The Daily Novel

(I was going to write, ‘Thank God for the New York Times’. But I paused, shouldn’t it be, ‘Thank Jehovad’, because been raised to its outstanding reputation for detailed and impartial reports of matters vital to the world as well as the US, by a devoted and talented Jewish family. But really we should ‘Thank America’, because the NYT, which was my daily newspaper when I lived in New York, is most definitely a product of the American dream, the American constitution and the American reality.

Its detailed coverage enables democracy to have a chance of working. Voters cannot make an informed decision unless they know what is going on, including most importantly Governments, big business and other powerful interest groups, don’t want them to know. It is the kind of newspaper that makes you entirely happy to be a journalist. Shabby raincoat, but not shabby values.

Its standards slipped badly two or three years ago, but the mistakes were recognised and publicly acknowledged. But when the NYT published the results of its long investigation into McCain’s friendship with the blonde lobbyist, it once again became the Aunt Sally for most of the rest of the media. Most attacked it because they thought the story was not worth printing unless the NYT had been able to prove that McCain had slipped between the sheets with his beloved friend. So they did not ponder about what the NYT had demonstrated very clearly. That McCain had intervened to help the causes which his beloved friend espoused.

That is far more important in terms of the government of the country than what McCain does in bed. And my testimony from many conversations with American men of McCain’s age while they were peeing in the next cubicle to me, is that if McCain was having a fling with the blonde lobbyist, that did not make his wife special. Because most American men of his generation, and in his relatively powerful positions, were doing exactly the same thing.

But some of the media attacked the NYT for taking so long to run the story, dithering like an old woman. But when I read the full details, in the New York Times, and in the other media, which for a brief time wrote thousands of words about it, my reaction was different from the majority.

I think it is entirelyi creditable that there was a prolonged discussion within the newspaper as to whether to run the story. Responsible journalists know that what they write can wreck the lives of individuals, and that what they write can sometimes affect who wins an election and who wins a war. Disagreement and argument within a newspaper office is healthy. The young sleuths following the scent on the trail may be unaware of some of the things the editors know from their experience.

So it is entirely to the credit of the NYT that they did not rush to print. And it is entirely to their credit, that they confessed when they printed it, that they simply did not know whether McCain had slept with his blonde lobbyist friend. But of course their story did not need that. Because McCain had favoured his friend, who happened to be blonde, female and young. But every day people in positions of power favour their friends, whether they be lovers, business associates or just ‘buddies’.

In a democracy what is important is that these relationships, lover, buddy, old school friend or business associate, are known about. The lover or business associate sometimes is the best person to get the contract.

That is not entirely reprehensible. Because if you know someone well, you know a lot about their strengths and weaknesses. It is only a problem when the powerful person is so emersed with people who think like him, or her, that he, or she, is blinkered about their weaknesses.

So I thank America for the New York Times. Because the New York Times is trying to do what the founding fathers of the American constitution were trying to do, escablish a better world, where they could live their own lives, rather than have their religion dictated by the King, who in those days was George 111, who today is thougt by most of  the academic psychologists to have been clinically mad.

But the liberated American men I peed next to in the lavatories were just like the Rugby club at my own metropolitan university, Birmingham. Like them they were eager to tell me, in our brief  60 second ‘interviews’, that, altthough they were happily married men with kids, they still made it in the sack with the young and gorgeous.

Today, the story in the US is the Presidential election and probable threat of the most serious recession since the 1930s. In the Brittish tabloids and the heavies, thousands of words are devoted to the McCanns, who have been suffering the most appalling human tragedy.

Their daughter has disappeared. No-one knows where she has gone. Maybe the McCain’s were wrong, to think that she was safe, in the holiday they had booked liked many others with a company, which was caring of people’s children. Maybe they were wrong to have gone off to dinner with their friends, even though they were checking on their daughter.

Yesterday, they won £550,000 in the courts because the Express newspapers, had implied that they may even have murdered their own daughter. The Express group has coughed up the money. They have printed their apology. And all the rival newspapers have given masses of coverage to this story.

