The Power of Blog

According to Fortune magazine, more than one Halloween mask retailer has claimed they can correctly predict who will win the White House. Spirit Halloween, the largest seasonal Halloween vendor in the US, says Bush outsold Kerry two to one in 2004, Gore sold 14 percent fewer masks in 2000, and Clinton masks won with 71 percent in 1996.

Levi Stubbs, who sang on Motown band the Four Tops' biggest hits, has died at his home in Detroit aged 72. Abdul Fakir is the only surviving original member of the group, who have sold more than 50 million records.

Arguments about why abortion should be considered a problem have changed considerably in recent years. Writing in the 1980s, the American philosopher LW Sumner stated: ‘Abortion is a moral problem… What is at stake for the fetus is life itself… What is at stake for the woman is autonomy – control of the use to be made of her body.’

In the early twenty-first century the issue appears far less clear. A whole range of issues – fetal viability, fetal sentience, and a range of areas relating to the effects of abortion on women’s health – are just as likely as moral questions to animate participants in the abortion debate. What these issues have in common is their (pseudo) scientific and medical character. In all these examples, the language of risk and safety replaces that of right and wrong. Heated debates about ‘the evidence’ take the place of that about political outlook.

Ferguson, it seems, is - or was, at least - a fan of money, and the way the economy works. But it's as if he had written a fan's book about Manchester United, to be published on the eve of the Champions League final, only to discover that the whole team had been arrested for brawling the night before the match, and the board had been embezzling money, and the manager had bribed the referee. Right now, would you want to have written a book called The Ascent of Money?

David W. Moore, who worked for Gallup for 13 years as managing editor and senior editor of the Gallup Poll, has a new book out denouncing most polls by Gallup or anyone else as useless, and explaining that this became obvious to him when he first began work at Gallup, raising the obvious question of why he stuck around for 13 years. The explanation seems to be that he was trying to fix the problem, and one of the motivations for the book seems to be that he believes he still can fix it.

Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn’t their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that’s why we need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, ‘This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon.

Beginning with Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979, government after government - and party after party - fell to the onslaught of an extremist faith: the narrow, blinkered fundamentalism of the "Chicago School." Epitomized by its patron saint, Milton Friedman, the rigid doctrine held that an unregulated market would always "correct" itself, because its workings are based on entirely rational and quantifiable principles. This was of course an absurdly reductive and savagely ignorant view of history, money and human nature; but because it flattered the rich and powerful, offering an "intellectual" justification for rapacious greed and ever-widening economic and social inequality, it was adopted as holy writ by the elite and promulgated as public policy.

This radical cult - a kind of Bolshevism from above - took its strongest hold in the United States and Britain, and was then imposed on many weaker nations through the IMF-led "Washington Consensus" (more aptly named by Naomi Klein as the "Shock Doctrine"), with devastating and deadly results. (As in Yeltsin's Russia, for example, where life expectancy dropped precipitously and millions of people died premature deaths from poverty, illness, and despair.)

According to the cult, not only were markets to be freed from the constraints placed on them after the world-shattering effects of the Great Depression, but all public spending was to be slashed ruthlessly to the bone. (Although exceptions were always made for the Pentagon war machine.) After all, every dollar spent by a public entity on public services and amenities was a dollar taken away from the private wheeler-dealers who could more usefully employ it in increasing the wealth of the elite -- who would then allow some of their vast profits to "trickle down" to the lower orders.

With Palin we encounter the purest example, in our lifetime, of a candidate whose mere presence on a national ticket demeans and pollutes the very process. To watch her being interviewed is to behold someone not only unwilling, but constitutionally unable, to give a lucid answer to a serious question...

This is a woman who is incapable of passing a Turing test, let alone acting as a Vice-President.