I’m happy that it seems likely Senator Obama will be the next President. But I would have liked to see a better campaign, one that would have not only pitted “the same” against “change” but actually defined those concepts with a little more detail. It’s now up to the next President elect to do that.

Versioning is a term used in marketing where it describes a product/pricing strategy in which one combination is significantly more expensive only to make another one look like a bargain – think of your favorite fast food chain’s size/price combinations for soft drinks. Or, the other way around, think of my ever reliable method for choosing great bottles of Bordeaux if you don’t know the wines – buy the second cheapest bottle that fulfills your measurable quality standards, as the cheapest one is probably only on offer to make the second cheapest look better and should not actually be consumed.

But is versioning applicable to electoral decision making? Could having more extreme candidates on one side of the marginal vote lead to a higher vote for that side’s more centrist candidate instead of (usually assumed, arithmetically plausible, or even statistically evident) opposite?

Definitely an interesting thought. But let’s still hope that there won’t be another Florida recount and this will remain a purely theoretical question, at least for this US Presidential election.

The Republicans have made a last-minute attempt to prevent Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House by trying to recruit an Oxford academic to “prove” that his autobiography was ghostwritten by a former terrorist.

With two days before the election, Obama is poised to become America’s first black president, according to polls showing he has an average six-point lead over John McCain, his Republican opponent.

Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, has devised a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases.

Following the Script – Obama, McCain and ‘The West Wing’

Paul Krugman – OK, we are a banana republic

Here’s Sarah Palin making that point to CBS news anchor Katie Couric. It would funny, if weren’t so sad and scary.

Why did boarding take over from cure, treatment and torture? Darius Rejali, the author of the recent book “Torture and Democracy” and a professor at Reed College, has an answer: “There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding” — a word found as early as 1929 — “they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them.”

“Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people.”

Sure, in that case, everything would depend on the votes of the unpledged superdelegates, and I think it is fair to assume that most of them would not want to risk alienating “the will of the people”. Alas, or fortunately, that’s not as easily done as it seems, simply because “the will of the people” cannot be as evident to a party official from, say, California, as it appears to a journalist looking at the nation-wide delegate count. What’s more important to said superdelegate? Supporting the candidate chosen by the voters in his or her home state? Or the one with the higher total number of pledged delegates (assuming they are not the same)? As superdelegates do not appear to be representing states proportional to the number of superdelegates, I’d suggest that the nomination is indeed still an open race, and possibly will be even at the Convention should both campaigns still have the same “momentum.”

Maybe it’s deal time now that John McCain is officially the Republican nominee. Why not have an “unbeatable democratic ticket” by guaranteeing Obama an active vice presidency to get the experience he still needs (at least for the campaign) and let the two agree that Hillary Clinton will not run for a second term… we’ll see.

Arizona Weighs Bill to Allow Guns on Campuses – Horrified by recent campus shootings, a state lawmaker proposes that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons might deter future incidents.

“[w]hen Mr. Clinton left office in 2001, … , … the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment had opened the door to the era of George W. Bush.”

A little too reminiscent of the tale of Sex, Lies, and Dossiers which a young Texan student called Amber told me in June 2003 on the train to Prague, the myth that Bill’s unsatiable libido can be blamed for just about everything from global warming to Abu Ghraib. Maybe that’s some kind of conservative Godwin’s law equivalent, but I just wouldn’t have thought this kind of thinking has made it into the NY Times. Well, maybe the Times are a changing.

SPIEGEL ONLINE – Toilettenaffäre: Sex-Skandal zermürbt Republikaner

Und ausgerechnet in dieser Woche machen sowohl Jon Stewart als auch Steven Colbert Urlaub…

An article published in the Boston Globe a month after the directive had been published details that even Conservatives who were involved in the campaign against former Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry are deeply critical of the directive. According to to the Boston Globe -

“[t]he unanswered questions have provoked anxiety across ideological lines. The conservative commentator Jerome Corsi , for example, wrote in a much-linked online column that the directive looked like a recipe for allowing the office of the presidency to seize “dictatorial powers” because the policy does not discuss consulting Congress about when to invoke emergency powers — or when to turn them off.”

Interestingly, the Congressman, Peter DeFazio, who is apparently a member of the U.S. House on the Homeland Security Committee and as such entitled to review classified material, asking to review details of the policy on behalf of some of his constituents who worried about “a conspiracy” being buried in the classified documents, told The Oregonian after his request was denied that

“[m]aybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right.”

Coming from a Congressman, that’s at least somewhat scary.

Looking forward to John Stewart’s take on this.

“HISTORY can be kinder to presidents than journalists and voters are. Like Truman, Johnson and Nixon before him, George Bush has seen his approval ratings wither under the burden of an unpopular war. But all three of those presidents look better now than they did when they were in power.…” (American politics | Saving the Bush presidency | Economist.com, behind subscription wall)

I think The Economist has far too many “natural Republican” readers in the US to maintain any kind of journalistic credibility in this respect. They should simply stop reporting the issue, but instead they keep writing and wet themselves whenever they put the name George W. Bush on the cover… that’s also quite some pattern.

“In the March issue of GQ, Wil S. Hylton argues that Vice President Richard Cheney should be impeached for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Now I suppse there was a small chance for this to appear in Hustler magazine, although Larry Flynt is better known for being sued that for suing. But GQ? I’m confused. Maybe they just want to give everyone an good alibi, you know… I’m just reading Playboy for the interviews…. and I’m just reading GQ for the impeachment proceeedings…

Even Bush’s last friend among the German newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, seems appalled about the seemingly totalitarian legal practices applied by these “courts”. As the newspaper reports (in German), defendants may be punished with the death penalty based on indirect witness accounts and forced testimonies.

