A friend of mine is currently taking a class on globalization at Harvard. Along with Larry Summers and Michael Sandel, the class is also being taught by Thomas Friedman.

When I sent my friend an amusing review of Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, he responded with the following:

i didn't know much about [friedman] before the class but have pretty much been underwhelmed by him. he's clearly outclassed by summers and sandel...every time friedman talks he repeats the same jargon about the world being flat, the internet solving every problem globalization presents, mozilla being proof of this, etc.

I couldn't help but think back to this assessment while reading Friedman's most recent Times column, "A Man without a Plan."

Although the piece is about America's educational system, Friedman nonetheless mentions how the world is flat three times:

--America's biggest challenge today? "The flattening of the global playing field."

--Why do we need to develop our own talent? Because "we Americans can't rely on importing the talent we need anymore -- not in a flat world."

--What should President Bush do? Produce "a comprehensive U.S. response ... to focus on developing talent in a flat world."

He's a little better about it here, but what irks me about Friedman's 'flat world' rhetoric is not so much his point -- that the dramatic rise in information technology has provided unprecendented access to global markets -- as the relative ignorance with which he's been proffering it. From the currency crises in southeast Asia to the massive layoffs here at home, the last decade is littered with examples of the destruction that globalization can yield. Yet Friedman himself seems willfully unaware of the gravity of the situation. He continually seizes on the benefits of globalization while refusing to adequately address its more baneful consequences. If globalization were alcohol, Friedman would be that guy at the party who's become embarrassingly drunk and now insists on letting everyone know it.

Where his latest column is concerned, the real shame of Friedman's bromitic prose is that it drowns out his most important point. True to form, that point comes not from him but Summers:

"For the first time in our history, we are going to face competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China and Asia," President Lawrence Summers of Harvard told me. In order to thrive, "it will not be enough for us to just leave no child behind. We also have to make sure that many more young Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them. How we meet this challenge is what will define our nation's political economy for the next several decades."

Never mind our educational system; Summers is tacitly proposing that we radically overhaul the educational philosophy which underlies it. Needless to say, that's no small task. It means altering how we currently reconcile the principle of equal opportunity with the reality of an unequal distribution of natural talent.

All the more pity, then, that Friedman couldn't discuss Summers' proposal in anything more than the limited terms of his own 'flattened' vocabulary.

Via The National Review, evidently Al Franken's ratings are in decline:

Between the hours of 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., the period that includes Al Franken's program, Air America drew a 1.4-percent share of the New York audience aged 25 to 54 in Winter 2005. That number is the latest in a nearly year-long decline. In Spring of 2004, Air America's first quarter on the air, it drew a 2.2-percent share of the audience. That rose to 2.3 percent in the Summer of 2004, then fell to 1.6 percent in the Fall of 2004, and is now 1.4 percent — Air America's lowest-ever quarterly rating in that time and demographic slot.

I have to say I'm not really surprised by this. As I've written before, one of the defining traits of liberals is that they need to be convinced that they've been convinced; they need to feel that they've arrived at their beliefs via persuasion rather than dogma. For that reason, any message that mixes rhetorical posturing with blind fury -- and not just in radio, but in any media -- is bound to fail if directed towards a liberal audience.

To illustrate this, I can pretty much just cite myself. I happen to like Franken, and probably agree with the majority of his views. He also gave a class day speech at my graduation that was so hilarious it had my mother in tears. If he has a target audience, I'm surely among it. Yet I don't have any desire listen to his show. Why? Because I don't need someone to remind me why I believe what I do. Frankly, it's a waste of my time.

As a result I see Air America's ratings decline not as a failure but a success. If the liberal establishment thought it was a good idea to pound home the party line, they've now learned better. The liberal base isn't the mindless mass it presumed. Nor should it be.

Note: This originally ran as "The Franken Flop."

From the AP:

The number of secret court-authorized wiretaps across the country surged by 19 percent last year, according to court records which also showed that not a single application was denied.

State and federal judges approved 1,710 applications for wiretaps of wire, oral or electronic communications last year, and four states -- New York, California, New Jersey and Florida -- accounted for three out of every four surveillance orders, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts...

In non-terrorist criminal investigations, federally-approved wiretaps increased 26 percent in a year, to 730 applications, while state judges approved 930 wiretaps, an increase of 13 percent.

Officials said most of the applications, some 1,308, were for drug investigations.

Don't look now, but the statistics here contain a rare testament to beaurocratic coherence: roughly 75% of the wiretaps were related to drug investigations, while roughly 75% also came in the states with the most heavily trafficked ports. There are certainly other factors at play, but that ain't too shabby, especially for Uncle Sam.

The problem is, however, there's one number that's a little too cohesive: 100% of requests were granted.

