I get a kick out of watching stupid people get angry. Is that wrong?

The U.S."Birther" movement believes that Obama was born in Kenya because of a mis-translation in a single phone interview between a street preacher, a translator with a poor grasp of English, and Obama's Kenyan grandfather's second wife. Or, more specifically, it is because they hate black people, or Kenyans, and have a loose view of facts.

The Birther movement has the power to ensure Obama wins four more years. It's clearly insane, and supported by a small minority who would never vote for Obama anyway. On the other hand, this insane racist minority is now frothing at the mouth and one hopes they don't froth too much.

Hopefully, websites like this will pour some water on them.

Interesting comic comparing the two: http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/1736/200905amusingourselvest.png

But why is it always, "they are trying to control us;" if the comic correctly shows Huxley's nightmare as our reality, it's not a result of a mid-century plan to control the population. This media universe arose within a free market system where mid-managers were incented to make slightly more appealing content, ads and media to capture market share. The net net after 50 years may very well be Huxley, but as a side effect, not an end.

For nearly a decade, I've been very clear about how I define this word: terrorism is the use of violence against civilians for political leverage.

Examples: bombs in mailboxes blowing up innocent men and women in London and Montreal to bring international media and political attention to the IRA and FLQ, respectively. If you care not about innocent human life, these methods were actually efficient in the short run. Of course, they are evil, perpetrated by evil men, and I believe in the long run they fail because it is hard to gather friends and supporters when your heart is pus and bile and your mind is cracked with hatred.

The PLO has engaged in terror. By my definition, the Oct. 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole was not a terror attack -- I would term that a guerrilla attack. While suicide bombings of a Tel Aviv restaurant is terror.

This definition I feel is important, much more so than in the USS Cole case. The definition should not be molested or forgotten. On Jan. 30, 1972, British Para's in Ulster shot 27 civil rights protesters, killing thirteen, including two teenagers and a priest. All who were shot were unarmed; five were hit in the back. No one has been charged.

My definition has two tests: that the act is against civilians and it is for political leverage. Clearly, Bloody Sunday meets the first test; on the second, it is unclear whether it was murder or terrorism. 

But the result of Bloody Sunday is key: a two-decade long, bloody and unnecessary terror campaign by the IRA. If we call it terror only when fighters are not uniformed, we leave an ethical vacuum that is filled with death.

I think my definition gels with a more general sense of justice; while Brits sick of IRA terrorism may have irrationally supported their Paras in 1972, an emotionally sober, disinterested party could only find it disgusting. Irrationally supporting terrorism carried out by men with uniforms and very long, clear chains of command is extending the evil into the population. It cannot stand long. A civilian population that accepts this is bending the bar too far and it must return to centre or snap. I believe that large civilian populations are usually good.

Justice is a difficult, difficult subject -- always being trampled on by heated emotions, inflamed by propaganda. Rational thought -- as Pierre Trudeau might say -- must trump emotional nationalism and the cult of victimhood.

No issue has united the left and right like this. A company whose leadership has done nothing but fail for two years; a company whose management is so incompetent that the business -- the world's largest financial institution in 2008 -- would evaporate from the planet if it were not for a $150 billion handout from American taxpayers. 

AIG is an epic icon of failure and immorality, responsible to a serious degree for the greatest economic disaster to affect the world in nearly 80 years.

And yet, the leadership is rewarding itself with $150 million in bonuses.

I think this illustrates a problem with how public markets have altered capitalism. We have ceased to think of AIG's management as "the help," when in fact they are an educated form of just that. Because large public companies usually have no clear owner -- just millions of stockholders -- a vacuum forms at the top and is filled by people who work at the company, but own little or none of it. But we have to remember that capitalism is based on ownership, not management. If it was based on management it would be called something like gilded socialism.

In the realm of private, closely held companies, management is just a more skilled form of a company's labour. Owners of private companies hire people with good track records and perhaps education and demonstrated skills, to achieve certain results using the owner's capital. If they are successful, they will usually be paid well, and may be rewarded with some of the profits or perhaps even with a sliver of the owner's capital itself.