But of course all the other newspapers also printed the stories that the McCanns MAY be telling lies to cover up the fact they had murdereded their daughter, or killed her accidentally. There is no shred of evidence that this happened. But this possibility was present in all the newspaper coverage, including the ‘heavies’. Because the heavies reported all the wildest accusations of the tabloids. And the other tabloids, were a lot more skilful than the Express in peddling copy which might lose it millions in libel actions.

So the current position is that one newspaper group in the UK, the Express group, has paid up and admitted its guilt in this disgraceful saga sub-standard journalism. But all the rest of them have fuelled the flames, not just the Express, which is owned by Richard Desmond, the man many of the heavies love to describe as ‘ the pornographer’ True. He has made his fortune from perfectly legal, but not very uplifting, porn magazines. But is he therefore better than Rupert Murdoch, who made a huge amount of money by turning what was originally the only serious popular left wing newspaper in Britain, the Daily Herald, into the tabloid Sun, which made millions by publishing every day on Page Three, a picture of a young woman with naked breasts.

(That is not meant to imply that Murdoch is ‘only’ a merchandiser like Desmond of soft porn. He is also a serious newspaperman who endeavours to cover the real news as well. And, a born again Christian, who does not want a world is which young men are lusting after the unattainable favoured dimensions, portrayed on Page Three.’)

But reading the New York Times, after a day spent reading the British press, the message is quite clear. The New York Times is a newspaper of serious journalism. And the British press, the heavies as much as the tabloids, and the television and radio progcrammes as well, are skewed by the agenda set by the tabloids. Porn, rape, crime, etc. Coverage of all the human beings caught up in this daily saga.

But in order to make up its mind as to who governs the country, the readers want to know about what potential governments are going to do about this. And other ratther more complicated matters, like the behaviour of the banks, which has pushed us into what is probably the worst global recession since the 1930s.

The people who will really suffer from this, are the readers of The Sun and the Express papers, who have been seduced into borrowing more than they can afford.

Thank America for the New York Times, which gives detailed coverage to the real issues.

Thank America for the New York Times, which yesterday wrote an editoral on Obama’ s speech on race. I did not read this until after I had written my own blog about the speech. But many of the conclusions they come to are similar to mine.

But they headlined on something that I had not mentioned. Profile in Courage. As soon as I saw it, I realised that it was right. Obama, though he is sometimes portrayed as being ‘inexperienced’ knows that race is an explosive issue. He knows the risks he is taking by talking straightforwardly about being a black in today’s America. And being a ‘loser’ in today’s America, which is the thing that hits the white working class, who cannot afford plasma TV or Bill Gates rather expensive software. Or even tickets for the baseball game.

After eight years of Geogre W Bush, who has tried to impose the vision of a minority of Americans on the majority, and has attempted to impose that minority vision on other countries as well, I would be delighted if Obama wins.

But I would not be unduly worried if Hillary Clinton wins. Because she has a real concern for the poor of America, who don’t vote, although, unlike the original British feminists, do have the right to vote. They don’t chain seven card studapostar dinero paginas internettrucos ganar ruletajuegos apuestas paginas internetsistemas ruletasapuesta dinero portales internetcasino du libanjugar apostar portalruleta sistemas juegolos mejores casinos onlineweb baccaratruleta europea portal internetcasino virtual gratiscasinos netjugar baccarat en lineadescargar juegos de casino gratisayuntamiento madrid casinojuegos flash casinojuego interactivo internetapuesta dinero onlinejugar cartastrucos para casino empirecasino villajoyosajack black en linea gratisjuego tragaperrascasino portales internetruleta internetcasino on net downloadruleta pagina webjugar interactivo portalcasino virtual portal websistemas ganar ruletaganar dinero real portalescomo ganar en la ruletaruleta portal webjugar gratisganar dinero real portales webcasino internacional paginas internetcasino virtual paginas webcasinos internacionales paginas internetmaquinas tragaperras portalvideo poker paginas webapuesta portales internetjuego gratis la ruletaplay free baccaratjuego instantaneo portal internetcasino juegosroulette paginas webjuegos seguros paginas internetjugar cartas linea themselves to the railings because they feel whatever they do is not going to make much difference.

