(1) When I heard the kerfuffle about Obama’s radio discussion on civil rights and the constitution, I went back and listened to it, drawing two major conclusions. First – that anyone who expects him to appoint lots and lots of radical judges, is likely to be very disappointed; he has a small c conservative understanding of what the judiciary can do. Second, I was reminded how much I missed _Odyssey_ – it was the best radio show I have ever been on, and more generally, a really first rate contribution to public discussion. A full audio archive is “available here”:http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/audio_library/od_ra1.asp.

(2) Via Josh Cohen, Archon Fung and ABC news have put together “MyFairElection”:http://myfairelection.com/, which seems a very useful exercise for those of you who are (unlike me) eligible to vote next week. It combines Google maps with data on polling stations, allowing people to report problems such as long lines etc, and (if it works according to plan), provide a ‘weather map’ of voting conditions across the country.

(3) I did a Campaign Free edition bloggingheads “with Dan Drezner”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/15457 yesterday on changes in the global economy. The dialogue stopped early because Dan had to pick up a sick kid from school, but was pretty interesting for me, at least – in contrast to many of these conversations, which involve battles over set piece positions, I found myself actually rethinking what I understood to be going on and its implications during the process (so, a real conversation, or something like it).

Unfortunately, I’ll be out of the country on Halloween this year, but seeing this house and yard over the weekend in the northern suburbs of Chicago sort of made up for it. (Click for links to the individual photos.)

“Miriam Burstein”:http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2008/10/halloween-blogging-2008-residents-of-madame-tussauds-chamber-of-horrors-in-the-late-nineteenth-century.html provides an annotated and hyperlinked list of the murderers modelled in the Victorian version of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, taken from the 1886 Tussaud’s guidebook.

While we are on the subject: I just found out one of my old grad school buddies – no, not the same one as devised the moral sense test – is selling Star Wars-themed Obama t-shirts. Proceeds go to the candidate. (It’s the sort of T-shirt that feeds hand-wringing about how liberals think Obama is ‘the One’. But they were going to do that anyway, so feel free.)

Also, I was going to make a one-line response yesterday to this K-Lo post. Something along the lines of: good idea, now I don’t have to do it. But then it occurred to me: that means I don’t have to do it. But today the results are too rich. [click to continue…]

This story about the IMF rescue package for Ukraine (second of many to come, after Iceland) quotes Timothy Ash, head of emerging-market research at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London as saying

`The money is only half of the issue, conditionality is key. We hope the fund is maintaining its push for a more flexible exchange rate, far- reaching reforms in the banking sector and more privatization.”

Mr Ash, just returned from a six-week holiday on Mars, was reading from his prepared boilerplate script and had yet not been advised of the recent nationalisation of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

(found in today’s AFR)

Reading Maria’s post below reminded me that I’ve meant to write a brief post about two ways in which there is much more information available about the current US elections than previously. The first is the availability of high quality polling information and analysis thereof. Here, somewhat rightwing sites (“Real Clear Politics”:http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ ), who-the-hell-knows sites (“Pollster”:http://www.pollster.com/ ) and definitely leftwing sites (“538”:http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ ) provide much _much_ better information (or so it seems to me) than was available to the average politically obsessed punter four years ago, especially through the aggregation of state-level and national polls. And the fact that they lean in different directions and have different models/means of aggregating poll numbers means that you can more easily discount for ideological wishful thinking of the one or the other side than you could previously. This does, at least to some extent, help guard against the kinds of selectivity based on cherry-picked polls that lead many people (including me) to think that John Kerry was going to win in 2004. Second – there is much better information available to an _international audience._ In particular, there is a lot more good televisual content available via YouTube and the various TV stations’ own websites than there was four years ago. I suspect (but can’t prove of course) that this makes people in different countries feel more directly connected to the current US election than they have to previous ones – they’re able to observe it in a more visceral way, see speeches that would never get reported on their national TV stations etc. I don’t know whether either of these is having a broader political effect – but I do know that they are making US politics more fun for a wider swathe of people across the globe than they were previously.

Someone left a comment to my Blues Verification post, saying that when they visited the page in question their A-V software terminated the connection upon detection of a “HTML:Iframe-gen” virus, which, a quick Google informs me, might mean some sort of malicious SQL injection thingy. Does anyone know about such stuff? I certainly would feel bad about sending lots of readers off to some compromised site to get infected with malware.

