Thatcher relives Bruges heyday

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Baroness Thatcher is welcomed by fellow Conservatives

By Brian Wheeler
Political reporter, BBC News


She may no longer make speeches, on doctor's orders, but there is no keeping Lady Thatcher away from her public.

From the moment she clambered shakily from the back seat of a black Jaguar, on to the forecourt of the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, this was going to be her night.


At 83, and reportedly suffering from dementia, she makes few public appearances these days.

But this was a special occasion - the 20th anniversary dinner of the Bruges Group, which takes its name from a speech in which she first warned against the creation of a European "super state".

She is still recognisable from her prime ministerial heyday. The extraordinary sweep of back-combed hair is still there - as is the famous handbag - but she is clearly very frail.

She walks with tiny, deliberate steps, all her effort seemingly concentrated on getting from A to B.

But she managed to summon up a hint of the old steel, as she paused at the hotel entrance for the photographers, shooting them a determined glare of the type that once reduced Cabinet ministers - and Brussels bureaucrats - to jelly.

And instead of being shepherded past the crowd of admirers in the bar on her way to the top table, she was thrust straight into the middle of them.

They could hardly believe their good fortune.

"How many times in your life, do you get to meet a legend? She will be remembered for hundreds of years," said Nikki Sinclaire, a UKIP Euro election candidate.

"She is the reason I got involved in politics."

'My heroine'

These are Thatcher's people - true believers who had paid upwards of £125 each for the opportunity to have dinner in her presence, including several current Tory MPs, the novelist Frederick Forsyth and the UKIP leader Nigel Farage.

And for a good half hour she walked among them, steadily working the room as her minders battled to keep the pin-striped throng at bay.


How many times in your life, do you get to meet a legend? She will be remembered for hundreds of years
Nikki Sinclaire, UKIP Euro election candidate

At times, the crowd threatened to overwhelm her, as they held up their camera phones to film her progress and pushed forward with outstretched hands, always deferential, but eager for just a few seconds with the former prime minister.

"You are my heroine," said one woman.

"You inspired me," said another, reaching out to grasp her fragile hand, "we need more like you".

Ms Sinclaire explained that she was standing for the UK Independence Party in the West Midlands.

"Good for you. Never give up, never give up," Lady Thatcher told her.

Then, unexpectedly, as she pushed further into the crowd, I found myself face-to-face with her.

Dementia claims

"It's an honour to meet you," I said, shaking her hand and, for reasons which now escape me, adding: "I come from the North East."

She seemed delighted.

"Thank you for coming down. Give them my warm regards," she said.

I did not have time to explain that, on this occasion, I had only come down from North London, but it did not seem to matter.

She seemed much sharper than I had expected.

Her daughter, Carol, recently wrote about her battle with dementia and that on bad days "she can hardly remember the beginning of a sentence by the time she got to the end".

There was little sign of that here.

"I think she gets a bad press about how bad her condition is. She comes to visit us and talks to people for hours without any trouble and of course the pensioners love her," said Susan Smith, of the Chelsea Pensioners' Appeal, one of Lady Thatcher's charities.

Vocal support

She appeared to be flagging a little by the time dinner was over and the speeches were under way.

She was seated at the top table, next to her old comrade in arms Lord Tebbitt, who gave a speech calling for a referendum on Britain's relationship with the EU - and a move towards an alliance of sovereign states, of the kind first outlined by Lady Thatcher in her Bruges speech.

It was typically red-blooded stuff, with much scorn poured on the "euro fanatics" in his own party and their "fellow travellers" in the civil service and the BBC, which went down a storm with the die-hard Euro sceptics in the audience.

But the night belonged to Lady Thatcher.

The sense of betrayal many of her supporters felt 18 years ago at the way she was ejected from Downing Street is evidently still raw among members of the Bruges Group.

As she reached the end of her final procession through tables of applauding admirers, pausing at the top of the stairs for a farewell wave, a chant went up from the back of the room which summed up the night perfectly and - if she heard it - will have left her with a smile on her face.

"Ten more years! Ten more years! Ten more years!"


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7694477.stm

Published: 2008/10/28 08:04:54 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

McCain Presses Obama in Final Debate

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 16, 2008

By JIM RUTENBERG
Senator John McCain used the final debate of the presidential election on Wednesday night to raise persistent and pointed questions about Senator Barack Obama’s character, judgment and policy prescriptions in a session that was by far the most spirited and combative of their encounters this fall.

At times showing anger and at others a methodical determination to make all his points, Mr. McCain pressed his Democratic rival on taxes, spending, the tone of the campaign and his association with the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers, using nearly every argument at his disposal in an effort to alter the course of a contest that has increasingly gone Mr. Obama’s way.

But Mr. Obama maintained a placid and at times bemused demeanor — if at times appearing to work at it — as he parried the attacks and pressed his consistent line that Mr. McCain would represent a continuation of President Bush’s unpopular policies, especially on the economy.

That set the backdrop for one of the sharpest exchanges of the evening, when, in response to Mr. Obama’s statement that Mr. McCain had repeatedly supported Mr. Bush’s economic policies, Mr. McCain fairly leaped out of his chair to say: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

Acknowledging Mr. McCain had his differences with Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama replied, “The fact of the matter is that if I occasionally mistake your policies for George Bush’s policies, it’s because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people — on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities — you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush.”

The debate touched on a wide variety of issues, including abortion, judicial appointments, trade and climate change as well as the economy, with the candidates often making clear the deep differences between them.

But it also put on display the two very different temperaments of the candidates with less than three weeks until Election Day. The lasting image of the night could be the split screen of Mr. Obama, doing his best to maintain his unflappable demeanor under a sometimes withering attack, and Mr. McCain looking coiled, occasionally breathing deeply, apparently in an expression of impatience.

Sitting side by side with only the host, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, between them on the stage at Hofstra University, Mr. McCain made clear from the start that he was going to follow the prescriptions of many of his supporters — among them his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska — and try to put Mr. Obama on the defensive and shake him from his steady debate style.

Seizing on an encounter in Ohio this week with a voter — Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber — who told Mr. Obama that he feared that his tax policies would punish him as a small-business owner, Mr. McCain pressed his attack on Mr. Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. Mr. Obama’s plan would raise taxes on filers earning more than $250,000 a year, a category that includes some small businesses, but would cut taxes on households earning less than $200,000 a year.

Seeking to suggest that Mr. Obama would hurt the economy and many entrepreneurs, Mr. McCain said, “The whole premise behind Senator Obama’s plans are class warfare — let’s spread the wealth around,” repeating a phrase Mr. Obama had used to Mr. Wurzelbacher in explaining the rationale for his upper-income tax increase.

“Why would you want to do that — anyone, anyone in America — when we have such a tough time, when these small-business people like Joe the Plumber are going to create jobs unless you take that money from him and spread the wealth around,” Mr. McCain said.

The plumber came up directly or indirectly 24 times during the debate, an Everyman symbol of the divide between the candidates on how best to address the economy.

As he has done in previous encounters, Mr. Obama looked into the camera and repeated his plan: “Now, the conversation I had with Joe the Plumber, what I essentially said to him was, five years ago, when you weren’t in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then. And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now.”

Coming on a day that the Dow Jones average had one of its worst drops in history, Mr. Schieffer tried something other moderators had failed to do this fall: get the two candidates to enumerate which proposals they would specifically have to postpone or cut in the face of an economic environment that has changed drastically since they first drew up their plans.

Neither man went very far, though Mr. McCain perhaps offered a more detailed list. Repeating his pledge of an across-the-board spending cut, he said, “Well, one of them would be the marketing assistance program. Another one would be a number of subsidies for ethanol.”

Mr. Obama, for his part, specifically cited the “$15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies,” a component of the Medicare program. But, he said more generally, “we need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don’t work, and I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page. Programs that don’t work, we should cut.”

Still, though the winner of this election will inherit the most sweeping federal intervention in financial markets in at least three generations, the debate, while not short of policy discussions, was at least as much about the styles of the two men as they engaged one another.

In the days before the debate, Mr. Obama had appeared to have goaded Mr. McCain, saying in an interview with ABC News that he did not know why Mr. McCain had not personally made an issue of Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Ayers, with whom he worked with on two nonprofit boards, in their last debate considering that Mr. McCain’s campaign had done so repeatedly in recent weeks.

And there was some degree of anticipation over whether Mr. McCain would do so this time. He did, though only after a bit of prompting from Mr. Schieffer, who, in a question about the tone of the campaign directed at both men, asked Mr. McCain specifically, “Your running mate said he palled around with terrorists.”

Mr. McCain initially did not address that point directly.

But as Mr. Schieffer seemed prepared to move to another topic, Mr. McCain returned to Mr. Ayers on his own. Mr. McCain seemed most agitated in that moment, saying: “I don’t care about an old, washed-up terrorist. But as Senator Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship. We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with Acorn, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

He was referring to a community activist group that focuses on housing issues and has been running voter registration efforts in many states that have drawn accusations of fraud.

