Blaming the voters

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This is really interesting. It turns out that the mainstream media were rather too credulous about popular hostility to the US ‘bailout’ plan. Here’s what the Pew Research Center found out.

The American public is taking a bad rap for Congress’s failure to pass the bailout bill. Members who voted against the original House bill are said to be responding to strong opposition to the rescue plan from their constituents. While there is little doubt that Congressional representatives are hearing a lot of harsh words from voters back home, that clamor does not reflect broad American public opinion. It is a classic case of the squeaky wheels getting first attention at a time when Washington is in a quandary about what to do.

The most recent polls — those conducted through Monday night — show the public is at best divided over the plan. There is little indication of overwhelming public rejection of the bailout proposal. A new Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 27-29 found support for the bailout slipping, but still showed a narrow 45%-38% plurality of the public saying that a government plan to invest or commit billions of dollars to secure financial institutions is the right thing to do.

An ABC/Washington Post survey conducted on Sept 29 found the public evenly split with 45% favoring and 47% opposing a government proposal to use $700 billion to shore up failing financial institutions on Wall Street. The question asked in the survey also pointed out that critics of the plan say that the failing companies don’t deserve a bailout, while proponents say it is necessary to protect the economy…

I was a bit suspicious of the way TV and radio reporters were using random vox-pop interviews to support the excuses of Republican refuseniks in the House for voting down the Bill. I should have pursued the thought, but didn’t. It’s also a case, though, where professional journalism could have done better. Mainstream media have the resources to commission polls.

Beggar (all) Thy Neighbours

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The Irish government’s extraordinary move to guarantee all investments in Irish banks has infuriated Willem Buiter. First of all, he says, it’s illegal under EU rules. And secondly,

Financial crises may not be the best time to make friends and influence people, but the Irish guarantee is the most ‘in-your-face’ beggar-thy-neighbour provocation since medieval armies catapulted bubonic-plague-ridden corpses into the cities they were besieging. Between the attempt to favour Irish shareholders at the expense of foreign shareholders and the poaching of UK sterling deposits (and indeed euro deposits anywhere else in the euro area) through subsidy-fuelled interest rate offers, Ireland should not be surprised to encounter limited support and solidarity in the EU the next time the country is up against it, for whatever issue…

Er, actually the Irish government is already ‘up against it’ in relation to Europe, because of that little local difficulty it had with ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Personally, I’m not sure I’d put money into anything ‘guaranteed’ by a Fianna Fail-led government. One delicious twist in all this is that the EU Commissioner who will have to examine the latest Fianna Fail wheeze is Charlie McCreevy, a grizzled old Fianna Fail hack. How will he square this particular barbed circle? Stay tuned.

Great Firewall of China (contd.)

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Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has just released its analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform. No surprises. They uncovered discovered a huge surveillance system that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

John Markoff of the NYT has a report.

PDF of the Citizen Lab report available from here.

I’ve always assumed that Skype was compromised — which is why I would never use it for confidential conversations. Wonder what eBay have to say about it all?

The perils of skunk

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Agonising article by Patrick Cockburn on his son’s schizophrenia.

I blame cannabis for what happened to Henry. He says he smoked a lot between the ages of 14 and 19, but I didn’t notice at the time.

I would have been concerned, of course, if I’d known back then, but until recently I had no idea about the explosive impact cannabis can have on some people.

I don’t think people realise 19 out of 20 people might take a small quantity of cannabis without ill effects, but for the 20th person who has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, the result is catastrophic.

I don’t believe those who advocate less stringent laws on the sale and consumption of cannabis realise the devastating effect it can have…

Bush’s legacy

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Timothy Egan, writing in today’s New York Times…

Among the many dispiriting things to come out of Bob Woodward’s quartet of books on George W. Bush is his observation that the president has not changed since he first started talking to Woodward in 2001.

No growth. No evolution. No regrets.

“History,” Bush replied, when asked by Woodward how he would be judged over time. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Broke, as well.

It would have been nice to let Bush’s two terms marinate a while before invoking Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan from the cellar of worst presidents. But then — over the last two weeks — he completed the trilogy of national disasters that will be with us for a generation or more…

That Esquire profile of Steve Jobs

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Hmmm… Just finished reading Tom Junod’s profile. A bit contrived and over-written. And it concludes lamely by asking what peaks remain to be scaled by Jobs now that he has transformed the mobile phone business? “Well”, Junod writes.

there is the “cloud,” as it’s known in geekspeak — the treasure trove of our disembodied data, the digitized version of ourselves that exists beyond ourselves, the next step in the virtualization of the human experience. It’s being posited as the basis of a mobile Internet, or what some people call “a new Internet,” but its lure is the lure of finding a way out of our bodies and into the invisible, and that’s the oldest of human dreams. And so, while everybody else wonders how to get there, how to gain purchase on the ether, Jobs, with his iPhone, offers the same possibility he always has, the possibility of getting there one glittering box at a time. But his soul is in those boxes; it’s never been unlocked, and the service he introduced at the June keynote — a service called MobileMe, which staked his claim on the invisible, or at least announced his readiness to compete for control of it — was deemed, upon its launch a month later, a “disaster” . . . “a failure” . . . “Apple’s worst product launch in the ten years since Jobs returned from exile.” The digital ether would seem as uncongenial to Steve Jobs as heaven itself. But still it beckons, and still he has to answer its call. What other choice does he have? He is already halfway there.