Cheat Sheet

Talk about a bad starting hand. The next president, Joe Klein writes in Time, will be the first since FDR to “face the prospect of neither peace nor prosperity.” Relegating McCain mostly to parenthetical asides, Klein suggests that Obama will avoid shaking up national security for stability’s sake and focus on the economy. Obama’s number one priority will be to put us on the track for an alternative-energy economy, which will take the form of an infrastructure and stimulus package in the $300 billion range. “It’s what used to be derided as big-spending liberalism,” and in order to overcome skepticism, Obama will need to make good on his campaign pledge for an “Infrastructure Bank”—a bipartisan board of five governors who would judge and approve all major projects. Such an institution would threaten congressional business as usual. “Will he be willing,” Klein asks, “to spend his political capital on this relatively obscure notion?”

In a potboiler dispatch from corruption-plagued Miami, Ann Louise Bardach surveys the combustible local power struggle that could determine the fate of the U.S. Embargo against Cuba. Two brothers, Congressmen Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, both nephews of Fidel Castro, wield enormous influence in Washington regarding U.S.-Cuban relations. Now Lincoln, facing a formidable challenge from a Democratic insurgent, is accused of fighting dirty: disappearing ballots, cash-for-votes, media manipulation. With Obama ascendant and Florida’s Cuban-American support for the GOP splintering, the dissolution of an international wall that’s stood for nearly half a century may finally be on the horizon.

A spy working for one of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels had no trouble infiltrating the U.S. Marshals Service office at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, according to a new article in El Universal. He found the position, criminal investigator, by browsing through the embassy's online job bank. "Felipe," as the man now under witness protection is known, had been on the Beltran-Leyva cartel's payroll since 2005, when he infiltrated the Mexican office of Interpol. The job at the U.S. Embassy allowed him to share with the cartel the names and telephone numbers of people under investigation by the DEA and the Marshals Service. In exchange, the Beltran-Leyvas paid him a monthly salary of $30,000.

Those awaiting an October Surprise may soon get a familiar one. Government officials tell ABC News that they expect another election eve appearance by Osama bin Laden. Before someone calls John Kerry for comment, know that bin Laden’s appearance is only a rumor at this stage; officials reason that bin Laden wants to prove to the world that he’s not dead. Two reasons bin Laden may not make it back to CNN: the U.S. has staged operations against Al Qaeda Internet sites; and Special Forces operations in Pakistan make issuing a recording a dodgy proposition.

For a longtime, luxury magazines with high-end advertising have been considered the sole safe haven of print journalism. Now, not so much. Condé Nast announced today an across-the-board 5-percent budget cut. Even flagships Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker are affected. Additionally, business magazine Portfolio will be reduced from 12 to 10 issues a year, and Men’s Vogue will drop all the way from 10 to two. Wired and Vogue will assume much of those two magazines’ operations.

In a column from this month's Atlantic, Virginia Postrel argues that the anxiety over indebted Americans is nothing new, and not necessarily something we need to worry about. She notes that as far back as 1920 newspapers and social scientists were decrying easy credit. Postrel says that debt has indeed increased, but she believes, "The expansion of consumer credit is one of the great economic achievements of the past century." The figure of $10,000 per family is greatly exaggerated, averaging in customers like Cindy McCain, who ran up a $200,000 AmEx bill last month she probably can afford to pay. And credit cards are cheaper than payday loans or pawn shops, once the only resources of those living check to check. "Forms of credit may change," writes Postrel, "but credit anxiety, alas, does not."

Swing-state voters have, judging by the polls, mostly rejected the darker insinuations about Barack Obama’s background. But they sure have taken hold in Texas, where a University of Texas poll shows a full 20 percent believing that Obama is a Muslim. That makes it one red state Obama won’t be winning. Another 28 percent could not identify his religion. But there is one intriguing finding in the poll: Only 34 percent approve of George W. Bush.

Beatles’ music still isn’t on iTunes, but it will be arriving on your PlayStation in late 2009. The Hollywood Reporter writes that MTV Networks and Harmonix are working together to develop a video game based on the Beatles catalog. The game will be based on the popular “Rock Band” platform and will take users on an “experimental journey” through the Beatles’ career. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are both involved in the game’s vision and direction, but—bad news for purists here—so is Yoko Ono.