Mr. Obama’s aides said during the day that he was preparing for the Ayers question.

“Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago. Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts,” Mr. Obama said. “Ten years ago, he served and I served on a board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan’s former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.”

On Acorn, Mr. Obama said, “Apparently what they have done is they were paying people to go out and register folks. And apparently some of the people who were out there didn’t really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names. Had nothing to do with us. We were not involved.”

Speaking of his involvement with the group, he said, “The only involvement I’ve had with Acorn was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people register at D.M.V.’s.” Mr. Obama’s campaign made some payments to an affiliate of Acorn.

Mr. Obama said sternly as Mr. McCain bristled, “And I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Senator McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me.”



Home
World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Automobiles Back to Top
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map

Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale

Thursday, October 16, 2008 OpinionWelcome, Logout


OCTOBER 16, 2008
Both candidates continue to tinker with their strategies.
By KARL ROVEArticle

In the campaign's final two weeks, voters will take a last serious look at both presidential candidates. The outcome of the race isn't cast in stone yet.
Barack Obama holds a 7.3% lead in the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, but the latest Gallup tracking poll reveals that there are nearly twice as many undecided voters this year than there were in the last presidential election. The Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll (which was closest to the mark in predicting the 2004 outcome -- 0.4% off the actual result) now says this is a three-point race.

APThis week also brought a reminder that Sen. Obama hasn't closed the sale. The Washington Post/ABC poll found 45% of voters still don't think he's qualified to be president, about the same number who doubted his qualifications in March.
This is seven points more than George W. Bush's highest reading in 2000 and the worst since Michael Dukakis's 56% unqualified rating in 1988. It explains why Mr. Obama has ignored Democratic giddiness and done two things to keep victory from slipping away.
First, he is using his money to try to keep John McCain from gaining traction. The Obama campaign raised $67 million in September and may be on track to raise $100 million in October. Sen. McCain opted last month for roughly $85 million in public financing, giving him less than half of Mr. Obama's funds for the campaign's final two months. Even with robust Republican National Committee fund raising to augment his spending, Mr. McCain is at a severe financial disadvantage.
So Mr. Obama is spending $35 million on TV this week versus the McCain/RNC total of $17 million. Mr. Obama is outspending Mr. McCain on TV in Virginia by a ratio of 4 to 1, in Florida by 3 to 1, and in Missouri and Nevada by better than 2 to 1. The disparity is likely to grow in the campaign's final weeks.
Money alone, however, won't decide the contest. John Kerry and the Democrats outspent Mr. Bush and the GOP in 2004 by $121 million and still lost.
Mr. Obama's other strategy is to do all he can to look presidential, including buying very expensive half-hour slots to address the country next week. He wants to give a serious, Oval-Office type address. This is smart. People appreciate Mr. Obama's empathy on the economy, but as they take a long look at what he wants to do about it, they will be less impressed, especially if Mr. McCain draws sharp contrasts with clear policy proposals.
Mr. Obama is trying to make the case that his lack of experience or record should not disqualify him. But in doing so, he seems to recognize that the U.S. is still a center-right country. His TV ads promise tax cuts and his radio ads savage Mr. McCain's health-care plan as a tax increase. It's a startling campaign conversion for the most liberal member of the Senate. We'll know on Election Day if he is able to get away with it.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
Similarly, Mr. McCain appears to be making three important course corrections. First, he and Gov. Sarah Palin are sharpening their stump speeches so their sound bites come off well on TV. Gone are offhand remarks and awkward comments read from notes perched on a podium. In are teleprompters and carefully crafted arguments. Mr. McCain is also more at ease than before and has an ebullient, come-from-behind underdog optimism that will serve him well in the final weeks.
Second, Mr. McCain is shaping a story line that draws on well-founded concerns about Mr. Obama's lack of record or experience. Mr. McCain is also bowing to reality and devoting most of his time to the economy. His narrative is he's the conservative reformer who'll lead and work hard to get things done, while Mr. Obama is the tax-and-spend liberal who's unprepared to lead and unwilling to act.
Mr. McCain is hitting Mr. Obama for wanting to raise taxes in difficult economic times, especially on small business and for the purpose of redistributing income, and for having lavish spending plans at a time when the economy is faltering. He's criticizing Mr. Obama for lingering on the sidelines while Mr. McCain dove in to help pass a rescue plan, necessary no matter how distasteful. And he's attacking Mr. Obama for not joining the fight in 2005 when reformers like Mr. McCain tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Mr. McCain's other adjustment is his schedule. His campaign understands the dire circumstances it faces and is narrowing his travels almost exclusively to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada. If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP's 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It's threading the needle, but it's come to that.
This task, while not impossible, will be difficult. By mid-September, the McCain camp was slightly ahead in the polls. Then came the financial crisis. The past month has taken an enormous toll on the McCain campaign.
Whether it can find the right formula in the next 19 days to dig out is a question. If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

www.djreprints.com
More In Opinion Email Printer Friendly Order Reprints Share: Yahoo! Buzz
MySpace
Digg

Copyright ©2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

The meeting between Joe the plumber and Barack Obama

Joe Wurzelbacher is an Ohio man thinking of buying a plumbing business who has briefly come to prominence in the US presidential debate.


Last week, when Democratic candidate Barack Obama came to his hometown of Holland, Ohio, Mr Wurzelbacher told the presidential hopeful that the Democrat's tax plans would prevent him from buying the business where he has worked for years.

Mr Wurzelbacher said the company earned $250,000-$280,000 (£144,800-£162,250) a year, and he challenged Mr Obama: "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?"

Mr Obama said that under his proposals, taxes on any revenue below $250,000 would remain the same, but that earnings above that level would be subject to a 39% tax, instead of the current 36% rate.

Mr Obama said that 95% of small businesses earned less than $250,000 and that he wanted to give those small businesses a tax cut.


I've always wanted to ask one of these guys a question and really corner them. Unfortunately, I asked the question but I still got a tap dance... Almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr
Joe Wurzelbacher

Mr Wurzelbacher told Mr Obama that would mean he would be taxed more "for fulfilling the American dream".

The encounter was picked up by the Republican campaign, and Senator John McCain spoke of "Joe the plumber" several times during the final presidential debate on Tuesday.

"Joe wants to buy the business that he's been in for all these years. Worked 10, 12 hours a day. But he looked at your tax plan and he saw that he was going to pay much higher taxes," Mr McCain said.

"And what you want to do, to Joe the plumber, means more like him have their taxes increased, and not be able to realise the American dream."

"Joe" came up more than a dozen times as both candidates argued over how their economic and healthcare policies would help him.

'Slippery slope'

After the debate, Mr Wurzelbacher told CBS News that being mentioned in the campaign was "surreal" but that Mr Obama's answer to his question had left him feeling uneasy.

"I've always wanted to ask one of these guys a question and really corner them and get them to answer a question... for once instead of tap dancing around it.

"And unfortunately I asked the question but I still got a tap dance... Almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr," he said.


Robin Hood stole from greedy rich people and redistributed it to the peasants, so to speak, so if he's calling us peasants, I kind of resent that
Joe Wurzelbacher


"When's he going to decide that $100,000 is too much, you know? I mean, you're on a slippery slope here. You vote on somebody who decides that $250,000 and you're rich? And $100,000 and you're rich? I mean, where does it end?" he added.


Speaking to Fox News, Mr Wurzelbacher said Mr Obama's plan to raise taxes to redistribute money was "kind of a socialist viewpoint".

"Robin Hood stole from greedy rich people and redistributed it to the peasants, so to speak, so if he's calling us peasants, I kind of resent that," he said.

He added that the American dream for him was "you work hard. You're going to get what you want eventually... I just resent the government or Barack Obama's plan to take more away from me."

Mr Wurzelbacher said Mr McCain did a "fine job" and said Obama did well too, though added "talk is talk".

He still thinks Mr Obama's tax plan would keep him from buying the business, whereas Mr McCain had "got it right as far as I go".

Nonetheless, Mr Wurzelbacher declined to reveal how he would vote in the election on 4 November.

"Only me and the lever knows," he said.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/us_elections_2008/7673170.stm

Published: 2008/10/16 08:05:41 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Queen Nets Her Own Google Logo

Thursday, October 16 09:28 am

Sky News
Print Story
An image of the Queen has been incorporated into the homepage logo of internet search engine Google for the day. Skip related content
Related photos / videos Queen Nets Her Own Google Logo
Related content
Google doodle do for Queen
Queen image appears on Google logo
The Queen Features As Google Logo
Related Hot Topic: Royal Family
Have your say: Royal Family
The "Google doodle", which changes periodically to mark national holidays or anniversaries of major events, will feature a profile of the monarch and a crown.

