James Fallows points out an interesting perspective on Tim Geithner, Obama’s pick to be US Secretary of the Treasury: experience with Asia and at the IMF. Both will be very useful in the current crisis.
When I was with a DC finance firm about a decade ago, my colleagues had fairly regular contacts with him. [...]

The US state of New Hampshire now has more female senators than male in the upper house of state government.
After [the November 4] election, thirteen of the twenty-four state Senate seats in New Hampshire are now occupied by women. Peggy Gilmore (District 12), Bette Lasky (District 13) and Amanda Merrill (District 21) beat out their [...]

As if the time in power for Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party had not provided enough comedy, a backbencher has been quoted saying something so far out of the potato patch that even the party’s leadership has condemned it. Not only did Artur Gorski claim that Al Qaeda was rubbing its hands with [...]

Apparently a great-great-great grandfather of his came from Ireland, and at least one visitor reports that this is all the rage right now.
From the chorus: “O’Leary, O’Reilly, O’Hare and O’Hara/There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.” The verses are pretty funny, too.

It has come to this. Does anyone remember Nicolas Sarkozy of a year ago? Back then he was being feted by the anglospheric media as a French Thatcher, a neoliberal wind of change shaking a battery of outdated perceptions to its heart and mixing a few other metaphors whilst they were at it. We blogged [...]

As the BBC puts it
The new leader of the party previously headed by Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider has admitted the two men had a “special relationship”.
Stefan Petzner told Austrian radio that Mr Haider, whom he met five years ago, was “the man of my life”. …
Mr Petzner has described feeling a magnetic attraction [...]

“The Kazakh government is ready to step in,” Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Karim Masimov said this morning in a telephone interview with Bloomberg “The Kazakh banking system with the support of the government and central bank will fulfill all obligations to international investors…..We have our own specific plan to survive without any external support….I don’t think [...]

And somewhere between 52 and 53 in the popular vote. Florida and West Virginia because I’m feeling optimistic.
What do you all think?
What I think.

Well, these are indeed troubled times. According to the latest news to come off the Reuters wires the International Monetary Fund has announced its readiness to offer financial and technical help to Hungary, effectively stepping in and providing support for an EU member state in difficulty at a time when the EU institutional and [...]

The Nation has a cracking, snarky and sharply reported, story out about Rick Davies (John McCain’s campaign manager) and his role in the run-up to Montenegrin independence. Read the whole thing, as they say. What struck me about it was first that AFOE had a damn good little controversy of its own about the same [...]