been the most dramatic campaign since 1968. I wonder if anything - short of, God forbid, an inaugural assassination - can bring it to a suitably compelling climax.

But the next 24 hours should be pretty damn good.

Essential resources (besides the obvious):

• Twitter’s election portal offers stream-of-conscious commentary from its (Obama-centric) young user base
• Twitter accounts @866OURVOTE and @electionjournal have live reports of voting problems and fraud, while Twitter Vote Report offers voting reports from across the country (on a map!)

I’ll be twittering non-stop once the results start coming in. Happy voting, America!

Proof that New Yorkers really are the bestest, funniest, most damn full-of-life people in the world. Listen to this and I defy you not to smile throughout.

American RadioWorks: New York Works

This starts well:

The election’s over.

Sure, the votes still need to be counted.

And yes, things could radically change over the next two weeks.

But let’s be realistic: Republicans are in a bad spot.

And it’s never too early to start planning for 2012…

So far, so sane. Just the kind of thing the soul-searching the GOP needs to do.

…and a ticket that actually inspires the conservative base.

Uh-oh.

And that ticket is Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

Pfffbwahahahaah!

Sure, laugh now. But the main reason the Republican base hasn’t completely ditched McCain is because of Palin and her Jane C-Cup appeal.

Joe the Plumber, meanwhile, has about as much political experience as Palin did four years ago and has immense Joe Six-Pack appeal.

For God’s sake– his name’s Joe! It works perfectly!

It goes on. Once the election’s out of the way, this is going to be one highly entertaining GOP civil war.

Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?

… Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury secretary), have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.

This is an unexpected turn of events … the British economy is far smaller than the U.S. economy, and the Bank of England doesn’t have anything like the influence either of the Federal Reserve or of the European Central Bank. So you don’t expect to see Britain playing a leadership role.

But the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own. [emphasis added]

- Paul Krugman, yesterday. Earlier that day, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

What we have here is a Prime Minister who, thanks to his quick thinking, is literally leading the rescue of the world’s financial system; and we want to throw him out of office in favour of an untried kid because, a year ago, he dithered over whether to call an election?

First John Snow called it. And now this:

Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it. The campaigns themselves can’t afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can’t say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn’t going to save John McCain.  The race is over.

John McCain’s candidacy is as much a casualty of Wall Street as Lehman or Merrill… Before Wall Street’s collapse Senator McCain was ahead. His approval ratings remained high, his VP pick had generated excitement and interest, and his campaign operatives were capable, on any given day, of winning news cycles and giving their opponents fits. And then the underpinnings of American capitalism begin to sink — and with them sunk McCain.

An election dominated at its inception by the war in Iraq is now overwhelmingly focused on the economy. More than half of voters in polls say that the economy is their top concern and Senator Obama enjoys double digit leads among voters asked who can better fix our economic mess. Put simply, there is no way Senator McCain can win if he continues to trail Senator Obama by double digits on the top concern of more than half of voters.

Howard Wolfson, “It’s Over: Why Bill Ayers Won’t Save John McCain“

What could turn things round? Wolfson points to a domestic terror attack as the only thing that could seriously shake things up now. I think the “Bradley effect” is likely to mean Obama’s vote will be smaller on the day than the polls suggest now, potentially making things very tight. And the danger is that overconfident Obama supporters will stay at home. The democrats have to warn against complacency and focus all their efforts on getting out the vote.

Still, it’s true: a McCain victory now would be a stunning turnaround.

Track the latest odds on the race

Hello Philly,

I am glad to be here today for this voter registration drive and for Barack Obama, the next president of the United States.

I’ve spent 35 years writing about America, its people, and the meaning of the American Promise. The Promise that was handed down to us, right here in this city from our founding fathers, with one instruction: Do your best to make these things real: opportunity, equality, social and economic justice, a fair shake for all of our citizens, the American idea, as a positive influence, around the world for a more just and peaceful existence. These are the things that give our lives hope, shape, and meaning. They are the ties that bind us together and give us faith in our contract with one another.

I’ve spent most of my creative life measuring the distance between that American promise and American reality. For many Americans, who are today losing their jobs, their homes, seeing their retirement funds disappear, who have no healthcare, or who have been abandoned in our inner cities, the distance between that promise and that reality has never been greater or more painful.

I believe Senator Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and in his work. I believe he understands, in his heart, the cost of that distance, in blood and suffering, in the lives of everyday Americans. I believe as president, he would work to restore that promise to so many of our fellow citizens who have justifiably lost faith in its meaning. After the disastrous administration of the past 8 years, we need someone to lead us in an American reclamation project. In my job, I travel the world, and occasionally play big stadiums, just like Senator Obama. I’ve continued to find, wherever I go, America remains a repository of people’s hopes, possibilities, and desires, and that despite the terrible erosion to our standing around the world, accomplished by our recent administration, we remain, for many, a house of dreams. One thousand George Bushes and one thousand Dick Cheneys will never be able to tear that house down.

They will, however, be leaving office, dropping the national tragedies of Katrina, Iraq, and our financial crisis in our laps. Our sacred house of dreams has been abused, looted, and left in a terrible state of disrepair. It needs care; it needs saving, it needs defending against those who would sell it down the river for power or a quick buck. It needs strong arms, hearts, and minds. It needs someone with Senator Obama’s understanding, temperateness, deliberativeness, maturity, compassion, toughness, and faith, to help us rebuild our house once again. But most importantly, it needs us. You and me. To build that house with the generosity that is at the heart of the American spirit. A house that is truer and big enough to contain the hopes and dreams of all of our fellow citizens. That is where our future lies. We will rise or fall as a people by our ability to accomplish this task. Now I don’t know about you, but I want that dream back, I want my America back, I want my country back.

So now is the time to stand with Barack Obama and Joe Biden, roll up our sleeves, and come on up for the rising.

Bruce Springsteen, Vote For Change rally, Philadelphia, October 4