The special logo will appear on the search engine's UK homepage to mark a visit by the Queen to the organisation's London offices in Westminster later today.

The monarch has embraced technological changes over the decades - sending an email for the first time when she visited an Army base in 1976.

In 1997 she launched the official royal website during a visit to Kingsbury High School in north west London while the Queen's Speech was made available as a podcast for the first time in 2006.

And last Christmas the first Royal Channel on YouTube - the popular video-sharing website - was launched. It now has 54 royal videos that have been viewed 1.6 million times.

During the visit to Google's offices the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, will meet the company's senior management.

The royal party will be shown a series of demonstrations explaining Google's various operations, from its popular search engine facility to Google Earth, where users can access detailed maps and satellite images of the planet.

The Queen and Duke will also meet 16 schoolchildren, all winners in a competition to design new doodles for Google.

Later at a reception the royal couple will chat to members of the YouTube community whose videos have proved particularly popular with internet users.

Email Story Print Story Subscribe to RSS
Latest UK news
3 mins ago
Jail 'not deterring knife crime'The threat of longer jail terms is not deterring teenagers… More
10 mins ago
Olympic heroes parade in London 25 mins ago
Google's UK homepage gets royal makeoverGoogle Inc received the royal seal of approval on Thursday… More
32 mins ago
FTSE plunges amid recession concern 1 hour 3 mins ago
Jersey votes to keep UK time 1 hour 12 mins ago
NHS criticised over superbug targets 1 hour 21 mins ago
Access to GPs far worse than thought 1 hour 28 mins ago
Jersey residents vote to keep GMT 1 hour 28 mins ago
British soldier killed in Afghanistan to be… 1 hour 42 mins ago
Govt signals flexibility in banking bailout… 1 hour 45 mins ago
Play video NHS criticised over superbug targets 3 hours 40 mins ago
Play video UK News Roundup, Morning Edition for October… (Advertisement)

Subscribe to RSS
Most Popular in: UK
1
Pets suffer when owners splitStressed-out cats and dogs are suffering compulsive disorders because of Britain's high break-up rate between couples. …More
2 Stores drop petrol price below £1 3 British House Prices Down By 40% 4 Madonna and Ritchie 'set to split' 5 'Northerners have dirtiest hands' More popular stories MORE ON YAHOO! NEWS
Home

UK

World

Politics
Business

Sport

Technology

Science
Health

Entertainment

Oddly Enough

Video
Subscribe to our news feeds
Editor's Corner
Subscribe to RSS Add to My Yahoo! More news feeds What are news feeds? ALSO ON YAHOO!
Answers

Cars

Finance

Games

Movies

Music
Sport

TV

Travel

All Yahoo! Services
SITE HIGHLIGHTS
Weather

Photos

Message Boards

Editor's Corner

Celebrity News

Gadgets
Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! All rights reserved.

Terms of Service Remarks and Suggestions Copyright/IP Policy
Copyright © 2008 Sky News

Notice: We collect personal information on this site. To learn more about how we use your information, see our: Privacy Policy

Printed from http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20081016/tuk-queen-nets-her-own-google-logo-45dbed5.html

Paddington bear celebrates 50th birthday

E-Mail | Reprint | Post | Republish | More>

October 13, 2008

By Jack Riley
He would barely appear out-of-place in any group of 50-year-old males; a little gnarled, anachronistically dressed, and clinging on to accessories which have seen better days. But what marks out Paddington bear, who celebrates his half-century today, is that he has always looked like this.



It is 50 years since the first story featuring Paddingon, the iconic bear found at his namesake West London station and beloved of many an English schoolchild, was published by former BBC radio engineer and cameraman Michael Bond.

The first Paddington story, entitled A Bear Called Paddington was released on 13 October 1958. The book described the bear's first year in Britain, from his discovery at Paddington station by his owners Mr and Mrs Brown, through the trauma of his first experience of bathing, and concluded with the anniversary of his fortuitous discovery.

Mr Bond describes how a pang of sympathy for a neglected toy bear in a London shop inspired him to write the children's stories which have since been translated into 30 languages, and sold more than 30 million copies around the world: "I bought a small toy bear on Christmas Eve 1956. I saw it left on a shelf in a London store and felt sorry for it. I took it home as a present for my wife Brenda and named it Paddington as we were living near Paddington Station at the time. I wrote some stories about the bear, more for fun than with the idea of having them published. After ten days I found that I had a book on my hands. It wasn’t written specifically for children, but I think I put into it the kind things I liked reading about when I was young."

To celebrate the marmite-loving bear's 50th, search engine Google has adorned the logo on its homepage with a picture of Paddington carrying his trademark battered suitcase and standing at a fictional crossroads between his native Peru and London.

© 2008 Independent News and Media. Permission granted for up to 5 copies. All rights reserved.
You may forward this article or get additional permissions by typing http://license.icopyright.net/3.7463?icx_id=news/uk/this-britain/paddington-bear-celebrates-50th-birthday-959692.html?service=PrintICopyright into any web browser. Independent News and Media Limited and The Independent logos are registered trademarks of Independent News and Media Limited . The iCopyright logo is a registered trademark of iCopyright, Inc.

U.S. gasoline price marks biggest drop ever: survey By Ilaina Jonas

Back to Story - Help

Sun Oct 12, 4:10 PM ET



The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States recorded its largest drop ever as consumer demand continued to wane and oil prices slid, a prominent industry analyst said on Sunday.

The national average price for self-serve, regular unleaded gas fell 35.03 cents to $3.3079 a gallon on October 10 from $3.6582 two weeks earlier, according to the nationwide Lundberg Survey.

It was the lowest national average price since March 21, 2008. Since peaking at $4.1124 on July 11, the average cost of a gallon of gas has receded by 80.45 cents. Diesel fuel fell 21 cents to $3.95 a gallon, the first time since March that it has been below $4.00 a gallon.

"Plummeting oil prices and caving gasoline demand have combined to bring the biggest retail gasoline price cut in the history of the market," Trilby Lundberg, who compiles the survey, said in an interview. "We've been doing this 58 years. This is truly the biggest price drop."

On Friday, fears of a global recession helped drive down U.S. crude oil futures prices more than 10 percent to the lowest settlement since September 2007. U.S. crude for November delivery settled on Friday at $77.70 a barrel, down $8.89, or 10.27 percent, on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Meanwhile, travel on all U.S. roads fell 3.6 percent, or nearly 10 billion vehicle miles in July, compared with the same period last year, according to the most recent figures provided by the Transportation Department. It was the ninth straight month of declining driving activity.

HOW LOW CAN THEY GO?

Lundberg said the average gasoline price could fall below $3.00 a gallon as early as December.

"If crude oil prices don't spike, we can expect further price cutting for two reasons," Lundberg said. "Gasoline demand will continue to shrink in our weak economic condition, and retailers, who have been receiving deep buying price cuts, will be anxious to pass through any further price cuts they receive quickly. They need the sales."

According to the Lundberg survey, drivers in Honolulu paid an average of $3.91 a gallon for unleaded gas, the highest price in the nation. The Wichita, Kansas, region had the lowest average price, at $2.79 a gallon.

The Lundberg survey evaluates prices at about 5,000 gas stations.

(Reporting by Ilaina Jonas)




Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.


Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy

G7 nations pledge to fight crisis

Finance ministers from leading industrialised nations have pledged action to tackle the financial crisis after a torrid week on stock markets.

The G7 nations said they would take "decisive action and use all available tools", after a meeting in Washington.

They issued a five-point plan aimed at unfreezing the flow of credit.

Widespread fears of a global recession caused Asian, European and US markets to tumble on Friday despite rate cuts and cash injections by central banks.

As well as the Washington meeting of the G7 - which comprises the US, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Canada - the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will hold talks in the US capital over the weekend.

Leaders of the eurozone countries are also scheduled to meet in Paris on Sunday.

'Protect savers'

After Friday's G7 meeting, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the group had a clear vision of what needed doing, and was working together to stabilise the world's panic-stricken money markets.


Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Henry Paulson says "it is critical for governments to provide much needed liquidity"

"We are squarely focused on the immediate need to stabilise our financial market and recognise that investor confidence is critical to restore liquidity and enhance the stability of our financial system," he said.

The plan is intended to protect major banks and financial institutions from failure and ensure they can raise capital from public and private sources.

It includes steps to unfreeze the flow of credit and protect savers, although it did not reveal any specific measures.

Mr Paulson said the US was working closely with China and Japan - both of which hold large amounts of US treasury bonds - to resolve the crisis.

He added that the US government was also working on a scheme to buy stakes in struggling financial institutions.

"We are working to develop a standardized programme that is open to a broad array of financial institutions," he said.