But these private company managers know their place -- they know the owner is not an irrelevant abstraction. The owner is often someone they see in the halls and in meetings every day; or at least is someone who visits the office. They cannot fire the owner but the owner can dismiss them. 

Public companies should be the same. But this vacuum has allowed management to take the role of owner.  

Obama's challenge is to change this perception; to ensure that managers manage and owners decide, among other things, how much managers are to be paid. I fail to understand why this is so difficult in the case of AIG, as Obama's government owns 80 per cent of the firm. Why does Obama not remove AIG's board and appoint a committee representing taxpayers to evaluate the past achievements of AIG's top managers and make decisions about their future ability to create value for the firm. Instead of the loosers controlling the purse strings, they will be purged Once AIG has competent managers and is stabilized, it should be returned to the private sector under a new regime of regulation.

Apart from AIG, we need to understand how this ascension of management occurs, and we need to prevent it. Unless a CEO is like Bill Gates, where s/he owns a large part of the company (ideally a controlling share), all CEOs, CFOs, or SVPs should act as though their "owner" is someone who walks the halls and asks questions about $1,200 trash bins and other things that are difficult to sneak by a private company owner. We need a mechanism to make public companies operate with the kind of attention and passion private company owners bring.

Some guy named Caleb Harrison just received an 18-month prison sentence for killing a 44-year old taxi driver named Michael while driving drunk in 2005.

I continually feel these sentences don't reflect the crime. For me, driving drunk and causing injury/death, or racing and causing the same, is akin to throwing hatchets off buildings. We know -- we all know -- that people can die because of this behaviour. So why is it treated more as an accident than as a pre-meditated crime against an unknown victim?

In sentencing him, Justice Michael Tulloch told Harrison that he seemed to be "a decent man" with many positives but he was lucky he didn't receive a prison sentence.

Someone who kills an innocent person with a 2000 lb weapon ceases to be a "decent man." He is a horrible human being; more horrible than virtually all Canadians. He should not be among us non-killers for a decade because he he drove his Mercedes into a taxi and killed a 44-year old man. 

Furthermore, he is not allowed to drive for two years, following his release, just as he was not allowed to drink prior to his killing. 

Driving drunk, or racing a car, and subsequently injuring or killing someone, should be treated like the crime compounding a crime that it is; in fact, Harrison was a criminal twice just when he got in his car that night -- as a drunk driver and as a violator of his probation. 

If a known drug dealer on probation sells rat poison to an innocent person, killing him, he'd be looking at a decade in prison. A drunk driver knows, or should know, that he is doing much the same thing.

Michael Bryant reformed racing laws; perhaps it's easier to do that because the target appears to be outside of "normal" society -- young punks. Well, a young punk who stays under 120 on the highway is a thousand or a million times more decent and responsible as a Canadian than this killer.

They should teach this blog post, and the much more brilliant Jon Stewart rant that gave rise to it, in journalism schools and frankly schools for citizens in democracies, for a generation.

Clearly, the world economic system failed society in some way. My view -- for a later post -- is that it has a lot to do with the cluster of people called Manhattan and that Rockefeller Plaza isn't in Pittsburgh.

So, not only is it odd that Stewart, though a New York-based show one that I think is outside of the mainstream, speaks truth to ... well, normal people ... but I think it's actually quite expected that the only clear thinking getting broadcast today comes from outside the mainstream.

Will Bunch -- not a fan of Reagan -- gives a few lessons "real" journalists could learn from Stewart's show:

• research trumps access. Be smarter than everyone else.
• stop pretending the media was not complicit
• make it watchable by average people. average people have a mind and can make it up and think critically, but perhaps have little time in their busy lives for stuffy shirted faux gravitas.

I wish I could find the quote; Scott Reid, former communication director for PM Martin, once said (to paraphrase), don't look at what a politician says, look at what he wants. 

Astutely, Obama's #2 Rahm Emanuel recently called Rush Limbaugh "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party." Of course Emanuel is not praising Limbaugh or the Republicans; he is trying to cement Limbaugh's status in the media as the spokesperson for the party.

