India has thrived under Bush’s pro-outsourcing policies, and many Indians hope for to a greater distance prosperity with McCain

By Mehul Srivastava

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A sand sculpture of US presidential candidates John McCain (L) and Barack Obama (R), created by Indian sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik, is seen at a beach in Puri adhering November 2, 2008. SANJIB MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images

It is an oft-repeated withhold in the 2008_election season that even while America remains torn between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, the trust of the world has overwhelmingly chosen Obama. Poll after person shows how the invasion of Iraq, the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the sagging popularity of President George W. Bush have translated into a battering of America’s image abroad—and by enlargement, soured the world on a Republican President.

But in the American-style shopping malls and 24/7 call centers of modern India, where McDonald’s franchises sell paneer tikka wraps and American flags adorn the walls of outsourcing firms, the beyond eight years of a Republican Presidency have been fantastic. That approval of a Bush Presidency has overflowed into a wellspring of support for another Republican Presidency, making India one of those rare countries in the world where support for Obama’sitting historic run has not resulted in a landslide of public opinion in his favor. Indeed, depending without interruption which poll you look at, Indians each prefer McCain and Obama equally, or Obama by the smallest margin in the world.

India’s enchanting with the U.S. has grown in direct put in proportion to their economic intertwining: The more business Indians do with Americans, the else they seem to fall in love with them. Indeed, during the season that the earth has grown disenchanted with America during the Bush Presidency, Indians have grown to be appropriate to its biggest fans.

Billions of dollars and millions of jobs be the subject of flowed to India since 2000, igniting an economic engine that has changed the fortunes of urban Indians, and tied their financial futures closely to the U.S., a country that most will never visit. But viewed like many persons Indians spent hours on the phone through American customers, walking them through their daily tribulations with merit cards and misplaced online purchases, it created every understanding of America—and Americans—that divide through geopolitics. "They’re a lot like us," says Ranadeep Sen, 24, who spent three years at a call center that handled computer-related problems for Midwesterners. "They have their problems, but it’session not taste they are all trying to conquer countries and kill civilians. Their cars break down, their computers break down, they have trouble [paying bills]."

Couple that with a Bush-sponsored nuclear deal, which while creating tens of billions of dollars of business opportunity in the place of American companies, also helps India emit its status as nuclear pariah, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan wasn’t well-nigh from the truth when he declared to President Bush in Washington earlier this year that "the people of India to love you."

In two separate polls carried out by the Pew Global Attitudes Project and the BBC, Indians have been amidst the most supportive—and appreciative—of American outward and housekeeping policy. Among Indians, 59% held favorable views of the U.S., second but to Nigerians, according to the Pew survey. Between Obama and McCain, the choice remained almost a cold heat.

More recently, a BBC survey of 22 major countries showed 49% of the respondents preferred Obama, compared through just 12% for McCain—composition a 37-point lead for Obama. But in India, that lead shrank to just nine percentage points. (One caveat: That poll was conducted about the Democratic convention but before the Republican convention—and before McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.)

In his popular "Swaminomics" column for India’s largest English newspaper, The Times of India, Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar added up the relating to housekeeping benefits of McCain as compared with Obama, and reached the conclusion that a McCain Presidency would be good in the highest degree for India. He found that McCain voted against trade barriers 88% of the time, and against send abroad subsidies 90% of the time. This contrasts sharply with Obama, who supported both of those measures. In 2007, according to Aiyar’s survey, Obama voted to lower visa quotas for Indian engineers (BusinessWeek.com, 5/18/07) working in the U.S., and moreover supported subsidies for U.S. farmers. Opposition to those subsidies (BusinessWeek.com, 7/30/08) which was single in kind reason India and other developing countries refused to approve lengthwise with a proposed World Trade Organization distribute earlier this year. "It volition be great to take a calamitous U.S. President," wrote Aiyar. "It would have being equal greater if he followed McCain’s economic policies."

Even though the excitement of Americans potentially electing a minority President is palpable in discussions by Indians who follow the U.S., there is a clear element of self-interest in for what cause most Indians view the two candidates. "Their ideas on Iraq or terrorism or global warming all seem the same to me," said Sanjiv Singh, 32, a bank-employee. Singh, who plans to visit relatives on the West Coast nearest year, had driven to the shops in Delhi’s crowded Bhogal market on Monday afternoon in a Chevrolet Spark. "What matters is simple things," he says. "Is in that place going to be more economic growth? Are they going to back us or Pakistan?"

New Web sites and blogs, as well as expanded cable coverage, propose viewers more ways than ever to dissect and obsess over the consecrated by a vow

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Ray Vella/BW

By Moira Herbst

During the hindmost two Presidential elections, the Internet played a bigger role as news organizations supplemented their coverage with online posts. But more than in any previous election, the 2008 contest will be covered from every possible angle online.

