It's named after the Fiddler on the Roof dude

[New York Times] No details [of Russia's new nuclear weapon] were immediately available, but Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said earlier this month that Russia expected to test-fire a mobile version of its Topol-M ballistic missile this year and that production of the new weapon could be commissioned in 2005.

Hawker Stalker: Kramer was wrong

Report from the front:

* M Street, Georgetown, Monday, lunchtime. A beautiful, sunny, clear day. Me: heading to Chipotle for a few soft tacos. George Will: Strolling along past Urban Outfitters, the sunlight dappling his bright yellow locks. Dude! If you're going to go for the dye job, at least get it professionally done. Clairol Nice 'n Easy Champagne Blonde just doesn't cut it in 2004.

[UPDATE: Here's what Kramer had to say]

How the National Football League could save American diplomacy

[Dubya today nominating Saint Condi of Palo Alto for Secretary of State] As many of you know, Condi's true ambition is beyond my power to grant. (Laughter.) She would really like to be the commissioner of the National Football League.

That's our true ambition for Condi, too. Somewhere that she can do no harm.

Blame the Yanks

One of modern Ireland's plagues is the VIP culture -- government ministers speeding here, there, and everywhere in hopes that Sight of Minister in Official Car = Votes. Years of electoral success for Fianna Fail vindicates this strategy. But, combined with the pathetic state of Irish roads (the mania for building motorways around Dublin notwithstanding), something like this was bound to happen:

A car carrying the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht [Irish-speaking] Affairs, Éamon Ó Cuív, has been involved in a head-on collision with another car in Co Kerry.
Mr Ó Cuív suffered a broken finger and bruising. He and four other people were taken to hospital. It is understood none were seriously injured.
The accident happened on the Muckross Road outside Killarney this afternoon.
Gardaí [our lads in blue] believe the other car involved was being driven by an American person.

That big lad from Ancient Greece

Since we've been doing a lot of political posting recently, it might be time for a temporary excursion into other fields. And so it is that we finally got around to seeing some previews for the Oliver Stone Alexander film over the weekend. As our well-informed readers doubtless already know, the title role belongs to Irish actor Colin Farrell. And while we try to avoid the all-round boosterism that comes with Irish success abroad, we certainly didn't see any harm in an Irish actor getting a big part in one of those epic productions where the acting is secondary to the battle scenes anyway.

But that was before we heard the words come out of Colin/Alexander's mouth. The accent, my God, the accent. A quick Google search revealed that this does appear to be considered, shall we say, an issue:

An insider tells the magazine [ContactMusic], "He sounds like a Dublin bus driver."

Now, we tried to go through the obvious thought process on this one ... lots of classical roles are played with English or American accents, and no-one ever complains about those; indeed it's a safe bet that the popular conception of actual historical characters incorporates them having the accents that come with English theatre training.

So are we just giving into this well cornered market when we say that we cringed at Colin's Bertie-esque inflections? Maybe. It's just that ... Farrell is trying to have it both ways: he plays to the stereotype of the Irish wild man in what often seems like a deliberate strategy to build an aura in Hollywood:

Hellraiser Colin Farrell almost faced the wrath of movie maker Oliver Stone after breaking his ankle and his wrist with three days of Alexander still to film. The Irishman fell down a stairway after living it up at a party co-star Val Kilmer threw for the cast and crew in Thailand and passed out. He woke up in agony with broken bones, and Stone admits he came close to ruining the film's ending.

So sometimes we get the antics and the aut(h)entic, gritty Dublin films, but other times we get an aspiring Patrick Stewart.

Again, we might be wrong. Is Colin being truer to his own self than Navan man Pierce Brosnan, who told his oft-repeated accent story to Sunday's New York Times:

Q: Did anyone ever ask you to lose your Irish accent?

A: It's not really Irish anymore. I have my own sound. When I was a young actor in London, they didn't like it -- they forced me to play the token Paddy. But in America, I found my voice. It's now an international sort of accent.

UPDATE [Nov 24]: It looks like there's a reviewer consensus that Farrell's accent is a bit of a problem, but as such it pales in comparison to the film's much bigger problems, which can be tracked back to director Oliver Stone. Here's one review in Slate:

At his [Farrell's] best, he's shrewdly small-scale. You can imagine him firing up the lads at the pub before he gets too stuporous. But all the armies of the Western world? He doesn't begin to have the stature—or the lung power.