This is astute for two reasons: Limbaugh is passionately obeyed by a fanatical core of Republican voters too small as a group to ever form a majority; he is also unappealing to moderates and extremely unpopular among young voters. In other words, he is a polarizing figure who could overwhelmingly win an election of old, white, Evangelical Christians, but is more cancerous than Bush 43 on the national stage. He is a large, loud wedge issue for the Republican party, just as immigration reform may be for the ethnic-friendly, union-friendly Democrats.

Secondly, Limbaugh is an ideologue who earns a living as an entertainer -- as Michael Steele put it -- so he is driven by controversy and the attention it brings. He wants to be outspoken and famous more so than deal with the mundane aspects of helping a party gain or hold power.

Strategically, Rush Limbaugh is a gift to the Democratic party, who should do all they can to maintain Rush's status as the leader of the Right. But as I said at the start, doing so is much more complex than saying, "It benefits me for Rush Limbaugh to be the leader of the Right."

Which begs the question, why are Democrats having fun with this? If you type www.imsorryrush.com into your browser you get an Onion-style satire of RNC leaders who have apologized like scolded children to Limbaugh. You also have this story revealing the coordination of Clinton-era strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, which perhaps shows who is responsible for Limbaugh's current eminence.

Eisenhower didn't reveal Overlord to Great Battles Monthly on June 5, 1944 for a reason -- because he wanted to win, not be adored.

After eight years of being losers, the Democrats finally figured out how to win last year. For their sake, I hope they exercise more control.

It's waaaay to early to define if/what it is, but the word is hilarious.

I can't stop thinking of manamanah.

Tom Flanagan, whom I've described as  a Calgary School teacher, was an intimately trusted advisor to PM Harper from their days at the University of Calgary and in forming policy for the reform party.

I'm not a Conservative, so I didn't read this book out of admiration for Harper. I do admire what he's accomplished, though. There's a line in the final few pages that suggests only four people have strung together Conservative governments of any meaning since John A, and that all of them did it in a way that inflamed the country and ultimately harmed Conservatism in Canada. We know that Brian Mulroney built the Quebec wing of his grand coalition by inflaming the nationalism that nearly cost us the country.

I read "Harper's Team" because I'm very impressed with Harper's strategic skill. The book appears to be a fantastically candid -- almost too candid -- peek into the backrooms of leadership races and general elections. Covering the late 1990s and 2000s, it also captures the changes in political campaigning, which reached an entirely new level last November, well after the book was published.

"Harper's Team" is a frank, detailed, un-objective but not unbalanced history of political campaigning in this era. It's of the nitty gritty -- how to telephone people and how to pay for those telephone calls. And it's framed around a narrative -- the rise of Harper -- which makes it far more readable than a textbook.

If there was substantial emphasis on issues of phone banks and postal drops, perhaps there was not enough emphasis on the strategy of triangulation. Flanagan relates that he gave Harper a copy of Dick Morris' "Power Plays", which as a history of several modern and ancient political campaigns provides as comprehensive description of triangulation as I've read. Harper reads the book on a solemn vacation following an election loss and returns re-invigorated. 

Frankly, he has triangulated the entire national "conversation" (what an odd word that is). The Quebecois are a Nation -- and the Liberals are no longer inside that circle. Most recently, Harper triangulated himself out of the conservative sphere (the geometry is difficult, but the principles are sound) with a stimulus package bigger than Liberals could have imagined.

Triangulation, as I believe Dick Morris roughly put it, is to adopt in part the policies of your competitors, and make them your own. A divided opposition is no opposition.

Liberals in this country need to swallow a lot of pride, recognize that the Conservatives are not even close to being the B team; we need to all read this book.