Now, a perfect success rate would be one thing if the application for wiretaps was highly regulated by law. But this isn't a matter of merely having the right papers in order. In fact, the entire application process exists in a vast grey area: you don't apply for a wiretap unless you have "enough" evidence to be suspicious, but not so much that you -- or at least a jury -- would be convinced.

As a result, when it comes to wiretapping the burden of discretion falls on the judiciary.

Yet that is precisely what makes the 100% rate so troubling: since the independent oversight that the judiciary provides secures the legitimacy of the whole process, the fact that no applications were denied calls into question the independence of the judges and the legitimacy of the process overall. Either our government has excercised exceptional restraint in choosing when they apply for wiretaps, or the judiciary has abdicated its legislatively-mandated role.

Alas, given the marked increase of federal applications in particular -- 26% more than last year -- it would seem to be the latter.

Not that you can blame the judges though: after all, if they actually did do some deliberating, wouldn't that constitute inappropriate "activism"?

Update: In general I try to eschew straight-up ranting in favor of being at least somewhat constructive or informative. Now that I've re-read this though, it would seem I was too tired last night to make that distinction. To those who were bothered by it, my apologies.

Thanks to this post by John Quiggin, I've spent much of the day mulling the current state of collegiate athletics.

Although Quiggin doesn't mention it, that state can pretty much be summed up by one curious fact: in 2003, the highest paid employee of our federal government was not the President or the Secretary of Defense or the Chief Justice; rather it was the head football coach at Army.

Granted, only 35% of that salary came from taxpayer funds, while the rest was subsidized by the "Army Atheltic Association". But even that 35% percent -- around $210,000 -- was still more than Bill Clinton ever made.

So why was Army's football coach being paid a presidential salary? The immediate answer is that that was the market value for someone of his caliber in his position. (The coach, Bobby Ross, was a former NFL head coach.)

Yet why was the market value so damn high in the first place?

Here things gets a little more complicated, but the general answer is that there's really no where else for all the money to go. True, part of the revenue that collegiate athletics generates does go to athletic scholarships, and part to the universities themselves. But when it comes to the actual producers of that revenue -- the 12 basketball players, say, and their 4 or 5 coaches -- only the head coach is allowed to negotiate his or her salary in a free market. As a result, when any school seeking a higher share of the multi-billion dollar college sports industry feels compelled to outbid other schools for proven coaches, the salaries quickly get ridiculous.

How to correct that imbalance I'm not really sure. The most obvious answer is to drop the pretense of amateurism and just start paying the players directly under a labor contract; but if you dropped that pretense, it isn't at all certain that the revenue will remain.

The only further commentary I have to offer is that in the long-term there's probably going to be something of a natural correction to all this. Since the rise in merit-based scholarships and the increase in female enrollment didn't really take hold until the 80s and even 90s, my guess is that as those classes begin to hit their peak earnings potential in the next few decades, the pattern of alumni giving will change accordingly. At Harvard, for instance, alumni giving after the Yale game still sways significantly enough -- from what I've heard, roughly $20 million more in winning years -- for the development office to sit up and take notice. Yet the ones writing the checks mostly graduated in the 60s, when Harvard was still all-male and its students were much more likely to have viewed their admittance as a birthright. They may care a lot about football, but it's highly unlikely that those who've followed them will.

Admittedly, Harvard is a unique case, and a sizeable portion of athletic revenue does indeed come from the NCAA's massive television contracts. But as big as those contracts are, alumni giving still tops it considerably. For that reason it is the alumni who still control how much and in what ways a university can grow. The more alumni bodies change over the next few decades, my guess is that what they earmark their money for will as well.

One shame about the "Freedom Fries" nonsense prior to the Iraq war is that it became taboo in liberal circles to criticize French policies at all. The Republicans were going to such absurd lengths in inveighing against Chirac's government that speaking out against France meant aligning oneself ipso facto with the blind contempt of American conservatives.

However understandable that reflexive correlation was at the time, it has regrettably persisted until today -- and needs to end now.

There are several reasons for why I say that, but at present I'll just stick to two recent AP stories on France's involvement in the Rwanda genocide.

The first came out on Sunday, and concerns a French soldier who has accused the French military of training les genocideurs civils:

A former French soldier said Friday that he saw French troops training Rwandan militias in 1992, two years before those same civilian militias took a leading role in a genocide in the tiny central African country.

...The French government, which had close ties with the extremist government, has denied training Rwandan civilians, and the Defense Ministry refused to comment Friday on the allegations made by Thierry Prungnaud, a former noncommissioned officer in the French Army.

"In 1992, I saw French military members training Rwandan civilian militias to shoot a gun," Prungnaud told France Culture radio. He said he had been sent to Rwanda that year to train the presidential guard.

"I am categorical. I saw it."

Then yesterday the AP released this piece on a lawsuit about to be filed against the French military:

...A civilian investigatory panel, made up of lawyers, historians and leaders of human rights groups, [has] issued a 600-page report alleging that French forces helped the attackers more than the victims.