A few through reference to something else new Web sites obtain suit indispensable for election junkies. Politico, launched in 2007, showcases established names as well in the same proportion that younger talent with stories, blogs, and columns on the candidates and the issues. RealClearPolitics has a comprehensive list of the age’sitting major op-eds as well as an in-depth, right-leaning commentary section. There’s also Talking Points Memo, that has a left-leaning perspective and has surged in popularity this fall.

Then there are, of course, the more traditional intelligence outlets. CNN is known as a top source on the side of withdrawal polls and state-by-state vote results, by its Web site oftentimes posting results more quickly than the broadcast counterpart. Meanwhile, networks such as ABC, CBS, and NBC are offering a union of wide-awake intelligence streams from their newsrooms and selection headquarters, for example spring as blogs and interactive electoral maps. PBS and National Public Radio have an interactive map, along with election news and analysis from public broadcasting stations across the country.

The New York Times plans to offer video updates online every 30 minutes from 7 p.hodge-podge. to 12 a.m. Eastern time, featuring reports from the paper’s correspondents, more interactive maps. The Wall Street Journal’s Election 2008 page in like manner has video reports, analysis, interactive maps, and an Electoral Compass that allows readers to measure their political leanings. Social networking sites are also getting in on the game; MySpace will air a live stream of MSNBC’s coverage on its MySpace Decision08 page, along with a map that will update election results in real time, blogs, and user-generated video.

From every economic acme to a Detroit bailout, Obama or McCain last will and testament have to bound right on the U.S. economic crisis

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By Theo Francis and Jane Sasseen

The winner on Tuesday, Nov. 4, won’t get much of a chance to rest on his laurels—or rest at all, for that sense. The calendar may divulge 11 weeks to the time when Inauguration Day, if it were not that the President-elect will subsist expected to stage what may amount to the fastest change in history.

"He’ll have concerning a day to rest. His Presidency resolution start on Nov. 6," says one top staffer for a key Democratic senator.

That may be a slight exaggeration, but events won’t wait towards the new Administration. Congressional Democrats are laying the groundwork for a fiscal stimulus package they hope to disregard in late November. Under compressing from European leaders—and perhaps with an eyelet on his own legacy—President Bush is hosting a summit of world leaders on Nov. 15. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has scheduled a sense of hearing on the bailout for Nov. 18. And the President-elect may hold his own economic summit as well, as Bill Clinton did in 1992.

Meanwhile, Detroit is clamoring for $25 billion more in loan guarantees (BusinessWeek.com, 10/31/08), and all sides say something has to be done—soon—to prevent homeowners and petiole the housing market collapse.

Whoever wins, naming a Treasury Secretary is sure to be high on the list, followed by other guide economic posts. Among other things, an early Treasury nominee will give the repaired Administration other thing influence over how the rest of the $700 billion do banking bailout is rolled not at home.

Beltway pundits are working overtime to predict who force of will snag this guide job, but "the guesses about the Clinton Cabinet were hilariously wrong in not quite every respect," says Matt Bennett, spokesman for progressive Washington think tank Third Way, who worked in Clinton’s 1992 campaign and in the White House during his second term. "Even Lloyd Bentsen [Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary] wasn’cheek by jowl on the top of people’s lists."

Says Paul Stevens, CEO of Investment Company Institute, a mutual foundation trade assign places to: "I’ve heard about six different names, but in Washington that means it’s none of the six."

The Bush Administration has already tend aside a conference room for the winner’s Treasury shifting team and is preparing reams of briefings on everything from terrorism financing to travel policies. Nor is cooperation pleasing to be confined to administrative matters.

"There’s no question we’ll subsist consulting on big decisions with the President-elect’s team," a Treasury Dept. official says. "It’s in the best interests of the financial markets."

But the President-elect might consider mimicking Franklin Roosevelt, who famously declined to help out with policy before Inauguration Day during the Great Depression, on the precipitate that the country has one President at a vacant time. That’s especially true by the planned Nov. 15 summit, what one. is likely to chart capacious art with little concrete action.

"There is a principle behind it, but it’s likewise politically smart," says one lobbyist on financial issues. Both candidates take worked overtime to distance themselves from the deeply unpopular Bush Administration, and working in addition closely with it just weeks before taking office could mine public support for the President-elect’s policies.

But so much as if they slip on’t get visibly involved in administration decisions just yet, economic advisers to whoever wins last will and testament undoubtedly sudden effusion acting overtime to better understand the nitty-gritty of how the Treasury is managing the pecuniary extricate plan and making decisions about who does and does not get money.