How Howard Dean revived the Democratic party

• Boston Herald "The pioneering that Dean and aide Joe Trippi did on Internet fund-raising served as a model for Obama’s greatly expanded operation which raised more than $100 million."
• Speech. We raised more money than the RNC, and we did so by attracting thousands of new small donors ... We trained tens of thousands of new activists ... Now we need to build on our successes while transforming the Democratic Party into a grassroots organization that can win in 50 states.
• Conservative view. "Part of what made Obama's vaunted online operation succeed where Howard Dean's fizzled—and this is something his online people themselves always stress—was that it was an organic component of the broader brick-and-mortar campaign."

Why Obama won

• Politico. "The campaign’s early decision to play on a more ambitious map than other Democratic nominees was the source of his mandate"
• Washington Post, Feb. 2007. "The gathering of several thousand students at George Mason University in Fairfax underscored the potential power of online communities in the 2008 campaign. Its genesis was a group created last summer on Facebook.com, a Web site frequented by college students who post profiles and assemble virtually." "Another Facebook group, Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack), was started less than three weeks ago and has already recruited 200,000 members."
• Advertising chess at the LA Times. "Obama has “stretched the playing field,” said Edward Carmines, who teaches political science at Indiana University. “Now, in the last month of the campaign, Sen. McCain is having to make very tough decisions where to spend his money.”"
• The $5 philanthopist @ givemeaning.com, Feb 2008. According to Barack Obama's official website, more than 280,000 people have created accounts on BarackObama.com. From those online accounts, 6,500 grassroots volunteer groups have been created and more than 13,000 off-line events have been organized through the site. Over 370,000 individual online donations have been made, more than half of which are less than $25 donations .And most interesting to me, personal fundraising pages (individual fundraising pages where you proactively recruit your social network to donate through your personal fundraising page) have raised over $1.5m.
• The Atlantic -- mid-campaign. Thoughtful. "Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, [emphasis mine] veteran activists and first-time contributors ... If the most that any one person could write a check for was $2,000 [it was said] then the important people suddenly became those who would put their hand up and say, ‘I’ll raise $50,000 or $100,000.’ ... North and Gorenberg borrowed the subscription model for their “Win Back the House” project. Instead of asking for a big check up front, as they would for a presidential candidate, they invited each of their House candidates to the Bay Area over the course of the year, so that supporters could give recurrent, but smaller, donations ... As before, the emphasis was not on writing big checks but on building raiser networks, including people who couldn’t contribute much themselves." "The purpose of social networking is to connect friends and share information, its animating idea being that people will do this more readily and comfortably when the information comes to them from a friend rather than from a newspaper or expert or similarly distant authority they don’t know and trust ... When My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one (which Spinner found) that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry “Yes we can!” and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too ... It’s not enough to have a bumper sticker. We want you to give five dollars, make some calls, host an event. If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s a presumption that they will organize ... The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising “thermometer” rise. “The idea,” Rospars says, “is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.” The organizing principle behind Obama’s Web site, in other words, is the approach Mark Gorenberg used with such success—only scaled to such a degree that it has created an army of more than a million donors and raisers ... The most striking thing about all this was that the headquarters is entirely self-sufficient—not a dime has come from the Obama campaign. Instead, everything from the computers to the telephones to the doughnuts and coffee—even the building’s rent and utilities—is user-generated, arranged and paid for by local volunteers. It is one of several such examples across the country, and no other campaign has put together anything that can match this level of self-sufficiency ... In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year. [emphasis mine] “If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,” Gorenberg told me, “and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online ... It’s possible to track the network effects [emphasis mine] in the growing fund-raising numbers that seem to arrive in ever larger denominations: $25 million … $30 million … $35 million … in February, the staggering $55 million—nearly $2 million a day.

I read another good quote today, which perhaps helps to clarify how we are governed. It read: "The prime minister is the person who can retain the confidence of the house."

Due to issues of marketing and branding, the spectacle of elections concerns party leaders. And, in fact, U.S. presidential elections really are about party nominees. But government is not marketing and the U.S. president is not the Canadian prime minister.

The flight back from Prague today will not be relaxing for our GG. The role is almost entirely ceremonial, but if in fact it were completely ceremonial, I think we would by now have replaced the GG with a piece of nicely carved wood, or something gilded and inurt.

