Going to the chapel ... As some of you know, my brother is getting married this Friday.

Since I happen to be best man -- and since I also happen to be thrilled about his fiancee -- I'll be doing my best over the next few days to make the wedding as special as possible for them.

Which means, of course, no posting. In my stead you may hear from a good friend of mine, but if not I'll be posting again starting Saturday.

Until then, feel free to check out a piece I put up yesterday on the Huff Post.

Putin and the Pats ... It's rare that sports and international politics intersect directly, but according to the Globe that's exactly what happened yesterday in Moscow:

It could be an international incident of sorts, a misunderstanding of Super Bowl proportions. Or it could be a very, very generous gift.

Whatever the case, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is out one championship ring, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia has scooped up some very flashy bling.

At a meeting of American business executives and Putin on Saturday in Russia, according to Russian news reports, Kraft showed his 4.94-carat, diamond-encrusted 2005 Super Bowl ring to the Russian president, who, after trying it on, put it in his pocket and left.

It was unclear yesterday whether Kraft intended to give Putin the ring. It was just two weeks ago that he presented this year's championship baubles to Patriots players at his Brookline manse. A Patriots spokesman said yesterday that Kraft was still traveling overseas and could not be reached for comment.

Now, I generally try to keep my personal biases separate from the public statements I make on this site. But this is ridiculous.

If Putin wants to he can seize Lukos, play coy with China, even build a nuclear reactor in Iran. I won't like it but I'll let it slide. But one thing Putin cannot do is pocket a Pat's super bowl ring.

Does he have any idea how hard we -- and oh yes I do mean we -- worked for our three championships? The blood, the sweat, the tears? The generation that came before mine, filling seats and cheering in freezing winds at BU, Harvard, and Foxboro? The six years of torture I personally endured among rabid New Yorkers, blocked-out from even watching the Pats play?

I don't know about you, but it seems pretty clear to me: this calls for war.

____

Update: I'm only half-kidding. We even have a picture of him stealing the thing. Didn't we invade Iraq for less?

Brooks on Sachs ... I didn't come across this until now, but David Brooks' latest column is baffling. "Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives and I have mine," he begins. "Mine include the differences between Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush." Thereafter he spends half his column lambasting Sachs for his philosophical influences before taking a belated -- and inaccurate -- look at how Sachs' plan for economic development differs from Bush's.

I've generally admired Brooks for the way he refrains from personal attacks, so the only way I can explain his column is that Sachs must have said something to or about Brooks that rubbed him the wrong way, perhaps for one of the columns he wrote after he made a recent visit to Africa.

But I find it hard to imagine that Sachs would have said something to sufficiently warrant Brooks' invective. Before Sachs left Harvard to take his post at Columbia -- and thereby be closer to the U.N., which he regularly advises -- he taught a Core class on the Economics of Development. I took it my senior year. Although I disagreed with a few of his positions, no one in the class could have doubted, let alone reproved, his sincerity: in his final lecture, as he challenged us to care about poverty, his voice began to crack, his eyes looked away, and -- for one remarkably poignant moment -- he openly wept.

David Brooks has every right to debate Sachs' positions, but not the integrity with which he has arrived at them.

Hollywood and digital piracy ... Last night Kevin Drum took up the digital piracy issue:

As bandwidth increases, DVD technology improves, and software becomes as easy to use as a toaster, every piece of digital content on the planet will be available within minutes. It's possible that the movie industry could survive for a while based on the dwindling band of old farts who like to sit in theaters, but that's about it. Unless a movie has enough cross-promotional potential to make the production worthwhile all by itself, it will be impossible to make any money in the movie industry. Ditto for music.

As on point as Kevin typically is, I think he misses a key distinction here between movie production and movie distribution.

The demand for movie production has always held fairly constant: people enjoy being entertained. That said, there's only so many times you can watch Spiderman before it stops being entertaining. So if no new movies were made for, say, a year, by the end of that year people would be quite willing to dish out cash for new content. How exactly they'd make that payment -- watch ads, buy a dvd 'bond', etc -- is open to debate. But the point is the demand for the production of movies will always be there.