Obama’s courage is evidenced by the fact that he not only did not repudiate his friend and mentor, Jerimiah Wright, he defended him, when the media was after his head. In my terms he showed himself as a person of integrity. But he took the stand in full awareress that Wright is an eary target for the Clinton supporters and an even easier target for the Republicans.

At this stage of the match, my preference is for Obama as the next President, but I would be quite happy with Hillary Clinton, who has spent years trying to get better health care for poor Americans. On top of all her other relevant experience.

And I would not be unhappy with John McCain. As the New York Times has demonstrated he is not quite as whiter than white as his supporters would have us believe. But he is quite clearly a man of integrity. George W, I have always thought, was led in to the Iraq war, by his more experienced and assertive associates, including the vice President, Dick Cheney, who has has just surfaced, after a bout of ill health, to try and show that the Iraq war, was a triumph not a disasster.

McCain will not be as gung ho as Cheney, because he knows, as Cheney does not, the reality of war. He will not lightly order that the US use its huge stockile of missiles to kill those who oppose them, and a bunch of ordinary civilians who are standing next to the people the US wants to kill.

Because McCain, like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, believe in the American dream.

That is possible to establish a world which is not as bad as that dictated by the now ‘proven’ mad English King, George 111.

These are the kind of things the New York Times tells its readers about. Meanwhile the British press follows the tabloid agenda.

Who is Prince William going to marry? Who are the girl friends of his younger brother, Harry? As if it matters. Because the British Prime Minister listens to the Queen, because of British courtesy. But in deciding policy the imperatives for current British Prime Ministers, are Presidents of the US and the bosses of multi-national companies.

The reality is that we no longer rule the world. And although the Queen is still the religious boss, the adherents of her church are a tiny minority. Outnumbered by all those Roman Catholics, the old Irish, but many incomers from all parts of Europe. And the Muslims, refugees from Uganda, and more recent typrannies. And the slowly growing multitude who think that God was invented by man, and that maybe he was not as all powerful as his supporters would like to think.

Already there is a comment on the ‘Obama’s Wright is wrong’ blog I wrote earlier today. Lexi thinks that he has torn the scab off the wound in America’s race history by treating his old Pastor Jeriah Wright as a mistaken human being rather than the devil incarnate.

My own view could not be more different. When I read the full transcript of his speech on the New York Times website, it is clear that he has matured hugely in the last few weeks. He speaks as a statesman, not a politician who will stop at nothing to win the race. He uses the speech, not to fire rockets at his opponents, but to explain, why, however, much he dislikes the infamatory remarks of his pastor, he is still grateful to him for the encouragement he got from caring side of Wright’s ministry.  He also refuses to join the outcry against Geraldine Ferraro; like me, he does not think she is a racist. As I said in my earler blog, she is someone who got carried away in the heat of the battle, so that her commitment to advancing the cause of women in public life temporarily clouded her judgment.

Obama seeks to understand how Wright came to his views. And he explains how his own life trajectory has led him to different opinions. Obama does not go in for public relations. He makes no secret of the fact that he believes racism is still present today, quoting William Faulkner.

 “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

For those who don’t have time to read the transcript, I reprint a few paragraphs which reveal a lot about how the mind of the man who would be President works.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners ……I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” …..The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well. …..At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” …. 

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America……As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; 

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith…He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; ….who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother….We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.  

(Wright’s mistake was) to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them. But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.

That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations  The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

(Obama talked about other issues as well as race) 

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.  

It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children. But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.  

The final paragraph demonstrates that Obama is imperfect. Not clear what it means but I think it was an attempt to link back to his start which was a lengthy bit about the writing of the American constitution.

But I hope I have quoted enough here to demonstrate why I think Obama’s eloquence is not just tub-thumping.