David Frum makes a silly argument that it is unconstitutional (or practically so) for a parliament to chose a prime minister. Perhaps we (and by "we" I mean more than one Canadian) are confusing our system with the U.S.'s, in which the Presidency is an institution apart from the parliament. After all, Canadians seemed to follow the U.S. presidential election more than our own.

But Canada is different, and as long as we are not the U.S., we should perhaps see the prime minister's role for what it is. The PM is not elected by the people generally, and has no mandate independent of parliament. He is instead chosen by parliament; if that parliament wants to organize into parties and vote as blocks, the constitution could really care less.

So it is perfectly reasonable and normal in Canada for a parliament to change who is the prime minister. In fact, Kim Campbell and Paul Martin both became Prime Ministers without an election. If this parliamentry power doesn't feel correct, that suggests we have been influenced by the U.S. We can change the constitutionm but we cannot ignore the constitution.

I feel that, because it would be very easy for three opposition parties to merge into one party, it is also legitimate for them to temporarily form a coalition. A super-Liberal-NDP-Bloc party received about two-thirds of the votes in the last election; the Conservatives, about one third. So it is not wrong for them to control parliament, from where our PM springs.

At any rate, I think it's important to not attack the legality of the situation we're facing. Let's discuss the other implications for a Liberal PM leading a coalition government before Christmas.

Of most importance is the effect on Western alienation. Stephen Harper is a product of the rise of the West, and decades of anger at feeling outside the centre of power were somewhat alieved when a Reform-heavy Conservative party took power in Ottawa. The re-election of that party affirms that Canada does not reject the West.

So, for left-leaving, French-speaking, Liberal-appointed Governor General to take the country's leadership away from the West and hand it to a French-speaking, failed leader who is rejected by his own party, and who requires separatists to stay in power ... this will not play well out west. I think this would inflame Western anger more than any previous policy or slight. The optics are not entirely of Harper's failure, as perhaps they should be, but of a system stacked against the West.

I am not opposed to Rae or Ignatieff being crowned Liberal leader and PM. Both have considerably more government experience than Brian Mulroney did when he ascended to the highest office. Frankly, although Harper was a policy wonk, he had never really run anything more substantial than an SME before running the country.

But a Rae or Ignatieff appointment as PM again smacks of elitism.

All this said, I feel that a coalition government is a reasonable path for Canada. More than 300 MPs represent Canadians' interests in parliament; a group of about two-thirds of them came together and said that Canada requires a fiscal stimulus package, given the state of the global economy. I think they're right about that. And I think our system is right to allow them to remove from power a government that fails to deliver this.

This was a much more thorough and interesting (though fawning) foreign policy essay by Sean Penn than I expected; it is based on interviews with two leftists heads of state, who are viewed as (lukewarm) enemies by the U.S.

I've noticed Penn's political activism; certainly his campaign to Iraq immediately before the invasion in 2003 had the potential to end his Hollywood career. 

But clearly, based on the quality of this article, and on his friendship with Iraq-war enabler Christopher Hitchens, with whom he and historian Douglas Brinkley travelled to Caracas and Havana, he is likely among the leading foreign policy minds in Hollywood.

Maybe that doesn't say much. But based on the media reverberations of his article in the Nation, he may be among the U.S.'s leading foreign policy instruments in the Americas. 

He quotes Joe Biden -- no right wing ideologue -- as calling Chavez a dictator. While Fidel Castro is a dictator, clearly Chavez is no more a dictator than was Bush or Pierre Trudeau for that matter. Penn also appears to be take the most significant step toward resolving US-Cuba relations of anyone in the last 30 years. Fidel is writing his memoirs and Sean Penn is granted the first interview by Cuba's new president, who took office earlier this year. In the interview Raul reveals that the U.S. military itself has long dropped the ideology driven agenda the U.S. formally has held against Cuba. According to Penn, the U.S. State Department and military meet with Cuban officials (not the president) every third Friday, a tradition that began more than a decade ago. According to Penn, the U.S. views Cuba as a key strategic player in their campaign against drugs.

