There is an undeniable allure in putting those two words (coined by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, not me) together. Beyond that, I found this story -- about Rachael Ray's controversial Dunkin Donuts scarf-with-jihadi-undertones, which made it through the mad, mad world of the blogosphere all the way to the New York Times today -- to be too fantastical for anything but a Friday Exchange blog posting. Fridays are our designated day for frivolity here on the blog; often we turn to comic stalwarts like John Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Luckily, neither of them had to make this one up (though it seems straight from the Colbert playbook). Nope, it really happened. As recounted succinctly on The Huffington Post:

Dunkin Donuts has pulled a commercial featuring pitchwoman Rachael Ray wearing a scarf because Michelle Malkin and other conservative observers thought the scarf looked too much like a keffiyeh, what Malkin describes as "the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad."

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This from Good, Inc. (Click on the #'s for detail.)

Don't be scared of China--the country is perfectly positioned to be our most powerful ally (lack of democracy notwithstanding, of course). But if there is anything to worry about, it's not China's massive military; it's the economy, stupid.

#10 - Because Nixon went to China and your world was born.
#9 - Because China may be an ancient civilization, but it's a young society that's growing up very quickly--and unevenly.
#8 - Because China's transformation echoes much of America's past: not only the good, but plenty of the bad, and the ugly too.
#7 - Because China's rapid and deep integration into manufacturing means that Chinese products permeate your life--at some risk.
#6 - Because China's demand for resources is altering global markets in ways both profound and perverse.
#5 - Because the panda "huggers" versus "sluggers" debate is a lot of hot air--until Washington scares Beijing into raising your mortgage interest rate five points overnight.
#4 - Because as China builds out its infrastructure, it can set a good or a bad example to developing economies struggling to deal with fragile environments.
#3 - Because China is globalization's general contractor: always happy to take the job and your money, but hard to get on the phone once you discover problems.
#2 - Because China will not be our biggest future enemy but our most important ally.
#1 - Because we're less than five years from a new generation of Chinese leaders with whom a far stronger relationship may well be built.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm fascinated by the promise of prediction markets (like Intrade) that allow users to buy and sell predictions about candidates and elections, among other things. I mean, if we "public will" advocacy types believe that Americans can and should be more involved in setting the political and policy agenda, picking winners, etc., then this sort of system for commenting on the chances of various candidates is a lot more democratic than listening to various TV pundits shout their opinions.

Also, what with the popularity of the wisdom of crowds and all, we thought we'd be getting better, more nuanced information from prediction markets because there are so many more players involved. There are some problems though; it turns out, according to Wired Magazine, that during this primary season prediction markets have made all the same moves as the pundit pros:

Like financial markets, prediction markets are big information processors, distilling the collective wisdom of their traders. But the success of any market depends upon the stakes and the pool of traders. Most prediction markets aren't anywhere near as robust as those they emulate on Wall Street. "They are thin, trading volumes are anemic, and the dollar amounts at risk are pitifully small," market analyst Barry Ritholtz wrote in January. That opens them up to all kinds of problems as information processors. Political markets, for example, have a lot of political junkies but few real insiders or outsiders, so they're not very good at catching something the polls might miss.

There's another unsettling thing about prediction markets used to gauge candidates (or policies). They're quantitative -- totally focused on the odds of who will win, not on who should win or why. It may be possible to grease the wheels of these markets so that they become better predictors, yes, but odds are that excellent odds-making does not an excellent leader make.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wired Magazine revels in its contrarian approach to environmental problems. The magazine has run stories about why the guilt-fired approach to environmental advocacy has run its course; the editors love to catch environmentalists off balance by questioning the conventional wisdom (conserve! go organic! stay local! buy a hybrid! etc.) associated with the movement.

This month Wired spins it another way, arguing that we should be all about prioritizing climate: focus, focus, focus. "Winning the war on global warming means we're going to have to slaughter some of environmentalism's sacred cows," goes the cover story, "Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green." The bottom line, argues Wired, is that we should work to cut carbon emmissions and put the other causes on the back burner, since the effects of climate change would doom any progress we might make on say, biodiversity, anyway.