Richard Desmond, the owner of the four Express newspapers paid a heavy price yesterday for the coverage of McCann child’s disappearance. According to the Daily Mail that price was £550,000. Peanuts perhaps compared with the £24 million Heather Mills has just squeezed from Paul McCartney, following the break-up of their unhappy marriage. But a big dent in the coppers of the man who rival newspapers like to call the pornographer. He has found making money from newspapers rather more difficult than cashing in from porn mags.

The news has been duly reported by the Fleet Street finest. Picture at the top is from The Daily Telgraph. The news was broken by The Guardian’s media columnist, Roy Greenslade, who was also touring the radio and television studio last night to let the nation know just how much Express standards have fallen since it was owned by that old Crusader, Lord Beaverbrook.

To be fair to Greenslade is his colunm in The Guardian, he makes the important point was while the Express was the worst offender, particularly with its headlines, all of Fleet Street, broadsheets and tabloids, printed thousand of words, containing many allegations about the McCann’s parenting, most of it from elements in the local police and anyone the journalists could find in the neighbourhood. Most of it was unstantiated gossip.

Much of this was magnified still further by the television and radio coverage. And today’s newspapers, alongside their reports of the shaming of the Express, are also telling us about ‘novel’ written by the Portugues policeman, which suggests the child was killed and dumped in the ocean.

The blanket coverage over many months has left ordinary readers, listeners and viewers, not knowing what to believe. But the essential fact is that no one has found any hard facts to indicate were gulity even of bad parenting, let alone guilty of murdering their child.

The fact that the Portugese police questioned the McCann’s as potential suspects, gave all the newspapers something ‘hard’ to report. What the police say is ‘news’. You can fault the police on their clumsy handling of the press relations, but any poliice force has to treat family members as suspects, because of the overwhelming evidence that murders, rapes, kidnappings, etc, are more often done by members of the family or friends, rather than by strangers.

So also this morning the newspapers are reporting that the British police have now charged a family member with the kidnapping of Shannon Matthews. But not before all the shortcomings of Shannon’s mother and her numerous lovers have been  trumpeted to the world.

Matters like this should not be left to the lawyers, which gives more help to the rich like McCartney and Mills, and the relatively well off, like the McCanns. But leaves poor and dysfunctional families like the Matthews as helpless victims under the media spotlight.

The problem is how to get changes while preserving the freedom of the press. The Press Complaints Commission and its various predessors has proved a toothless tiger. Self regulation by the editors and the proprietors has not worked. Whatever their good intentions, the decision making is mostly dominated by the need to make money, when circulations are falling and the economy is moving into recession.

And there is no doubt that stories like this sell newspapers.

It is not a problem that can be solved quickly. And all media commentoros, including myself, are only too aware of the long history of earlier enquiries, including the several Royal Commissions and the enquiry into the Yorkshire Ripper. But the fact that they have not worked does not mean that there is no satisfactory solution. And any enquiry should include the role of the internet. Where, according to a comment one of my recent blogs, you can get away with calling for the murder of Tony Blair.

Obama is showing that he can stick to the essence of the Christian faith better than his long-time pastor, Jerimiah Wright, who wanted to God Damn America soon after 9/11. In the last fow days a series of old videos of Wright’s inflamator sermons have appeared as the US Presidential campaign hots up. Obama removed him as a religious adviser. But he made a speech restating his own religious position. He forgave the pastor, who married him, but concentrated his fire on the need to tackle racial prejudice.

Whether his friendship with Wright will do any harm, I doubt. Sally Quinn, in her God Slot column for the Washington Post, reminds readers of some of the prominent pastors to Presidents in the past. Jesse Jackson, who came around to the White House in the Monica Lewinsky days, and gove spitual guidance to the First Lady, the First Gentleman and little Chelsea. In his public life Jackson was sometimes equally inflammatory, making anti-semitic slurs, such as calling New York City Hymietown. In his private life he fathered a child by a staffer. Quinn also reminds us that Billy Graham, spiritual advisher to several US Presidents in including Clinton and Bush was caught on tape exchanging anti-semitic comments with Richard Nixon, including one choice complaint that reporting had deteriorated now more Jews had become journailsts. (One of them was, of course, Carl Berstein, one half of the Post duo who had those talks with Deep Throat in the car park.)