While the G7 statement identifies the main areas requiring urgent attention, it is short on detail, says the BBC's Andrew Walker in Washington, adding that much will now depend on how each government takes its own plans forward.

Panic-stricken markets

Earlier on Friday, US President George W Bush said his government would continue to act to resolve the crisis.

Speaking on the White House lawn, Mr Bush said the recent market turmoil was being driven by "uncertainty and fear".

But he said the US authorities had a comprehensive strategy and a wide range of tools that they were using "aggressively" to fix the problems.


We're in this together and we'll come through this together
President Bush


Mr Bush defended last week's rescue package, saying it was big enough, but stressing it would take time to have its full impact.

But volatile market conditions continued despite moves on Wednesday by six of the main central banks to cut interest rates by 0.5% and a separate move by China's central bank to cut rates by 0.27%.

Wall Street has lost a fifth of its value in the past 10 trading days, suffering one of its biggest weekly falls since the Dow Jones index was created 112 years ago.

Markets in France, Germany and Britain plunged to end Friday between seven and nine percent lower.

Shares in Asia also closed down sharply, with Japan's main Nikkei index suffering its biggest one-day drop since the 1987 stock market crash.

As panic mounted, there were trading suspensions in several countries including Russia, Austria, Iceland, Romania, Ukraine, Brazil and Indonesia.

Amid the gloom, the British pound tumbled to a five-year low against the US dollar and oil prices plummeted to a one-year low.


What is your reaction specifically to the G7 announcement? Does the five-point plan sounds like a good idea to you? Tell us your thoughts on the latest development by filling in the form below.




Published: 2008/10/10 23:37:16 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Oil prices dive to one-year lows as stock markets slide

Back to Story - Help
1 hour, 6 minutes ago



Oil prices slumped Friday to one-year lows under 80 dollars per barrel, striking 75 dollars in London, amid a global equities meltdown that sparked fears over demand for energy, traders said.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) also warned that the threat of recession and the ongoing financial crisis would erode oil demand and set back investment in new oilfields.

Brent North Sea crude for November plunged as low as 75.00 dollars -- which was last witnessed on October 12, 2007 -- as traders responded to renewed heavy falls on world stock markets.

The contract later stood at 77.23 dollars a barrel, down 5.43 dollars from Thursday.

On Friday, New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in November, plumbed a one-year low of 78.61 dollars a barrel. It later stood at 79.94 dollars, down 6.65 dollars from Thursday.

The sharp falls came despite news that OPEC will hold an emergency meeting next month on the impact of the markets crisis -- amid speculation that the crude producers' cartel could cut output to safeguard precious oil revenues.

"The deteriorating outlook for world growth is leading to a violent correction in commodity prices," said Deutsche Bank analyst Martin Lewis in a research note to clients.

"Further deterioration in the global GDP (gross domestic product) outlook could act as a trigger for lower oil prices," he said, adding that prices could fall to about 60 dollars per barrel.

The price of crude oil has now slumped by almost 50 percent since striking record high points above 147 dollars per barrel on July 11.

Meanwhile, global stock markets suffered another calamitous sell-off on Friday, as the ongoing financial crisis showed no signs of easing up, dealers said.

"Crude prices continued to tumble as fear over the uncertain outlook for energy demand continues to be the dominating factor," said Sucden analyst Nimit Khamar.

"Markets are very much trading on fear, which has overwhelmed (the) fundamentals" of supply and demand, he added.

The 12-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced Thursday that it would hold an emergency meeting in Vienna on November 18 to discuss the effects of the international financial crisis.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday that a cut in output reportedly being discussed by producing nations would be "wrong for the world economy".

"I'm concerned when I hear that the OPEC countries are meeting, or about to meet, to discuss cutting production, in other words making the price potentially higher than it should be," he said.

It would be "wrong for the world economy ... for OPEC to cut production and therefore keep prices high," he added.

The cartel's next regular meeting was scheduled for December 17 in Oran, Algeria.

At its last ordinary meeting on September 9-10, OPEC decided to cut its production of 520,000 barrels of oil per day to sustain oil prices above 100 dollars a barrel. Prices have since plunged dramatically.

In a monthly report published on Friday, the Paris-based IEA said that falling demand "in the face of higher prices is now being perpetuated by weakening economic prospects."

The IEA, energy policy adviser to major industrialised countries, cut its forecast for demand in the 30-nation OECD area this year by about 360,000 barrels per day.

Overall world demand this year would be 86.5 million barrels per day -- a reduction of 240,000 barrels from the previous estimate, to show a rise of 0.5 percent from last year.

The world forecast for next year was cut by 440,000 barrels per day to 87.2 million barrels per day, showing an annual increase of 0.8 percent.



Copyright © 2008 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.


Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy

JOINT ACTION

The US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the central banks of Canada, Sweden and Switzerland took the unprecedented step on 8 October of co-ordinating a half-point percent cut in interest rates in an effort to ease the credit crunch.

Central banks cut interest rates

AMERICAS
MEXICO: President Felipe Calderon has proposed to spend $4.4bn on infrastructure and energy projects to boost the economy. The central bank has also begun to auction off $2.5bn in reserves to prop up the falling peso.

US: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has warned that some banks will fail despite the $700bn rescue package to shore up the financial system.

He said the financial crisis would not end soon and called for the plan's swift implementation.

The bail-out plan was voted through on 3 October by the US House of Representatives, days after it had rejected an earlier version. The Senate had approved the measure earlier and President George W Bush wasted no time signing it into law shortly afterwards.

Mr Paulson wants to use the money to buy up many of the dubious mortgage investments on Wall Street.

The hope is that eventually the Treasury can sell the distressed assets back into financial markets once the housing market has stabilised and make a profit.

The amended Congressional bill raised the government's guarantee on savings from $100,000 to $250,000 and included tax breaks.

US warns of further bank failures
Return


ASIA-PACIFIC
AUSTRALIA: Australia's central bank has cut its key interest rate from 7% to 6% - a much bigger-than-expected reduction.
The Reserve Bank of Australia said that the sharp cut was justified given the prospects for growth, even though inflation is currently above target.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the move would maintain financial stability and help Australia in "tough times ahead".

The cut, the bank's largest since May 1992, was well received by investors and the stock market rallied.

Observers had only expected the rate to be cut to 6.5%.

Australia slashes interest rates
CHINA: China has also joined the interest rate offensive, cutting rates by 0.27 percentage points.

JAPAN: Prime Minister Taro Aso has said more action will need to be taken to boost the country's flagging economy, even after the lower house approved a $18bn stimulus plan.

In a sign that economic growth has nearly ground to a halt, figures for machinery orders - a key measure of capital spending - showed they slumped 14% in August.

SOUTH KOREA, HONG KONG, TAIWAN: The central banks of South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan joined the growing number of countries to cut their interest rates.

Return


EUROPE
AUSTRIA: Austria officially announced a guarantee for all personal bank savings, retroactive to 1 October.

"Deposits in Austrian banks are safe and the state is vouching for them," said Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer.

BELGIUM: The Belgian government has agreed to guarantee bank deposits of up to 100,000 euros ($136,000) - an increase of 80,000 euros.

The country's largest banking group, Fortis, has been in difficulty since it joined two other banks to purchase the Dutch bank ABN Amro, just before the global financial crisis began.

After several failed bail-out attempts, French giant BNP Paribas agreed to buy 75% of Fortis's operations in Belgium and Luxembourg. The two governments will take a minority share of the company, while its Netherlands operation has been nationalised.

DENMARK: The Danish government and banks agreed on 5 October a crisis plan which removes the ceiling on savings deposit guarantees, to be funded partly by banks and partly by the taxpayer.

GERMANY: State-owned savings banks in Germany reported a flood of new deposits as people look for safer accounts which are insured for 100% of their value.

The country's second-biggest commercial property lender, Hypo Real Estate, was threatened with collapse last week after incurring large amounts of bad debt.

The government attempted a bail-out, only for it to collapse on 5 October after a banking consortium withdrew support for the deal. A new bail-out was arranged with guarantees of 50bn euros ($68bn; £38.7bn), 15bn euros more than the first rescue attempt.

The German government also announced what appeared to be unlimited guarantees for private savings. However, it said there would be no legislation to give extra protection to savers.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said those financiers who did "irresponsible business" would be made accountable.

Germany clinches bank rescue deal
GREECE: The Greek government said on 3 October it would fully guarantee all bank deposits of citizens, but an official added that this was a "political commitment" and the banking system was not at risk.

HUNGARY: The Hungarian government has proposed raising the guarantee on bank deposits from the current 6m to 13m forints (£40,000; 51,000 euro) following talks with the president of the Hungarian central bank.

ICELAND: The authorities have taken over the country's biggest bank, Kaupthing, the third such takeover in recent days. Iceland's financial regulator said the move was made to protect domestic deposits.