I appreciate the bold stroke. There are some sacred cows of questionable relevance in the environmental pantheon. The very safeguards that environmentalists have pushed for to protect coastlines, for instance, are hampering efforts to test renewable energy options.

But let's be honest. Bold stroke-ness aside, articles like this one provide Wired's unabashedly nerdy readership with intrinsic satisfaction: silly do-gooder environmentalists have too many causes! What they need is a serious engineer to draw up some specs for this project! It's clearly a left-brained thought exercise, not unlike telling people during wartime to give up painting pictures and writing poetry; it's a war out there!

But people simply will not play down the environmental causes they care about, even if the greater good should actually be the higher priority. We have only to look at Wired itself to see this conflicted dynamic in action: in the same issue that features the cover story calling us to set aside peripheral environmental causes, Wired columnist Clive Thompson warns that man-made sounds are drowning out natural ones that allow flora and fauna to communicate and adapt to their environments. Someone's got to develop "quite tech," writes Thompson. "Earth has a voice; we can't let it go silent."

Quiet, Clive, you're drowning out our plans for cutting carbon.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The GII is motivated by the idea that U.S. foreign policy is improved when the public understands and participates in the decision-making process, to some degree at least. We tend to focus on how the public could and should influence global health, development, the environment, even nuclear disarmament. But I'm not sure I've ever argued (or spent much time considering the possiblity) that the public should delve into intelligence issues. This would seem to be the issue most closed off to influence from the public. Yet in Sunday's Washington Post, Mark Lowenthal, former assistant director of central intelligence and vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, called for the intelligence community, first and foremost, to explain itself to the public.

The U.S. intelligence community has failed. We have failed as a public institution and as a profession. We have failed not because of 9/11, or Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, or Iran's supposed WMD, or the horror stories about renditions and detentions. We have failed because we have not explained ourselves adequately and comprehensibly to the public.

Lowenthal is disturbed by the sorts of promises that political leaders make about "fixing" our intelligence structure to create an airtight system that will guarantee no more 9/11s -- or Iraqs:

The intelligence community's predicament was largely forged by two very different events: the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the failure to find WMD in Iraq. But the lessons that outsiders have learned from these two watersheds have often been glib, fatuous and contradictory.

In 9/11, intelligence was excoriated for "failing to connect the dots" -- a demeaning, inapt concept that, unfortunately, has entered the popular lexicon. But in Iraq, intelligence was blamed for connecting too many dots.

In 9/11, intelligence did not warn intensely enough. But in Iraq, intelligence warned too intensely.

In 9/11, intelligence was faulted for a "failure of imagination." But in Iraq, intelligence had too vivid an imagination.

In 9/11, the failure to share intelligence was seen as a major problem. But in Iraq, too much information -- such as the fabricated reports about mobile bioweapons labs from the Iraqi defector infamously code-named "Curveball" -- was shared.

The subtext here, as we say in intelligence analysis, is that intelligence needs to be right all the time. But it can't be, no matter how blithely the critics expect otherwise. And it's past time we all got used to that...

It is too disturbing to hear the truth: Despite what we have learned, despite the changes that we have made, it could indeed happen again. And it is both comical and distressing to see members of Congress declare that, with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004, the United States was once again made safe.

If I understand Lowenthal's reasoning, he is essentially arguing for a more humble approach to the products intelligence agencies put out. Don't expect too much out of us, he's saying; we can give you useful information, but it's up to you (policymakers) to make the tough calls since intel agencies aren't supposed to be doing this anyway. The agencies do a better job of keeping policymakers generally well-informed with a menu of likely scenarios and options.