The exposure of Wright’s fire-raising sermons comes days after Geraldine Ferraro made an even more inflammatory remark suggesting Americans were voting for Obama, just because he was black. Her implication was that it was more difficult for a woman to become President than a black. The best analysis of this continuing debate I have seen is in an article by The Guardian’s Gary Younge the day before yesterday. He exposes the sloppy thinking which brackets sexual identity and racial identity together.

His conclusion below:

Pitting underrepresented groups against each other in this way simply undermines any potential for building the kind of progressive coalitions necessary to eradicate the very obstacles to the emergence of more black and female candidates. If this is what the Democrats do to each other, just imagine what fun the Republicans will have.

Journalists trained in the Anglo-American tradition are trained to stick to reporting, not to editorialise by trumpeting their own opinions. Mathew d’Ancona, schooled in that tradition is now the editor of The Spectator, which like its arch-enemy, The New Statesman, is a weekly with opinions. He has just thrown in his hat in the ring for the US election, pledging his support for John McCain, in a very well argued story in the Daily Telegraph.

 Now as it happens, The Spectator is currently owned by the Barclay Twins, who also own the Telegraph newspapers. They are usually descrribed in the press as ’secretive’ and by implication, tax avoiding, because they are domiciled in the Channel Islands, where they have an island fortress.

Now, since I know d’Ancona, I am sure he has made up his own mind.

But has he done so, without any knowledge of the views of the twins who pay his mortgage. For his earnings as editor of The Spectator and as a columist of the Telegpraph?

I don’t know.

But the question is worth asking.

In this, the most difficult to predict US election of my lifetime, the media tycoons are as flumoxed as I am.They want a candidate to advance their interests. But they also want to be able to deal with the winner.

Although the media tycoons can twist Tony Blair and Gordon Brown around their little finger, they cannot treat the US press that way, although it is historically deferential to the Presidency.

Because the freedom of the press is enshrined in the US constitution. The US press is a part of it, which is not the case in Britain. US reporters, unlike their equivalents in Britain, know this. So they understand that their historic role is not to find the missing daughter of the McCanns, it is to convey to the US electorate what the McCains, and other aspiriants to power, are saying.

The London Times has not yet thrown its hat into the ring. And my guess is that the proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, has not yet made up his mind. But I would surprised if  has not yet made any arrangements to have a chat to McCain, which he can do conveniently stateside, where he spends rather more time than in London.

Murdoch is above all a careful man. He knows, as well as King Canute, that his he cannot move the tides. But in this situation he has bargaining power.

As of now there are three credible candidates, Clinton, Obama and McCain. But only one of them - McCain - is in a position to start talking.

This Presidential campaign began with most commentators thinking that a Democratic victory was a near certainty and that Hillary Clinton was the front-runner.

Today both those assumptions are under challenge.

While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still have their antlers locked in a struggle to be the Democratic candidate in the US Presidential election due to take place next November, John McCain has started his campaign for the election proper.

First stop was Baghdad, where he appeared today, to the astonishment of the media who thought he was just going to Europe and the Middle East. He has been there before and his visit is not just political opportunism. He cares about the US troops who are risking their lives a long way from home. He knows what it is like because he has experienced such things himself.

On Thursday he is due in London, where Lord Rothschild has organised a fund-raising lunch for him, which will give him a chance to make his views known on the another strand of American policy in the Middle East. George W Bush’s war against the Taliban, against Sadaam Hussein and against terror and Osama bin Laden, has been mxed up with his intervetion in the argument between Israel and Hamas, which has moved on since George W took office.

Since then the world has seen, through 24 hours a day news, Israeli rockets killing a lot of innocent people of all races and religions in Lebanon. But in America there is the Jewish vote to take account of, not least in New York, where Hillary Clinton is the senator, and has had to deal with the very powerful Jewish vote in New York City, many of whom are the descendents of victims of Hitler’s holocaust.