Not so, however, for distribution. Currently an enormous chunk of a movie's full expense is tied up in marketing and distribution costs. I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but it's at least half the price of a ticket. What a digital platform is going to do is drive down the price of that half-ticket. As with the music industry, file sharing programs will match producer and consumer directly and largely bypass the traditional distribution points in between.

The people crowing the most about digital piracy are the theatre chains and major studeos, each of whom have significant stakes in the distribution process. But what they're really concerned about is not the piracy per se so much as, again, the platform. They dominate the way films are currently distributed, so this represents a huge potentially huge loss of revenue for them. But the all important fact here is that revenue gained from film distribution does not finance subsequent movies.

So there's no way I'm shedding tears for those guys. They're trying to say Hollywood will disappear when the truth is only they will. Technology is radically altering how their business; they need to deal with it the same as everybody else.

Church activism and foreign policy ... In itself, civic activism based upon a religious principle is neutral. Whether it's a moral good depends on the particular principle in question and how it relates to the context it's being applied to.

When church leaders began pressing for action in Sudan, for instance, I thought it was a good thing. Darfur is a mess because no politician can currently be held accountable for what's going on there; only if there's popular support for change will politicians feel compelled to act. Consequently, if a group of pastors wanted to help increase Darfur's public profile -- even if their desire to do so stemmed from absolutist religious convictions -- then they had my blessing.

But North Korea is a totally different issue, which is why this story concerns me:

Christian supporters from President Bush's Texas hometown, believed to have been instrumental in pressuring the White House to raise concerns over war-ravaged Sudan, are launching another international human rights campaign -- this time against North Korea's hard-line regime.

Members of the Midland Ministerial Alliance, a network of more than 200 churches in the city, are in Seoul this week seeking support for their latest push for improved human rights in the communist North.

''North Korean human rights will be the primary focus that we encourage the community here to actively engage in, to use their influence, and to not rest until the lives of North Koreans have changed for much better," alliance spokeswoman Deborah Fikes told South Korean lawmakers Friday.

As much as I respect the idealism here, applying the same absolutist approach to Pyongyang as to Darfur is a needlessly dangerous gambit.

To say the least, there's a few significant differences between North Korea and Sudan. First is the fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons. Second is the fact that North Korea is not a failed state: it may be corrupt, brutal, and tyrannical, but it is not failed; by all accounts Kim Jong Il's regime has access to and control over every region of the country. So right there you're talking about regime change rather than merely keeping the peace.

Then, finally, unlike Sudan two years ago, the world hasn't ignored the plight of most North Koreans because they've overlooked them. Every industrialized nation knows full well what's going on there and how bad it is, but they're clueless as to what to do. As a result, improving the lives of North Koreans isn't a matter of merely airlifting supplies or installing an embargo.

I agree with the Midland Ministers Alliance that North Korea needs to improve -- and further, that God must be appalled by what is happening there. But I also believe, quite fervently, that given the current context it is in God's hands rather than our own.

That doesn't mean we should ignore what's going on, just that we should be treading incredibly carefully. No one should apply undue pressure to Pyongyang unless they're certain of what we'll get -- and right now, only God, if anyone, could have such certainty.

The Politics of Billy Graham ... Christianity Today has been a staple in my parents house for about as long as I can remember. Not surprisingly, the latest issue has a lot on Billy Graham, both on his career as a whole and his current crusade in New York City.

To my mind, the most telling passage actually comes not in any of the stories or commentary about Graham, but in CT's "Reflections" page, which cites the following gem:

It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.

--Billy Graham in Parade (1981)

Say what you will about Graham as an evangelical or a theologian, but as a politician he was astute enough to know the value of staying outside of the political sphere. Not only did he recognize that within either political party Christianity would always be a subservient force, but even more he understood that refraining from politics granted him access to whichever political party was currently in power. From JFK to Nixon to Reagon to Clinton, he stayed relevant because he stayed out.

Iranian elections ... There's two things I have to say about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory yesterday in Iran's national elections:

1) We will not be leaving Iraq any time soon. If it's ever been in doubt that the model for our post-war engagement in Iraq was not the first gulf war but the occupations in Germany and Japan (where we continue to have troops to this day), Bush's response to this election will likely underscore how significant he thinks Iraqi real estate is. To give him (some) credit, this is primarily about restoring Iraqi sovereignty. But the key ancillary motive here is establishing a base from which to exert a substantive geopolitical influence throughout the region.