Lowenthal is right. The real world is quite unlike an episode of 24; we should not expect to catch terrorists in the act, nor should we promise such things to Americans. But it's easy for intel pros like Lowenthal to argue along these lines when their agencies are taking a beating. I suspect the national intelligence agencies got to be the political force they are today because, not content to gather data and dispense it, they themselves promised more.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here at the Switchblog we think that more peace is better. But how do you know when you have more? It's easy: consult the Global Peace Index (GPI), whose second edition was released in London and right here in Washington yesterday. The Index ranks countries - 140 of them this year - by 24 indicators of domestic and international peacefulness: military exports; domestic murder rates; political instability; percentage of GNP devoted to military expenditures; respect for human rights, etc. Wherever practical, the Index uses existing data sets from reliable sources. To lend that elusive patina of intellectual rigor and high-class respectability, the GPI hired the Economist Intelligence Unit to develop the data sets, measurements, and weighting used to produce the Index.

Like the Commitment to Development Index launched by the Center for Global Development, the purpose of the GPI is partly to provoke healthy competition among countries. GPI co-founder Clyde McConaghy underscored as well the GPI's role in stimulating debate about what makes nations more peaceful, among practitioners, scholars and students in international relations, conflict resolution, and peace studies.

For me the most appealing feature is the simple re-framing of a familiar problem: founder and visionary Steve Killelea noticed that it was easy to find rankings of the world's most dangerous and violent regimes. We know a lot about drivers of conflict. But there was no list of peaceful nations. And no particularly good research that would permit us to isolate drivers of peaceful behavior. So he created it.

Fun facts:

• The US is ranked 97th out of 140.


• The US is behind 16 countries in our hemisphere alone; but we totally out-peaced Colombia and Venezuela. Woo-hoo!


• Iceland wins! They are absurdly tall and gorgeous; peaceful, too.


• Steve Killelea founded a firm whose software runs 80% of the world's ATMs; he is the second largest source of development assistance funding in Australia, behind only the government, and he likes to surf before breakfast.

We will be hearing more about the GPI in years to come: it's a brilliant idea.

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jason Kottke points to an interview with the makers of a documentary on the phenomenon of second-hand clothing in Haiti. Since the 60s, the US has been shipping/dumping its second-hand clothing on less developed nations. The interview is an interesting because Haiti is a place where some aspects of the old system -- like hard currency -- are essentially optional, or gone altogether. The international hand-me-downs are called pepe, for some reason (possibly for the distributor's calls of "paix, paix" to calm crowds when new items arrived), and my favorite question was about the non-clothing pepe:

Are there controls in place to keep people from sending over real junk, such as inoperable gadgets or stained items? Do they recycle unwanted things?

As far as we could tell, there was a lot of "junk" being sent over. Even pepe cars marked "no brakes" on their windshields. However, appliances or cars might be used for their parts. Stained clothing might be used as rags or upholstery stuffing. Haitians are very resourceful in ad-hoc engineering and repurposing. That said, we did see an incredible amount of trash and pollution. It was hard to tell whether this was due to the lack of sanitation services or the flood of discarded pepe.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Frederick Leith-Ross said "Inflation is like sin; every government denounces it and every government practices it." Wait'll he gets a load of the newest money from Zimbabwe:

imbabwe's central bank introduced 500 million Zimbabwe dollar notes worth just $2 on Thursday in the latest sign of spiralling hyperinflation, only a week after issuing the 250 million bill.

The new highest denomination note would buy about two loaves of bread.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think more than most folks about the TSA. I'm afraid of them, and they don't seem to like me very much, so we agree to disagree about me. Still, I participate in screenings at airports not with exasperation but with what I imagine to be the casual enthusiasm of a person who, unlike myself, can't conjure up a sequence of events where I end up in a no-man's-land prison complex sporting an orange jumpsuit.

That said, it sounds like maybe the European oceanographers and researchers who went through this screening for ID cards to work around boats may want a do-over:

A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T. applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card allowing him to work around ships and docks.

What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M. Busch, a security administration official: "I have determined that you pose a security threat."

Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of terrorism, agency officials said Monday.

The officials also said they were sorry about the language, which they may change in the future, but had no intention of withdrawing letters already sent.

"It's an unfortunate choice of words in a bureaucratic letter," said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I approached TA Frank's piece on life as a sweatshop inspector with interest because the continuum of workers, trade and, at bottom, forced labor or effective slavery is part of our work as evaluation partner for the Action Group on Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery.

Among many other things, this group debates the impact of trade and the dilemma it presents for anti-slavery advocates. Instantly, most people react with horror at the thought that goods they purchase may be made by forced or sweatshop labor. This response is not a guarantee that people avoid such goods. They avoid the knowledge of such goods.

Groups debate this question because a natural response to this situation may be to boycott goods from a company or country that allows these terrible conditions to persist. And such a boycott could potentially punish or harm the people suffering the terrible conditions. A very bad job is better than no job, and in some cases working in indentured servitude in one country is better than being forcible repatriated to another where the oppression is worse.

There are value judgments to be made here, and I am not the one to make them. But Frank's piece articulates these questions thoughtfully and a few more to boot. Read the whole thing, but start here, at the end, for one more reason why engaging on labor standards, versus ducking the issue, is critical:

I don't pretend that everything monitoring brings about is for the best. An example: Mattel's factories in China are superb, but workers there often earn less than their peers in shadier factories because their employers confine them to shorter workweeks to avoid paying overtime. Another: You may rightly hate the idea of child labor, but firing a fourteen-year-old in Indonesia from a factory job because she is fourteen does nothing but deprive her of income she is understandably desperate to keep. (She'll find worse work elsewhere, most likely, or simply go hungry.) A third: Small village factories may break the rules, but they often operate in a humane and basically sensible way, and I didn't enjoy lecturing their owners about the necessity of American-style time cards and fifteen-minute breaks. But labor standards anywhere have a tendency to create such problems. They're enacted in the hope that the good outweighs the bad.

One final thought: If you're like me, part of you feels that Peru's labor standards are basically Peru's business. It's our job to worry about standards here at home. But that sort of thinking doesn't work well in an era of globalization. We are, like it or not, profoundly affected by the labor standards of our trading partners. If their standards are low, they exert a downward pressure on our own. That's why monitoring and enforcement have such an important role to play. We don't expect developing nations to match us in what their workers earn. (A few dollars a day is a fortune in many nations.) But when a Chinese factory saves money by making its employees breathe hazardous fumes and, by doing so, closes down a U.S. factory that spends money on proper ventilation and masks, that's wrong. It's wrong by any measure. And that's what we can do something about if we try. It's the challenge we face as the walls come down, the dolls, pajamas, and televisions come in, and, increasingly, the future of our workers here is tied to that of workers who are oceans away.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ah, the promise of a "foreign policy election" is a fickle mistress. We probably should have had one in 2000, but instead, we debated the merits of down-home-itude versus the funny way Al Gore says the word "lockbox." We thought for sure we'd have one in 2004, and rather than actually discuss foreign policy, we sort of made fun of both candidates and re-discussed the merits of the Vietnam War, through the looking glass. And here we are again. Sigh.

The foreign policy we'll debate during this election, besides the pockmarked elephant in the room of Iraq (or the scary mouse of Iran), is the "how irrational are you?" type of policy. Follow me here.

We're not comparing policy papers or sitting at desks talking about issues. We're throwing mud and sniffily promoting innuendo.

This of course never ends well for anyone. In the stink raised by Senator McCain about Hamas, McCain should have known better. Someone is always listening. McCain did -- as a rational person might when momentarily forgetting that running for president is not the action of a rational person -- note that ending the conflict in Palestine might mean talking to the elected leaders of Palestine, a little party called Hamas. And even though the campaign's explanation for this sounds thoughtful and nuanced -- as was Senator Obama's explanation for endorsing US meetings with our enemies but not Hamas -- nuance and thoughtfulness don't thrive in the glare of a campaign.

