Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader gave a few choice words on the election, emphasis on “few”.
In an act that was part satire and part protest, Nader gave a press conference in which for the first portion he would only respond to reporters’ questions with one word answers, mocking what his campaign describes as the media’s reliance on sound bites.
When asked for one word to describe Obama, Nader responded “clever”, and described the amount of money the Obama campaign has spent as “disgusting”. When questioned what the major policy difference between Obama and himself Nader answered “corporations”. When asked what promises Obama wouldn’t keep Nader replied “change”, “hope”, and “peace”.
When asked about his impression of McCain, Nader answered with “clone” and “Bushlike”. Prompted to predict which Presidential candidate he would take more votes from, Nader responded “McCain” and when pressed to elaborate said “polls”.
Nader answered that the reason he ran this year was “justice” and that he would “maybe” decide to run in 2012.
In the second portion of the conference, Nader reverted to complete sentences and elaborated on his grievance with the media.
“It’s remarkable, when journalism studies this campaign that Joe the plumber will have received more coverage than a Nader-Gonzales campaign rooted in forty years of accomplishment and determination. This is one of the worst hours of the press.”
Nader also blamed the candidates for the coverage, saying that the repetitive nature of the candidates forced the media to resort to trivia.
“The candidates have wasted almost two years in redundancy and evasion and refusal to elaborate on what’s troubling most Americans on the community level.”

Various Washington D.C. voters explain why the chose to vote for Barack Obama. (1:16)

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Ambassador Urbina from Costa Rica gave a briefing on the program of work for the Security Council in the coming month. He underscored the importance of this historical program to open up as many activities as possible.
There will be consultations and a high level event on collective security and armament regulation on November 19th. The President of Costa Rica will be in attendance with ministers of foreign affairs and special envoys. There have been concerns cited by several countries including representatives on the expansive army build-up in East Timor.  The hope is to reach consensus and adopt an outcome.
Ambassador Urbina said: “Talking about arms control in the Organization is a very delicate issue. We Latin- Americans believe that arms control is an achievable goal and we believe that through arms control we could give an incentive to some countries to reduce military expenditures. Our main concern is that the developing world reduce arms expenditures as cited in the United Nations Charter under Article 26 and which the Security Council has not reviewed since 1947.”
Urbina also emphasized the important elections on the International Court of Justice this month. The Ambassador hopes the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will improve with the visit of the Prime Ministers of France and the United Kingdom. Leaders will visit with the goal to improve the relationship between the governments of Rwanda and Congo. There is a fixed date to follow up on the situation of the DRC on the 26th of this month. The issue of rising tensions in Djibouti and Eritrea will be brought to the attention of Council as well.
Daily Update:
Fighting has resumed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, especially in the eastern part of the country.  As of today, violence seems to be limited to rebel held territories. United Nations peacekeepers appear to be trapped in the crossfire but the ceasefire seems to be holding in Goma.
There are currently 5,000 peacekeepers in North Kivu. UN officials are visiting with the Congolese Prime Minister today to discuss the situation of the 60 percent children left homeless. Over 250,000 people have been displaced in the past two months. Nearly 1 million have been displaced since the start of the conflict. The World Health Organization and the World Food Program are calling for more support to meet urgent health needs. The International Criminal Court representatives have expressed serious concern over crimes, thefts and rapes being committed against civilians in the rebel held areas.
Iran’s parliament has impeached the country’s interior minister in a vote widely seen as a defeat for President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad.
In Iraq, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) supported the call today by the Iraqi Council of Representatives (CoR) to allocate specific seats for representatives of Iraq’s minorities. The adoption of the amendment to the electoral law should be seen as a contribution towards furthering the respect for human rights and democracy in Iraq.

Legal Affairs Correspondent Jay Tamboli will be covering the Supreme Court oral arguments in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, where the Court is considering the constitutionality of FCC fines over “fleeting expletives.”
Bureau Chief Ellen Ratner and Political Analyst Bob Ney will be covering the elections from Columbus, Ohio. Pentagon Correspondent S. Dawn Casey is in Chicago today. Legal Affairs Correspondent Jay Tamboli and News Director Lovisa are going to be in Washington DC. UN Correspondent Tala Dowlatshahi will cover the United Nations today and do election coverage with Governor Patterson tonight.
The rest of the Washington bureau will cover election events in Northern Virginia, College Park, Maryland and Washington DC polling places.

Voting line in Alexandria, VA, originally uploaded by talkradionews.

The line at 6 AM, when the polls opened, contained over 600 people.

