Magic Statistics

A series of political gaffes and blunders has taken a toll on Ségolène Royal's quest to be elected president of France.  The latest poll shows her opponent Nicolas Sarkozy widening his lead.  It gets worse.

In almost every question in the poll, Ms Royal trailed her main rival, the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy from the ruling conservative UMP party. Mr Sarkozy's campaign was more "solid" (57 per cent against 25 per cent for Ms Royal); he was more "precise" (52 per cent to 23 per cent); and he was more credible (45 per cent to 31 per cent).
. . .
After months of running neck and neck, Mr Sarkozy is now pulling ahead, despite accusations that he is employing smear tactics.

Ms Royal has just returned from a weekend trip to the French Antilles, where she blamed her problems on dirty tricks by her centre-right opponent and his political allies.  Well, what else would she say?

But she has repeatedly fallen victim to her own embarrassing errors, which more and more French voters are seeing as evidence of inexperience.  She has bungled statements on a wide range of issues, including Quebec independence, France’s nuclear missile capability, Chinese human rights, and support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Thus, it is not surprising that nasty rumours are beginning to circulate about her future as the Socialist Party’s candidate.

Some senior Socialist politicians are said to have discussed a "lifeboat scenario": an emergency switch of candidates in early March if Mme Royal's poll ratings collapse.

Sego appeared to do well on her trip to the West Indies (no obvious gaffes, anyway), where she was campaigning for votes on Martinique and Guadeloupe.  The two islands are officially part of the republic of France, although, as Charles Bremner of The Times of London suggests, it’s hard to tell exactly what distinguishes them from colonies.

From the moment you arrive in Fort de France, the capital, it is obvious that being part of  the  republic has huge benefits. Unemployment is high and the economy is poor but rather than the ramshackle air of the rest of the Caribbean, the French islands feel relatively prosperous. This is thanks to huge subsidies from la Métropole [France]– and from the European Union, of which they are of course part. The roads, communications, gendarmerie, schools, the health and other public services are French. The French 35-hour working week also applies.
. . .
Treating the islands as part of France is convenient but it is really a fiction that gets around a colonial reality.

But one great French tradition has been adopted well on the islands: going on strike. For the past few years Martinique and Guadeloupe have been struggling to win back tourists — especially Americans — who deserted the resorts because of work stoppages that disrupted their vacations. This week, the Club Med in Martinique blew up all the good work.

The Boucaniers resort, on a gorgeous site on the south coast, was reopened in 2005 after a 60 million dollar renovation. It has now been forced to close at the peak of the season, sending 500 holiday-makers home because there are no free hotel rooms on the island. There was almost a riot at the airport as passengers from France who had paid 3,000 euros per couple for the week and flown nine hours across the Atlantic, were told that they were going to be put back onto flights for home. Travel agents from New York to Sydney are again telling customers to avoid the French Antillies. 

Ségo got out of there just in time.

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• Ségolène blunders again
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If the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs) are enacted without change, Roman Catholic adoption agencies in Britain will be legally bound to consider homosexuals as potential adoptive parents.  Catholic officials in the United Kingdom have previously said they will close down their offices rather than violate their consciences and church teaching.

Another course of action has now been suggested.  They will continue to operate with no change in policy, daring the government to haul them into court.

[T]hey will deliberately break the law in order to bring a case to court. The Church believes it could then challenge a guilty verdict through Article 9 of the Human Rights Act, which upholds the freedom of religious expression.

The challenge considerably increases the temperature in a row that last week left the Cabinet divided and prompted warnings from Church leaders that the issue would prompt them to campaign against Labour in May's Scottish elections. Scotland has two Catholic adoption agencies, which place about 200 children and offer aftercare to 2,000 more.

Previously, Church leaders have said that the agencies would be forced to close, however, a spokesman for the Church told Scotland on Sunday: "We will not shut down the agencies. We will carry on working until someone takes us to court for breaking the law." He added: "There would then be a case where one of our agencies would be found guilty of breaking the law and would be put out of business."

The SORs have already been proclaimed in Northern Ireland, where legal action by the Christian Institute and five Christian denominations resulted in a court ruling permitting a judicial review of the regulations, to be held in March.

h/t: Big News Network.com - Breaking Religious News

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When the Stern Review into the Economics of Climate Change was issued at the end of October, the BBC carried several stories uncritically summarising its sensational claims.  Now that the report has been subjected to in-depth scientific scrutiny, however, the worm has turned.  BBC is now dissing the Stern report.

The report may have been loved by the politicians and headline writers but when climate scientists and environmental economists read the 670-page review, many said there were serious flaws.

These critics are not climate change sceptics, but researchers with years of experience who believe that human-induced climate change is real and that we need to act now.

Richard Tol is a professor at both Hamburg and Carnegie Mellon Universities, and is one of the world's leading environmental economists.

The Stern Review cites his work 63 times; but that does not mean he agrees with it.