And that's not the only thing not thriving.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't normally write up little political hits. This post is not exactly an exception, because I'm going to make a larger point. But I want to start with the political hit, because it really helps.

The Congress passed a Farm Bill yesterday. Here's a geographically appropriate link to the Des Moines Register story about the passage. Veto-proof majority, a natural in an election year, when farmers (or big agriculture?) soar in significance as the last group of people with an intact blue collar stereotype, solid representation in Congress and new importance in the wake of a global food crisis.

President Bush wants to veto the bill. Here's the secretary of agriculture, apparently a man named Ed Schafer:

"At a time of record farm income, Congress decided to further increase farm subsidy rates, qualify more people for taxpayer support, and move programs toward more government control."

It's a good question, and I'll come back to it when I'm making my point in a moment.

In February, the House of Representatives voted on a piece of legislation that would curtail about $18 billion worth of tax breaks for oil companies. Tax breaks don't have the exact same affect as subsidies, but on the balance sheets at the end of the day, both of these numbers represent money the US treasury doesn't have.

It nearly goes without saying, President Bush announced he would veto the legislation. Of course, the two industries aren't in perfect sync, but the White House argument that the farmers are making a lot of profits right now would seem also to apply to oil companies. (That link notes that ExxonMobil earned -- profits not revenue -- $1,300 per second for every second of 2007.) What's the difference?

Could it be something as small as the fact that nobody in this administration is running for re-election, and farm friends you take care of while you're in office, but oil friends are forever? Maybe the White House argument, that ending the oil company tax breaks singles out one industry for taxation, makes secret sense somehow, but I can't find it. We tax one industry, one country's exports, one class of goods all the time. The tax code is a wily thing.

In truth, it's rank disingenuous behavior, probably, pure and simple. This president has suddenly rediscovered fiscal restraint as the sun sets on his time in office, but that goes as far as farms but apparently doesn't extend to ExxonMobil

That was the political hit, here's the point: Don't let it be said I'm arguing for preserving farm subsidies. Far from it. If anything, they're worse because not only will they cost me and my children (and their children) billions of dollars forever, they strangle the chances of millions of farmers and potential farmers around the world who -- even as the world prices of food products surge -- still can't compete with subsidized farm goods from the richest country in the world. De facto subsidies to oil companies ring hollow as well, for self-evident reasons. More than anything, are we as a nation in a position to be giving away money to the industries doing the best while others -- people and companies inside the United States -- struggle?

And worse yet, the collateral damage from these warring vetoes presented wonderful opportunities now gone. The legislation reversing oil company subsidies would dedicate the new revenue to non-biofuel renewable resources like wind and solar power, a long overdue commitment. There were little, useful glimmers of hope in the president's scaled down farm bill: As another sometime-member of the Administration, Greg Mankiw, notes in his blog, President Bush proposed freeing a portion of US food aid dollars from the onerous requirement that they be spent on US goods, and instead be directed to buying goods in more local markets to provide food aid. That could mean helping hungry people in Africa by feeding them AND by contributing to their economy. This is opposed to the current situation, where US food is transported at a high cost to feed people while simultaneously contributing to the depressed economic situation that helped make them hungry in the first place.

Maybe next farm bill, in 2013.

Corn photo courtesy of Flickr user Romanlily and used under Creative Commons.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Day There Was No News.

This witty little video of silenced talking heads and an empty news crawl put me into a reverie of my own. Pretty much continually for the last month or so, the world has been offering up too much news -- not that there have been any takers. Since the spams of violence in Tibet and the disturbing but strangely compelling attempts to link China's human rights abuses there with the 2008 Olympic torch relay, the global servings of news have been harder to digest.

As a nation, we've got a lot going on right now. The Democratic presidential nomination battle continues, the war in Iraq and the nearly-ignored war in Afghanistan grind on, the sabers rattle with Iran. Against this turbulent backdrop, inside American homes, a slow-motion financial meltdown is unfolding. Food and fuel prices are surging, credit for all kinds of things is getting harder to get, debt is piling up, and things could get worse before they get better.

