Cheat Sheet

Rumors have circulated that Colin Powell will endorse Barack Obama for months. Might Sunday finally be the day? Powell is scheduled to appear on Meet the Press on Sunday, and no one’s quite sure what he plans to talk about. Powell has advised the last three Republican presidents, and was once mentioned as a potential running mate for McCain. “It’s going to make a lot of news, and certainly be personally embarrassing for McCain," a McCain official said of a potential endorsement. "It comes at a time when we need momentum, and it would create momentum against us.”

Is this the end of the current wave of turbulence? Two weeks of a crazy rollercoaster ride and we have come to rest with the Dow down 127 points on the day but 4.8 percent up on the week, the best gain since March 2003. The market reflects the many competing views of the bailout plan and whether Paulson and Bernanke have done enough. Brian Gendreau, an investment strategist at ING Investment Management spots four different investing types: "The bailers, who want out no matter what; the rearview-mirror people; the stay-the-course investors; and the opportunists. Add all these people up and you get the swings in the market." Everyone hopes next week will see some calmer markets. In the meantime, enjoy the rare calm of the weekend.

Joan Didion weighs in on the election over at Salon with typical cynicism and eloquence. We hesitate to tamper with her prose, so here's the rundown: "What seemed striking about the long and impassioned run-up to this election was not how different it had been—but precisely how similar it had been to previous such seasons. … [I]n the end the old notes had been struck, the old language used. The prospect for any given figure had been evaluated, now as before, by his or her 'story.' … Time got wasted in the familiar ways. The presence of Barack Obama in the electoral process allowed us to talk as if 'the race issue' had reached a happy ending. … Amnesia was our preferred state."

Rising oil prices may threaten commercial airlines, but one carrier keeps on growing: Immigration and Customs Enforcement Air, or “Repatriate” as it’s known to air-traffic controllers. The airline, used by the United States government to deport illegal immigrants, has doubled its fleet to ten planes since last year, during which it deported 76,102 non-Mexican immigrants by air. In-flight amenities include leather seats, boxed lunches, and free tickets—or, at least, tickets paid for by the United States government (average price: $620). "For a lot of these immigrants, it has been a long journey to the U.S.," said one ICE official. "This is going to be the last impression they have of the United States. We want to provide good service."

Need some pretty pictures to click through this afternoon? GQ has compiled a wonderful portfolio (from Jeff Riedel) that shows the 2008 campaign in all its glory. We see Obama Girl—remember her?—looking heroic; Bill Richardson on horseback; Meghan McCain in bed; John Lewis at a fateful Memphis hotel room; the literary bullfrog Jerome Corsi; and McCain’s 96-year-old mother, Roberta, her head popping out of a crowd like an ostrich. The final photo has Obama standing on the football field in Denver, gazing up at the sky like a character out of myth. Maybe those Greek columns were there for a reason.

Among sportswriting’s great traditions is Roger Angell’s elegy for the baseball-season-that-was. Fans, however, are being treated to an early sample, as Angell blogged [!] last night’s epic game between the Red Sox and the Rays. Here’s the newbie blogger offering on the game’s turning point: “This sleep-deprived fan will hold out for the ten-pitch, eighth-inning at-bat of the Boston center fielder Coco Crisp, whose stance begins with his chin oddly propped on his front shoulder, in imitation of Junior Griffey. Crisp’s relentless, unflustered five foul balls, four of them in a row, looked like the expert chisel-tappings of a celebrated safe cracker before the great underground door swings open.”

With lips like these, how can Angelina Jolie be taken seriously as an actress? That’s the question posed by a fun Los Angeles Times feature, which notes that nearly every Jolie movie poster shows the actress’ lips blown up to gargantuan size—like those red novelty lips they used to sell at Spencer’s. It doesn’t matter whether the film is Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling (opening today) or Shark Tale, in which Jolie is an animated fish. “The message? Come watch 90 minutes of these gently arched brows, gray cat eyes, and pursed pink lips. You won’t even care what the movie is about.”

Andrew Lahde, a 37-year-old hedge fund manager who quit after posting an 870 percent gain last year, sent a farewell letter to clients thanking stupid traders for making him rich and calling for the legalization of marijuana. Turns out that while he was raking in the dollars, he was building up a heap of resentment against the rich. "I was in this game for money," wrote Lahde. "The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other sides of my trades. God Bless America.'' Youch!

Over 1,000 volunteers spent the past two days in Tehran building the world’s long sandwich—a 1,500-meter ostrich-meat hoagie that would beat the previous record of 1,378 meters set in Italy in May. One problem: a hungry mob destroyed the sandwich before the Guinness representatives had a chance to measure it. The entire sandwich was said to have been eaten within a few minutes. Organizers hope that video and photographic evidence of the sandwich will allow them to still claim the record.

Roger Ebert continues to give you a reason to read him. The critic ends a new review, a pan of the film Tru Loved, with a startling disclosure: “I lifted the words ‘San Francisco to conservative suburbia with her lesbian mothers’ straight from the plot summary on IMDb.com, because I stopped watching the movie at the 00:08.05 point.” This may seem to some a deplorable shirking of critical responsibility, but Ebert justifies his abandonment thusly: “The rating only applies to the first eight minutes. After that, you're on your own.”

Your cell phone may not give you brain cancer, but it's not exactly harmless. Ever heard of "mobile phone dermatitis"? The condition refers to an allergic reaction people have on their cheeks and ears to the nickel in mobile phones, and is now diagnosed by the British Association of Dermatologists. It's also pretty harmless, making it the perfect comeuppance for those who spend too much time talking on the phone.

Warren Buffett's stock keeps rising. Not just literally—he's increased his net worth over the past month—but figuratively as well: Both Barack Obama and John McCain now cite him as an authority on the campaign trail. So pay attention to his op-ed in the Times today, sharing with investors his golden rule: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful." Short-term turmoil will not change the fact that, in the long-run, the markets grow, and so Buffett advises investors to follow his lead and take advantage of the cheap prices of American stocks. "Bad news is an investor's best friend," he writes. "It lets you buy a slice of America's future at a marked-down price."

Playing hard to get has won Obama a new supporter: David Brooks. "He doesn't seem to need the audience's love. But they need his," Brooks writes in a paean to Obama's Zen-like calm. "It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president," Brooks says in what is probably as close to an endorsement from the conservative columnist as Obama is going to get. "He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered." The pitfall is that "Obama will be an observer, not a leader," but then his success with voters over the past year hints that the former possibility is more likely.

If Obama is going to win white exurban voters on Election Day, it’s not going to be due to his usual appeals, Matt Bai writes in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. White exurbanites are more likely to vote for Obama out of "frustration with the alternative”—no matter what crazy things they’ve heard about Obama. "If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me, right?” Obama tells Bai. “Because the way I'm portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?”

The Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan was a stand-in for the Red Sox hordes last night. Appearing on a web video after Boston’s amazing 8-7 win in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, Ryan’s hair was mussed, his sentences unkempt. The facts were plain enough: Trailing Tampa Bay 7-0 after in the bottom of the 7th inning, Boston mounted a furious comeback, powered by homeruns from David Ortiz and J.D. Drew. Drew drove home the winning run with two outs in the 9th inning. “You put this up there with all the great ones,” Ryan stammers. “These guys have earned their niche in Red Sox history.” On to Game 6…