Cheat Sheet

Another baseball season has drawn to a close, with the Philadelphia Phillies beating the Tampa Bay Rays tonight 4-3 to win the World Series. The game—a continuation of Monday night’s contest, which was suspended after 5 1/2 innings with the score tied at 2—was a chilly but tense capper to a gutsy season for the National League champions. Pitching phenom Cole Hamels took World Series MVP, and Manager Charlie Manuel dedicated the win to the city of Philadelphia, which last had a baseball champion in 1980.

The Wall Street Journal has posted excerpts from a fascinating interview Sarah Palin gave on her campaign plane last night. Between her defense of aide Nicolle Wallace—“I think she’s brilliant”—and her dismissal any rift with McCain—“until any reporter can give me a name of any legitimate source that is criticizing I will never believe that even the complaints, the criticism, is coming from within the campaign. That’s how unbelievable it is to me”—it’s a must-read.

Well, maybe it will work this time. The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by half a point today, lowering it to one percent. The movie is intended to restore the flow of credit, although many fear there is little can be done at this point to avoid a recession. This is the lowest the rates have been since 2003 and 2004, and the rate is now within striking range of zero, which Japan lowered its rates to in the 1990s when it struggled to jumpstart its economy. So far today, the Dow Jones has held steady near the 9,000 mark.

How will George W. Bush use his last 12 weeks in office? The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland writes that this weekend’s raid on Syria offers a hint of what to expect. “However we are meant to read it, the attack on Syria looks a lot like a parting shot from Bush, an end-of-the-movie reminder of what this long and bloody saga has been about,” he writes. In the anything-goes “twilight zone” that comes after November 4, all bets are off, Freedland suggests: We could just as easily be looking at an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal as a strike on Iran.

Tony Blair has been raking in the dough since leaving 10 Downing Street, earning an estimated $19 million, The Times of London reports. Since embarking on the speaking circuit a year ago, the former prime minister “tours the world speaking to audiences including investment banks, private equity firms and chambers of commerce, is now said to be the highest-paid speaker in the world.” He’s even outperformed Bill Clinton’s first year out of office—no mean feat. But would Blair trade it all for taking Gordon Brown’s mantle as the brain behind the bailouts?

When Patrick Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January, nobody much expected to see him on the screen. But as Bill Carter reports in today’s Times, Swayze is working grueling days, starring in a TV cop drama called The Beast. “I do find myself, at the end of the day, riding home sort of catching myself with a smile on my face,” Swayze says. Swayze had turned down TV jobs in the past (“I thought I was DeNiro”), preferring to pursue on big-ticket films like Ghost and Dirty Dancing. Now, he wants the job. “How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man?” Swayze asks. “You go to work.”

Uh-oh. Remember what happened last time Germany and France disagreed over Europe’s future? Nicholas Sarkozy’s advocacy of a government takeover of important companies marks, according to Der Spiegel, “the beginning of a conflict over which model is to dominate Europe in the future, that of the social market economy, which keeps the government out of the business of running companies to the greatest extent possible, or the French model of a government-controlled economy.” Germany, whose economy “has outperformed France by almost every economic measure,” favors the former model. Sarkozy’s ego isn’t making cooperation any easier—he recently said “Without me Europe would be in a sorry state.” How long until German tanks roll into Paris?

Not only have the Gulf States survived the financial crisis relatively intact, but apparently they also get to reap the spoils from the suffering West. Christie’s is opening a $40 million auction of Middle Eastern art and jewelry in Dubai this week, as the art market seeks refuge in one of the regions least affected by the global crisis. Bonhams held its inaugural auction in Dubai in March, while Sotheby’s recently opened an office in Qatar and Phillips de Pury & Co. named a director for its new office in Dubai. Since opening its auction house in Dubai in 2005, Christie’s has held four auctions that have raked in over $100 million. The number of Middle Eastern buyers at Christie’s has risen 400 percent since 2004, and the area now rivals Russia in terms of sales.

Sony’s Blu-Ray won its battle with Toshiba’s HD-DVD, but its looking like both will lose the format war. Anticipating consumer dissatisfaction with the picture quality of regular DVDs on HD televisions, Sony packaged Blu-Ray licenses with exorbitant fees. (Hence the absence of indie films on Blu-Ray—small producers can’t afford the fees). But Sony failed to anticipate new regular DVD players that display just fine on HD TVs. With only a 4-percent market share and the emergence of HD-download capability, Blu-Ray may soon be joining its vanquished foe on the scrapheap.