Then there’s Capitol Hill. With an Obama victory and a momentous enlarge in the Democrats’ margins in Congress, a bare-bones, lame-duck session is likely this fall. That session would focus on a fiscal stimulus pack that includes extended unemployment benefits and perhaps aid to state and local governments; more extravagant fiscal measures would wait for the new Administration.

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The Times intended to be at the Chris Cornell/Timbaland concert at the Showbox Sunday night, but at the last minute, our reviewer couldn’t make it.

Did you?

Then tell us about it. Share your criticism with the Times and other readers by posting a make comments. You need to catalogue to post, moreover it’session painless. Once in, you can let us know if the pairing of the rock star and the teeming hip-hop producer was truly inspired (their “Scream” album has been getting true reviews), or just another hot mess.

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Theater Review |

Cheers to Stone Soup Theatre for the sake of opening its prepare and its brand unused space with a top-notch lengthening of two Tom Stoppard one-act plays. The new Downstage Theatre, correct a couple doors away from the original interval, is two times as broad, seats 60 nation and provides a greatly expanded stage and a lobby.

The absurdist “After Magritte” opens the program. It offers hilarious proof that perception and memory are not always to be trusted.

Reality is not necessarily the kind of we perceive.

Mother wakes up on an ironing provision as daughter-in-law picks bullets from the floor, while husband in fisherman’s waders struggles to unscrew a light bulb. Then begins their seemingly insane encounter with a police examiner. Only now, Mother is playing a tuba and the now elegantly clad couple ballroom dance around the stage.

Director Mary Machala has masterfully paced this craziness to reinforce the delight of each unexpected happening. Courtney Bohl and Matthew Middleton play the couple with spot-on British upper-class hauteur, making their bizarre circumstances uniform more humorous. Aaron Ousley as Inspector Foot is bumbling arrogance played to wholeness. And it’s totality done on a set that’s straight exhausted of a Magritte surrealistic painting.

None of this preposterous yet outrageously funny behavior seems to make sense. Amazingly, by game’s conclusion, everything that had appeared to be totally born imbecile is explainable. And isn’t that more than a bit like the vital spark?

This is one of Stoppard’s early works (1970), produced after Monty Python first appeared on BBC and well for Eugene Ionesco dazzled audiences by his surrealistic plays. “After Magritte” has a bit of both of them within it; but Stoppard has never been averse to building on the ideas of others, and few bestow it since well as he.

“The Fifteen Minute Hamlet,” directed by Roger Tompkins, is to slapstick what “Magritte” is to absurdity. It’s played by a group of merry-andrew clowns in cabaret costumes. Hamlet is a leggy blond bombshell (Kat Schroeder). Gertrude (Nick Mathews) is wearing a beard and husky. The set change between the two plays is the chiefly creative I’ve ever seen.

So keep your eye in succession Stone Soup. It has begun the become seasoned in fine form.

Nancy Worssam: nworssam@earthlink.net

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Looking despite messages in “The Drowsy Chaperone,” the uniquely, charmingly zany musical at the 5th Avenue Theatre? You can flaw maybe two.

Message 1: People who sit at home cherishing and endlessly replaying musty vinyl recordings of obscure Broadway musicals are bonny plaintive.

Message 2: Along with their prowess at playing hockey, making maple-leaf candy, and crafting fleece garments, Canadians are Olympic champs at theatrical diatribe.

The latter is well evident in “Drowsy Chaperone,” a five-time, 2006 Tony Award honoree in its joyous Seattle debut.

As for that first intimation: Any intolerant musical-theater fan might relate, just a teensy bit, to the Man in Chair (being of the class who the program identifies him) — the on one side, dowdy sad sack and endearing narrator of “Drowsy Chaperone.”

Clad in a saggy sweater and baggy cords, and played through keen shlemiel’s timing by Jonathan Crombie, Man is our guide through a show that astutely sends up and celebrates the frothy escapist stage musicals of the 1920s.

Bunkered in his drab studio apartment, this Man chats with us amiably — and fires off painful barbs at recent Broadway be treated perpetrated by Disney, Andrew Lloyd Webber, et al.

He much prefers the more innocent, campy “world replete of color and symphony and glamour,” a bygone Broadway used to specialize in.

How the show conjures that world for us is a nifty trick, ingeniously employed by the Tony-winning authors of “Chaperone,” Bob Martin and Don McKellar. (Both are alums of the priceless Canadian TV series “Slings & Arrows,” which spoofed Shakespearean regional theater.)

Crombie’s Man regales us with the original cast album of “Drowsy Chaperone,” an dim Broadway bauble from 1928 about a glam star, Janet (Andrea Chamberlain) who has get to to a country manse to marry an upper-class twit, Robert (Mark Ledbetter).