Let’s hope Ben Franklin did not hear about it.

Update

(27/01/2007) Of course, Jon Stewart did not let this go through without commenting. Check the videos on thedailyshow.com.

Supposedly, CNN stands for cable NEWS network. That of course is not just a slight euphemism in the case of the video linked to below, which Edward Hugh just sent to the afoe mailing list: Wolf Blitzer manages to spend almost 9 minutes with US vice president Dick Cheney without getting *any* answer. I think by now we can all agree that Cheney is a phenomenon – he may have stopped just doing the Rove thing, you know, creating a reality for everyone else to believe in. He may have actually started to live in his own world. On the other hand, he may just know very well that he can shoot a man in the face without any consequence, so shooting down a lonely Wolf doesn’t seem too big a deal.

But the Wold tried to bite back: Mary, Cheney’s lesbian daughter is apparently pregnant, and I think that Cheney managed to largely keep her out of politics and the “family values” faction of his constituency off his back throughout Bush’s presidency, throughout all the “gay marriage” shebang, is remarkable from a communications point of view, and likely one of the few things he could be congratulated for. So when Wolf Blitzer called Cheney on his “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy by asking him to comment on a “familiy values” group’s statement regarding the upbringing of children out of heterosexual wedlock, he lost his cool – but only a little.

It’s an interesting document to watch though, not least because we learn that Iranian Uranium isn’t just a complicated foreign policy issue: Try to say it fast, it’s not that easy – “Iranian Uranium Iranian Uranium Iranian Uranium Iranian Uranium Iranian Uranium…”

People are finally waking up – let’s hope it’s not too late. From the NYT -

“The concept of the N.S.A. having near-real-time access to information about every call made in the country is chilling,” said Mr. Bass, former counsel for intelligence policy at the Justice Department. He said the phone records program resembled Total Information Awareness, a Pentagon data-mining program shut down by Congress in 2003 after a public outcry.

Oh, and there’s a chance the US forces on German soil will have to do more than singing Karaoke in local Irish Pubs soon: Via SFGate, I noticed, that the President is not entirely sure about the state of democracy in Germany…

Zeroing in on the United States’ ties to Germany and recalling that German troops did not help attack Iraq, Bush admits: “I’ve come to realize that the nature of the German people are such that war is very abhorrent, that Germany is a country now that is — no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, Germans are — just don’t like war…. The point now is how do we work together to achieve important goals. And one such goal is a democracy in Germany [sic].” (The White House published its transcript with Bush’s glaring error and called attention to it.)

A part of the American blogosphere, on the other hand, was most excited to finally learn hrough the interview that President Bush’s best moment of all was

“when [he] caught a seven and a half pound perch in [his] lake.”

A little fishy, indeed.

I’m starting to wonder if we’re gonna miss him, after January 2009…

Here’s the BBC reporting on Bush’s performance – and here, via throwawayyourtv.com, is Colbert’s performance (25 minutes).

Truly a struggle of giants. I want the GW Bush show on Comedy Central now. Seriously, he’ll probably consider resigning the Presidency if he gets a good enough offer. The comdy thing is really what he should be doing.

And if it happens, remember you read it here first. See, Germans can be funny, too…

Update: Rightwinged.com has a video of Mr Bush’s performance. Perhaps not too surpringly, given the name of the blog, the author believes that Colbert delivered a weak show, based on the impression of relative silence during the performance. I don’t know how the sound was mixed but even if the “room full of liberals” he cites (Foreign White House Correspondents and the usual American political A-list suspects if they were not on a book promotion tour) was unexpectedly quiet, this was certainly the case because they must have had a hard time believing that someone would indeed dare to beat up the President seated on the Podium right next to him in the way Colbert did.

“Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson’s Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature.”

Well, we’ll see. First of all, the state legislatures have to pass the resolutions. The floor rule may have given the opponents a new lever to apply, but politics still do play a role in this. Still, these attempts are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Particularly given the fact that the Bush administration is caught in a negative feedback slope now: Revelations about misconduct reduce its political clout thereby leading to more revelations about misconduct, and so on.

Today’s exaymple? From ThinkProgress via Economist’s View -

“[Yesterday, on CBS] 60 Minutes, CIA analyst Tyler Drumheller revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.”

Watch it (quicktime).

By the way, according to the tape, the White House had no comment…

Well, those were days. Three years, a misconceived war, a press secretary, and a watergatesque scandal later, Bush bashing has finally gone mainstream again, even in the US. Still it’s not often as beautifully packaged as P!nk’s “Dear Mr President”, which you can listen to via YouTube. And while you’re at it, why not listen to my very own song GW Blues – you can download and play it right here. I wrote the lyrics in March and April 2003, and initially published it on afoe just before the 2004 US presidential elections.

As much as I would have then welcomed the current Presidential approval rates, now they are, in my opinion, possibly dangerous. The President’s severely limited legislative clout could prompt him to foreign policy activism – if in doubt what that could mean, read Seymour Hersh’s piece about “The Iran Plans” in the New Yorker. I still don’t think the US will attack Iran, simply because it would be such an overt example of acting against one’s own interests. But allowing the President to be a little busier at home would seem like a useful risk reduction strategy. Maybe he should go take that walk with P!nk.

By the way, the latter is always welcome to record a cover version of my song… ;)