So it's forgivable, then, that at this moment, in the wake a Burmese Cyclone complete with bad-guy junta looting international aid and an earthquake in Sichuan province that triggers a strong humanitarian and public relations response from China, Americans will take a moment and relish the day there was no news.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll confess to boosting this from NPR without including a link because it was included there as a bit of a lark. (NPR has just wrapped up a year of almost always interesting, sometimes depressing stories on climate change, so this item being a little tidbit can be forgiven.) The National Geographic Greendex (which may be a terrible name) ranks the "performance of individual consumers, rather than countries as a whole." That would mean that as going green sweeps America, we would have a good score even though the Bush administration has provided less than stellar leadership on these issues, right? Wrong.

Consumers in the United States rank last of all study respondents on the Greendex, scoring last on three out of four of its component measures: transportation, housing, and consumption of goods -- and near the bottom on food.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well maybe not all our jobs. But amidst the steady political drumbeat bemoaning the woes of American workers at the hands of the nefarious Chinese, who do everything cheaper and would never return the favor by creating jobs here, it's particularly strange to read about Chinese businesses creating more manufacturing jobs in America.

Markets are funny things; you never can tell what they will think of next. Why would a Chinese business, like the printing-plate factory owned by Liu Keli of Dongguan, profiled in the LA Times, move to the United States? Public relations ploy on behalf of the Chinese government? Loss leader for access to American consumers? Nope. Economics, pure and simple:

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg -- less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn't have to put up with frequent blackouts.

About the only major thing that's more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

The Chinese boom economy has reached a point at which it is cheaper to make some things in the U.S. And, because the U.S. developed more steadily over a longer period of time, cut fewer corners and created broader wealth among the consumer class, Chinese businesses are coming here and hiring American workers to fill in the gaps that their own manufacturing-focused (some would say obsessed) process of development has missed.

I often find myself irritated when I hear pundits, as I did yesterday, talk about how everyone in Washington these days is a disciple of the "gospel of free trade." Then these pundits, usually fresh from the campaign trail while covering a primary race, talk about the "real face" of free trade -- the people they meet around the country who've been hit by overseas (or NAFTA) competition. These are real people, to be sure. And recently there have been many such stories as China and India develop. But the people Mr. Liu is hiring in South Carolina are just as real (not to mention all the Chinese who have good jobs for the first time).

It's common practice to acknowledge the "theoretical benefits of trade" (those crazy economists with their wacky formulas and theories!) while shaking one's head at the evident folly of such doctrines when practiced in the real world. I don't want to overstate what Mr. Liu is doing; anecdotes are not trends. But where there is incentive for one business, there are probably incentives for many...

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What David Brooks wrote in his recent column, "Combat and Composure," about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is not news -- those themes have more or less been the subtext of each campaign throughout the past months. But Brooks does clarify in my own mind why I sense that Obama is the more appealing candidate -- and potentially the more effective leader in the present circumstances (Full disclosure: I succumbed to Obamamania months ago).

This contrast between combat and composure defines the Democratic race. The implicit Clinton argument is that politics is an inherently nasty business. Human nature, as she said Sunday, means that progress comes only through conquest. You'd better elect a leader who can intimidate. You'd better elect someone who has given herself permission to be brutal.

Obama's campaign grows out of the longstanding reform tradition. His implicit argument is that politics doesn't have to be this way. Dishonesty and brutality aren't inevitable; they're what gets in the way. Obama's friend and supporter Cass Sunstein described the Obama ideal in The New Republic: "Obama believes that real change usually requires consensus, learning and accommodation."