Penn also raises the concern that Columbia is viewed now as the U.S.'s Monroe Doctrine ally -- sort of an Israel in Latin America. So we get into the question of whether rightest human rights violations are better than leftist ones.

Personally, I am very comfortable with the ethics of Canadian business people, so that increased  trade with, say, China, will necessarily and almost organically work toward resolving issues of human rights -- though not necessarily democracy itself. I feel the same about Cuba. Though there our only trade barrier is a mass of land, 48 states wide.

At any rate, what a surprise to read that Sean Penn not only has a brain, but is himself acting as a subtle instrument for change.

That said, let me be clear that Cuba is still a dictatorship, though warming under Raul, that it imprisons non-violent political protesters, and that it needs to not be/do both of these things. I love the tale of Che Guevara's youth on a motorbike, but he very clearly murdered many innocent poets and intellectuals -- not in battle but kneeling on the ground. His silk screen is no icon for me.

An interesting question will arise between today and Jan. 20 around the semantics of the word "illegal."

This article argues what many suspect; that Mr. Bush and others in his employ broke the laws of the United States hundreds or thousands of times. 

Other than the invasion of Iraq itself, we don't really know what if any crimes George Bush committed. But we do know that journalists who attempted to investigate these crimes were themselves victims of threats from the people who currently work for Mr. Bush. 

So, if a President commits a crime, is it illegal? If you do commit crimes, and your country's Attorney General sits next to you at work, and you're not in jail, then it is not illegal to break the law. 

Power is a funny thing. Mr. Bush is about to lose it, and not in a subtle way. His family name, his ideological partners, his team and much of his party have lost almost everything. They will have no real power, of course -- other than high but not stratospheric personal wealth, and good connections. They will have no coercive power because their people will be out of power. No one associated with Bush who does not repute him will have any statesman-like standing after he leaves office.

Almost like Nixon, he will be completely stripped of everything. And then, two things will happen:

a) he will be powerless against the people he pushed around, and who have been holding in years of disclosure about what he and they did that broke the law but was not illegal.

b) he will be a private citizen in a country with a massively more powerful domestic security apparatus. He created a monster, which is incredibly stupid when you have a term limit.

Should Bush be found to have committed crimes, and those crimes be considered illegal ones, I'm not sure I like the actual optics of Bush going to prison. It's too vindictive, and he's a symbol. But President Obama may just find it nearly impossible to stop the tide of indictments against people who broke the law while serving Bush, thinking somehow that it wasn't illegal.

I wanted Barack Obama to become president from about 2005 or 2006 onward. I think his charisma first caught me, and his single policy decision: to oppose the Iraq war when it was just as wrong as it is today, but when few public people would say so. I responded to that because virtually everyone in my country opposed the war before it began for exactly the reasons that virtually everyone in his country does now.

I'm not American, and I feel it's arrogant or overbearing for me to care too much about U.S. domestic policy. I'm no fan of Quebec separtism, and it annoys me when foreign people delve into that issue with little knowledge of Canada, or of the undercurrents of that failed movement to destroy a country. And so I don't want to tell Americans to support gay marriage. But I do want to tell them to stop locking people in cells on island bases without normal laws. And I want to tell them to not lie to pre-emptively invade a country that poses little threat, when other measures may have come to a similar, less bloody end. I want to tell them to stop picking innocent people off the streets and from their homes in allied countries, taking them to secret places, and torturing them.

Barack Obama was the only person I felt would do this. And it looks like he may follow at least this spirit -- which I feel is a far more American spirit than what America has recently been. I'm not a beliver in American Exceptionalism, but I'm a believer in the power of this idea to do good; I want people around the world, and in my country too, to look at the United States as an almost immutable force for the steady progress of good in the world.

So on Nov. 4, I was almost shocked to realize that Barack Obama is black. I was fixated on his three unusual names -- especially the middle one. But I had hardly reflected on what it means for a black man to be elected by a white electorate in a country still not healed from the legacy of slavery. Barack Obama, and his wife and young girls will inhabit a house built by slaves. A house with an allusive name. I cried when he won, because it shocked me that, in one night, the entire American conversation around race has changed.