Now I know what it’s like to be blonde. Today I wore my moveon.org / Obama t-shirt around the 5th arrondissement of Paris. The reaction was extraordinary. Talk about turning heads. I hesitate to blog about this because for many Americans, the excitement Obama inspires in the rest of the world is a disqualification for the US presidency. But honestly, it would do your heart good to experience first hand the joy and enthusiasm and just plain old-fashioned hope people express when Obama is mentioned.

After too many years of Americans being unpopular abroad, now everyone wants to talk to them and wish them well. My first suitor was a Moroccan builder who flagged me down in the street. He wanted to know if I was American and could vote for Obama. I’m not, so we both fervently shared our hopes about the US election.

Later, in a bookstore, a young woman working there wished me the cheeriest hello I’ve ever received in a Parisian shop. I told her I’m not American and don’t have a vote there, but figured wearing a shirt was one way to say what I think. She said she wished you could get them in France. She asked what date the election was, and talked excitedly about how wonderful it is to see so many Americans walking around the 5th wearing ‘hope’ buttons.

I know there are many in the US who think the support of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ is something you can do without. But much of what animated the French in opposition to Bush is their almost fan-boy type love for what they see as truly American; an open-hearted curiosity about the rest of the world, and the sometimes naïve desire to make it a better place. Often in France, you get the sense of an old, old culture made weary and cynical by its long experience. Today, on a beautiful autumn day in Paris, America’s hope made an old city feel young again.

Yesterday I linked to an archive of free Leroy Carr mp3s. All well and good. Then I noticed that they are part of a much larger collection. Very nice. (Scroll down, down, little farther. There.) Today I listened to dozens of those tracks, while messing about in Photoshop. Dum de dum. Perfect Sunday, really. Turned out the one I liked best was Blind Willie McTell (two great, free mp3s). Interesting. It had never occurred to me that Bob Dylan’s claim that “no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell” was a proposition subject to empirical confirmation. Also, I hadn’t realized that the White Stripes “Your Southern Can Is Mine” was a cover.

There’s been a bit of discussion about what Alan Greenspan really conceded in his recent testimony. Although Greenspan was less opaque than usual, I won’t try to second-guess him any further, and will instead ask again what the crisis means for the way we think about economics and the economy. There are two big economic ideas that look substantially less appealing in the light of the current crisis.

The first is the macroeconomic hypothesis, often called the Great Moderation which combines the empirical observation that the frequency and severity of recessions declined greatly from 1990 to the recent past with the explanation that “the deregulation of financial markets over the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s had a damping effect on the fluctuations of the business cycle”.

The second is the microeconomic idea, central to much of modern finance theory called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. In its most relevant form, the EMH states that prices observed in asset markets (for stocks, bonds, foreign exchange and so on), reflect all known information, and provide the best possible estimate of the value of earnings that assets will generate.

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I was going to say YouTube Saturday. But YouTube has only got a couple. Whereas you can download 10 free Leroy Carr mp3’s here. Says they are in the public domain. I recommend: all of them. But you might start with “How Long How Long Blues”, “When the Sun Goes Down” and “How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone”, later covered by the Supremes. Speaking of which: you can hear an unreleased demo of the Supreme’s version here.

I don’t know much about Leroy Carr. I heard him for the first time a few days ago, bought a bunch [amazon], and I think it’s fantastic. Here’s a short appreciation, which appeared in the NY Times a few years ago: [click to continue…]

There’s been a fair bit of debate about what, if anything, the current crisis means for economic policy and political philosophy more generally. A lot of this has been hung up on issues of terminology, which I will do my best to avoid here and in future.

Coming to substance, quite a few people have argued that the crisis doesn’t really signify very much, and that, once it is resolved, things will return to pretty much the way they were a couple of years ago. I disagree.

This concession of error by Alan Greenspan is, I think, pretty strong evidence against the view that the crisis is not so significant, in policy or ideological terms.
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First, credit where due. Ross Douthat made a couple of wholly sensible posts about that ‘spread the wealth’ business. For example: [click to continue…]