The U.N. was alleged to have been a "passive" accomplice to the crimes, while France was an "active" participant, said Francois-Xavier Verschave, a panel member from human rights group Survie.

That France was involved in the Rwandan genocide has been known ever since it occurred; what's new is that enough dust has settled that the knowledge of that involvement can now take a more legal form.

Not surprisingly, a few of the more conservative sites out there have picked up on this story. While I disagree with their "I-told-you-so" tone, they're very much in the right to criticise France for this: genocide is obviously a very serious affair, and by all accounts (except the French military's) France has been implicated in one.

So why has the American left remained so noticeably silent? I wish I could give an acceptable answer, but the truth is I can't. No matter how appealing France's liberal politics may be to many in the U.S., there's no excusing genocide -- or merely overlooking it -- simply because it was perpetrated by a friend.

You know something is relatively official when the New York Times reports it. And since the Times published an article on Arianna Huffington's group blog yesterday, now's probably the time to mention that I was invited to join it.

Arianna's site is being syndicated nationally, so once it goes public I'll probably end up posting longer commentaries there, while publishing shorter, more frequent pieces here. In that case the goal for Democratic Vista would be to act as a kind of news filter for the headlines and quotes I think are most interesting or important. Obviously, all that could change quickly, but as of now it's how I imagine things will play out.

Finally, thanks again to all those who have been reading the site, offering feedback, and helping to spread the word. I never imagined I would gain any kind of readership this quickly, so thank you for your support!

As some of you know, I spent the last ten days in France. Although most of that time was spent trying to keep my students out of trouble, I did at least manage to scribble down a few thoughts.

Without further adieu:

1) EU federalism is in serious trouble. Although France is a principal architect of European integration, all the recent polls show France voting no in its May referendum on the EU constitution. The 'oui' campaign is even doing so poorly that last week president Chirac all but announced he would sack his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, if a 'non' vote actually came to pass. In the short-term the French themselves wouldn't be much affected by a no vote, but the regional fallout would be enormous, particularly in Eastern Europe.

2) 'Gagnons les Jeux' is plastered everywhere, from soda cans to public monuments. Personally, I don't really care who gets the 2012 Olympics. But should it go to Paris, they really need to change their marketing strategy: you know you've gone awry when even I can tell that something is tacky. Adorning baroque architecture with technicolor neon lights just isn't a good idea.

3) There's a curious contrast in France where memorializing war is concerned. Visit Verdun, where 500,000 French soldiers died in WWI, and you'll find a relatively quiet town with an austere ossuary looking over rolling battlefields. Visit Normandy, where 50,000 allied soldiers died in WWII, and you'll find countless cemeteries, battle sites, and museums -- as well as a thriving tourist industry. Much of the contrast has to do with the clear historical significance of the Normandy invasion, whereas the battle of Verdun accomplished little for anyone. But the extreme commercialization of Normandy also has a lot to do with the peculiar nature of American remembrance generally. For us, history is yet another commercial domain, often in ways that would be anathema to others. That we ought to be reproached for this I'm not prepared to say; but I do think we should at least debate our habit of mixing profit and past before we instinctively revert to it again (in a place like, say, lower Manhattan).

4) As with Austria, the population of France is noticeably old. There are a host of reasons for this, but in my view the most salient is that the generation which made the case for sexual liberty in the 60s and 70s effectively bred themselves out. This is not to say that their case was misguided; now as then, the government has no right to interfere with the sexual lives of consenting adults. It is to say, however, that those who preach the value of sexual liberty need to be aware of the demographic gap it has historically led to. Offsetting that gap by increasing immigration isn't a big deal in the U.S., where the history of immigration is a defining one. But in countries such as France or Germany -- which continue to identify themselves, culturally if not politically, according to ethnicity -- it's another story altogether.

5) The latest evidence of globalisation: "Red Sox Nation" is everywhere. From the Eiffel Tower to Mont-Saint-Michel, there wasn't a single place I went where someone wasn't wearing a Sox hat or t-shirt. No doubt a large part of that has to do with their recent championship, as well the uniquely visceral pride of their fans. But even had Boston won ten or twenty years ago, I highly doubt I'd have encountered as many Sox fans trekking through France. While I may not agree with Thomas Friedman's unbridled optimism for globalisation, there's no denying that more people are travelling more places than ever before.

Fifty years ago today, Ray Kroc started up a company in Des Plaines, Illinois that would later become synonymous with globalization. As some of you may know, that company was McDonald's.

I'm tempted here to write an encomium on great french fries, but that would be missing the point. The spectacular success McDonald's has enjoyed is as much a result of the emergence of a new global order as it is its own business practices. Unlike fifty years ago, there now exists a vast community of countries with compatible legal and proprietary systems; McDonald's has simply done the best job of exploiting new markets as soon as they emerge in stable form.