One's embarrassing English friends

Every so often when scrolling through the comments on an Andrew Sullivan related post on a blog, someone says something along the lines of "who gives a f*ck what he thinks," a sentiment with which we'd agree except that he is influential, although lately that has meant just influential enough to get on Bill Maher's show on HBO and make a complete fool of himself both with what he said and what he ...er... did.

So anyway, having established that we do give a f*ck about what he says, here's a topic where it will be equally revealing if he doesn't have something to say. One of the values of reading Sullywatch every day is to track Sully's chronically inconsistent positions on privacy, a classic sign of inconsistency being that he has retool his position with each new case that comes onto the radar screen, including of course his own [Here's one post from Sullywatch in 2002 trying to make sense of his then position on the issue].

The new problem: Sullivan likes dropping references to his English chums into his blog, and archetypal chum Boris Johnson has made this list a few times. Boris is the court jester for the UK branch of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy -- as Tory MP, editor of the Spectator, columnist for the Telegraph, and general media personality. He got into trouble parroting some VRC spin about the murdered hostage Ken Bigley but this mess is now dwarfed by personal problems.

It had been rumoured for months that the married Boris was having an affair with Petronella Wyatt, a well-connected columnist at the Spectator (the type of connections that are signified by having a mother named Lady Verushka Wyatt). To be honest we thought that this was already fact, since the incomparable Private Eye has been making reference to it for months.

But Sunday's British papers bring the allegation that not only has there been an affair, but that it produced an unwanted pregnancy and that Boris paid for the abortion [here's a link to the tabloid version of the story]. A toxic set of circumstances for the principals, for sure, but what will the self-styled Catholic Tory pro-privacy anti-hypocrisy pro-life pro-Boris media rebel make of it?

UPDATE: He clearly is reading the news from England so he can't claim not to know about it.
FURTHER UPDATE [Nov 24] Boris's travails even made last Friday's New York Times. Perhaps, like us, Sully still has a stack of recent NYTs to work through.

Fake but accurate

We've noted before how the New York Times corrections section provides a useful index of Republican enforcement of particular spin points. There is another revealing one today. In the wide coverage of the fact that Dubya has replaced the guy who thought that brothels were a bigger threat to America than Osama with the guy who helped trash the Geneva Conventions, it was often said that the latter, Alberto Gonzales, had described the conventions as "quaint." Well, he did, but:

[New York Times correction] The passage [from his legal writings], discussing the war on terrorism, read in full: "In my judgment, this new paradigm [War on Terror] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms and scientific instruments.'' The version in the article yesterday was truncated after "some of its provisions."

So the interpretation is clear: the White House sees the impact of a potential spin point New Attorney General says Geneva Convention Quaint, and is moving to head it off as quickly as possible. A couple of responses. First, the 'quaint' word was clearly anchored to what sounds like a 1940s conception of POW life. So we suppose the point is that Dubya's lawyers are strict constructionists when it comes to the text of the 1789 Constitution, but not to the much more recent Geneva Conventions.

Second, note the previous clause of the disputed sentence -- he clearly says that the restrictions on interrogation are obsolete, and in that section he's not talking about the sort of POW life envisaged in a certain movie starring Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, Max von Sydow, and Pele.

And there is a broader point. Why wouldn't the Republicans be alert to the potency of the arguably out-of-context quote, since they made such effective use of it themselves? Who among us has not heard that John Kerry said "I voted for it before I voted against it," that he wanted a "global test" for US self-defence operations, and that he said "who among us" at a stock-car race in Wisconsin?

The bottom line is that, as sweet as it would be to hit them with their own trick, sensible liberals should stay away from the claim that Gonzales said that the Conventions were quaint. There's enough dirt in everything else he wrote to avoid that distraction.

How they do things in blue states

[New York Times]
In Minnesota, Flu Vaccines Go Waiting
The state has a surplus of 120,000 vaccines because even the people considered most vulnerable are forgoing the shots so there will be enough left for others.

Go Cheers Yourself

Who among us is not familiar with the word 'Cheers' as a common salute over alcoholic beverages and the name of that bar where everyone knows your name? But a little while ago, one of our friends from Africa alerted us to another context for this word which we feel has been proliferating: an e-mail (especially if work-related) ending in 'cheers' is usually a sign that either (a) the sender has refused to do something that was asked or (b) the sender is dumping work onto someone else. The 'cheers' is taken by the sender as a way of defusing the negative content of the message. We also suspect a higher rate of prevalence of this usage amongst non-native English speakers. Instances or contra-instances welcome.