Yesterday was a sad day in the world of Joaquin Phoenix fandom: The actor, who played Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, announced to Extra that he's quitting film. "Are you being serious?" asked the host. "Yeah. I'm working on my music," Phoenix said. "I'm done." Phoenix's representative, when contacted for confirmation, seemed a little miffed. On the plus side: When Phoenix inevitably returns to acting, we can look forward to "Phoenix rises from the ashes" headlines.

The Bush brand is a political scarlet letter, but might Condoleezza Rice escape its burn? A new Der Spiegel article suggests that Rice may be the only person to escape the Bush White House with her career intact—odd, given that, “If there is anyone, besides Bush, who ought to be held accountable for the failings of the current administration, it is Rice.” She has been his closest confidant and never publicly dissented from his line, and yet she “was never as unpopular or hated as her boss.” Author Marc Hujer sees this as a result of Rice’s unique biography and her role as chief “empathizer” with foreign people in the Bush administration. Also, we learn about her workout routine. “She works her biceps, her back and her abdominal muscles. … Almost out of breath, she orders [her trainer] to stop counting. ‘I can count for myself,’ she barks.”

American automakers are running on empty and eyeing the government for a refueling: GM and Chrysler want taxpayers to back a merger between them to the tune of $10 billion, so that both companies can avoid bankruptcy. But as Steven Pearlstein writes in The Washington Post, bankruptcy reorganization is "the very process they need to get their costs and structure in line with market realities." In bankruptcy court, the automakers could bypass laws that make it difficult for them to pare back their bloated dealership networks and restructure employees pay and benefit packages to mirror those of nonunionized workers in foreign-company plants. "If the Treasury were to commit government funds without getting this kind of long-overdue restructuring," Pearlstein writes, "it would simply be throwing good money after bad."

How's this for A-List? Martin Scorsese is producing a David Mamet-scripted, Mike-Nichols-directed remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 thriller High and Low. Scorsese has long wanted to remake the film, which is based on an American novel and tells the story of a businessman who mortgages everything he owns in order to rescue his kidnapped son—only to learn that the hostage is, in fact, his driver's son. He must then decide whether or not he should sacrifice everything for another man's child. In addition to this project, DreamWorks is developing a new version of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, while the Weinstein Company is considering a remake of The Seven Samurai.

Over at The New Republic, Eli Lake has the key background on the United States' attack inside Syria on Sunday. Heralding a "new phase" in the war on terror, Lake writes that, in July, "the Bush administration formally gave the military new power to strike terrorist save havens outside of Iraq and Afghanistan." That means that Gen. Petraeus can order such strikes without Bush's permission. That could mean attacks in places like Kenya, Mali, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—although Iran would still require approval from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, since it has the ability to retaliate in the western hemisphere. "With the clock winding down on the administration," Lake writes, "it has a greater appetite for racking up victories against al Qaeda—and less worries about any residual political consequences from striking."

Top conservatives are planning a secret session in Virginia two weeks after the election to plot strategy, Politico’s Jonathan Martin reports in a must-read piece. The gathering will discuss how to form a “national grassroots political and policy coalition” similar to the one Republicans formed after their 1976 defeat. Martin doesn’t name names of the attendees, but says they will be a who’s who of conservatives eminences. Even if McCain manages to win the election, a source says, the group wonders how or if they could work with him. Sarah Palin “would be the conservative in the White House.”

Obama’s 30-minute advertisement aired on three major networks tonight, and Jeanne Cummings of Politico asks whether it risks going too far. Well, according to the experts she asked, not really. “I don’t see any risk at all,” says Mike Murphy, a former McCain adviser, while another Republican strategist, Alex Castellanos, compares it to football. “People may complain that a team is running up the score, but that team is still the one that wins.” Democratic strategist Jim Jordan says it will particularly help Obama with late-deciding female voters and another Dem strategist says it probably won’t aggravate channel surfers, with all the other options on cable these days. The biggest advantage, according to the founder of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, is “it probably locks up 24 hours of the news cycle.” With only seven days to go, “it’s going to suck a lot of oxygen out of the room.”