Cheat Sheet

Jinx-fearing Democrats won’t heave a sigh of relief, but the newest batch of national polls does show their man with about a seven-point lead over McCain. Nate Silver notes, however, that “candidates with large leads in the polls have had some tendency to underperform marginally on election day, and so projects an Obama win of 6.0 points.” His model shows Obama winning in Iowa, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania, among other battlegrounds. McCain’s only chance of a victory, according to Silver? The Bradley Effect: “McCain’s chances of victory are estimated at 1.9 percent, their lowest total of the year.”

Sean Combs’ “Vote or Die” campaign has been noticeably off the radar this election, as opposed to 2004, but maybe it will get jump-started in this final day. Combs was reportedly a participant in a call Obama held this morning to rally African-American leaders. Oprah Winfrey, who was also on the call, chimed in to urge listeners to make America “truly one nation indivisible.” Other participants were more traditional political leaders, like Donna Brazile and Jim Clyburn. Obama’s topics included “what it would say to the world to see his daughters play on the South Lawn of the White House,” according to Politico. “The call is another mark of Obama’s broad, if low-profile, effort to drive historic black turnout,” writes Ben Smith.

One sign the world is transfixed by the US presidential election? Britain’s gambling industry is raking in around $8 million in bets on the outcome of the voting, a spokesman for Ladbrokes told MarketWatch, more than double 2004’s tally. While a staggering 250 million pounds is wagered every year on Britain’s premier horserace, this year’s US election tally is on par with a typical British general election, MarketWatch reports. And the odds mirror the polls in the States: Going into Tuesday’s election, Ladbrokes was offering odds of 13-2 on a McCain victory, while Obama is a 1-in-12 favorite.

The campaign’s final days are supposed to be its most glorious, as supporters turn out for one final push. For example: Obama’s crowd of 60,000 in Ohio yesterday. McCain, on the other hand, seems to be crawling toward the finish line. In Tampa today, McCain was greeted by 1,000 voters. A Fox News reporter (!) said the event looked as though it were set up for 10 times as many people. On the eve of the election in 2004, President Bush drew 15,000 voters in Tampa.

Financial experts fear that the federal government’s $143 billion rescue of American International Group may not work, and some argue the company shareholders and taxpayers would have been better served by a bankruptcy filing. AIG has been zipping through its vast $85 billion loan since it was aided by taxpayer money in September, and it borrowed a further $20 billion last week. “Unless there is immediate change to the structure of the Federal loan, the American taxpayer will likely suffer a significant financial loss,” former AIG chief executive and major shareholder Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg wrote to AIG’s current chief executive on Thursday, according to The Washington Post.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has predicted that Obama (whom he always refers to as “the black man”) will win on Tuesday and has offered to start a dialogue with the new administration. “We’re not asking [Obama] to be a revolutionary,” Chavez said at a public meeting. “We’re not asking him to be a socialist. We just want the black man who’s about to become president of the U.S.A. to rise up to the times that the world is facing.” More Chavez: “I want to get closer to the black man from here, because we are indigenous, blacks, Caribbeans, of South American race.” Chavez has urged Obama to end what he has termed the threats from the US toward Venezuela.

The Israeli government announced yesterday that it would cut off funding for illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank and “crack down on extremist squatters,” according to the AP. This is a new acknowledgement of the Israeli government’s complicity in the development of the settlement outposts, despite promises to the United States to dismantle them. Dror Etkes, leader of the human-right group Yesh Din, said he believed the move would affect little. "What matters is not the statements, but what happens on the ground, and everything on the ground is precisely the opposite," he said.

Shakir Stewart, the executive vice president of Def Jam Records, died Saturday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 34 years old. The New York Post reports that Stewart signed Rick Ross, Young Jeezy, and other artists before succeeding Jay-Z in June; at Hitco, where he worked previously, he signed Beyoncé. Stewart’s fiancée released a statement saying, “Over the past several weeks, Shakir’s behavior was inconsistent with the man we all know and love. As much as we all tried to help him, Shakir was in deep pain and largely suffering in silence."