Two other largest banks, Landsbanki and Glitni, had earlier been nationalised.

Iceland's financial regulator said that Kaupthing's domestic deposits were fully guaranteed and that the bank was open for business as usual.

Iceland's parliament has passed emergency legislation giving the government wide-ranging powers to dictate banks' operations.

Prime Minister Geir Haarde said the legislation would help the island avoid national bankruptcy.

Iceland will also offer an unlimited guarantee for all savings accounts.

The Icelandic krona plummeted against the dollar after the government nationalised the country's third-largest bank, Glitnir, last week. By 3 October it had lost one-fifth of its value.

The government has agreed measures allowing the banks to sell off some foreign assets to help shore up the financial system.

Negotiations are underway with Russia for a big loan to support the country's banking system.

Moscow has offered more than $5bn in emergency loans.

Iceland takes control of top bank
IRELAND: Ireland was the first government to come to the rescue of its citizens' savings, promising on 30 September to guarantee all deposits, bonds and debts in its six main banks for two years.

The move initially prompted consternation among some European partners, but several countries have since followed suit.

Cowen defending Irish banks move
ITALY: The Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said the government was prepared to buy stakes in failing banks while waiving voting rights in an effort to guarantee stability.

"Eventual intervention will be carried out by the treasury," said Mr Berlusconi after a cabinet meeting to address the impact on Italy of the global credit crisis.

NETHERLANDS: The Dutch government has said it will make 20bn euros (£16bn; $27bn) available to protect the financial sector from "extreme shocks" during the credit crisis.

Finance Minister Wouter Bos said any "essentially healthy" bank or insurer would have access to the funds.

The Netherlands has also trebled the amount of savers' deposits it will protect to 100,000 euros (£77,700; $136,776).

RUSSIA: President Dmitry Medvedev announced 950 billion roubles ($36.4bn) of long term help for banks at an emergency Kremlin meeting on 7 October.

Russia's two leading stock exchanges were forced to close after suffering massive falls in value.

Mr Medvedev called for urgent international measures to combat the global financial crisis in a statement.

"The crisis of the international financial system demands urgent joint action. It's absolutely obvious the time has come for new decisions," he said.

Falls halt Russian market trading
SPAIN: Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on 7 October increased bank deposit guarantees to 100,000 euros ($136,000) from the current 20,000 euros.

Mr Zapatero told leading banks that the government would take immediate steps to increase deposit guarantees to boost confidence in the financial system.

Spain has been calling for a joint European initiative to tackle the world financial crisis.

UK: The government has announced a £50bn ($88bn) package to prop up eight of the largest banks and building societies. In return, the government would receive shares in those institutions.

A further £200bn would be made available by the Bank of England to provide the banking system with much-needed liquidity.

A special company will also be set up to provide up to £250bn in loan guarantees to banks and building societies.

The announcement came after UK banking shares plunged on 7 October and the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) warned that Britain was already in a recession which could see unemployment rise by 350,000 by next year.

The UK government increased its guarantee to savers from £35,000 ($62,000) to £50,000 from 7 October.

The Northern Rock bank and the mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley were nationalised earlier, and two other large groups, HBOS and Lloyds TSB, are to merge.

UK unveils bank rescue plan
Return


MIDDLE EAST
ARAB STATES:Share prices have dropped precipitously this year, amid fears of weakness in Dubai's property boom and exposure to global markets. However, economists expect growth to continue at a moderate rate as the region's oil wealth cushions the worst of the financial turmoil.

IMF takes action to stem crisis

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has activated an emergency finance mechanism to help countries hit by the financial crisis.

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Khan said the lending procedure would allow the IMF to react quickly to support countries facing funding problems.

The scheme, which was used during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, will help speed up approval of loans.

The news came as US stocks sank to a five-year low.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones ended down 7.3% - tumbling below 9,000 points for the first time since August 2003 and falling for a seventh consecutive session.

'Cusp of recession'

Mr Strauss-Kahn said the world was "on the cusp of recession", but could still recover.

The IMF has already sent a mission to Iceland, where the government has taken control of its three biggest banks.

Speaking ahead of meetings of the IMF and World Bank, Mr Strauss-Khan urged countries to act "quickly, forcefully, and co-operatively" to solve the global economic problems.


There is no domestic solution to a crisis like this one
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director


A day after seven central banks around the world cut interest rates in an effort to calm financial markets, the IMF chief said further co-ordinated action was necessary.

"All kinds of policy co-operation are to be commended," he said.

But he issued a stark warning against countries acting unilaterally to fight the crisis, referring to recent isolated moves by certain European Union member countries.

"There is no domestic solution to a crisis like this one."

Finance ministers from the G7 group of wealthy nations are also meeting in Washington this weekend.

Turbulent week

It has been yet another turbulent week on world financial markets. Thursday's key developments include:

The Dutch government is preparing 20bn euros ($27.4bn) in funding to support financial institutions in the Netherlands during credit crisis.
US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is considering capital injections into troubled US banks, a White House spokeswoman said
The UK has condemned Iceland's handling of the collapse of its banks and its failure to guarantee British savers' deposits
The oil producers cartel Opec will hold an emergency meeting in Vienna on 18 November to discuss the impact of the financial crisis on oil prices, which fell below $87 a barrel
'Human crisis'

Mr Strauss-Khan said the events of the past few weeks were beginning to take their toll on emerging economies as credit lines were cut and as trade was being hit by slowing demand in Western economies.

He said the IMF was ready to assist any country in need of funding through its emergency aid mechanism, set up in 1995 to help Mexico stabilise its financial system after a crisis of confidence that led to sharp declines in the country's currency.

The Philippines, Thailand, Korea and Indonesia also drew on the mechanism to access billions of dollars of loans after the eruption of the Asian financial crisis in 1997.

Separately, World Bank president Robert Zoellick warned against letting the "financial crisis become a human crisis".

He said a drop in exports combined with higher credit costs will trigger business failures in the poorest economies and, in some cases, "bankrupt" countries.

Acknowledging there was no "silver bullet" to fix the global financial difficulties, he said it was up to the Group of Seven industrialised countries to work together to come up with a plan to solve it.

"Countries will take different actions, customised to their circumstances, yet the actions need to target the same basic problems," he said.





Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7661956.stm

Published: 2008/10/09 21:17:39 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Dow plunges 679 for 6th triple-digit loss in a row

Back to Story - Help
By TIM PARADIS and MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writers
18 minutes ago



A runaway train of a sell-off turned the anniversary of the stock market peak into one of the worst days in Wall Street history Thursday, driving the Dow Jones industrials down a breathtaking 679 points and deepening a financial crisis that has defied all efforts to stop it.

Stocks lost more than 7 percent, $872 billion of investments evaporated, and the Dow fell to 8,579. When the average crashed through the 9,000 level for the first time in five years in the final hour of trading, sellers had only begun to hit the gas pedal.

As bad as the day was, even worse was the cumulative effect of a historic run of declines: The Dow suffered a triple-digit loss for the sixth day in a row, a first, and the average dropped for the seventh day in a row, a losing streak not seen since 2002.

"Right now the market is just panicked," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York. "Nobody wants to take on any risk. Everybody just wants to get their money and put it under the mattress."

It all took place one year to the day after the Dow closed at its record high of 14,164. Since that day, frozen credit, record foreclosures, cascading job losses and outright fear have seized the market and sapped 39 percent of its value.

Paper losses for the year add up to an staggering $8.3 trillion, according to preliminary figures measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index, which tracks 5,000 U.S.-based companies representing almost all stocks traded in America.

It was the second straight day that Wall Street was rocked by a final-hour sell-off, but this one was particularly shocking.

Most of the day was relatively calm, and the trading floor was quieter than usual because of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Wall Street awoke to news the federal government was brandishing a new weapon against the financial crisis — considering seeking an equity stake in major U.S. banks in order to stabilize them.

But that step appeared to be as ineffectual as the others Washington has rolled out in recent weeks, including a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, a coordinated interest rate cut by central banks around the world and direct lending by the Federal Reserve to private companies to provide them with short-term cash.

Acquiring a stake in the banks would be yet another startling intervention by the government in the free market, but economists said President Bush was left with little choice because of the credit markets, where tight lending has choked off the everyday cash that is the lifeblood of the economy.

"In normal times, this would be out of the question, but in the present dire situation, I think the government should be employing all the powers that it can," said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University, Channel Islands.

Wall Street has been teetering on the brink of panic for a month now, vulnerable to any bad news. Thursday's sell-off was triggered when a major credit rating agency put General Motors Corp. and its finance affiliate under review to determine whether it should be downgraded.

Stock in GM, one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones industrials, lost 31 percent of its value and closed at $4.76 — its lowest in more than half a century, since the Korean War began.

For the Dow, it has been nothing short of a free fall:

_The average is down 2,338 points, or 21 percent, in the last four weeks, since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy escalated a long-running credit crunch into a full-fledged crisis.