2) Ahmadinejad's victory is the latest in a long string of conservative and nationalist triumphs, ranging from Bush's election here to the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitution to, finally, a resurgent patriotism in China. What each illustrates is that conservatives have been far quicker to realize that what the poor want is not money but justice. They understand, that is, how to capitalize on indigent ressentiment. Consider the platform of Ahmadinejad:

Ahmadinejad, 49, ... called for eliminating the growing gap between rich and poor, repeal of unspecified ''weak" or un-Islamic reforms, and a restoration of the original spirit of the revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979. He received strong support from paramilitary and radical Islamist organizations.

When you are born poor in a world of conspicuous wealth -- and further, when your society lacks economic mobility -- you have to integrate the stark inequity of your poverty with your conception of the world at large. The only way to do this is to appeal to a transcendent figure, typically either God or a patria, and to believe adamantly that its sense of justice will in some way redeem your own personal suffering. In the face of that kind of psychology, money doesn't help. What does is a political leadership which corresponds with its absolute values. The one similarity between Bush and Ahmadinejad is that they have understood this far more intuitively than their rivals.

Kelo Comedy ... Kieran Healy has two great "snippets" of satire today on the Kelo decision.

At least, I'm assuming Healy intends them as satire. Either that, or he's been reading a little to much Karl Marx lately.

Call it coincidence ... The day after a Chinese oil company announced a hostile takeover bid for the American oil giant Unocal, Fed Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan advised Congress that trade tariffs imposed on Chinese imports wouldn't work.

Clearly the timing was just a coincidence -- the hearing had to have been scheduled prior to the Cnooc announcement -- but it underscores what a major issue Chinese trade has become, and how confused Congress is in reacting to it: Congress is currently thinking in terms of manufacturing and currency, but China itself is now thinking in terms of capital.

In a sense, then, Congress's current debates are already anachronistic; if China persists in its attempts to acquire U.S. interests, in the long run it will be in China's patent interest to revalue the yuan, which in turn would significantly impacting its manufacturing.

In other words, the currency and import issues would eventually take care of themselves.

Meanwhile, the issues which would take their place all have to do with America's current dependency on cheap credit. As I've noted before, at present China is underwriting America's trade imbalance by buying Treasury notes. Should China begin to significantly divert their earnings into capital markets, some pretty funky things would begin to happen -- chief among them a rise in domestic interest rates. Yet that, in turn, would depress growth most in the one sector currently driving the bulk of U.S. growth, the housing sector.

I know that analysis is stretched thin, but in my view the gist is thus that the Unocal bid wasn't a warning shot to America's board rooms so much as its consumers. Rather than renewing calls for protectionism, our response should be to focus on our Achilles heal -- the dependency, even addiction, to artificially low-interest rates.

The End of the Internet ... This has to be, in my opinion, the most conclusive evidence to date that there is in fact a website for everything:

www.cryingwhileeating.com

I recommend scrolling down to "Spenser." Be prepared to feel conflicted, though. It'll make you want to laugh and cry -- and possibly even eat.

Public use for private means ... I've spent the last few days working on a piece for the Huffington Post about how corruption today nearly always occurs when private interests are extended into the public sphere. (As opposed to when state agents seize private property.)

Then yesterday the Supreme Court unleashed a bombshell of a decision in which it ruled that the city of New London could seize the property of private interests for the "public use" of other private interests. The decision uses all kinds of language to try and safeguard the abuse of this "public use" understanding, but as Justice O'Connor notes in her dissent, it essentially dissolves the distinction between public and private altogether:

Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings "for public use" is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Needless to say, the stakes here are huge. The state has long been able to seize private property under eminent domain, but only for explicitly public goods such a road, dam, school, etc. Now the state can seize one person's property in order to give it to another, so long as it can demonstrate that there would be indicental public benefits. The result? Anyone with a demonstrably underdeveloped property -- such as, say, a modest beachhouse -- can now have their property legally taken from them.

If this doesn't scare you, it should. One of the corporations involved with the development plan in New London is the drug company Pfizer. If they or a comparably large company started lobbying your town council to put an office park or industrial plant where you live, who do you think would have more resources with which to persuade them?