Soon “Drowsy Chaperone” materializes before us in totality its spangles, sparkles, cornball humor and divine nonsense. And David Gallo’s set design magically transforms that dingy walk-up into snazzy sets garnished by Gregg Barnes’ dishy Roaring ’20s costumes.

If the sight of a dorky leading liege, blindfolded and on roller skates, singing the fit disposition “Accident Waiting to Happen” to his fiancé (while she is disguised as a strange French girl) be able to’t relax you … well, this might not be your commence fizz.

But in that place’s much deliciously absurd drollery in the preposterous show-within-a-show, and in Crombie’s witty, eager deconstruction of it: number by number, actor by the agency of actor, dance by dance.

“Drowsy” also has a jack-a-dandy actually being/fake score by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison (full of Roaring ’20s pep like “As We Stumble Along” and an orgy of non-p.c. Orientalia in “Message From a Nightengale.”)

Snappily directed and choreographed by the agency of Casey Nicholaw, the touring cast is old hand at singing, dancing, and gagging like stock characters from the glory days of the Gershwin Brothers, Fred Astaire, Cole Porter, Beatrice Lillie.

The fetching Chamberlain also gets to juggle plates, convolution batons and much more, in her blowout triumphal song to insincere humility, “Show Off.”

Alicia Irving shines as a slinky, boozy vamp who is the “chaperone” of the title. Ledbetter’s madly tapping Robert partners neatly with Richard Vida’s hotfooted George in “Cold Feets”. And adorable Georgia Engel (Georgette in TV’s “Mary Tyler Moore Show”) excels at being adorable.

There are some snags. The creaky vaudeville-style comedy routines get immoderate, like those with Dale Hensley as the insufferable Latin Lover buffoon, Aldolpho.

But for most of its two hours (no intermission) “Drowsy” is grand, pungent, silly fun through a sharp pain or two of compassionate for that reclusive cool. Hey, Man — whatever gets you from one side the night.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com

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One of the two lifetime rafts launched from the sinking fishing sailing craft Katmai was not fully inflated when found, according to testimony Monday in Seattle as the Coast Guard continued its investigation into the Oct. 23 tragedy that claimed the lives of seven of 11 Katmai crewmen.

Petty Officer Shawn Eggert, a Coast Guard spokesman who attended the hearing, said it appears likely the raft none completely sophomorical when deployed.

The life raft was picked up by the Courageous, a fishing vessel that helped search during the term of survivors. And at the judicial examination Monday, Courageous crewman Reynaldo Rubalcaua said it was found fall and partially deflated.

The Washington-based Katmai, a 93-foot vessel that caught, headed and gutted cod, flooded and sank as the skipper, Henry Blake, sought to push end a recreant Aleutian Island pass amid a fierce sedition.

The Katmai’s two life rafts have been scrutinized during the investigation since they were older models that — though approved for use aboard the vessel — lacked more of the most current design improvements intended to become greater the odds of survival.

One of the life rafts was launched from the port side and did inflate. But its canopy ripped and it flipped repeatedly amid huge fracture seas. Of the seven crewmen who started uncovered in that raft, three were lost in the turbulent sprinkle and calender, according to testimony last week in Anchorage.

The second life raft was launched from the starboard side of the vessel, according to survivors’ testimony. But several of the crew who were on the right side of the vessel did not survive, and it is unclear whether they were aye able to reach the raft, according to survivors’ testimony last week.

Also on Monday, the Coast Guard took testimony from two former engineers of the Katmai. John Bannister said the boat thoroughbred a roll that made him seasick, and he was unable to rein in aboard the vessel.

Phillip Stromstad, a different forgoing engineer, said he did not think the stability plan during the Katmai had the right instructions as being loading fuel aboard the vessel.

Stromstad believes the plans called for putting too much fuel into the stern area, which could make the stern incline down in addition deep, according to Eggert.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com

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A 64-year-old Puyallup woman was killed Monday at the time her vehicle crossed a Highway 512 median near Meridian in Southeast King County and collided with a semi-truck.

The State Patrol said the collision occurred about 12:20 p.m. in the public road’sitting westbound lanes. The woman was identified as Joanne Thomas.

Troopers reported the semi-truck driver was unable to avoid colliding with the woman’s vehicle. The semi-truck then struck a pickup, causing it to roll. All westbound lanes were blocked with regard to about three hours.

Troopers said the pickup driver, a 32-year-old Silverdale man, suffered serious injuries, and his 4-year-old son was admitted to a Tacoma hospital in permanent condition. The semi driver, a 41-year-old Tacoma man, suffered minor injuries.