The greatest testament to all this? In April 1955, Time had only recently run a "Shake-Up in the Kremlin" cover story on Nikita Khrushchev. Today, the most frequented McDonald's in the world is in, of all places, Russia.

In reading up on the case of Maher Arar this afternoon, I couldn't help but think back to a great quote a friend of mine recently sent:

The Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process of law applies to 'any person' who is accused of a crime by the Federal Government or any of its agencies. No exception is made as to those who are accused of war crimes or as to those who possess the status of an enemy belligerent. Indeed, such an exception would be contrary to the whole philosophy of human rights which makes the Constitution the great living document that it is. The immutable rights of the individual, including those secured by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, belong not alone to the members of those nations that excel on the battlefield or that subscribe to the democratic ideology. They belong to every person in the world, victor or vanquished, whatever may be his race, color or beliefs. They rise above any status of belligerency or outlawry. They survive any popular passion or frenzy of the moment. No court or legislature or executive, not even the mightiest army in the world, can ever destroy them. Such is the universal and indestructible nature of the rights which the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment recognizes and protects when life or liberty is threatened by virtue of the authority of the United States.

--Justice Murphy, in Yamashita

Is there any more eloquent description of the meaning and value of human rights than this?

From a capital punishment argument that Lawrence Solum quotes:

Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect, preventing as many eighteen or more murders for each execution. This evidence greatly unsettles moral objections to the death penalty, because it suggests that a refusal to impose that penalty condemns numerous innocent people to death. Capital punishment thus presents a life-life tradeoff, and a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, that form of punishment...The widespread failure to appreciate the life-life tradeoffs involved in capital punishment may depend on cognitive processes that fail to treat "statistical lives" with the seriousness that they deserve.

You know you're getting desperate when you start relying on negative statistical research to justify your claims. Unlike positive statistics -- such as the mean age of homicide victims -- negative statistics can never yield empirical certainty. They begin with a hypothetical premise and yield purely speculative results.

Yet when it comes to state-sanctioned executions, the finality of death demands moral certainty on the part of the state. As a result, if the state relies on a philosophical argument to produce that certainty, then the argument in question must be logically consistent; and if it relies on an empirical argument, then a) the statistical evidence offered must be positive, and b) the methodology used cannot have an innate margin for error.

When it comes to those latter qualifications, a life-life argument using negative statistics plainly doesn't cut it.

This week's Economist has two pieces that appear unrelated but in my view have a good deal to do with each other.

The first is a column on centrism in America called "Slumbering On." Its basic point is that if 3 out of every 10 Americans are Democrats, 3 are Republicans, and 4 are independents, then the independents must be sleeping. I wouldn't quite put it in those terms; independents are a decidedly non-homogenous lot. But if we are talking instead about conservatives, liberals, and moderates, then I'd agree with the general sentiment. At present the American landscape is so cluttered around opposing idealogical poles that moderates would indeed appear to be sleeping.

Which raises the question of why. What exactly is going on that moderates exert proportionately less political influence than they should? I've yet to see a convincing answer, but at the least there's clearly some kind of political magnetism at play: moderates who prioritize civil liberties over economic growth are drawn towards the Democratic Party, while moderates who prioritize economic growth over civil liberties are drawn towards the GOP.

Yet that of course only reframes the question. For why do moderates have to choose between political poles at all? Why isn't there a more centrist party which defends civil rights even as it practices fiscal responsibility?

Again, I don't really have a full answer to that. But the second Economist piece I want to mention -- its special report on "The Economics of Saving" -- may go a long way toward suggesting how a solution could arrive. Bear with me as I explain.

In its crudest form, savings is inversely proportional to consumption and directly proportional to investment. The more you save, that is, then the less you consume and the more you invest; the less you save, the more you consume and the less you invest. From a macroeconomic perspective, the trick for a society is finding the point at which people are saving and investing enough to generate economic growth, but not so much that they're no longer consuming enough goods and services to make investment profitable.

At present, America has an astonishingly low savings rate -- less than 1%. The only reason we can afford this level is that foreign debt allows us to make up the resulting lack of investment. As usual, the Economist itself wavers over whether such a macroeconomic model is sustainable. But its starting point is that it is not, and for good reason: some of the more fundamental laws of economics dictate that eventually the foreign debt will have to dry up. More specifically, the more competitive the global economy becomes -- and the more consumers in China, India, the eastern EU, etc begin to compete with American ones -- the more interest rates on American foreign debt will rise.

So how do savings rates relate to political centrism? In the coming decade or two, my guess is that both the public and private savings rates are going to serve as economic indices for a corresponding shift towards moderate political policies. The same competitive forces which force America to save more are also going to drive its politics towards the center. The endgame: the political spectrum will remain polarized, but the gap between them will have diminished. The right will have discovered that minority (yes, that includes gay) rights boost economic performance, while the left will have realized that fiscal restraint is equally beneficial.