Blair and the EU ... In a speech to the EU parliament yesterday, Blair laid the groundwork for his 6-month EU presidency in the second half of this year. According to the London Times, Blair didn't mince any words:

"It is a time to recognise that only by change will Europe recover its strength, its relevance, its idealism and therefore its support amongst the people. And as ever, the people are ahead of the politicians...

"We have to renew and there is no shame in that. All institutions must do it and we can, but only if we re-marry the European ideals we believe in with the modern world we live in."

That last line seems as elegant a summation as any of the political challenge the EU is currently facing ... What is typically absent in the EU rhetoric about human rights is the recognition that economic growth is the moral good which often secures them in the first place. Kudos to Blair for trying to re-work the continent's political vocabulary in such a way that both idealism and modernity can now be seen not only as compatible but complimentary.

ScentHighlights and "spreading activation" ... Google searches, apparently, are so twentieth century. The CSMonitor has a story today on what's next:

The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says....

ScentHighlights gets its name from a theory that proposes that people forage for information much in the same way that animals forage in the wild. "Certain plants emit a scent in order to attract birds and bees to come to them," Chi says. ScentHighlights uncovers the "scent" that bits of information give off and attract readers to it.

If the reader types in "Wimbledon tennis," for example, ScentHighlights would highlight each word in its own color in the text, as search programs do. But ScentHighlights adds additional keywords in gray that the system has inferred that the reader would be interested in (perhaps "US Open" or "Andy Roddick"). It would also highlight in yellow entire sentences that it deems likely to be especially relevant.

To do this, ScentHighlights combines two approaches, noticing how often words are near each other in text and using a technique called "spreading activation." Chi says: "It basically mimics how humans retrieve information." ScentHighlights actually knows nothing about tennis, he says. "It's a purely statistically based technique."

Off the top of my head, the most interesting thing about this is that it could help document media bias. Imagine doing a search on "evangelical", for example. The keywords ScentHighlights would come up with would probably include "socially conservative" or "religious right". By contrast, if you searched "liberal agenda" you'd quite possibly come up with something like "unpatriotic". By matching words with qualifiers and attendant phrases that have a far higher frequency than would be statistically expected, the program could help indicate just how pervasive media bias truly is.

Unfortunately, ScentHighlights hasn't quite hit the market yet. But there is at least Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases, which turns up some pretty funky stuff within books themselves.

Tracking Osama ... I'm a little surprised I haven't come across this elsewhere. But in an interview this week with Time magazine, Porter Gross, the CIA head, aired some pretty telling frustrations:

WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHERE HE IS. WHERE? I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?

So basically Gross is saying that Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. But the U.S. cannot go into that area because it would be a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. Not only so, but Pakistan's President can't send troops there either because it would compromise the tenuous political balance on which his authority is currently based. As a result Osama can now essentially just chill out in broad daylight.

Reading even further into this, my guess is that Gross is actually annoyed as hell at Rumsfeld. As substantial as the geopolitical hurdles are with going into Pakistan, we could handle them if we wanted to; all it would take is a fair amount of local pressure followed by a quick exit. The trouble is Rumsfeld and the DoD have bungled Iraq so badly that there is currently no way to summon that pressure. Consequently, the CIA now has to spin its wheels. They did their job and found bin Laden -- Gross wouldn't be saying those things, especially after the intel failures with 9/11 and Iraq, if he didn't know exactly where Osama is -- but their intelligence isn't yet "actionable" because so much of our military and diplomatic resources are still tied up in Iraq.

So that's my guess. Gross could get Osama if we let him, but our military ineptitude is holding him back -- and he sure as hell knows it.

Blog Changes ... Ever since I began Democratic Vista there have been countless times that I came across a great quote or interesting story, but didn't share it with you. The reason I didn't was that briefer, more colloquial posts would have seemed a bit incongruous amid the longer, more formal pieces; and it was to have a platform for more formal commentary that I began this blog in the first place.

However, now that I've started writing at the Huffington Post and also in the discussion groups TPMCafe, I no longer need a private platform for formal analysis. As a result I can now, finally, open this site up. With any luck, over the next few days and weeks it should start to seem much more spontaneous, informal, and above all, fun.