Republicans have tried to extricate themselves from George W. Bush’s failure by claiming that he is not a “true” conservative, but Simon Schama warns readers of The Guardian to take such efforts with a grain of salt: “for there never has been and never will be a more doctrinally faithful instrument of the creed.” It was Bush’s misfortune to come “to power armed with an ideology that was about to crash and burn”—an allegiance to voodoo economics without any evidence of its success. “Not even Gibbon,” Schama writes, “could supply a story as fatefully bizarre as the ultimate consummation of Reagan-Bush conservatism, its last act: the most massive shift of financial power from the private to the public sector since the New Deal. Rather like the Pope deciding that all along he really wanted a bar mitzvah.”

Here’s a satisfying read for English majors, who have long had their educations derided in favor of more “practical” fields like business and economics. John Lanchester compares the development of financial markets to that of modern art in this week’s New Yorker. “Finance, like other forms of human behavior, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts—a break with common sense, a turn toward self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English.” That makes the current crisis “unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism.” Our current ills have precedent in the pages of Derrida, for whom meaning was endlessly deferred, much like the value of financial derivatives.

Some surprising news from the University of Hawaii: A study of 7,000 women found that 92 percent of overweight women had slept with a man compared to 87 percent of “normal” size women. The study’s findings contradict previous results suggesting that large women have lower libidos and that thin ones are more sexually active. The study also looked at age, race, location, number of partners, and frequency of sex, but found that size was the only thing that affected whether a woman slept with a man. Dr. Bliss Kaneshiro, who led the study, adds, “These results were unexpected and we don’t really know why this is the case.”

Mexico’s efforts to rein in its drug lords suffered a blow when Gerardo Garay, head of the federal police, resigned under suspicion that he worked for a major cartel, The Guardian reports. Drug violence in Mexico is rampant as gangs jockey for cocaine-trafficking routes from Colombia. This year there have been nearly 4,000 drug-related execution-style murders. Garay became Mexico’s top cop after a hired assassin killed his predecessor. Now, press reports have linked the Sinaloa cartel to one of Garay’s closest lieutenants. “I am resigning because the bloody fight against organized crime makes it our duty to strengthen institutions,” Garay said, “which means it is essential to eliminate any shadows of doubt regarding me.”

The Irish budget airline Ryanair is offering flights between London and America for less than the cost of a tank of gas. In the face of a worldwide recession, the airline is doubling down against its larger rivals and offering trans-Atlantic flights for $12.70.” We’ll just have to keep flying more aircraft, opening up more routes and offering people more cheap flights,” said Michael O'Leary, the airline’s CEO. “Economy class will be very cheap…but our business class will be very expensive.” He plans to buy more than 50 extra aircraft to meet demand and will fly between London and Dublin and New York, Florida, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston. Ryanair has just announced a fall in profits year on year of 47 percent.

The celebrity sex tape is one of the entertainment industry’s most salacious products, but its opposite is becoming increasingly popular as well. “Porn stars are turning up with increasing regularity on shopping mall movie screens and in prime time television shows,” the Los Angeles Times reports, “underscoring pornography’s steady migration over the last three decades from the pop culture margins to the mainstream.” Most notable is Steven Soderbergh’s decision to cast Sasha Grey, 20, in his upcoming movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Soderbergh cites as evidence of porn stars’ growing acceptability to the movie-going public the Paris Hilton sex tape, which boosted her image rather than destroyed it. “That changed everything,” Soderbergh said. “Or it didn’t change everything; it confirmed that everything had changed.”

Ali Kordan, Iran’s interior minister, faces impeachment after admitting to padding his resume with a bogus degree from Oxford University, The Guardian reports. Kordan says he won’t resign, though he is willing to apologize. In the meantime, he has President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s support. Ahmadinejad has claimed that because Kordan did not fake the degree while in office, the impeachment proceedings are illegal, and back in August, during debates about Kordan’s appointment, Ahmadinejad dismissed degrees as mere “torn paper” and irrelevant to public service.