It's been six days, and I don't fully believe that it's happened. I said in October that I was waiting for Christmas, and I wasn't sure it would happen. Even when he won Penn. and Ohio I still worked out ways he could lose. But today feels like a continuing Christmas in which the massively wrong trajectory the world's guardian of classical liberalism (despite their brand-based fear of calling it that) had taken, was corrected. 

I think, with it going the right way, the all-important long term stability of things in our lives will continue. And, perhaps, the world will be a better place in eight years.

The U.S. race doesn't get more quant than:

www.fivethirtyeight.com

In Colin Powell's talk endorsing Obama, I was struck by his credibility; he seemed entirely un-partisan. Entirely objective and paternal, cutting through the partisan swipes with a very decent case for electing Barack Obama.

He's also a conservative. National Security Advisor to Regan, architect of the first Gulf War, and enabler of the second. 

Chirstopher Hitchens is also an enabler of the second war, though I'm not quite sure anyone can nail down his small-letter affiliation. He's anti-Clinton (Bill), anti-Bush II, pro-Gulf II, anti-Kissinger, and anti-Mother Teresa. Seriously. The title of his book on her: "The Missionary Position." 

Hitchens was, or became, a rampant supporter of Gulf II, based on his liberal fear of totalitarian strains of Islam. But this principle led him to defend neo-cons and oppose those who questioned the war. I think he lost his way quite a bit after 9/11, and that's not forgivable because one should be right, or pretty close to right, in a crisis. He was way off. 

But Hitchens all but endorses Obama, albeit in his rambling, Oxford-intellectual prose.

Hitchens first came to me as a sort of un-hippie liberal. He called himself a contrarian, and I've always appreciated his arguments, wrong as they sometimes are.

Ken Adelman is essentially the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld-Nixon you've never heard of. He too endorses Obama in a New Yorker article.

To be fair, both of these men reject McCain's most-recent record as much as they endorse the alternative. But for two men with a seat at the table of neo-conservatism, or a variant thereof, to support one of the most left-wing Presidential candidates in U.S. history is striking. I can't explain it, really: likely these are decisions based on the character of each candidate and not on the policies the country will be under. But I wonder if it's deeper; Buckely's similar statement may allude to an unrecorded undercurrent among conservative intellectuals?

In 2005 Stephen Harper's Tories began the election with the announcement that they would cut the dreaded GST tax to 5 per cent from 7 per cent. This headline-grabbing statement (made in a consumer electronics store), was followed up with almost daily policy announcements. In fact, it soon became clean that the Tories' election strategy was based on releasing their entire platform one trickle at a time, with well-staged photo ops.

This worked brilliantly. And, frankly, I think it's good for democracy. For as long as elections are covered by TV (or its new-media variations) photo-ops will be necessary. For years, these photo ops felt like exactly what they were: bad, vacuous theatre arranged by political handlers. To have a photo-op be tied to a policy statement -- ie. an announcement of a potential change to life in Canada -- provides these photo ops with some meat. And by stretching out these photo-ops over weeks, reporters, intellectuals and the rest of the voting public can digest all of the policy they may or may not vote for.

After Harper beat the unbeatable Martin, I predicted that this would be the status quo for Canadian elections henceforth. 

It seems I was wrong. The NDP and the Tories are both set to release their policy books next week. We, the voting public who are influence by policy, who are trying to care about this election, and who are also stretched so many ways, will be asked to vote on fat books of policy presented all at once, and likely poorly read or summarized by time-constrained journalists. Sure, eventually these red books, green books and blue books will be fully digested by policy-minded people, but by then they will not be new and thus not news. And when something isn't news, it doesn't make the news, limiting the number of people who receive digested versions on this policy.

This is bad politics, because we're back to vacuous photo-ops. And this is bad for democracy because we're back to voting for the man or woman we hate least.