In other words: the global economy may well push the awkward political choice currently endured by moderates out to the margins. Ultimately, the ideological diehards on both ends could have to choose between their principles and their pocketbooks; and if human history shows anything, it's that most will go for the latter.

Is all this a pipedream? Perhaps. But for now it's enough to take hope that one day relatively soon American centrism might finally awaken.

The good news: things are relatively calm around here again. The bad news: I'm still too exhausted to write anything substantive.

Instead, I'll just re-direct you to three of the more interesting stories and arguments that I've come across over the last week:

1) As the Boston Globe reports, MIT and Taiwan's Qanta Computer just finalized a 5-year, $20 million research deal. The goal: creating "the next generation of communications platforms and products." Translation: if the venture proves successful -- which I imagine it will, since Qanta is the world's biggest computer maker and MIT is, well, MIT -- the platforms it comes up with will dictate just how fluidly our natural and technological environments converge. And therein lies my interest in the story; this research group is about to exert a pretty fundamental influence over our daily lives.

2) As Kevin Drum notes, people need to stop assuming that Republican growth means conservative growth. The numbers of conservatives, liberals, and independents have stayed relatively even over the last thirty years. All that's changed is that conservatives -- particularly Southern conservatives -- have left the Democrats and joined up with the Republicans. Conservatism isn't more popular now than in the past; the Republican party is.

3) Strangely enough, another tech story. New Scientist reports that Sony has filed for two patents capable of non-invasively manipulating neural sensory data. Evidently the patent is only for a theoretical procedure, but still. The fact that they've done enough research into how to make games and movies that directly manipulate your sight, smell & hearing to now file for a patent says a lot -- namely, that Sony knows it isn't the only company/institute actively interested in and researching such a technology. What kind of neural research has Microsoft been doing? Or the military, for that matter?

"I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way." So it was that the world was introduced to Auggie March, a character of such undeniable verve that the world -- or America, at least -- has never been the same.

Fifty years on, it's hard to appreciate just how audacious that opening line was; we're so accustomed to an expansive understanding of American identity that it's difficult to imagine it being any other way. Yet in 1953, the year The Adventures of Auggie March was first published, for a Jewish kid from a Chicago ghetto to so boldly proclaim himself an American still meant something uniquely daring. And particularly so when it came to American literature: prior to Auggie, the most famous Jewish character in American letters was probably Ray Cohn, the famously symbolic social lamb of The Sun Also Rises. By contrast, Auggie unabashedly asserted his right to join the literary pantheon then occupied only by protagonists -- such as Tom Sawyer or Nick Carraway -- of protestant or anglo-saxon heritage.

Although Bellow would later follow Auggie March with masterpieces like Herzog and Humboldt's Gift, to my mind it's Auggie March that is his greatest accomplishment. Save perhaps for Wright's Native Son or Ellison's Invisible Man, no single novel did as much to irreversibly shatter the remaining post-War limitations of American identity.

Note: For more on Bellow's life and achievements, I'd recommend starting with this excellent obituary by Michiko Kakutani.

Unfortunately there have been a couple of medical emergencies here at school over the last 48 hours. I'm about to publish a post I jotted down at the hospital last night, but if I don't post much in the next day or two, that would be why.

In the meantime, please pray for the Royer and Gorbena families.

In an email regarding yesterday's post, one reader made the valid point that European leaders have really backed off Wolfowitz to preserve their own unspoken right to appoint the IMF head.

This is certainly part of the story, and a concern I should have mentioned. But I still think there's a fair amount of structural stuff at play too. Otherwise I don't know how else to answer the following question: if Europe really believes in the absolute immorality of torture, then why aren't they taking advantage of the one chance they have to do something about the widespread use of torture by the American military? On its own the IMF argument doesn't cut it. There were a few Democrats in the U.S. who flirted with breaking a similar unspoken rule regarding cabinet appointments by threatening to veto Gonzalez, as well as several others who gave Gonzalez a hard time in his nomination hearings. Why have European leaders not done the same for Wolfowitz?

During the election run-up last year, I talked with a fair number of American liberals who spoke longingly of Europe. Since America seemed to be drifting to the right, this was certainly understandable. In Europe the Democratic platform is the norm rather than the dream; it's taken as a given that civil liberties are inherently valuable, that no government should ever torture or kill prisoners, and that you don't declare war unless it's first been declared on you.

Yet the reality of European politics is a far cry from its appearance. In fact, European liberalism is in many ways a mere reverse-image of American conservatism: lots of rhetoric, little substance.

The latest example of the European rhetoric-reality disconnect is the confirmation process for Paul Wolfowitz. The European press has quite rightly pointed out Wolfowitz’s numerous failings, foremost among which are his handling of the Abu Graib scandal and the Pentagon's shady reconstruction accounting in Iraq. Yet the European political establishment is more or less granting Wolfowitz a free pass. As a result it's all but certain that Wolfowitz will be the new head of the World Bank.