Stuck on our own flypaper

Wasn't the logic of flypaper, one of the cooked up ex post rationales for invading Iraq, that a war there would attract all the super-duper evildoers to one place, thus making all of them fight concentrated US firepower? But this wasn't meant to be something that the US imposed on itself:

[New York Times] Insurgents opened a new front in Mosul and killed 13 in a Baghdad car bomb, while U.S. troops moved into Falluja's south.

Elitist, moi?

It would be laughable if we weren't in for four more years of it: the spectacle of pundits and commentators who spend their days (and their wealth) in the smarter parts of the northeast corridor, railing against "an elite" that "demeans middle American values" and so can never understand the appeal of The Infallible One.

There is no finer example of this than an article by Marty Peretz, sitting behind the subscription window in the Wall Street Journal. That's Marty Peretz, embittered spokesman for those misunderstood ordinary people in middle America -- and owner of the New Republic, with a teaching position at Harvard, a founder of the thestreet.com and holder of a zillion corporate board positions.

The article is a tendentious screed not worth your time, so we'll just note his (unintentionally) comic lurch for Pseud's Corner right after his opening salvo against those elitist Dems:

The American people have plumb busted the hearts of the country's liberal elites, and the sentiments evoked among these elites are not dolorous but actually quite nasty. So much so that they reminded me of a poem by the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht,

Brecht? He could only top that by insisting that the word elite really should be spelt with an accent on the first 'e.' One thing is clear: the logic behind his choice of editors for the New Republic looks ever clearer with time.

News you can't use

For reasons too complicated to go into, we found ourselves surfing the Statistics Canada website today. Where we found the following exciting news:

Canadian farmers more than doubled their area planted in pumpkin, squash and zucchini between 1986 and 2001, making them the nation's seventh most important vegetable crop, according to a new report.
Pumpkins were the fastest growing vegetable crop between 1986 and 2001. (For the sake of simplicity, the term "pumpkins" refers to three vegetables: Pumpkin, squash and zucchini.)
This fast growth appears to be related to the popularity of this vegetable during Thanksgiving and Halloween.

And if wasn't already clear that we have too much time on our hands, we have some quibbles here. For one thing, since Thanksgiving and Halloween happen, like, every year, how can these holidays alone explain the brilliant recent growth in the pumpkin crop? And then, if you're going to lump squash and zucchini in with pumpkins for statistical purposes, doesn't that weaken the explanatory power of Halloween? How many carved zucchinis with candles inside did you see on the doorsteps last week?

Next year in Dublin

We were thinking about a longer post on this topic, but to be honest -- we've got nothin'. So here's the basics: today's New York Times has a long article on the phenomenon of the returning Irish i.e. both legal and illegal Irish immigrants in the US deciding that they've had enough and returning home. This Crooked Timber post fleshes out some of the discussion but one point we'd like to make is that those emigrants reading about their return to a "fast-paced multiracial society" back home -- don't expect it to mean good Chinese food. Oh, and one thing hasn't changed -- Fianna Fail are still in charge.

Of that ilk

On the day that Yasser looks finally to be on the way out, and the invasion of GroznyFallujah proceeds, it seems to be the role of Irish home news to provide some light relief. The New York Times has a lengthy article in their sports section on the Olympic showjumping affair, and then there's the events recounted in this court case, which cry out for a modern day Synge to do them justice:

The Laois Gaelic football team captain, Colm Parkinson, has pleaded guilty to two assault charges after a nightclub disturbance in Athlone.
Mr Parkinson, 26, from Meelick in Portlaoise, was charged with assaulting two men in separate incidents inside and outside Bozos nightclub at Church St in Athlone in the early hours of Sunday, 24 October last.

... Earlier the court heard from Inspector Tom Curley, who said that in relation to the first assault, victim Patrick Macken was sitting in a toilet in a nightclub texting friends when he was assaulted by Mr Parkinson ... In the second incident, the court heard that Mr Parkinson had arrived outside a chip shop some time later where a row was already going on ...

Mr Quinn [the accused's solicitor] said that his client held a finance degree, and was a star GAA player. He said he came from an upstanding family and had a very good reputation.