Now, while I suspect Brooks has hit on Clinton's and Obama's essentials correctly, I'm mindful of the fact that columnists must say provocative things, usually overstatements. I think there is some of that here. But such temperaments affect the options open to presidents. Today Sean Wilentz was at The Aspen Institute talking about his new book, "The Age of Reagan." He made a convincing case that Reagan was only able to move past the recommendations of hard-bitten realists in the foreign policy establishment because of his open-minded temperament and essentially utopian belief that he could sit down with Mikhail Gorbechev and work something out. And he did.

Sometimes America needs tough-minded, combat-ready leaders. Not now.

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Kenyans are returning home at last, reports the New York Times. After "languishing for more than four months, since the disputed election set off a wave of ethnic and political bloodshed that pitted neighbor against neighbor and drove upward of 600,000 people from their homes," the Kenyan government is finally making an effort to return people to their homes and communities.

Distrust across ethnic lines still exists, and not all refugees feel that it's safe to return. But via "Operation Rudi Nyumbani, the government is promising food, tools, new houses and even cash for those who return to their farms."

To make its plan work, the government has said, there must be genuine ethnic reconciliation. Over the past several weeks, local administrators have held meetings, seminars and soccer games to build trust between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin.

So how is Kenyan leadership modeling reconciliation? Well, there is a unity government that carves out a place for both Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, but protocol tiffs plagued their first weeks sharing power. We can only hope that a homecoming for many Kenyans will drive a new status quo that pressures both leaders to press beyond electoral maneuvering to begin governing.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Good Magazine does some cool things with infographics. The image to the right is a small corner of a gargantuan graph detailing the value of U.S. government contracts awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2006. The graphic breaks out contracted spending by sector (air transport, medical, power, military training, etc.) and by the ten companies that receive most in contract funds. Never have I seen so much taxpayer money mapped away...

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week the New York Times offers a bounty of slideshow features touching on interesting trends in the area of globalization.

First read the culture shock/migration/remittances piece from Jason deParle. Then stroll through Brian Sokol's haunting photos of life in Sindhekela.

Next check out Tamara Abdul Hadi's photos of "Education City" in the United Arab Emirates. The subtle, charming images of American collegiate life, shoehorned into the religious-status conscious world of Qatar will leave you scratching your head. The captions tell a good story about the trends pushing US universities to recruit students in the Middle East and the migrant workers (both professors from the US and nearly everyone else doing every service job in the Emirates) who fuel the enterprise.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This weekend, I attended an interesting symposium with a discussion about major factors facing the next president of the United States. This isn't a remarkable thing, necessarily. It feels sometimes like panels on the future of foreign policy are as common as hay fever this spring. I wouldn't be surprised to hear foreign policy insights from my Realtor of babysitter in the days ahead. Nothing new, of course, but still.

So I confess to expecting more of the same from this panel. And then they started talking.

It wasn't a wondrous revelation or anything as sweeping as that. It was the view, some might say, from the other side. It was more cynical, and more leftist, and more anti-elite than we hear or discuss a lot here.

The content itself isn't the most important part of it. I know where to find these views if I'm interested. I have a lot of cynicism to spare, and nothing these folks -- advocates for Africa, drug policy reformers, anti-globalization activists -- had to say was revolutionary. Rather, it was just so unheard-of these days. I am literally drowning in mainstream, narrow-cast, rather centrist foreign policy.

It was like slipping into a dorm lounge in 1996. And this isn't a criticism. As much as I sit here, at the Aspen Institute, feeling like we're in the heart of the Foreign Policy Universe (FPU), we're really about an eighth of a degree left of center of the mainstream foreign policy safe zone. We don't discourage, or undermine, or ridicule radical ideas here; they're self-policed out of the system.

These folks would have none of this, and they don't get a lot of chances to come sit around our table and talk their talk. They don't, for the most part, see foreign policy as something that has anything to do with consensus. (Here's a place where I agree with them more than others.) They don't think the White House particularly cares about the concerns of civil society in the US, or of our legislature, or of (heaven forfend) civil society in some other country country. To them, foreign policy decisions are made in back rooms, with political and business interests at the fore and little else under discussion.

