Cheat Sheet
The Best In Brief
Please register to manage your email preferences and comment on the site.
Despite promises to sleep in this weekend, Obama took time out of his napping schedule today for a phone call with President Hu Jintao of China. Hu thanked the president-elect for his focus on China during the campaign—we didn’t notice that, either—and pledged to work with the US to resolve the global financial crisis, Chinese state media reports. “China and the United States should respect each other and accommodate each other’s concerns,” the Chinese leader said—a reference to the Taiwan independence issue. For his part, Obama called China “a great nation.”
Ian McEwan takes to the pages of The Wall Street Journal today to weigh in on what Obama can do for the environment. “To those who believe that climate change is our most pressing problem, underpinning all others, requiring degrees of cooperation and rationality we might not even be capable of, the elevation of this slender, handsome man becomes the object of unreal expectation,” the novelist writes. How to address climate change, with scientists warning we have only eight years left to make radical emissions cuts? The president must not move too cautiously, McEwan advises, and must attend and boldly lead the climate conference in Copenhagen next November: “There are those who said during the campaign that Barack Obama turned a fine speech empty of intent. He must surprise his detractors and start the detailed, practical preparation for Copenhagen, and refute them thus!”
Sarah Palin continued her counterinsurgency against anonymous McCain aides yesterday, calling them “cruel,” “mean-spirited,” and “unprofessional”—in sum, “those guys are jerks.” The comments were made in an interview from Alaska. As to the charges that she didn’t know the countries in NAFTA or that Africa was a continent, Palin said various subjects had come up during debate preparation and her quotes were “taken out of context.” She also claimed that no RNC lawyers were coming to Alaska to try to reclaim the clothes she was bought during the campaign. John McCain’s post-election unveiling will be Tuesday, on The Tonight Show.
Three of the Bali bombers have been executed on a prison island in Indonesia, The Australian reports. Mukhlas, Amrozi, and Imam Samudra went before a firing squad around midnight on Nusakambangan Island in Central Java, after being convicted of masterminding the bombings of two Bali nightclubs in October 2002. The bombers yelled “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great”) as they were taken from their cells, the paper reports. The bombings of the Sari Club and nearby Paddy’s Bar left 202 people dead, among them 88 Australians, and injured hundreds more.
Britney Spears’ comeback album isn’t out until December 2, the popster’s 27th birthday, but The Sun already has a review, and it’s a rave. The record “takes her bravado to startling new heights” and “sees Brit morphing ever closer to Madonna,” the paper reports, particularly the track If You Seek Amy. An ode to Amy Winehouse, perhaps? “All the boys and all the girls want to if you seek Amy,” Britney sings cryptically—but those are only the written lyrics. What the audience hears, the paper reports, is “quite shocking”: “All the boys and all the girls want to f-u-c-k me.” Still, the paper concludes, it’s “a great track.”
While European leaders have hailed Obama’s presidential victory, Klaus Emmerich, described by Der Spiegel as “the Wolf Blitzer of Austria,” has gone the other way. The Austrian journalist, retired after a six-decade career, told a talk show this week: “I wouldn’t want the Western world to be directed by a black man. When you say that is a racist remark: right, without a doubt.” After his remarks were universally condemned, Emmerich decided to dig his hole a little deeper, calling Obama’s victory an “extremely disconcerting development” because “blacks aren’t as politically civilized.” To cement the point further, he added yesterday that Obama has “a devil-like talent to present his rhetoric so effectively.”
In addition to a terrific map of what a nation governed by the youth vote would look like, FutureMajority.com reports some intriguing statistics about the election. Among them: 23 million young voters cast a ballot, a 3.4 million increase over 2004; youth turnout will probably end up near 53 percent, just short of the all-time record, 55.4 percent, set in 1972; Obama won 66 percent of the youth vote; and turnout was higher in states that were particular targets of the campaigns. The information was compiled by CIRCLE, a nonpartisan research center run out of Tufts University.