Photo by S. Dawn Casey

“Internal stability and anti-terrorism are main focuses for the United States in Ethiopia,” said David Kramer, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Kramer was part of a panel of experts at the Center for Strategic & International Studies who held a discussion today on “Human Rights and Governance in Ethiopia.”
“We have seen a number of efforts that are perceived in many circles, in Ethiopia and here, of trying to close the political space in Ethiopia. Of immediate concern is the latest draft of the Charities and Societies Proclamation as well as the Media Law. Both of these run the risk of curbing freedom of speech, civic development and capacity building that we feel are very important to development of a democratic system and a respect to human rights in that country,” said Kramer.
Yoseph Mulugeta Badwaza, Secretary General of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, described the likely impact of the pending legislation known as the “CSO Bill,” which threatens non-governmental organizations that receive foreign contributions in support of human rights, civic education, and peace building activities. Ethiopia is currently the third largest recipient of U.S. aid in the African continent, and the panel agreed this legislation would severely hamper human rights regulation in the country.
Chris Albin-Lackey of Human Rights Watch said the draft of this legislation “isn’t just important in it of itself, it’s also very important as a bellwether and a very alarming signal about the overall direction that Ethiopia is moving in.”

According to James N. Class, assistant vice president of international affairs at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Russia’s acceptance into the World Trade Organization may be aided by pharmaceuticals.
During the Soviet era, Russia had a pharmaceutical industry that provided generic versions of Western drugs. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the status of these factories came into question. “You have 7,00 factories that need something to do,” said Class. While many of these factories failed to meet Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), then President Vladimir Putin made a 2004 statement in favor of meeting a better standard of GMP that put national treatment and WTO ascension on the table.
Research and development (R&D) for medicine has not yet been significantly affected by globalization, leaving the U.S. with 79.5% of the R&D market. However, Russia’s status as an emerging market can help draw R&D to the country, since populations without a history of heavy pharmaceutical use are considered better for clinical testing. Once clinical testing is brought to an emerging economy, it is possible to increase funding for academic research centers. An increase of R&D funding will benefit Russia by stimulating their industries, addressing security concerns, and by giving Russia the means to stop buying overpriced generics from other European countries Class explained.
Class concluded that there are several factors that are blocking Russia’s ascension to the WTO. The efforts have met with domestic resistance at home and the geopolitical situation with Georgia has stalled WTO Working Party meetings that would make the ascension possible. Still, there is a belief that meetings with the Working Party will resume in November, thus removing one of Russia’s obstacles.

For the past year Americans have been losing friends, making enemies and in general, being their old partisan selves over the question of who is best qualified to lead us. We’ve argued about Iraq, taxes, the budget, whether one candidate is a Mini-Me of George Bush and whether the other candidate is an honorary member of the Weather Underground.
It’s now end game. On Tuesday, the shouting, arguments, innuendo, dirty campaigning and the all the rest comes to a screeching halt. We’ll get our president … and then … and then … and then what?
Everybody, left, right, center and unknown agree that this time, it really is different. The meltdown, the looming global recession and the foreign-policy mess have produced a world unlike any other that Americans have faced since the end of World War II. So my question is this: Given the magnitude of the problems we and the world face, does the winner of this presidential contest actually lose?
What is to be done? Signs right now point to a deflation, possibly global. Everyone senses this – falling stocks, home values and commodity prices, layoffs and the threat of double-digit unemployment now point to falling wages. Even the price of gold is down. Can falling prices be far behind?
Everyone knows that what the candidates argued about during their three debates – tax cuts, spending programs, something better for everyone, no exceptions – was not only beside the point, but was almost irrelevant to the problems we face. In truth, whether the winner is McCain or Obama (and I hope it’s Obama), no one knows for sure what either man is going to do about any of this. It’s as if the candidates were sleepwalking. In fact, by not demanding more answers about real problems, so were the media and the public. One might call this the Great Denial Election.
So does the winner lose? If we are headed into a deflation, something this country has not really experienced since the 1930s, what exactly will McBama do about it? More to the point, what can they do about it? It’s as real as rain and as serious as a heart attack – neither McCain nor Obama has addressed the economy on its own terms and proposed anything of substance. It’s as if both men studiously avoided having to tell us the truth.
And what is that truth? Perhaps that we’re up to our eyeballs in debt. Perhaps for a generation, we spent too much and saved too little, pinned our hopes to real-estate investments (something our grandparents never would have understood) or our 401Ks (something our grandparents would have warned us against doing.)
So whether it’s the man from Illinois or the one from Arizona, be prepared to be disappointed. Be prepared to, as the old Yankees used to say, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Because for now, and maybe for the first term of whomever wins, we’re in a new age of austerity, limited missions, curtailed dreams and quite possibly, a declining standard of living.
It promises four years of heartache and broken hopes for Tuesday’s winner. And it will hit hard, because neither McCain nor Obama was able to look into that magic lens and tell the people the economic equivalent of what Winston Churchill explained on May 13, 1940 – that all he could offer the public was “blood, sweat, toil and tears” – especially the part about toil.

Talk Radio News is in immense preparation for the election events tomorrow and is very excited for the culmination of this historic election season. The Washington Bureau will be covering a discussion about human rights in Ethiopia. The Washington Bureau will also be covering a discussion about the World Trade Organization and Russia.