_The point decline Thursday was the third-worst in Dow history. The worst, 778 points, came less than two weeks ago.

_Of the last 19 trading days, there have been 11 triple-digit losses — including the unprecedented six straight. The six gains have all been triple-digits, and only one of them was enough to make up the losses of the day before.

_The Dow now stands only about 1,300 points above its lowest close of the bear market that followed 9/11. In a market as volatile as this, that gap can be closed in a couple of trading days, or less.

In fact, triple-digit declines can happen almost in an instant.

On Thursday, the Dow was above 9,200 after 1:30 p.m. and still above 9,000 after 3 p.m. The pressure to sell was so intense that the Dow kept dropping precipitously for 10 minutes after the 4 p.m. closing bell as the day's losses were tabulated.

In percentage terms, the drop in the Dow exceeded the day the markets reopened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It was not close to the 22.6-percent decline on Black Monday in 1987, the last stock market crash.

Still, it is becoming increasingly clear that Washington has ever fewer places to reach in its toolbox to stop, or perhaps even slow, the crisis. Among the options still left are buying up foreclosed properties and making direct loans to homeowners, both of them hard for free-market supporters to swallow.

Speaking in the afternoon before the market closed, President Bush told an audience on the South Lawn of the White House that the economy was going through a "very touch stretch." But, he said: "I'm confident in our economy's long-term prospects."

After the market closed, the White House said Americans should remain confident despite the market plunge, and President Bush planned to speak from the Rose Garden on Friday morning — though he was not expected to unveil any new policy proposals.

"The Treasury Department is moving quickly to use new tools to improve liquidity, which is the root cause of this problem," White House press secretary Dana Perino said. "Americans should be confident that every effort is being taken to stabilize our markets."

The broader stock indicators registered similar declines to the Dow's. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 7.6 percent to the 909 level, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 5.5 percent to 1,645.

Meanwhile, the credit markets remained stubbornly locked-up. The benchmark rate that banks charge each other for loans, known as Libor, rose to 4.75 percent from 4.52 percent a day earlier, signaling banks are still afraid to make loans because they worry they won't be paid back.

"The story is getting to be like that movie Groundhog Day," said Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co. "Everything we're seeing is historic. The problem is historic, the solutions are historic, and unfortunately, the sell-off is historic. It's not the kind of history you want to be making."

Adding to Wall Street's nervousness, a ban on short selling — a process in which investors borrow shares of stock and essentially bet the value will fall — expired.

With three and a half weeks before voters elect Bush's successor, there was also no immediate comment on the Wall Street action from the presidential candidates, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain.

Earlier in the day in Dayton, Ohio, Obama took aim at McCain's plan to have the government absorb the full cost of renegotiating mortgages for borrowers under strain from the dramatic decline of the values of their homes.

McCain rolled out the idea at the second presidential debate earlier this week, a forum in which he also told voters it was important to have a steady hand in the White House during a time of economic crisis.

___

AP Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Tom Raum in Washington and Patrick Rizzo in New York contributed to this story.



Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy

Dow plunges more than 660 to fall below 9,000

Back to Story - Help
By TIM PARADIS, AP Business Writer
5 minutes ago



Stocks plunged in the final minutes of trading Thursday, sending the Dow Jones industrials down more than 600 points to their lowest level in five years after a major credit ratings agency said it was considering cutting its rating on General Motors Corp. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell more than 6 percent.

The selloff came as Standard & Poor's Ratings Services put GM and its finance affiliate GMAC LLC under review to see if its rating should be cut. GM has been struggling with weak car sales in North America.

The action means there is a 50 percent chance that S&P will lower GM's and GMAC's ratings in the next three months.

General Motors Corp. led the Dow lower, falling about 30 percent.

The Dow fell more than 660 points, or 7.2 percent, to about

Stocks falter as fears persist

Stock markets have lost ground, erasing earlier gains as nervous investors remained concerned that the financial crisis would lead to a world recession.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones was down 0.43% despite opening higher.

European shares followed their US counterparts lower, with the FTSE 100 ending down 1.2% and France's Cac 40 down 1.55% by the close of trade.

Investors had earlier taken some comfort from Wednesday's co-ordinated rate cuts and a UK bank rescue plan.

"A lot of people believe the bottom has been reached but that doesn't mean volatility hasn't gone away," said Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC Partners.

"The underlying fear is how much hell we have in terms of recession," he added.


We've had a few false dawns over the past couple of months and it's too early to call a complete recovery, but there's hope that these measures will get some traction at some point

Richard Hunter
Hargreaves Lansdown stockbrokers


More guarantees

As the turbulent week continued, in other developments:

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is considering capital injections into troubled US banks, a White House spokeswoman said.
The oil producers cartel OPEC will hold an emergency meeting in Vienna on November 18 to discuss the impact of the financial crisis on oil prices, which fell below $87 a barrel.
The IMF head said the world economy was on the "cusp of a recession". Dominique Strauss-Kahn called on countries to work in joint action and forecast that a slow recovery would begin in the second half of 2009.
The British Bankers' Association said the interbank cost of borrowing overnight had fallen - a day after interest rate cuts and governments provided additional liquidity. However, longer-term lending rates rose to their highest this year.
Iceland suspended trading on its OMX Nordic Exchange until Monday, citing "unusual market conditions". Earlier, its largest bank, Kaupthing, became the third financial institution to be taken over by the country's government in the past week.
Ireland extended its guarantee of bank deposits to cover savings in Irish branches of five foreign-owned institutions Northern Ireland's Ulster Bank, British-owned First Active and HBOS, Belgium's IIB Bank and German-owned Postbank.
Gordon Brown wrote to G7 and EU leaders suggesting that the UK government's bank rescue plan could be a template for other nations to help unfreeze credit markets.
Dexia shares jumped 25% after France, Belgium and Luxembourg announced they would provide state guarantees for its borrowings.
UK Chancellor Alistair Darling flew to the US to discuss the co-ordinated cutting of interest rates by six central banks.
After trading on Russian stock markets had been suspended following sharp share falls earlier this week, they were again halted - this time after stocks climbed too high after trade resumed.
'False dawns'

Seven central banks on Wednesday cut interest rates in an effort to steady the faltering global economy.

It came after the UK government's announcement of a package of measures aimed at rescuing the banking system.

This package makes available £400bn ($692bn) of fresh money.

There was "an air of cautious optimism" that such measures would have some impact on the financial crisis, said Richard Hunter, head of UK equities at Hargreaves Lansdown stockbrokers.

"Banking shares have been the main beneficiaries of the UK's rescue plan, and the interest rate cuts," he added.

"We've had a few false dawns over the past couple of months and it's too early to call a complete recovery, but there's hope that these measures will get some traction at some point."

Asian stock markets rose, though Japanese shares closed lower.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7660568.stm

Published: 2008/10/09 16:22:47 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Iceland suspends stock trading, creates new bank

Back to Story - Help
By JANE WARDELL, AP Business Writer
27 minutes ago



Iceland suspended trading on its stock exchange for two days and took control of the country's largest bank — the third to be placed under its protective umbrella — on Thursday as it grappled with a banking crisis that is threatening to engulf the entire country.

The Nordic nation's government also used sweeping new emergency powers to create a new bank that will take over the bulk of the domestic operations of another one of its collapsed banks.

The country is struggling to get a grip on the collapse of its top-heavy banking system, a situation that Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde has warned is putting Iceland at risk of "national bankruptcy."

Government officials announced that President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson was hospitalized Monday and Tuesday after undergoing coronary angioplasty and coronary dilation. Grimsson has been advised not to return to work for a a few days.

A stock market boom in the mid-1990s supported the rapid growth of Iceland's banking sector, which came to dwarf the rest of the economy and provided financing for deals that ranged across Europe and conquered swaths of the British economy, from fashion retailers to top soccer teams..

The strategy gave Iceland one of the world's highest per-capita incomes, but when liquidity markets dried up around the world, the banks struggled to refinance those heavy debts.

Now Icelanders are watching helplessly as their economy implodes, causing ripples throughout Europe, where tens of thousands of people have accounts with subsidiaries of the Icelandic banks..

The OMX Nordic Exchange Iceland said that equity trading would remain halted until Monday because of "unusual market conditions."

The government's decision to take control of Kaupthing, the country's leading bank, which has assets and debts across the continent, means that the Financial Services Authority now has control of all three of the country's major banks. The other two, Landsbanki and Glitnir, are in receivership.

The authority said the action was necessary to ensure the "continued orderly operation of domestic banking and the safety of domestic deposits."

It also used emergency powers, rushed in by parliament earlier this week, to hive off most of the domestic assets of Landsbanki into a separate entity to be called "New Landsbanki" that is fully owned by the government.