CNN Money has the stats on our shrinking economy, just in time for the holiday season. 1.2 million jobs have been lost so far in 2008, including 240,000 in October. It's the first time the economy has lost one million jobs in a year since 2001. The unemployment rate, now at 6.5 percent, is at its highest since March 1994. Losses are expected to continue through, at the very least, the first half of 2009. Happy shopping!
Big plans in Oprah's future, though, sadly, they are non-presidential: Discovery Communications, which is partnering with Oprah to launch the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) next year, announced yesterday that Oprah's show will cease to air on ABC via syndication in September 2011. The Oprah Winfrey Show—the crown jewel of the talker’s vast empire—will air instead on OWN. Oprah will have full editorial and programming control of the OWN network, and to the surprise of no one, will give a show to her best friend, Gayle King.
A school in the Haitian town of Petionville, near Port-au-Prince, collapsed on Friday, killing 50 students. One report indicated that as many as 200 more students were still trapped in the rubble Friday night. Haitian President Rene Preval visited the site and said that “heard and saw with my own eyes children appealing for help.” Rescue efforts are complicated by poor roads near the school and the fact that Port-au-Prince currently has only one functioning hospital.
If one is to be judged by the company he keeps, then what does one make of this clique? Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Don Delillo, Denis Johnson, Philip K. Dick, and David Lynch. Jonathan Lethem compares the late Chilean poet Robert Bolaño to all of these writers (and filmmaker) in his review of Bolaño's new 900-page novel, 2666. The five-part novel is "not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition," Lethem writes, "but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world." Each section's plot is different, so it's not exactly possible to summarize it. Of the novel's final section, Lethem writes, "If the word 'unflinching' didn't exist I'd invent it to describe these nearly 300 pages."
Keep your eyes open on electoral maps for a blue dot in the heart of red-state country. Yesterday, Barack Obama was awarded the electoral vote of Omaha's congressional district in Nebraska, which, along with Maine, is the only state in the union to split its electoral votes by district. It is the first time since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 blowout that any Democrat has won an electoral vote from Nebraska. On Tuesday night, Obama was down a few hundred votes, but he won mail-in ballots, giving him a winning margin of 1,260 votes.
Harrowing story from The Independent: Jim O'Neill was flying his personal aircraft solo when he suffered a stroke that left him blind in one eye and with severely limited vision in the other. O'Neill was unable to follow instructions from an air traffic controller to the nearest airstrip, the Royal Air Force, which overheard the exchange on the airwaves, sent an aircraft to fly alongside him and shepherd him to a landing, via the radio. After seven tries, O'Neill landed the plane. He is expected to recover at least some of his vision when his brain's swelling recedes.
The recession is hitting Orange County, and its residents should prepare to trade in their supercars for something a bit more compact. Lamborghini O.C., the world’s largest Lamborghini dealer, has closed. The dealership previously sold about 10 percent of the 2,400 Lamborghinis made each year. Its owners are refusing to say why they shut their doors. Overall Lamborghini sales are down 15 percent so far this year.
In August, we learned from The New York Times Magazine that George W. Bush planned on writing a memoir and was “settling” on a ghostwriter. He might not want to sharpen his pencils just yet. The Canadian Press interviews several publishing executives and finds not a one salivating for Bush: My White House Years. “Certainly, the longer he waits, the better,” says Marji Ross, publisher of the conservative outfit Regnery. Ross goes on to add that Regnery will focus on (more) anti-Obama screeds. In Bush’s favor: Richard Nixon became a prolific and best-selling author after his political demise.
Well, that didn’t take long. President-elect Barack Obama gave his first post-election news conference Friday and has already issued an apology. Talking about the ex-presidents he had consulted about his new job, Obama quipped, “I have spoken to all of them who are living. I don’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about séances.” Obama called Reagan shortly after to offer his apologies. Moreover, Politico’s Ben Smith points out that Obama was apparently confusing astrology-loving Reagan with Hillary Clinton, whom Obama certainly doesn’t want to run afoul of yet.
Partner Sites: Expedia| Hotels| Hotwire| Urbanspoon| Vimeo