The actual reason Europe has been so docile in accepting Wolfowitz is that the U.S. is still able to leverage its political strength against each EU country individually. And when it’s one-on-one, none of them save Britain stands a chance. A few occasionally summon the courage to hold out anyway, but only if the cause is a defining issue such as capital punishment or war, not a peripheral matter like the World Bank.

What the Wolfowitz confirmation exposes anew then is the lack of a European political framework capable of supporting European political rhetoric. Making this failing particularly deplorable is the fact that all the countries involved share the same core values; each preaches the virtues of treating all people humanely, and of trusting your fellow man. Yet none are willing to practice those virtues on a national scale. Despite the miracle of a common currency and the common interests it generates, Europe's political scene is still rife with ethnic rivalries and petty jealousies.

Perhaps later I’ll get into the various ways in which the European dream fails in terms of domestic policies as well. But for now the main point I want to make is that anyone who thinks of Europe as a model for what American liberalism should be ought to take a closer look. Once they get past the rhetoric, they’ll find that Europe is very much the dog that always barks but never bites.

The man Bush tapped to be our new ambassador to the U.N. is John Bolton. Bolton is on the record as saying the following:

There is no such thing as the United Nations...If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

What can you possibly say to that?

One of the many tragedies involved with the Pope's death is that the news of his passing quickly drowned out the coverage of last week's parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe.

The results and significance of those elections:

With all 120 legislative races decided, Mr. Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, won 78 seats, versus 41 for the M.D.C. One seat was won by an independent.

The outcome was a blow to the opposition, which won 57 seats in the last election, in 2000, and had been predicting gains in this week's balloting. Because Mr. Mugabe personally fills 30 other seats in the 150-member Parliament, the election results mean that his party has gained the two-thirds majority it needs to change Zimbabwe's Constitution as it chooses.

Whether or not the elections were fraudulent, as the M.D.C. claims, is beside the point. When you deliberately starve your people so you can use the prospect of food to get them to vote for you, demanding vote recounts amounts to requesting aspirin to treat heart failure.

Much more to the point is why the international community is doing so little to confront Mugabe's government. After all, it's been evident for a while now that the opposition movement inside Zimbabwe simply isn't capable of reforming the country from within; and now that Zanu-PF has gained the ability to change the country's constitution itself, what little hope there once was for internal reform is all but gone.

So why has there been so little external pressure for reform?

The quick answer is that most countries are determined to follow South Africa's lead on this, for reasons having to do with southern Africa's all-too-recent colonialist past. Appropriately or not, the sense is that "regime change" in Zimbabwe can happen legitimately only if the pressure for it comes from within the continent. Since South Africa is the one country stable enough and strong enough to take on Mugabe effectively -- not to mention that South Africa has actively sought to exert its regional dominance over the past few years -- any effective pressure for regime change in Harare needs to come from Pretoria first.

Yet South Africa has done nothing but sit on its hands. The Mbeki administration has refused to take a tough line on Zimbabwe, even though the country's misrule is hurting its own currency and sending a flood of illegal immigrants across the border.

Why have Mbeki and others remained silent?

Initially, the standard reason had to do with the moral obligation the leadership of South Africa's ruling party, the ANC, felt to look the other way. Many among that leadership either fought with Mugabe prior to 1980 or trained in his country thereafter, so it's not surprising that in the late 1990s -- when Mugabe started to become noticeably worse -- the ANC's top brass explained their inaction by appealing to the solidarity of southern Africa's relatively recent liberation movements.

By 2000, however, Mugabe's actions had reached the point where appeals to solidarity were no longer enough. At that time, his regime had just begun both actively reappropriating white-owned farmland and, more often, refusing to arrest veterans who took over whatever land they pleased. The ensuing anarchy was disastrous. The short-term effect was to destabilize the region generally and plunge the country itself into a financial crisis (when I was there in 2001, even government banks refused to buy Zimbabwean dollars). The long-term effect was even worse: since most of the resettlers do not know how to farm industrially, there's been a massive food shortage.

Rather than changing its tune, however, South Africa has continued to turn a blind eye to Mugabe's transgressions. Not only has the ANC leadership maintained the solidarity defence, but because the M.D.C. posted encouraging gains in the 2000 parliamentary elections, they've also been able to argue that Mugabe's regime isn't so dominant that reform can't happen internally.

Consequently, the real significance of last week's elections is that South Africa's rationale for not confronting Mugabe now rests squarely on the solidarity argument alone. And simply put, that argument is no longer enough. Mugabe may have led a legitimate liberation movement once, but at present he's wrought a form of tyranny far more insidious than the one he replaced. It's time for Mbeki to step up and directly confront him.

Now that the Pope has finally passed, it seems the debate over his legacy has officially begun. The two camps: supporters who admire the leadership he provided for both the anti-Communist movement in Eastern Europe and, more recently, the anti-war movement in Iraq; and detractors who refuse to forgive not only his handling of the Church's child-abuse crisis, but also his firm positions against abortion, contraception, and homosexuality.