So not surprising that Hillary supported the Iraq war, which was partly fuelled by Israel’s fears that their security was at threat.

The present chaos in Iraq is nothing to do with Jews and not much to do with the Taliban. It is a struggle between the majority Shia Muslims, whose ally is Iran, and the next biggest group, the Sunni Muslims, whose cause Saadam Hussein espoused. And the large Kurdish minority, whom Hessain massacred to divert attention from his main problems.

Travelling with McCain is a former Demcratic Senator, Joe Lieberman, who is Jewish, and who was, way back in the Stone Age (2006) being talked up as a possible Presidential candidate, which would have made him the first Jewish President, a headline just as compelling as Hillary as the first female President and Barack as the first non-white President. His Presidential campaign never got off the ground because the Democratic voters threw him out when he was standing for re-election as Senator.

But this is an American election we are talking about. And while candidates and Presidents have to take account of the Jewish vote, there is still quite a lot of anti-semitism. So whether America is ready for a Jewish President is quite as real a question as to whether it is ready for a non-white or a female President.

Obama is the same colour as the opponents of Isreal and the Clinton campaign has fuelled fears that he might be a closet Muslim. These obvious facts must make America’s Jewish voters somewhat nervous. So perhaps his advisers should be thinking that the so-called dream ticket of Obama/Clinton is a recipe for disaster. Because Hillary is clearly a White Anglo Saxon Protestant.

Obama has based his appeal to the US electorate on a belief in he dominant American myth, that anyone, of however a humble background can aspire to be President. Although most recent American Presidents have been scions of dynasties, the Bushes, the would-be Clintons, the Roosevelts, etc, the myth is neverless a sustaining myth. Which also spreads over to the American business community, who admire a man who makes it on his own, rather than as the son of the boss.

So tonight, rather late, my dream ticket for the US Presidential election 2008 is Obama, with a vice President, who is both female and Jewish.

If he can find such a candidate, I am sure that Obama would have no difficulty in getting my Lord Rothschild in London to host a fund raising dinner. Lord Rothschild does not have a vote in the American election. He can vote in the British House of Lords, but he does not do so often. Because he is far too busy looking after his many stakes in multi-national companies. And he is keen on a world which is not governed by firing missiles at the enemy, but which recognises that it is less awful if the next generation, goes for Coca Cola, Mcdonalld’s hamburgers or binge drinking than opting for suicide bombing and belief in the compensations of a life hereafter.

In London this week was frequently reminded that bad news sells newspapers. A child abducted on her way home from school, with lots of detail about a mother’s struggle to bring up a family in the chaos arising from the five different fathers of her children. A teenager now known to be murdered in Goa. A female teenage cyclist knifed to death by two motorists, whose car she had maybe scratched. And, of course, the worst news for boozers for year’s in the Gordon Brown/Alaistair Darling budget.

It was relief to read the Axe Valley & District Midweek Herald, which was lying on the door mat when I returned to Dorset yesterday. The front page splash, Vision for old court, was an upbeat tale about a large county council-owned plot formerly the Axminster Magistrates’ Court. The news was that Councillor Douglas Hull has a plan to change it into a facility offering something for all the voters: new youth club, pre-school nursery, further education college, sixth form facility and dormitory block for foreign students.

The picture story was of a three-year old girl holding a plate of colourful fruit and staring appealingly at the camera. She was a toddler at the local school, who last week tried 25 different fruits last week as part of a healthy eating exercise.

The back page was even more cheering. It was entirely devoted to the Grizzly was fantastic spectacle of running story. The Grizzly, I learnt, was the local marathon, which starts on Seaton beach and covers nineteen miles including steep cliff paths and the infamous Branscombe bog. The main pic showed the 1400 runners at the start, who were all smiling as they ran towards the camera. The reporter was ecstatic. He told readers that the race was run in ‘almost perfect weather apart from the odd hail shower’. It was ’started with great aplomb by John Barrington-Rowell guided by the exuberance of commentator Dennis Elliott.