Other than no-one reading anything, it's a great life

It's already clear that the burden of imposing the "smart conservative" narrative on Dubya's value-voting victory is proving too onerous a task for NYT columnist David Brooks. Because in today's attempt to attribute Dubya's success to people who live in America's answer to Slough, he trips up on the quality of life in these places:

The places I [Brooks] was writing about are so new, and civic life is as yet so spare, there are few lecture series or big libraries to host author talks.

But a few sentences later:

On the one hand, people move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives ... they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality.

On second thought, maybe he's onto to something. If there is a civic culture out there, it's a child centered one -- which might explain Daily Howler's utterly accurate depiction of the rationale offered by some loud-mouthed but easily offended red staters for their votes:

Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo! For ourselves, we’re tired of all the blubbering self-pity which emanates hourly from talk radio. We heard it yesterday, right here in this city [Baltimore], as a "balanced" panel of four talk-show conservatives cried about "elitist" Dems who went to Harvard. Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo! Big wet tears splashed down their cheeks as these fakers and phonies tossed hay to the herd.

Devaluing the values voters

Remember when we said that we wouldn't be reading any of the post-election punditry, given its inevitable reliance on a bogus notion of morality? We lied. At least a little. Because we ventured into some of the election analysis in Saturday's New York Times. One thing is clear -- Dubya's blue state boosters have reacted pretty badly to the implication of the election they have common cause with the likes of Ella-May from Mobile, Alabama.

So there's a big pushback against the already famous moral values question on the exit polls and the related focus on gay marriage as the sleeper issue in the election. The morals question acted like flypaper to the Dubya-voting respondents. It's pretty tough being someone like David "smart conservative" Brooks, moving in the urbane circles of Ardmore Pa. and Bethesda Md. and seeing the messianic appeal of Dubya to JesusCountry voters.

So Brooks, in a piece called "the values-vote myth" and Andrew Sullivan, inter alia, push a two-part critique: (1) the percentage of voters from various religious classifications didn't change much from the 2000 election, so there's no sign of a new voting block being driven to vote by moral issues, and (2) the moral values question on the exit poll itself is flawed, because it's a catch-all term picking up "none of the above" responses in the poll.

Both elements of the critique are, of course, shite. First, unchanged voter composition: elections are decided by numbers, not percentages. Both parties did a much better job of voter mobilisation than 2000 -- there is more of every category voting, but, at the risk of sounding like an economist, there's still the question of how each party managed to appeal to those additional voters. Republicans needed additional numbers of evangelical voters to offset highly motivated new Democratic voters i.e. they needed an issue to tip previously lukewarm evangelicals into going to the polls. And what better than conjuring up for such people the spectacle of weddings involving men of the same gender in polygamous marriages with household pets?

Second, the flawed poll question. Gary Langer, the ABC director of polling, who was on the committee that selected the question (against his wishes) says:

This distortion comes from a question in the exit poll, co-sponsored by the national television networks and The Associated Press, that asked voters what was the most important issue in their decision: taxes, education, Iraq, terrorism, economy/jobs, moral values or health care. Six of these are concrete, specific issues. The seventh, moral values, is not, and its presence on the list produced a misleading result ... this hot-button catch phrase had no place alongside defined political issues on the list of most important concerns in the 2004 vote.

Notice the circular logic here: I, the pollster, believe that elections are decided by "issues." Therefore, any voter response to something that is not "an issue" is evidence that the poll question is wrong. But look at the actual campaign that Dubya ran: short of specific policy proposals, and long on references to his own leadership, resolve, and moral values (including the phrase hijacked from the Vatican, his reverence for a "culture of life").

And it's telling that analysts who, unlike Brooks and Sullivan, are unencumbered by the need to disassociate themselves from a particular narrative, are likewise skeptical:

But Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, called critiques "garbage.''
"The people who picked moral values as an issue know what that means," he said. "It's a code word in surveys for a cluster of issues like gay marriage and abortion."
Mr. McInturff said that if "moral values" was really a "catchall" with a confused meaning, then more Democrats would have picked it. Of the 22 percent who chose "moral values," 80 percent were Bush supporters, 20 percent were Kerry supporters. "It's self-selected by people for whom these issues are very important for their votes," he said, adding that the margin by which Mr. Bush carried these voters arguably made the difference in the election.

