YOUR ECONOMIST POST FOR THE DAY Sorry to inundate you with Economist bloggery, but we’re having a great week. From Democracy in America, our politics blog:

It’s now official: either taste-makers and pundits in New York and Washington are colossally wrong, or the polls are. Either Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are going to prove that it’s still the voters who get to vote, stupid, or these two are going to go down like lead zeppelins soon. But I, for one, am not going to accept for much longer that Republicans don’t know enough about Mr Giuliani (have you heard he’s pro-choice and had gay roommates?) to dump him, or that Democrats don’t yet know enough about Barack Obama (have you heard how charismatic he is?) to dump Ms Clinton. Both of those stories have been written over and over; the secret is pretty well out.