It certainly took awhile, but Barack Obama has finally received the photo-op he's surely been dying for: Yesterday in Florida, Bill Clinton joined him on stage for the first time this campaign. Relations have been icy between the two since Obama took on Hillary Clinton in the primary, but yesterday the Big Dog was unequivocal. ''Barack Obama represents America's future, and you've got to be there for him next Tuesday," Clinton told the crowd. Obama returned the valentine: 'In case all of you forgot, this is what it's like to have a great president," he said, before getting in a good jab at McCain. ''By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.''

It seemed unlikely that the case of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian father who locked up his daughter, Elisabeth, for 24 years and forced her to have his seven children, could get any more lurid. Today comes news that the jailed Fritzl, 74, told a psychologist that he kept his mother locked in a sealed room for 20 years—until she died—as revenge for allegedly abusing him. “She used to beat me until I was lying in a pool of blood,” he said. “I never had a kiss from her or a cuddle.” Though he told friends she died in 1959, he now says it was 1980. “I locked her up at the top of the house,” he said. “I then bricked in the window so she never again saw the light of day.”

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.

One of the more fascinating spectacles this election has been watching iconic conservative columnist George Will take after John McCain. From today’s scorcher: "Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin's never having attended a 'Georgetown cocktail party' is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents 'are in charge of the United States Senate?’” Ouch. Will goes on to charge to that “McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons.” One of the latest controversies is the attempt by the McCain campaign to make light of Obama’s huge fundraising haul; as Will points out, the average Obama donation for September was $86.

It’s not exactly an October surprise but it’s a stunner nonetheless. The Times of London has turned up Obama’s aunt—in a Boston housing project. Actually, Zeituni Onyango, 56, is Obama’s half-aunt, but she is described affectionately in Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The Times says she “is a frail woman who walks with the aid of a metal stick” and for a time mentored children. She has managed to contribute $260 to her nephew’s presidential campaign and tells the paper: “I can’t talk about it, I just pray for him, that’s all. After the 4th, I can talk to anyone.”

Few artists' works oscillate between crap and genius as thoroughly as David Lynch's. The good news is you'll be able to decide which category to place his latest work in for free and at your own convenience. The legendary director of Blue Velvet and creator of Twin Peaks has agreed to produce a webisode series based on his book "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity." Lynch isn't the likeliest candidate for web innovation, saying this of the iPhone: "It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real." We'll look forward to the results anyway.

Robert Kagan thumps his chest on The Washington Post op-ed page today, offering a provocative takedown of the "faddish declinism" taking over America. America's share of the global economy—21 percent—is consistent with its stake throughout the past five decades, and the American military still outstrips the Russian and the Chinese. It's true, Kagan concedes, that America's image is damaged, but is it really any worse than it was in the 1960s and 70s, when it suffered Vietnam, My Lai, the Watts Riots, and the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King? "The danger of today's declinism," Kagan writes, "is not that it is true but that the next president will act as if it is."

It’s probably best to take arguments about Obama’s “socialism” with a grain of salt, but at least they now have a better spokesperson than Joe the Plumber. In The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes that Obama and progressive Democrats are advocating a model where “business is allowed to create ‘wealth’ so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.” Obama’s universal health care proposal is “the sine qua non of planting a true, managed-market economy in the U.S.” and his tax-policies would move the United States “away from creation and toward protection.” “Are the American people,” he asks, “of a mind to throw in the towel on the system that got them here?”

Struggling to find a dragon to chase recently? This may be why: International law enforcement officials think that the Taliban is stockpiling heroin, possibly to rig the market. Time reports that 6,000 to 8,000 tons of opium – enough to satisfy the world's addicts for two years – have disappeared from Afghanistan, which produces 93 percent of the world's supply. Because production has exceeded demand in recent years, prices would have collapsed had the surplus hit the market. This year, the Taliban has posted notices in Afghanistan telling farmers not to grow opium. A similar order in 2001 led to a tight supply and skyrocketing price for opium on the world market. As one U.N. official put it, "This is classic market manipulation."