"If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a 'D' for diligence; but more likely I would give him an 'F' for fail.

"There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make," he told The Investigation on BBC Radio 4.

When asked why Stern uses his work so much, Prof Tol responded, “I don’t think Stern is using my work; he’s abusing my work.”

The BBC comment quotes other experts questioning Stern’s analysis, including economist Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University, and Professor Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Listen to the 28-minute BBC4 report on the Stern Review and the criticisms here.

h/t: Greenie Watch

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British Conservative Party leader David Cameron's silence on the adoption controversy seems to be motivated by a desire to avoid alienating anyone.  Whatever stance he supports—the government or the Catholic adoption agencies or some amorphous “compromise”—someone will be mightily displeased.

Reticence on that issue seems odd in view of his latest public cause.  He has delivered a proposal to improve social cohesion in Britain, including a call for the emancipation of Muslim women.

Tory leader David Cameron has promised a new "crusade for fairness" as he pledged to tackle the oppression of Muslim women prevented from going out to work or attending university.

A "crusade"?  I wonder how British Muslims will like that.

Osama Saeed, of the Muslim Association of Britain, said use of the word 'crusade' harked back to medieval wars between Christians and Muslims and was 'extraordinarily sloppy'. A spokesman for Mr Cameron said the politician's promise, made in a newspaper, was not intended to cause offence.

Is the Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition really that tone-deaf?  Did he really believe that labelling a campaign to encourage Muslim women to shrug off traditional Islamic mores a "crusade" wouldn't offend anyone?  Hello!

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British Conservative Party leader David Cameron (photo at right) is conspicuous by his absence from the controversy over whether Catholic adoption agencies should be exempted from regulations requiring that homosexuals be considered as adoptive parents.  The Labour cabinet forced PM Tony Blair to cave in to its intolerant stance, and has now rounded on Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and Minister for Women and Equality, because she is a staunch Roman Catholic who supports adding a conscience clause to the regulations.

While Labour is publicly tearing itself apart, the Conservative leader has been silent.  Sunday Telegraph columnist Matthew D'Ancona comments.

When I asked party headquarters what the official Conservative position on the row was, I was told that David Cameron "sees the difficulty. Our position is: wait and see."
. . .
[H]e knows that if he becomes embroiled in this particular row, he can be sure of only one thing: he will alienate gays, Catholics or possibly both.

There is a deeper, philosophical reason for his reticence, too. As one Shadow Cabinet member put it to me: "This whole thing raises a big issue at the heart of what David is doing. Yes, he wants to be liberal and modern on gay rights. But he also wants to harness the power of faith-based groups to deliver services which they can do better than state bureaucracy."

Thus does the diversity of modern society conflict with the diversity of traditional institutions: Mr Cameron is in favour of both.

Unfortunately, Mr Cameron, you can’t have it both ways on this one.

Cameron’s shadow home secretary, and the man he defeated for the Conservative leadership, David Davis, has now taken a stand, however.  He supports the Roman Catholic position that a conscience clause should be added.

Shadow home secretary David Davis has publicly sided with the Catholic Church in the row over gay adoption.

Mr Davis said he would "almost definitely" vote against forcing faith-based agencies to offer babies to gay couples.

But he stressed he was speaking personally and not for his party.

Other shadow cabinet ministers have spoken strongly in favour of allowing the church’s adoption agencies to exercise freedom of conscience.

Pressure is mounting on Mr Cameron to get off this particular fence.

Previous related posts:

• Pediatricians concerned about homosexual parenting
• If you think Labour is insufferable now, just wait
• We’ll get the second-best minds together to solve this

UPDATE (29 Jan.): Cameron is off the fence.  He opposes granting an exemption to Catholic adoption agencies.  On this, he is at odds with much of his caucus.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will make his first visit to Canada to attend the April meeting of the House of Bishops.  Leaders of the Anglican Church of Canada had been feeling neglected, but now all is forgiven.

“We have had the invitation in the works for over a year; we struggled with his calendar and we received the answer today (Jan. 26). We’re delighted,” said Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.

The move is significant since Archbishop Williams has come under criticism for avoiding the U.S. and Canadian churches since his election in 2002 and since the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada have been seen as moving toward more-liberal views on homosexuality at about the same time.

He declined an invitation to attend a joint meeting of U.S. and Canadian bishops in Windsor, Ont. in 2005, drawing criticism from Archbishop Hutchison at the time: “It does send a very, very negative symbol to the Canadian church, no question. The message it sends to us is that at the moment he does not want to be associated with the Canadians,” he said before the Windsor meeting.

So, ++Rowan is now apparently willing to associate with the Canadians.  Still no sign of an audience with the Americans, however.  Hmmmm.

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The collect for today, the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

O God, who knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright; Grant to us such strength and protection, as may support us in all dangers, and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:1-7
The Gospel: St Matthew 8:23-34