"The decision means that the new bank takes over all the bank's deposits in Iceland, and also the bulk of the banks assets that relate to its Icelandic operations, such as loans and other claims," it said in a statement.

"The decision ensures continued banking operations for Icelandic families and businesses," it added.

In an attempt to curb any panic, the regulator stressed that both Kaupthing and Landsbanki were open for business as usual on Thursday and that all domestic deposits of the bank were guaranteed under Icelandic law. However, the move leaves the international operations of Landsbanki, which have already caused a diplomatic spat with Britain, open to question.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has threatened to sue Iceland to recover the lost deposits of some 300,000 Britons who hold accounts with IceSave, the online arm of Landsbanki.

With local governments also holding accounts worth tens of millions of pounds (dollars) in Icelandic banks, the British government has also used powers under terrorism laws to freeze Landsbanki's assets until the status of the deposits is resolved.

Savings bank ING Direct UK has agreed to buy more than 3 billion pounds (US$5.3 billion) of deposits held by around 180,000 British savers with Kaupthing Edge and Heritable Bank, which is owned by Landsbanki.

Haarde said on Wednesday that discussions between the two countries had begun between the two countries to find a "mutually satisfactory solution."

Iceland's three major banks are being blamed for the financial catastrophe facing the country. A stock market boom in the mid-1990s supported the rapid growth of the country's banking sector, which now dwarfs the rest of the economy with assets at nine times annual gross domestic product of US$19 billion.

The newly wealthy banking sector provided financing for a number of business deals across Europe. Kaupthing alone racked up debts of more than US$5.25 billion in five years to help fund British deals.

When liquidity markets dried up around the world, they struggled to refinance those heavy debts.

Haarde said on Wednesday that the banking sector had "become too big" as he acknowledged that it will take the tiny Nordic nation of just 320,000 people several years to recover from the current crisis.

Glitnir, the country's third largest bank, said on Thursday that it had received liquidity support from the Norwegian Banks' Guarantee Fund of 5 billion Norwegian crowns (US$820,000) for its Norwegian unit. It added that the sale of the unit had begun.

Glitnir's move into receivership on Wednesday was a sign that troubles at the bank were larger than the government thought when it announced less than two weeks ago that it would nationalize the bank — the switch into receivership gives Glitnir temporary protection from its debt obligations.

In urgent moves to downsize the overgrown banking sector, the Financial Services Authority immediately began to restructure the bank, saying it would sell its Finnish and Swedish businesses.

Similarly, Iceland's central bank had already loaned euro500 million (US$680 million) to Kaupthing earlier this week while the Swedish central bank had provided a loan of up to 5 billion crowns ($702 million).

Those measures proved not to be enough in a rapidly deteriorating situation.



Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy

Comeback

Sarah Palin changed her image overnight.
by Fred Barnes
10/03/2008 1:45:00 AM



The moment when Sarah Palin knew she was winning last night's debate with her vice presidential opponent Joe Biden came after the subject had turned to nuclear weapons. Palin had talked about nukes as a deterrent and said it was important to keep them out of the hands of dictators who are enemies of America. Then she turned to moderator Gwen Ifill and asked, "Can we talk about Afghanistan real quick?"

Afghanistan? The impression Palin had left in television interviews with ABC's Charles Gibson and CBS's Katie Couric was that she was ill-equipped to discuss issues like that. She just didn't know enough to talk about foreign policy and other weighty matters with even a minimal level of comfort. And this meant she simply wasn't up to being vice president should John McCain win the presidency.

But by that point in the debate--two-thirds the way through--Palin was brimming with self-confidence. She knew she could handle any issue likely to be thrown at her by Ifill. She knew Biden would not outmatch her. So she purposely tackled an issue on which he was expected to have an advantage.

He didn't. She insisted the "surge principles" that had proved effective in Iraq would work in Afghanistan. Biden claimed the commanding general in Afghanistan disagreed. Then Palin said, no, the general didn't disagree, and she spelled out how "the counterinsurgency strategy" favored by McCain (and her) would work.

If that episode didn't demoralize Biden, a senator from Delaware for 35 years, it should have. For it showed she had passed the biggest test any vice presidential candidate faces--a test the media was ready to declare she'd failed. Was she capable of being vice president? Based on her debate performance, the answer was yes.

Not that she came close to matching Biden's experience or extensive knowledge of issues, especially foreign policy issues. But she was conversant with every issue, domestic and foreign, that came up in the 90-minute debate and talked with seeming confidence about them.

She may have passed two other tests as well. Did she once more energize the conservative base of the Republican party as she had when McCain picked her a month ago? Probably. And was her performance strong enough to change the direction of a campaign that has seen Barack Obama widening a lead over McCain in recent weeks? Maybe.

For sure, she did one remarkable thing aside from handling Biden with ease. She undid the negative impression that had been created by her avoidance of most of the media and hardened when the two TV interviews went poorly. Her image was that of someone unqualified to be vice president and uninformed on major issues.

Changing an image overnight is difficult. Ronald Reagan managed it when he debated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and blew away the widespread notion that he was a warmonger. But I can't think of other examples of this, at least in presidential or veep debates.

Two more things. Palin appeared to be in a good mood during the debate, just as she was when delivering her acceptance speech at the Republican convention four weeks ago. That made her more appealing than Biden, who came off, at times anyway, as less cheerful than he normally is.

And Palin wrote her own closing statement, or so I was told. It included what seemed like an invitation to Biden to have more debates. "I would like more opportunity for this," she said. I suspect Biden wouldn't.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.



© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Palin the Populist

See a sample reprint in PDF format. Order a reprint of this article now DECLARATIONS OCTOBER 3, 2008
Joe Biden was no match for "Joe Six-Pack."By PEGGY NOONAN
Article
more in Opinion »Email Printer Friendly Share:
Yahoo Buzz
MySpace
Digg
Text Size
She killed. She had him at "Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?" She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy.

APThe whole debate was about Sarah Palin. She is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled—they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold, but her magnetism did. At one point she literally winked at the nation.
As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there. This was classic "talk over the heads of the media straight to the people," and it is a long time since I've seen it done so well, though so transparently. There were moments when she seemed to be doing an infomercial pitch for charm in politics. But it was an effective infomercial.
Joe Biden seems to have walked in thinking that she was an idiot and that he only had to patiently wait for this fact to reveal itself. This was a miscalculation. He showed great forbearance. Too much forbearance. She said of his intentions on Iraq, "Your plan is a white flag of surrender." This deserved an indignant response, or at least a small bop on the head, from Mr. Biden, who has been for five years righter on Iraq than the Republican administration. He was instead mild.
The heart of her message was a complete populist pitch. "Joe Six-Pack" and "soccer moms" should unite to fight the tormentors who forced mortgages on us. She spoke of "Main Streeters like me." A question is at what point shiny, happy populism becomes cheerful manipulation.
Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We've got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom. Watch her crowds this weekend. She's about to get jumpers, the old political name for people who are so excited to see you they start to jump.
Her triumph comes at an interesting time. The failure of the first bailout bill was an epic repudiation of the Washington leadership class by the American people. Two weeks ago the president of the United States, the speaker of the House, the secretary of the Treasury and the leadership of both parties in Congress came forward and announced that the economy was in crisis and a federal bill to solve it urgently needed. The powers were in agreement, the stars aligned, it was going to happen.
And then the phones began to ring, from one end of Capitol Hill to the other. And the message in those calls was, essentially: We don't trust you to fix the problem, we suspect you may have caused it. Go away.
It was an epic snub, aimed at both parties. And the bill tanked.
We have simply, as a nation, never had a moment like this, in which the American people voted such a stunning no-confidence in America's leaders in a time of real and present danger. The fate of the second bill is unclear as I write, but the fact that it has morphed from three pages to roughly 450, and is festooned with favors, will do nothing to allay public suspicions about the trustworthiness of Congress. This, as a background, could not have helped Mr. Biden.
We have never seen an economic meltdown like this? We've never seen a presidential meltdown like this. George W. Bush's weakness is not all lame-duckship. In the last year of his presidency Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow and helped change the world. In the penultimate year of his presidency, Bill Clinton sent U.S. troops, successfully, into Kosovo.
After the first bailout failed, Mr. Bush spoke like a man who was a mere commentator, not the leader in a crisis.
We witness here a great political lesson. When you are president, it matters—it really matters—that a majority of the people support and respect you. When you squander that affection, you lose more than mere popularity. You lose the ability to lead when your country is in crisis. This is a terrible loss, and a dangerous one, for the whole world is watching.
Young aides to Reagan used to grouse, late in his second term, that he had high popularity levels, that popularity was capital, and that he should spend it more freely on potential breakthroughs of this kind or that. But Reagan and the men around him were wiser. They spent when they had to and were otherwise prudent. (Is there a larger lesson here?) They were not daring when they didn't have to be. They knew presidential popularity is a jewel to be protected, and to be burnished when possible, because without it you can do nothing. Without the support and trust of the people you cannot move, cannot command. You are left, like Mr. Bush, talking to an empty room.
We saw this week, too, a turn in the McCain campaign's response to criticisms of Mrs. Palin. I find obnoxious the political game in which if you expressed doubts about the vice presidential nominee, or criticized her, you were treated as if you were knocking the real America—small towns, sound values. "It's time that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency," Mrs. Palin told talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. This left me trying to imagine Abe Lincoln saying he represents "backwoods types," or FDR announcing that the fading New York aristocracy deserves another moment in the sun. I'm not sure the McCain campaign is aware of it—it's possible they are—but this is subtly divisive. As for the dismissal of conservative critics of Mrs. Palin as "Georgetown cocktail party types" (that was Mr. McCain), well, my goodness. That is the authentic sound of the aggression, and phony populism, of the Bush White House. Good move. That ended well.
We must take happiness where we can. Tina Fey's Sarah Palin has become, in that old phrase, a national sensation, and Ms. Fey is becoming, with her show "30 Rock," and now the Palin impression, one of the great comic figures of her generation. Her work with Amy Poehler (as Katie Couric) in last weekend's spoof on "Saturday Night Live" was so astoundingly good—the hand gestures, the vocal tone and spirit—that it captured some of the actual heart of the Palin story. Ms. Poehler as Couric: "Mrs. Palin, are you aware that when cornered you become increasingly adorable?" Ms. Fey as Palin mugs, adorably.
To spoof someone well takes talent, but to utterly nail a political figure while not brutalizing him takes a real gift, and amounts almost to a public service. After all, to capture someone is a kind of tribute: it concedes he is real, vivid, worthy of note. We are not as a nation manufacturing trust all that well, or competence, or leadership. But some things we do well, and one is comedy. Ms. Fey plays characters who are sour, stressed and who, on "30 Rock," live in a world that is cynical, provisional and shallow. But to observe life so closely takes a kind of love.
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