So here's our word of probably useless advice for disappointed liberals: tune out the self-serving drivel of the crypto and smart conservatives, and the self-hating liberals (like Richard Cohen). What's wrong with taking seriously the winning side's own explanation of how they won?

UPDATE: As a special service to our readers, we link here to the schedule of Bill Maher's show on HBO this week, for additional chances to catch a bizarre spectacle involving the aforementioned Andrew Sullivan, brought to national attention by James Wolcott.

FURTHER UPDATE [Nov 15]: The angry old man of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy is pushing the Brooksian line, with his own nasty insinuations thrown in. Charles Krauthammer, who we previously posted about when he was using the Stalinist trick of equating dissent with mental illness, has that plus so much more in this section from his currrent rant (in the Washington Post and WSJ):

In the post-election analyses, the liberal elite, led by the holy trinity of The New York Times -- Krugman, Friedman, and Dowd -- just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. As usual, Maureen Dowd achieved the highest level of hysteria,

Here's an experiment: suppose that a liberal columnist referred to the 'holy trinity' of the neocons, Krauthammer, Wolfowitz and (say) Andrew Sullivan, and went on to label Ann Coulter as 'hysterical' -- anyone want to guess what the lines of attack from the right would be?

EVEN FURTHER UPDATE [Nov 17]: Brad DeLong links to a post that is very apropos the question of whether voters think about "issues" the same way that pollsters do.

ONE FINAL UPDATE (Dec 23). Opinion polls are shown a clear plunge in support for the Iraq war. The plunge is pronounced since the election. Pundits scratch their heads and wonder why Dubya got elected if the war was so latently unpopular -- it's as if those voters were all worked up about other issues in election season ... like moral values!

The Oirish subsidiary of the Anglo-American Corporation

Back in June, the English satirical magazine Private Eye did an extremely funny take on the Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin. It was accompanied by a map relating present day Dublin to the sights and events of Bloomsday -- one place had become the Bank of Sinn Fein and another was allegedly now a Starbucks. [unfortunately the Eye web-content is still pretty skimpy so we only have memory to work from].

It was telling how accurate the parody was that the only correspondence it generated was to do with whether an old picture used in the piece depicted the Cairo gang -- a group of British intelligence agents killed by Michael Collins. But the mockery of the new Oirish Dublin compared to its Joycean counterpart was dead on.

Anyway, another feature of the map was a supposed Dublin bypass, which was shown as a one-inch wide swathe through the centre of the city. While well capturing the mania of our National Roads Authority to build a motorway in the least appropriate place, the parody has already been trumped by reality. Because the geniuses who run Dublin's light rail, the Luas, have decided to connect its two lines (why they are not connected now reflects much previous idiocy) and the preferred route goes right through Trinity College Dublin.

The current plan calls for taking a chunk (subs. req'd) of the Provost's Garden, which will destroy the current frontage of 1 Grafton Street and transform the context of a walk known to just about everyone who has been to Dublin. In what we assume was an intended provocation, a letter writer to Thursday's Irish Times wanted the line actually run across the interior campus, to provide the riders with a view of a college they would otherwise never see (we report, you decide).

This all comes in the same week as the news that Dublin is losing Bewleys but gaining Harvey Nichols. And to cap it all, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said that Dubya's win was better for the Irish economy, because Kerry's policies would have been more restrictive for US inward investment in the Republic. We're increasingly wondering if the real Ireland is now to be found in Northern Ireland.

After the Fall

Despite our manic rate of posting of yesterday, our sense is that the thousands of BOBW readers still await our definitive statement and reaction to the US election results. In the short-term, it has simplified our lives, because there are now huge sections of news coverage and analysis that we don't have to bother with. Sure, the pundits have lots to say, but we don't -- not when 58 million people knew what they knew about Abu Ghraib and civilian deaths in Iraq, voted for Dubya, and then told pollsters and reporters on the way out that they were "values voters."

And when we complain about civilian deaths in Iraq, we are saying that the US military's legalistic formulation "we don't deliberately target civilians" is not enough. Dropping bombs on urban areas may be strategically and tactically rational, but there is no moral veneer that can be attached to such a decision.