They suffer from the position-paradox I find hinders a lot of advocates; that is they believe that the issue to which they stand closest is the most important. A disturbing but necessary feature of mainstream foreign policy advocacy is the ability to simultaneously hold your issue as important enough to get you out of bed in the morning, but not so overly important that people working on other issues think you're smug or dismissive. The panel I saw over the weekend was rich with certainty. Without addressing their issue, the ship would surely sink.

Contrast this with, say, a talk given the other day by the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright here at the Aspen Institute. (Sec'y Albright is an Institute trustee.) She was discussing her recent book, a tome ostensibly prepared as a memo to the president-elect about how to "restore America's reputation and leadership." Albright is the essence of establishment Democratic foreign policy, I'd say. The difference between Albright and the panelists I saw Saturday goes far beyond content or even position on a given issue. The attitudes and perspectives on foreign policy issues are where the deepest division lies.

To Saturday's panelists, foreign policy remains a spectator sport where a choice few have busted through the elite's barricaded doors and are agitating loudly that more crash through and join them. To Albright and others in the mainstream, such histrionics are unnecessary. There is a calmness to the foreign policy mainstream-dwellers as they move through the issue universe advocating passionately, but without bomb-throwing or boat-rocking. They comfortably have disagreements but for the most part dwell in a common universe with others in the same issue area.

Listening to the panelists Saturday, I felt nostalgia for when I was more open to their ideas, and a twinge of regret for being so dismissive of their less ludicrous notions. After semi-consciously ignoring these views for a few years, you can notice the grain of truth at the center of each somewhat wild-eyed notion. It's worth looking for.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof notes in his recent column, '"Save the Rainforest" bumper stickers don't sustain local families.' He writes about a partnership between American businessman Douglas McMeekin and local Juan Kunchikuy that's working on that longstanding problem. What's the incentive to do the right thing?

There are -- or at least there should be -- several choices for locals tempted to clear cut in order to increase their income.

"People have to make a living," Mr. McMeekin said. "But they can chop down 50 acres of forest to make a pasture, or they can earn the same income by chopping down 5 acres and planting cacao."

So his organization, Yachana Foundation, is distributing high-quality cacao seedlings to encourage farmers to manage small plots that leave most of the jungle intact. Yachana also operates a factory that buys the cacao and turns it into mail-order chocolate.

Yachana also encourages family planning -- to reduce population pressures that lead to deforestation -- and runs a new private high school to train young people from throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon. The 120 students in the school get a superb education with English taught by American volunteers; the first graduation will be in July.

I'm always intrigued when NGOs, social entrepreneurs, businesses or whoever else finds a way to reconcile objectives across problem areas. Too often, the environmental needs are top of mind, while local human needs are ignored, or vice versa. We need case studies, like this one, showing how to avoid such dichotomies.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Employing a deadpan narrator talking us through rapid-fire video splices pulled from TV talk shows, debates, speeches, Stephen Colbert, and Lord of the Rings, to name a few sources, Slate has created a marvelous video show: "The Entire Democratic Presidential Race... In Seven Minutes."

We get the opening pitches from eight hopefuls, Florida/Michigan hi jinx, drivers licenses for immigrants v. Lou Dobbs, pre-caucus Iowa excitement and post-caucus shock (and even more excitement), pre-primary emotion in New Hampshire, endorsements large and small, fundraising probes, "Yes We Can," writers strike (and consequent overpopularity of CNN), accusations of plagiarism, Bill Clinton weirdness, inappropriate adviser comments, snatches of see-saw campaign ads, and on and on.

This stream of homages sparked two realizations for me. 1) The things candidates and pundits say in all seriousness are at least as funny as anything the writers for Jay Leno or David Letterman come up with. 2) It's amazing how dated footage from a few months ago can look today. Makes one wonder what, among all of this cleverly compiled and amusingly narrated material, will really make the difference.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)