Although the Midweek Herald is a free, coming through the door whether or not you have ordered it, it reflects the practice of the paid-for local newspapers, who have always prospered by printing the good news of weddings, rotary club dinners and local sports events, and have been careful to include the names of as many people as possible (spelt correctly in most cases).

So I now know that Lee Turner won the race with a time of 2:24:34 and Annie Thurgood and Margaret Pearce were joint 1362nd in 5:34:42. Not only that I know the names and times to the last second of getting on for a hundred of the other participants. Now that’s detail for you.

Inside the Midweek Herald hedges its bets by printing plenty of bad news, which local newspaper readers can read as well. Page 3 leads on Storm washes up ‘disgusting’ debris, with a pic of said debris which turns out to be five syringes on a car tyre. They quote a local resident:

I can understand that some people have drug problems, but why can’t they get their fix at home or at a friend’s rather than leaving needles and syringes on our beaches for a child to come along and step on?’

The letters page includes a heart wrenching sob story from a husband who posted a Valentine card to his wife with a first class stamp. Not only did the card arrive thirteen days late but he also had to fork out £1.06 which was the penalty due because his card was above the size covered by the standard rate.

The inside pages also demontrate that the Midweek Herald is a campigning newspaper. This week’s campaign is for giving up smoking timed to co-incide with no smoking day, which apparently happened this week. This is highlighted on several pages, including one item which reveals that East Devon smokers think about their tobacco habit almost twice as often as they think about sex. And they give the detailed poll results: smokers think sexy thoughts 4.5 times a day but they long for a fag 8.54 times a day.

This is also a participation angle. Readers are encoraged to send in an account of their own efforts to give up the weed to www.midweekherald.co.uk. And the Herald editor, Belinda Bennett, a hardened nicotine addict, is trying to kick the habit herself and reporting her experiences on the web page. Her last posting was on Friday, which was Day Three of the quit. She is keeping herself busy to quell the craving and was feeling upbeat on Friday, although she confesses that it is not easy. She usually jumps out of bed at 5 AM but without the fag to look forward too, she is tempted to stay between the sheets til 7 AM, an unheard of indulgence for her. (Actually she wrote in her blog 7 PM, but I guess that was a mistake brought on by the stress of not smoking.

The news that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has had to put together a rescue package,  with the help of J P Morgan, for Bear Stearns, the fifth largest US investment bank has already caused a plunge in the stock markets. Bear Stearns is not in the same league as J P Morgan and Lazards, but its difficulties are seriously worrying. And already some analysts are saying we are facing the worse financial crisis since the 1930s.

So just as the Bank of England had to step in to save Northern Rock in Britain, the Federal Reserve has moved quickly in the US to stop a serious problem turning into a panic.

The problem in both countries has arisen because of the way the housing market was inflated, with buyers encouraged to buy properties which they could only afford if their incomes rose.  The banks and building societies financed this rise by lending money to each other. Bear Stearns, like Northern Rock was a maverick, which went for fast growth by doing more of this dodgy lending than most. But all the major players did some and they are now trying to minimise the effect on their own profits, which involves repossessing some houses, and putting up mortgage rates, to safeguard their profits.

This has led to a real crisis in the US housin market and what is for the moment a modest fall in UK house prices. In the US this double squeeze has already led to a fall in retail sales. Which means lower profits. So there is a real danger of downward spiral which put the big players at risk.

Since everyone today, in the private sector, in the contral banks and in Government, has read the history of the Great Crash and the subsequent recession. So we will not get a repeat of the 1930s, when the Hoover Republican administration did almost nothing to halt the deepening depression, so that the rescue did not start until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, and the Democratic New Deal, when public funding was used to put people back to work and to get the US and the world out of depression.

The world in 2008 is different, hence the rather worried looking George W Bush, addressing the Economic Club in New York in a speech broadcast on national television.

And there is the political irony. George W, the arch priest of capitalism, will have to spend his last year of office, using Democratic (or even Socialist) tactics to stop the downturn in the economy spiralling out of control.

Which makes the 2008 US general election even more difficult to predict than it is now.