So as far as we are concerned, the political analysis going on right now is essentially beside the point in the face of a very selective definition of morality. As a pointer to the future it has been interesting to watch the emerging uncertainty amongst people who were once some of Dubya's biggest boosters. But they have a long way to go. For instance, Josh Marshall catches an amazingly naive Andrew Sullivan asking for Dubya to be given a fresh start for his second term, the antithesis of what having run and won on one's record is supposed to mean.

Sullivan also has found a dodge to avoid fully confronting his realization that gay people like him are the new Rovian wedge issue -- FEDERALISM WORKS. But he seems to be confusing the US with Switzerland. One doesn't pursue central government power the way the Republicans have just for the fun of a minimal state foreign and defence policy while letting 51 flowers bloom domestically. Dubya's federal courts are going to be coming after state autonomy in social matters sooner rather than later.

And while we're on this topic, we're willing to bet that somewhere in the bowels of the Justice Department, there is someone taking a look at whether the Federal government can fight California's approval of state funded stem cell research. To engage in amateur lawyering for a second, the interest on the state bonds to fund this research is presumably a tax deduction from federal income -- therefore contravening Dubya's ban on federal funding of stem-cell research. Although that argument would require Dubya to acknowledge that a tax cut is a form of government expenditure, which would open a hornet's nest.

But such Kerry-style nuanced analysis is for later. For now, we are devoting ourselves more fully, via the wonders of television, to football and music videos, especially those from the urban contemporary genre. Political thoughts still intrude on the latter -- for instance, watching the side-splittingly funny video for Kanye West's The New Workout Plan, we wonder, during the Anna Nicole Smith sequence -- would her character be a moral values voter?

One sign of God's continued existence

BBC 2136 FULL-TIME Deportivo La Coruna 0-1 Liverpool
A good night's work for Liverpool is completed as they hold on for a comfortable victory.

Back to the nation's business

MR. McCLELLAN [White House Press Secretary]: It was down the hall, they were outside the Vice President's office. And then he [Dubya] was headed over to the residence to see Mrs. Bush, who I know had placed a call to him. And he was going to get in a workout, which he probably has finished about now.

The Number of the Beast

In the spirit of post-election rage, we're going to allow ourselves the claim that the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy now has 59,471,754 unindicted co-conspirators.

The Hugo Chavez approach to slow counts

Thankfully, things in Ohio never got to the point where Dubya would have been taking tips from Hugo (subs. req'd):

Venezuela sent troops to two opposition-held states that still haven't tallied Sunday's local voting. Governors say Chavez plans to oust them

The moral values election

mor·al
(adj.)
1. Of or concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness of human action and character: moral scrutiny; a moral quandary.
2. Teaching or exhibiting goodness or correctness of character and behavior: a moral lesson.
3. Conforming to standards of what is right or just in behavior; virtuous: a moral life.
4. Arising from conscience or the sense of right and wrong: a moral obligation.
5. Having psychological rather than physical or tangible effects: a moral victory; moral support.
6. Based on strong likelihood or firm conviction, rather than on the actual evidence: a moral certainty.

Election night impressions

1. Someone at CNN needs to tranquilise Larry King and remove him from the panel as discretely as possible.

2. The exit polls were shite.

3. The spin that the huge lines at polling stations were a great sign for democracy is wrong. They are a sign of an antiquated electoral system.

4. Some retrospective interpretation. At about 6.40pm on the East Coast on Tuesday evening, we were working our way home and listening to the radio; CBS radio says their exit polls show that "moral issues" were very important to voters. We briefly wonder if this is standard code for the media to signal they have an exit poll showing Bush is doing well. But think nothing more of it. Until a few hours later.

The embargo spouts a financial leak

Slate magazine has made a tradition of publishing the exit poll data despite the supposed moratorium on such data while polls are open. And here's another example of the kind of Big Media inconsistency they have in mind when they justify the policy. If you go to the Wall Street Journal today looking for exit poll data, you won't find it. BUT, if you to the markets report update, you find (subs. req'd):

The first whiff of election results, however premature, knocked stocks from their perch Tuesday, wiping out a day of surprising gains that had carried the Nasdaq Composite Index above 2000 points for the first time in four months.

"This was an election-driven day. No earnings reports. No economic data," said Brian Bush [we're assuming no relation], director of research at Stephens Inc. in Little Rock, Ark. He said the Web site Drudge Report posted some form of exit-poll data in two battleground states -- Ohio and Pennsylvania -- that indicated Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic challenger, was doing better than President Bush.