For those like myself who find each side compelling, I offer the following passage from the Boston Globe:

John Paul's papacy was historic from the start: with his election, on Oct. 16, 1978, Karol Jozef Wojtyla became the first non-Italian pope in 455 years...

A survivor of both Nazism and communism in his native Poland, he was a forceful actor in many controversial issues both within and outside the church. He staunchly opposed abortion, capital punishment, and war, notably the US-led invasion of Iraq; he refused even to allow discussion of the ordination of women and criticized steps toward governmental recognition of same-sex relationships in parts of North America and Western Europe.

As the passage implies, John Paul was remarkably consistent when it came to affirming an absolute value for all human life. You can debate the particular ways in which he affirmed that value, or whether believing so absolutely in life might not do more harm than good. But all sides, I believe, need to bear in mind here that what is beyond debate is the integrity with which John Paul committed himself to his specific moral vision.

Update: Originally I'd planned a follow-up post today on how John Paul both created and lived out the pro-life moral ideal which Bush and DeLay so often cite (Shiavo, homosexual marriage) but so frequently fail to meet (Iraq, capital punishment). However, it seems Amy Sullivan already beat me to it, so I'd just recommend reading her article in Salon instead.

I'm not an oil expert, so I can't get into the actual market dynamics underlying yesterday's hike to $57 per barrel. Nor can I debate the $105/bbl mark that a Goldman Sachs report recently listed as the possible threshold at which oil cost would finally reduce demand.

But what I can do is try to stimulate some frank debate about our energy policy. Despite the best efforts of some, in general that debate is lacking; it seems the oil industry is very much the proverbial 800-lb gorilla in the room that nobody wants to talk about.

So, bearing in mind that I'm relatively ignorant on the subject, here's a few thoughts.

Thought #1: The rise in oil costs is a negative consequence of what is generally a global good. Oil demand has increased because people are trading more things, and people are trading more things because there are more capitalist countries in which to trade. The next time you flinch at the gas pump, consider those extra few dollars a small price to pay for democracy's global triumph.

Thought #2: Obviously, the long-term answer to global energy demand needs to be the development of sustainable energy sources. How we go about this I have no need idea.

Thought #3: America needs to get serious about the full costs of its energy use. Currently a lot of those costs are hidden from energy consumers themselves. Off the top of my head, there are at least three ways they're hidden. First, via direct government subsidies in the form of budgetary appropriations. Second, via indirect government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. Third, via national debt. (Whether we're using the credit card for a road trip or paying larger heating bills because we've bought bigger houses with bigger mortgages at undeservedly low interest rates, a goodly portion of our energy use is being underwritten by foreigners.)

Thought #4: If we ever actually decided to stick only to the energy we can afford, there's a lot we could do to reduce that consumption itself. For starters we could try to curb suburban sprawl. Getting this done shouldn't be too difficult: directly peg the gas tax to transportation appropriations; and more importantly, institute zoning limits for minimum residential capacities in downtown areas. In other words, shift more of the costs of driving onto drivers themselves, and don't let people build 1,000 new units fifteen miles away when a new apartment tower downtown will do the trick. Each of these measures would have painful consequences for some sectors, but they'd also generate growth in others.

Thought #5: As I mentioned, there's a lot of things we can do. Let me know what the other ones are.

Obviously, the standard for book reviews is The New York Times Book Review, but other good places to start are Book Magazine, BookForum, and the New York Review of Books.

Alas, I haven't found any good literary blogs yet ... until I do, I'll just refer you to the archives page for Michiko Kakutani, who in my view is the best critic out there today.

• Abu Aardvark
• Alina Stefanescu
• Avedon Carol
  
• The American Street
• Body and Soul
• Brad DeLong
  
• Bradford Plumer
• Catallarchy
• Catallaxy
• Chris Nolan
  
• Crescat Sententia
  
• Crooked Timber
• Democracy Arsenal
• Ed Kilgore
• Elizabeth Anderson
• Feministe
  
• Health Care Blog
• Helena Cobban
• Josh Marshall
• Juan Cole
• Julie Saltman
  
• Kevin Drum
• Kriston Capps
  
• Laura Rozen
  
• Left2Right
• Legal Fiction
  
• Mahalanobis
• Mark Kleiman
• Mark Schmitt
• Matthew Yglesias
• Max Sewicky
• Obsidian Wings
• Orcinus
• Pen-Elayne
  
• Readership Zero
• Rhetorica
• Steve Clemons
• Tapped
  
• TomPaine.com
• Trish Wilson
  
• Unfogged
• 212Farenheit
  

• Agora
  
• American Future
  
• American Scene
• Amy Ridenour
• Ann Althouse
• Andrew Sullivan
• Backcountry Conservative
• Begging to Differ
• Belgravia Dispatch
• Belmont Club
• Chrenkoff
  
• Daniel Drezner
• Everything I Know Is Wrong
• Fourth Rail
  
• Glenn Reynolds
• Instapundit
• Michelle Malkin
• New England Republican
• Pundita
• Redstate
• R.J. Rummet
  
• Ryan Sager
• Tacitus
  
• TNR's Corner
• Volokh Conspiracy
• Wizbang
• ZenPundit

As someone who's survived cerebral malaria, my favorite charity is by far the Global Fund, which finances treatment and research for the three most devastating diseases today: malaria, TB, and AIDS.

