Best Political Ad Ever

In case anyone hasn't seen the Chuck Norris-Mike Huckabee ad:

The World Is Getting Better

There's a great deal of pessimism about the state of the world today. For example, I was having a conversation with a very intelligent friend of mine, a senior politics major, who stated, with an air of complete confidence, that world-wide poverty was "getting worse." When I asked her how she knew this, she looked confused, then asked, "Isn't it?"

This article in Foreign Policy has the answer: no.

The stats: In 1981, 1.5 billion people were living on less than $1 a day (or, to be more exact, the World Bank’s poverty line of $1.08 in U.S. 1993 dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity). By 1990, that figure had fallen to 1.25 billion people. By 2004, the extreme poverty rate had fallen to 18.4 percent, or just 985 million people. If current trends continue, the world will achieve the Millennium Development Goal of cutting in half—from 32 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2015—the portion of the population in the developing world that ekes by on less than $1 a day.

Need to cheer up? Read the whole thing. It has four other ways the world is getting better, as well.

The Upside of the Declining Dollar

As much as the declining value of the dollar hurts the ol' pocketbook when vacationing overseas (or buying imported goods), it's worth remembering that a weaker dollar isn't all bad. It improves the competitiveness of US exports abroad. Check out this BBC article on the problems that (European, government-subsidized) Airbus is having competing against (American) Boeing, because Boeing's planes are now relatively cheaper.

Kerry and Edwards: Not on the Same Page

From the New York Times:

John Edwards, accepting his party’s nomination for vice president, roused a cheering crowd at the 2004 Democratic convention with the kind of buoyant refrain that had become his trademark: “Hope is on the way.”

The next night, wanting to give the American people something more tangible, John Kerry offered his own pledge, one intended as the ticket’s new slogan: “Help is on the way.”

But Mr. Edwards did not want to say it.

So the running mates set off across the country together with different messages, sometimes delivered at the same rally: Mr. Kerry leading the crowd in chants for “help,” Mr. Edwards for “hope.” The campaign printed two sets of signs. By November, the disagreement had been so institutionalized that campaign workers handed out fans with both messages, on flip sides.

No wonder the flip-flopping charge stuck. In all seriousness, though, the dysfunction displayed here is just depressing. That's why I find myself leaning more and more towards Hillary. She's the best at what the Dems are worst at: competent campaigning.

Chavez's Socialist Revolution Continues

From the New York Times:

In two weeks, Venezuela seems likely to start an extraordinary experiment in centralized, oil-fueled socialism. By law, the workday would be cut to six hours. Street vendors, homemakers and maids would have state-mandated pensions. And President Hugo Chávez would have significantly enhanced powers and be eligible for re-election for the rest of his life.

I wonder how all this socialist experimentation will turn out?

But walking into a grocery store here offers a different view of the changes washing over Venezuela. Combined with price controls that keep farmers from profitably producing some basic foods, climbing incomes of the poorest Venezuelans have stripped supermarket aisles bare of items like milk and eggs. Meanwhile, foreign exchange controls create bottlenecks for importers seeking to meet rising demand for many products.

Fix it

Looks like the VA needs to fix its disability-rating system. Soon.

Hugo Chavez in action: The disfunctional nature of Venezuela's national oil company

The New York Times Magazine has a well-balanced read on the plight of Venezuela's national oil company. Chavez has funneled oil profits away from reinvestment, like maintenance and new exploration, into social programs for the poor (and a slush fund that is used to buy weapons). Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences rears its head:

Whatever success the missions have at helping the poor may be dwarfed by the grotesque distortions in the economy as a whole. Inflation is officially at 16 percent but is most likely higher, according to Orlando Ochoa, the economist, who is usually critical of Chávez. He says that in the basket of goods and services used to measure inflation, just under half the items are sold at government-controlled prices. Many goods simply can’t be bought at those prices, and consumers must pay double the price in a street market. Or the goods can’t be found at all, their producers forced out of business by price controls. Beans and sugar were hard to find cheaply when I visited Caracas in September; fresh milk and eggs hard to find at all. Recently, people had to line up for five hours to get a liter of milk. One proposal in Chávez’s constitutional referendum could increase inflation much further by abolishing the autonomy of the Central Bank and giving the president power over Venezuela’s international reserves. The proposal would also essentially allow Chávez to print money.