A week is  long time in politics. And there are six weeks to go before the next big Democratic Primary election in Pennsvlvania, and nearly eight months to go til the day the Americans elect their new President.

For the moment the only advice I can give to any of the candidates is to think through the implications of the words of Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister in the days when JFK was US President. ‘Events, dear boy.’

Who wins this election may well be determined by how they react to events which have not yet taken place.

Eliot Spitzer resigned with a brief statement of apology. Whether the delay was because he was trying to negotiate a plea bargain is still not clear. But investigators  have made it public that they have come to no agreement with him. So the price he pays by the loss of an upwardly modile career may be just the first instalment.

The investigations concern the way he paid for his nights of pleasure. If he has breached the law on this count, and is also found guilty of breaking the rules about not crossing state boundaires to pay for sex, he could be facing a few years in jail too.

His departure thrusts David A. Paterson into the Governor’s mansion. He will the  first New York black governor, the third black governor, and the first ever blind governor. He has been a supporter of Hillary Clinton. But there must be lots of African Americans who hope he will change his vote.

Have to break off because we have old American friends for dinner. He is for Hillary, she is keen on Obama. Can’t wait to hear what they have to say.

Barrack Obama has cruised to victory in Missisippi with 60 per cent of the vote, a state he was expected to win. But that victory changes nothing. Hillary Clinton got a very respectable 38 per cent. The race will certainly not be decided before 22 April when Obama faces a much tougher battle amongst the steel mills of Pennsylvania which has masses of those working class whites, many of whom love Hillary because she is sensitive to their difficulties in finding work in this old industrial state.

It is, of course, the land of The Deerhunter, which evoked the realities of modern warfare and the shattering effect on the lives of the soldiers tried to rebuild when they came home. The final scene was in a bar, when they sang God Bless America, quite the most heartwrenching and mournful rendering of this familar anthem that I have ever heard.

The message from the Democratic voters to the candidates could not be more clear. They want both Obama and Clinton. But out on the campaign trail the supporters of both sides are engaged in trench warfare. While Missippi was still voting, Geraldine Ferraro, fired off a rocket, alleging that Obama was winning votes just because he was black and that Hillary Clinton was suffering because of the reluctance of American voters. She, above all knows, since she was the Vice Presidential candidate in 2000, and it was not a pretty sight to watch the negative stuff which was fired at her.

The passions that are being aroused by this struggle are reverberating three thousand miles away on the banks of the Thames. Dinner on Monday night at the National Film Theatre nearly ended in fisticuffs. I was blasted from across the table by a British woman,  who happens to be married to an American,, for calling Hillary Clinton in my blog, ‘Clinton’. She said this was sexist and was an example of just the prejudice that she is faccing from the press.

I tried to explain that I was simply following a journalistic convention, which was totally neutrel as far as gender was concerned, and saves words. Far from demeaning female candidates it gives the same status as the males. The convention is that you give the full name in the first reference and use the surname only for the rest of the article.

My friend argued that in this paritular case it was a reminder that she is the wife of big Bill. It is, after all, his family name not hers.  

Now that I have cooled down I think she does have a point. My own belief is clear. I think it is just as difficult for a woman to go for the top job as it is for a black. And if the journalistic convention I am using gives some readers a different impression I do not have to stick to the convention.

Quite how I am going to handle it, I am not sure. I would like to keep some consistency. I don’t want to have to write Barack Obama at every mention as well, and somehow it does not feel right to refer to him as Barack.

And what about the other contenders? It certainly does not feel right to refer to McCain simply as John, because that is one the most common first names, and leaves room for ambiguity.

My tentative decision is that I shall from now on write in my blog the way I speak in conversation. In conversation I usually say Obama, Hillary and McCain. I frequently say George W. instead of Bush, to make it quite clear that I am not referring to his Dad. And I say, either Jack Kennedy or JFK to make it clear I am not referring to Edward Kennedy.

That will acually save me time. Because I have just read what I have written. In the first paragraph I wrote ‘Hillary’ in the the second mention. Under my old rules I would have wasted time by changing that to ‘Clinton’ before I posted the blog.