Other great charities are the Hunger Project, which tries to overcome poverty by ensuring sustainable development, and Human Rights Watch, which monitors human rights abuses throughout the world. (In that line, there's also Amnesty International.)

Two more great ones are the International Red Cross, which has done some great work in Rwanda, and Medecins sans Frontieres, whose doctors I have the utmost respect for -- I've met several of them while travelling, and each had some remarkable (and often harrowing) stories to tell.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't also direct you to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

For great coverage of 'serious' cinema, check out Strictly Film School. It's by far the best individual site on contemporary film that I've come across.

Meanwhile, for all the ratings and reviews of more mainstream fair, check out Rotten Tomatoes.

Finally, if you've been haunted all night by which movie Brad Pitt first appeared in (No Man's Land) or who directed Metropolis (Fritz Lang), go to IMDB.

The basics: White House, Senate, Congress, Judiciary, Dept. of Defense.

Then there's also my peonal favorite: C-Span.

Global News

• Christian Science Monitor
  
• International Herald Tribune
• BBC World News
• CNN International
• Deutsche Welle
• London Times
• Al-Jazeera
• Haaretz
  
• Financial Times
• Voice of America

National News

• USA Today
  
• New York Times
• Washington Post
• Los Angeles Times
• Chicago Tribune
• Boston Globe

When I received a few emails yesterday recommending a Wednesday Times op-ed, it came as no surprise to see that the piece in question was written by Bill Bradley. Bradley is one of the more extraordinary individuals of his generation -- it's not often, after all, that you see Rhodes Scholar, professional basketball player, and Senator on the same resume -- and true to form, his piece puts in succinct and digestible form the structural advantages currently enjoyed by conservative political organization. Further, it also argues convincingly that for liberals to be competitive in the future, they need to reform their organizational structure accordingly.

According to Bradley, the current conservative structure resembles a pyramid with the following five levels:

1) big individual donors and large foundations
2) research centers and institutes funded by those donors
3) political strategists who spin/market those institutes' findings
4) partisan news media which disseminates the strategists' spin/message
5) presidential candidate who runs on that message

As Bradley notes, the vast bulk of this pyramid exists independently of the candidate it eventually supports. The all-crucial result is that the conservative structure and message remain stable even when its political appointees change.

By contrast, Bradley states that current liberal organizational structure resembles an inverted-pyramid. Rather than occupying the top of the pyramid, the presidential candidates occupy the bottom -- they themselves must develop their own message, strategy, and base. As a result, the liberal infrastructure is inherently unstable in moments of political transition.

Up to this point, I agree with Bradley entirely. His diagnosis of what's wrong seems just about dead-on.

When it comes to Bradley's solution, however, I have to disagree. His parting shot is that liberals need to begin emulating the conservative pyramid. This is nonsense. It's true that liberals need to develop a stable political structure and message independent of its specific candidates. But if such a structure is to actually work, it cannot resemble the one which conservatives use.

Why do I say this? It's a matter of personal psychology. Conservatives tend to fundamentally differ from liberals insofar as they prefer authority to persuasion. That is, to get conservatives to mobilize, you need to appeal to a transcendent authority such as a religious scripture or a constitutional text. However, to get liberals to mobilize, you need to convince them that they've been convinced; even if they're only fooling themselves, liberals need to believe they've critically analyzed an issue before they'll act on it politically.

In these terms, the conservative pyramid works because it combines hierarchical discipline within the pyramid with an outward political message that is authoritatively couched in a biblical and constitutionalist vocabulary.

For liberals to try to copy that success would thus be a disaster. The conservative pyramid is contingent upon a reverence for authority that liberals generally lack. And the point at which this would most become a problem is level four: the conservative means of disseminating a unified message simply isn't viable for liberals. Al Franken's listeners to the contrary, liberals do not believe in partisan media. In fact, to them the very idea is anathema. By expressly determining which news to air and why it is important, partisan news consciously pre-empts the deliberative process by which liberals define themselves. For that reason alone, the conservative pyramid will never work with a liberal agenda.

In the end, Bradley is right to articulate the need for liberals to develop a stable organizational structure that exists independently of its candidates. But if liberals adopt a conservative model in doing so, they needn't be surprised if conservatives still win.