www.djreprints.com
More In Opinion Email Printer Friendly Order Reprints Share: Yahoo! Buzz
MySpace
Digg

Sponsored by

Back To Back To MSN Money HomepageMSN Money Investing
Email Newsletters and Alerts
The latest news and analysis delivered to your in-box. Check the boxes below to sign up.

WSJ.com Email Features On the Editorial Page Best of the Web Today More Information on WSJ FeaturesAlso send me information about more WSJ Features
The email address is already associated with another account. Please enter a different email address:
Newsletter Signup
Enter Your Email
Sign UpSIGN UP
Thank you !
You will receive in your inbox

Terms and Conditions Go to Email Center null
Email Newsletters and Alerts
The latest news and analysis delivered to your in-box. Check the boxes below to sign up.

WSJ.com Email Features On the Editorial Page Best of the Web Today Submit
The email address null is already associated with another account. Please enter a different email address:

Enter Your Email
Sign UpSIGN UP
New! To sign up for Keyword or Symbol Alerts click here. To view or change all of your email settings, visit the Email Setup Center. Thank you !
You will receive in your inbox.

Manage Email preferences
Recent ColumnsPalin the Populist Party of One Why It's Getting Mean
Video previous next What They Said About Fan and Fred
3:30 Who Took the Risk Out?
3:30 What Will Congress Do Next?
3:30 More in OpinionThe Price of 12 Votes How Government Stoked the Mania What Leadership Looks Like Free Sarah Palin Iran's Nuclear Waltz Most PopularRead
Emailed
Video
Commented
1.Fish Catch On in Prison as Currency 2.What They Said About Fan and Fred 3.Senate Vote Gives Bailout New Life 4.Latest Immigration Wave: Retreat 5.Goldman, Morgan Rewrite Playbooks Subscriber Content
Read Preview
1.What They Said About Fan and Fred 2.Turning a Mac Into a PC Just Got Better 3.Fish Catch On in Prison as Currency 4.Colleges Scramble as Fund Is Frozen Subscriber Content
Read Preview
5.Welcome to 'Moral Hazard' 1.Nokia's Answer to the iPhone2.VP Debate A Study In Contrasts3.Biden, Palin Clash On Mortgage Mess4.VP Debate: Palin, Biden Tussle Over Rescue Plan5.Mossberg Tests VMware Fusion for Mac 1. Senate Vote Gives Bailout Plan New Life
152 comments 2. Palin Proved to Be Formidable Foe in Alaska Debates
62 comments 3. Rescue Plan's Prospects Brighten
41 comments 4. Latest Immigration Wave: Retreat
30 comments 5. Don't Let Bankers Run the Asylum
28 comments Most Read Articles Feed
Most Emailed Feed
Most Popular Video Feed
Most Commented Feed


Journal Communityclose window
Hello
Your question to the Journal Community Your comments on articles will show your real name and not a username.Why?

Why use your real name? The Journal Community encourages thoughtful dialogue and meaningful connections between real people. We require the use of your full name to authenticate your identity. The quality of conversations can deteriorate when real identities are not provided.

Please enter your first and last name
First name:
Last name:

Create a Journal Community profile to avoid this message in the future. (As a member you agree to use your real name when participating in the Journal Community)
Post
Cancel
Privacy Policy Community Rules
Notice:
Your participation access with Journal Community has been disabled due to violation of Journal Community Guidelines.

The Palin Rebound

TimesPeople



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 3, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

By DAVID BROOKS
There are some moments when members of a political movement come together as one, sharing the same thoughts, feeling the same emotions, breathing the same shallow breaths. One of those occasions occurred Thursday night when Republicans around the country crouched nervously behind their sofas, glimpsed out tentatively at their flat screens and gripped their beverages tightly as Sarah Palin walked onto the debate stage at Washington University in St. Louis.

There she was, resplendent in black, striding out like a power-walker, and greeting Joe Biden like an assertive salesman, first-naming him right off the bat.

Just as the midcentury psychologist Abraham Maslow predicted, Republicans watching the debate had a hierarchy of needs. First, they had a need for survival. Was this woman capable of completing an extemporaneous paragraph — a collection of sentences with subjects, verbs, objects and, if possible, an actual meaning?

By the end of her opening answers, it was clear she would meet the test. She spoke with that calm, measured poise that marked her convention speech, not the panicked meanderings of her subsequent interviews.

When nervous, Palin has a tendency to over-enunciate her words like a graduate of the George W. Bush School of Oratory, but Thursday night she spoke like a normal person. It took her about 15 seconds to define her persona — the straight-talking mom from regular America — and it was immediately clear that the night would be filled with tales of soccer moms, hockey moms, Joe Sixpacks, main-streeters, “you betchas” and “darn rights.” Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.

With a bemused smile and a never-ending flow of words, she laid out her place on the ticket — as the fearless neighbor for the heartland bemused by the idiocies of Washington. Her perpetual smile served as foil to Biden’s senatorial seriousness.

Where was this woman was during her interview with Katie Couric?

Their primal need for political survival having been satisfied, her supporters then looked for her to shift the momentum. And here we come to the interesting cultural question posed by her performance. The presidency and the vice presidency once was the preserve of white men in suits. As the historian Ellen Fitzpatrick pointed out on PBS Thursday night, if, in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro had spoken in the relentlessly folksy tones that Palin used, she would have been hounded out of politics as fundamentally unserious.

But that was before casual Fridays, boxers or briefs and T-shirt-clad Silicon Valley executives. Today, Palin can hit those colloquial notes again and again, and it is not automatically disqualifying.

On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it. From her first “Nice to meet you. May I call you Joe?” she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington. She ran not only against Washington, but the whole East Coast, just to be safe.

To many ears, her accent, her colloquialisms and her constant invocations of the accoutrements of everyday life will seem cloying. But in the casual parts of the country, I suspect, it went down fine. In any case, that’s who Palin is.

On matters of substance, her main accomplishment was to completely sever ties to the Bush administration. She treated Bush as some historical curiosity from the distant past. Beyond that, Palin broke no new ground, though she toured the landscape of McCain policy positions with surprising fluency. Like the last debate, this one was surprisingly wonky — a lifetime subscription to Congressional Quarterly. Palin could not match Biden when it came to policy detail, but she never obviously floundered.

She was surprisingly forceful on the subject of Iran (pronouncing Ahmadinejad better than her running mate) though she stepped over the line in claiming that Democrats sought to raise the “the white flag of surrender.”

Biden, for his part, was smart, fluid and relentless. He did not hit the change theme hard enough. He did not praise Barack Obama enough. But he was engaging, serious and provided a moving and revealing moment toward the end, when he invoked the tragedy that befell his own family and revealed the passion that has driven him all his life.

Still, this debate was about Sarah Palin. She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies. She established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative.

By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.



Home
World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Automobiles Back to Top
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map