Why famous people like to hang out with Hugo Chavez

Anne Applebaum explains:

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia, and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention, and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration John Reed once felt—the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all his wealth, fame, media access, and Hollywood power, Sean Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

As for Venezuelan politics, or the Venezuelan people, they don't matter at all. The country is simply playing a role filled in the past by Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua—a role to which it is, at the moment, uniquely suited. Clearly, Venezuela is easier to idealize than Iran and North Korea, the former's attitude to women being not conducive to fashion models, the latter being downright hostile to Hollywood. Venezuela is also warm, relatively close, and a country of beautiful waterfalls.

Most of all, Venezuela's leader not only dislikes the American president—so do most other heads of state—but refers to him as "the devil," a "dictator," a "madman," and a "killer." Who cares what Chávez actually does when Sean Penn isn't looking? Ninety years after the tragedy of the Russian revolution, Venezuela has become the "kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer" for a whole new generation of fellow-travelers. As long as the oil lasts.

Nothing makes me madder* than seeing so-called "liberals" wining and dining with dictators. Of course, Sean Penn describes himself as a radical, so maybe he is unconcerned with such classical liberal ideals as free speech, the protection of private property, etc. This phenomenon is not limited to Chavez by any means. Fidel Castro is another common object of hero-worship. One of the few weak points in Michael Moore's excellent Sicko is his unquestioning adulation of Castro's Cuba. Hey, liberals- if you want to make a point about socialism, why don't you do it by hobnobbing with the president of a Scandinavian country?

*Technically untrue, of course. For example, a genocide like Darfur makes me madder. It's a figure of speech, people!

"Setting back the clocks can be a killer..."

That's the actual title of an article on cnn.com right now. If this had been written, oh, six years ago, Michael Moore surely would have included this in Bowling for Columbine, which wasn't so much about guns as it was about the rampant fear-mongering in the American media.

Zoe's Ark and the child kidnapping controversy

This whole Zoe's Ark controversy is getting weirder and weirder:

DAKAR, Senegal, Nov. 1 — Virtually all of the children a French aid group tried to fly out of Chad last week had been living with family members in villages and were not orphans of the Darfur conflict, as the group claimed, the United Nations said today.

That finding was based on interviews conducted with some of the 103 children as the government and aid groups try to figure out where they came from and how to reunite them with their families. The plane carrying the children was stopped moments before it was scheduled to take off from Abéché, a small, dust-choked city that is the base of operations for dozens of aid groups working in eastern Chad.

Questions abound. Why on earth are they trying to steal these children? Why not bring home some actual orphans? What about the employee's of Zoe's Ark? When they joined the organization, did they realizing they were going to be stealing kids? If not, when did they find out? I hope they can get to the bottom of this mess soon, and find the kids' real parents.

Oink, oink, oink: Tax dollars for mule museum?

Talk about government pork:

In tiny Bishop, California, five hours north of Los Angeles, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California, wants to build a museum honoring the mule.

McKeon has requested a $50,000 earmark to explore the possibility of building a museum in the town that every Memorial Day weekend holds the biggest mule celebration in the United States.

The Decline of the Conservative Evangelical Movement

New York Times Magazine examines the recent political crisis of the conservative evangelical movement:

Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans.

The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.

One positive trend here is that the next generation of evangelical leaders are not just obsessed with gays; they're looking at the rest of the bible too:

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

The End of an Injustice

The Georgia Supreme Court has freed Genarlow Wilson, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old when he was 17.

An Ethical Dilemma of Monumental Proportions

At 8 o'clock tonight, Red Sox play the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. At the same time, my fraternity is having one of its important meetings of the year. What's a loyal Red Sox fan and Phi Kappa Sigma brother to do?

UPDATE: I've arrived at a compromise: have my mom text me the score every fifteen minutes. Go Sox!

Rivers, reservoirs drying out in the American West

Water managers are scrambling for solutions as water levels drop in the arid West. The combination of cyclical drought and, probably, global warming-induced drought, are creating a dire situation:

Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

Read the whole thing.