For that to happen though, I'll need feedback from you -- as things noticeably change, let me know what you think!

Gay marriage ... Sunday's New York Times Magazine more or less hits the nail on the head when anti-gay-marriage movement:

...the Christian activists aren't vague in their opposition. For them, the issue isn't one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual -- being black, say, or a woman -- and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can't be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue, the key to understanding those working against gay marriage as well as the engine driving their vehicle in the larger culture war: the commitment, on the part of a growing number of people, to a variety of religious belief that is so thoroughgoing it permeates every facet of life and thought, that rejects the secular, pluralistic grounding of society and that answers all questions internally.

There's really only three things I have to add to this.

First is the lexical distinction that the Judeo-Christian scriptures never address homosexuality as such but only homosexual acts. As a result the scriptures are ill-equipped to address questions of homosexual identity, which did not emerge until a century ago during the Oscar Wilde trial and on which any constitutional defense of homosexual marriage rests.

Second, in theological terms this is at root a hermeneutical problem. You cannot ask someone who believes in the infallible authority of the Bible to approve of gay marriage without also asking them to displace the Bible's centrality to their faith. Homosexual acts are so explicitly and frequently forbidden throughout the Old and New Testaments that for an acolyte to disavow any passages pertaining to such activity is in one sense to disavow the legitimacy of the scriptures as a whole. Consequently overlooking the Bible's preaching on this issue alone requires an incredibly delicate exegetical foundation -- one which it would be unreasonable to assume all believers can or even ought to make.

Third, in sociological terms what we are talking about is a group of people who refute the separation not of church and state but state and society. In this sense -- in urging political representatives to act on their behalf for exclusively Biblical reasons -- the Arlington Group in particular is ultimately attempting to restore a pre-Revolutionary understanding of community in which the claim that state and society were somehow separate would have been met by a host of blank stares. Yet for any number of economic, cultural, and political reasons restoring that understanding simply is not possible. The end result is that states which enact Marriage Amendments end up with a political body of indeterminant nature, since for some it is defined a) by a monopoly on violence, b) as a provider of public goods, and c) as a third-party adjudicator, while for others it is defined not only by all of the above, but also by d) its (religiously informed) social function.

More on this later, I'm sure, but that's all for now.

Credit Reports ... Today's USA Today has a frontpage story that weighs the pros and cons of granting consumers the right to freeze their credit reports.

It's not hard to see why the piece largely sides with consumers. Here's the argument for why consumers shouldn't have the right to control their credit reports:

Lenders, credit bureaus and businesses argue that the inconvenience created by a credit freeze outweighs potential benefits. Credit-freeze laws allow consumers to "unfreeze" their reports, but that typically takes about three days.

In the meantime, a consumer could miss out on a low mortgage rate or one-time credit card offer, says Nessa Feddis, senior federal counsel for the American Bankers Association. "It sounds good, but people don't realize how often they request their credit reports be pulled for a good deal," she says.

Opponents also argue that existing laws protect consumers from identity theft without the hassles of a credit freeze.

Yep, that's right: years of financial and legal hassling clearly do not outweigh my need to have instant access to a credit report.

Please. A three day wait? Are they kidding me? If it means eliminating the risk that someone can take out a major loan using my credit report, I will gladly wait three days on the paperwork to go through for a new car or house or even, hypothetically, consumer electronics. After all, a built-in delay would only extend the deliberation I already go through whenever I purchase something substantial enough to require a loan in the first place.

Yet what really gets me is the presumption that businesses know better than consumers when they would want to use their credit reports. This represents commercial condescension of the most egregious kind, and as such grates against the fundamental premise of modern capitalism -- namely, that each individual is best suited, as a rational agent, to make their own financial decisions.

The best part of living abroad is how consistently novel and invigorating your experiences can be. The downside is that you miss out on the fam. Thank God, then, for days like today, which are especially suited for rectifying such an imbalance.

Have a great Father's Day everyone.

Since returning to the States two weeks ago I've largely cooled down on the EU debate. Quite frankly, I've aired about as much as I have to say on the subject.

That said, today's quote from EU president Jean-Claude Juncker is too exceptional to ignore:

"People will tell you next that Europe is not in a crisis," Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who holds the rotating EU presidency, said after a two-day summit ended in acrimony.