His name was Jacques Piccard, but they called him “Captain Nemo” after the Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea hero. Exploration ran in the family. August, his father, was the first to take a hot air balloon into the stratosphere. His son Bertrand was the first to pilot a nonstop air balloon flight around the world. Piccard’s career took him to NASA, where he worked on pioneering submarines, and he also developed the Trieste bathyscaphe with his father; a vessel, as the Independent put it, that enabled humans “to descent to then inconceivable depths.” He undertook his record-breaking dive in 1960 with US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh. They dived 35,800 feet into the Mariana Trench and, Piccard said, “We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all.” Their discovery later helped prohibit oceanic nuclear waste dumps.

There’s nothing left that you can’t hire someone to do for you: walk your dog, decorate your home, buy your clothes, and now, pick your music. If you’ve got money to burn, you can hire a “personal music stylist” to choose music that matches your home. Music stylists might visit their clients’ homes, look at photographs, or pore through their clients’ music collections to see the kind of music they liked without the professional hand of a stylist guiding them.

After the record number of home foreclosures, Americans face a new peril. Utilities are shutting off more customers who cannot pay their bills. In Pennsylvania, an electricity company has cut off supplies to 78 percent more homes than last year. The utility companies say they are under pressure to clean out accounts that are weighing down their books at a time when their stocks are being hammered and earnings growth has slowed, The Wall Street Journal reports. And it is not just the poor that are at risk. “We’re seeing an uptick in middle-class people who have never been in this situation before,” said Eric Hartsfield, of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

If we elect Obama, be prepared to see Ed Rendell in the top energy or transportation post, Bill Richardson on a short list for secretary of state, and jobs for Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. Former Clinton appointees in the running for Obama jobs include former treasury secretaries Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. Rahm Emanuel of Chicago is tipped to be Obama’s White House chief of staff. A McCain victory would likely mean former Navy secretary John Lehman or retired Marine General James Jones or Senator Lindsey Graham as defense secretary, with staunch ally Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman or World Bank President Robert Zoellick as secretary of state. Also expect big jobs for former eBay chief Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard chairman Carly Fiorina.

In diagnosing why Sarah Palin’s arguments have not gained more traction among voters, Peter Beinart suggests it is because the culture wars—the conflict between those who agreed or disagreed with the upheaval in attitudes thrown up during the ’60s—are about to end. Palin is “depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic,” writes Beinart in The Washington Post. “But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out...Although she seems like a fresh face, Sarah Palin actually represents the end of an era. She may be the last culture warrior on a national ticket for a very long time,” he writes.

Be prepared for an early night on Tuesday. In the election’s final days, superstition and nerves begin to take over, but, according to poll guru Nate Silver, the statistical picture is still bleak for John McCain. “McCain’s clock has simply run out,” Silver writes. “While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.” Furthermore, undecided voters, which the McCain campaign has counted on as its saving grace, are down to less than 3 percent of the electorate, meaning that even if McCain won 70 percent of them, he’d only gain about a point in the total popular vote.

It has only just come to light, but the Saudis are letting it be known they foiled a plan by radical Islamists to hijack a plane and blow it up over an American city. The details remain sketchy, and why the news has taken so long to come out remains a mystery, but the Saudi Al-Watan newspaper reports the 2003 plot along with 159 other similar planned outrages, according to The Daily Telegraph. The plan smells of Al Qaeda, with terrorists traveling to America via a third country to avoid applying for a US visa, hijacking their plane, and blowing it up over an American city.

Researchers at the Rand Corporation report that teens exposed to the most sexual content on TV are twice as likely as teens watching less of this material to become pregnant before they reach age 20. And the problem is accelerating thanks to the rise of the Internet, Time reports. Children are accessing television not just via their home TV but on the computer and on cell phones. “It’s not just appointment television, now it’s anytime television,” says Dr. Donald Shifrin, former chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Communications. “And this study was begun seven years ago, so if it were done today, [the authors] would probably find more evidence of sex on screens that affects youngsters’ behaviors.”