"The market reacted very negatively to that," Mr. Bush said. "Many of us observed the market seemed to be predicting a Bush victory." After the early polling numbers turned up on a number of Web sites and online blogs, the stock market stumbled and the losses snowballed all the way to the closing bell.

So when the supposedly illicit data is now itself generating news, the quandary only deepens.

One result is already in

In the frantic quest for exit poll data, any website offering exit poll data is crashing.

Not big college states

Pretty boy Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, now at Harvard (motto: ennui, c'est nous) sets himself up as the voice of optimism about the US in Tuesday's Daily Telegraph -- there is no latent fissure in the US over politics, despite the bitter election campaign:

Having spent much of the past few months on the road, giving lectures in states as diverse as Massachusetts, New York, California, Michigan and Minnesota, I am happy to report that civil war is not imminent.

But ... Niall, check out a typical state-by-state map for 2000 -- all these states went for Gore, and only the final two show any wavering in terms of going for Kerry in 2004 (and in the end, will probably go for Kerry). And Niall is not telling where he was in these states -- for instance, we doubt that Ted Nugent attended his talk in Michigan.

Niall's audience in Michigan would doubtless have been capable of getting worked up about the Michigan vs Michigan State football game. But if you're looking for a political schism in this crowd, you're not going to find it. Next time, it would be worth presenting the Empire stuff to, and discussing politics with, the Florida crowd that swore a collective pledge of allegiance to Dubya.

From the mouths of hacks

In the spirit of building bridges after a divisive election campaign, we will flag the wisdom in this Mark Steyn column about the election:

For all those who complain with feigned ennui about the choice of candidates – the lesser of two evils, the evil of two lessers, yawn – the political system has contrived to throw up two men who are almost perfect embodiments of the choice facing the country.

Indeed. Is there anyone out there who didn't go to Harvard and/or hasn't some new connection to the New Republic or Slate who doubts that there's a real choice in this campaign?

Thank God Meryl Streep was not available

[Irish Times, subs. req'd] A star-studded cast has been lined up for My Boy, a film about the life of the late Irish singer Phil Lynott.

Gary Dourdan, who plays police officer Warrick Brown in the hit US series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, will play the role of the singer who died tragically of a drug overdose in 1986. An ex-bass player, Dourdan has been studying Lynott's life for the past few months.

The American actor joins a strong cast that includes Oscar- winning actress Holly Hunter, who will play the rock star's mother Philomena Lynott.

Hunter recently spent time in Ireland to perfect her Irish accent and she will return here next year to begin filming.

Bizarre but not unprecedented

Our visit today to the GUBU blog -- a necessary distraction from thinking about the many different fiascos the US election may present tomorrow evening -- draws our attention to the strange tale of Waterford Crystal (the horse, not the glassware). The horse, ridden by Cian O'Connor, won a gold medal in showjumping for Ireland in the Olympics. But the nags, like their human counterparts, are drug tested, using the same procedure: two samples are taken, and if the A-sample tests positive for banned substances, the B-sample is tested to confirm.

And the cycle of blame and excuses is the same for horses and humans as well -- "I didn't cheat," "it was for medical reasons," -- as was quickly seen when the horse failed the A-sample. The B-sample was on some circuitous route from Paris, to Cambridge, and maybe or maybe not to Hong Kong, because one way or another, it has been stolen. The rule seems to be that if the B-sample is lost, the entire test is voided. So, in the TV crime show terminology, we have Cian on motive, but not yet means and opportunity.

In any event, bringing our New World perspective to this incident, we were reminded of the Albert Belle affair in baseball. Albert was hitting suspiciously well for the Cleveland Indians in 1995, and during a game in Chicago, the White Sox decided that there were enough grounds to ask the umpires to confiscate his bat and test it for "corking" (in which the player has an illegally altered bat with a lighter interior, to get a faster swing). The suspect bat was stored in the umpires' dressing room. And it was stolen. The creative thief crawled from the Indians dressing room through air conditioning shafts, and through the roof panels, to substitute another bat.

It wasn't a very good substitution because the umpires could immediately see that the bat was different, but it did remove the presumably incriminating evidence. Of course, if Cian was involved in the disappearance of the B-sample, the logistics are much more complicated than crawling through some roofing. But there's no Olympic gold for ingenuity.

UPDATE Nov 2: Things get weirder, after the theft, a break-in and missing files.