Following the Kerry manicure “parody” a day or two ago (see Josh Marshall for more details), Fox News has apparently become a fully-fledged subsidiary of The Onion. A story by “Jane Roh”[1] I read recently include a straight reference to “Communists for Kerry” and an interview with “Bush supporter Hugh G. Monument, VII”. You can read some quotes from the original, which I failed to save, at News Hounds. When I returned to the story about an hour later, it had been changed without acknowledgement, and the lead in to this part referred to “pranksters”.

Looking over the rest of the Fox site, it’s not clear which bits are intended as hoaxes, to be changed later, and which, if any, as straight news. For example there’s this story headed Scalia: Orgies Ought to Be Encouraged . The long-running gag in which Fox attempts to manufacture a scandal out of the UN Oil-for-Food program, based on documents supplied by Ahmed Chalabi, also gets a run.

If I could be bothered, I’d archive the current versions of all these stories for comparison with the versions appearing tomorrow. But I’ll leave this task to readers.

fn1. I have no idea whether this is a real person’s name, or some sort of humorous allusion to “Roe vs Wade”

I notice that Labor has firmed quite a bit at Centrebet, coming in from 3.30 to 2.55 in the past week or so. This is good news for Labor supporters, but not, I think, such good news for the view that betting markets outpredict polls and pundits. Throughout the election, the polls and pundits, while leaning to a Liberal victory have generally presented the view that this is going to be a close race. Until now, the betting markets have treated a Liberal win as a foregone conclusion.

I’d argue that the most efficient test of claims about the informational efficiency of betting markets for political events would be to test the prediction that movements in polls should follow movements in betting odds (since we know that election-day polls give reasonably good predictions of actual outcomes). For this election at least, the opposite seems to be true – the betting markets have moved into line with the polls.

We’ve all heard about the US embassy in Baghdad, with its thousands of employees, advisers in every department, and capacity to instantly countermand any decision made by the Allawi government. But until now, I’d never given much thought to its opposite number, the Iraqi embassy in Washington. It turns out to be a kind of funhouse mirror image, as indicated in this story in the Washington Post which discusses Allawi’s tour and the ghostwriting of his speech

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and British Foreign Service officials also helped Allawi with the text and delivery of his remarks, said administration officials who were involved. The State Department and officials elsewhere in the government took the lead in booking Allawi’s interviews. Administration officials said that the Iraqi Embassy in Washington consists of just a few officials and has only a dial-up Internet connection, so was incapable of preparing for the high-profile tour.

One might think that with the IMF and World Bank located in Washington, not to mention the US Congress, the Iraqi government might feel the need for a more substantial presence, and that a few million of the billions of dollars supposedly allocated to reconstruction might have been used to establish it, if only for PR purposes. But obviously these institutions negotiate directly with the US Administration. Why talk to the monkey when the organ-grinder is right next door?

More on the speech from Mark Kleiman

Rising to my challenge of a consistent approach to unilateral pre-emption, Alexander Downer has stated that the Indonesians would be justified in bombing Australia if they thought a terrorist group was located in Australia (thanks to Jack Strocchi for this link).

It would be “absolutely” understandable if the Indonesian air force bombed the Kimberleys believing terrorists who threatened Indonesia were located there, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has said.

Defending the Government’s doctrine of last resort, pre-emptive military strikes against terrorists, Mr Downer said he would expect Indonesia to do the same if the situation were reversed. “Absolutely, by the way, absolutely,” Mr Downer told Darwin radio station Top-FM.

“If the Indonesians rang us up and said there’s a terrorist group in the Kimberleys who are planning to launch an attack on Kupang, and we said: ‘Well, we don’t really care, that’s your problem, pal, and we’re not going to do anything about it,’ and they sent an F-16 over and bombed the terrorist group, you could understand that.

It’s fortunate that this doctrine wasn’t put forward in the 1990s, when Fretilin, described by the Indonesian government as a terrorist group, operated openly in Australia.

The Russian Cabinet has agreed to submit the Kyoto protocol to Parliament for ratification. It is probable, though not certain, that the Russian Parliament will approve it, though it’s not clear how soon. Russian ratification would bring the treaty into force.

Australia and the US are now the only significant holdouts. Promises by Bush and Howard to produce an alternative, more effective policy have come to nothing. It’s time for us to join the rest of the world on this one. Howard could win himself a bit of credit by changing his position here.

As regards the election, I’m feeling more optimistic than at any time since the first flush of Lathamania around New Year. Howard looked like a beaten man on TV tonight, and with more than a week still left to go, I think that will sink in with enough voters to make the required difference.

Howard has nothing coherent to offer. His foreign policy is to follow Bush to catastrophic failure[1]. Domestically, he has accepted that the public want services more than tax cuts, but he’s too much of a Thatcherite to change his own thinking. The result is an incoherent spray of spending promises, targeted tax breaks, and so on. The result is that his $6 billion has been generally derided, and Latham’s $3 billion generally applauded. And of course his reputation as a responsible economic manager is gone for good.

Against this, there’s the fact that incumbent governments tend to survive unless there’s a really compelling reason to throw them out. Howard may not be much good, but there isn’t a recession on and the Iraq catastrophe doesn’t affect us directly. Until now, I’ve felt these considerations to be evenly balanced. Now, however, I think the odds are significantly in Labor’s favour.

fn1. Our only hope here is that our jihadist enemies have shown themselves more than a match for Bush in both stupidity and capacity for pointless evil. Their brutal atrocities, many committed against fellow-Muslims, have largely, and perhaps completely, offset the support they have gained as a result of the invasion of Iraq and Bush’s continued backing of Sharon/Likud against the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians. A large number of Muslims, I think, have the same view I do: “a plague on both your houses”.