"It is in a profound crisis." [emphasis added]

For those who haven't been following the story, the immediate impetus for Juncker's remarks was the failure of the EU commission to approve its next six-year budget. Britain and Holland effectively killed the 100 billion euro plan; and rightly so, at least for Britain. In my view it makes little sense that the Britain should have to subsidize continental welfare systems because only they have had the wherewithal to liberalize their markets.

Yet the larger impetus, and what Juncker was really talking about, were the failed EU referendums in France and the Netherlands. Those rejections led the EU into what are actually two separate crises. The first is, as perhaps was hinted at above, the legitimacy of continental welfare systems. France wants the amenities and living standards of a post-industrial economy without the attendant risk. At present only Britain and the newer, more Eastern European countries seem to fully recognize the paradoxical nature of that position.

The second crisis is what I would call, if history hadn't already lent it such a bad name, ethnic strife. For all the talk about peace and liberalism, the reality is that Europe has yet to fully supercede the ethnic divides of the last two decades. Their political systems may have evolved beyond ethnic identity, but their popular consciousnesses have not. The result is that in cultural terms the French or Dutch identity still incorporates a remarkable degree of ethnic criteria. When it comes to the EU, then, the all-important ramification is that a French or Dutch citizen has a hard time swallowing, in purely cultural terms, how the hell he or she can share an identity with a Bulgar.

Consequently the challenge for President Juncker and the other EU leaders is now to communicate to their citizenry a) that the welfare states which worked wonders for the last fifty years are no longer viable in a post-Cold War era, and b) that neither are the ethnic and even tribal identities by which they define themselves.

This will no doubt take a long time; it took the U.S. several decades. But as Juncker no doubt is aware, if Europe is to be saved, it needs to be done.

I spent the last hour or so coming up with a response to John Danford's editorial today in the Times. Then I realized I wasn't doing much of anything except echoing Danford's welcome perspective:

It is important for those of us who are sometimes called moderates to make the case that we, too, have strongly held Christian convictions, that we speak from the depths of our beliefs, and that our approach to politics is at least as faithful as that of those who are more conservative. Our difference concerns the extent to which government should, or even can, translate religious beliefs into the laws of the state.

People of faith have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to bring their values to bear in politics. Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth, and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.

Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.

When, on television, we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube.

When we see an opportunity to save our neighbors' lives through stem cell research, we believe that it is our duty to pursue that research, and to oppose legislation that would impede us from doing so.

We think that efforts to haul references of God into the public square, into schools and courthouses, are far more apt to divide Americans than to advance faith.

Following a Lord who reached out in compassion to all human beings, we oppose amending the Constitution in a way that would humiliate homosexuals.

For us, living the Love Commandment may be at odds with efforts to encapsulate Christianity in a political agenda. We strongly support the separation of church and state, both because that principle is essential to holding together a diverse country, and because the policies of the state always fall short of the demands of faith. Aware that even our most passionate ventures into politics are efforts to carry the treasure of religion in the earthen vessel of government, we proceed in a spirit of humility lacking in our conservative colleagues.

In the decade since I left the Senate, American politics has been characterized by two phenomena: the increased activism of the Christian right, especially in the Republican Party, and the collapse of bipartisan collegiality. I do not think it is a stretch to suggest a relationship between the two. To assert that I am on God's side and you are not, that I know God's will and you do not, and that I will use the power of government to advance my understanding of God's kingdom is certain to produce hostility.

By contrast, moderate Christians see ourselves, literally, as moderators. Far from claiming to possess God's truth, we claim only to be imperfect seekers of the truth. We reject the notion that religion should present a series of wedge issues useful at election time for energizing a political base. We believe it is God's work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree, and to overcome the meanness we see in today's politics.

Amen.

The retired journalist James P. Gannon -- not to be confused with the "reporter" Jeff Gannon, whom Karl Rove planted last year in the White House Press Room -- has a great column in today's USA Today.

Responding to Howard Dean's recent comment that Republicans are a bunch of "white Christians," Gannon makes the important point that Dean's rhetoric is simply the latest instance in which Democrats have needlessly alienated Christians in general and pro-life Christians in particular.

"Let's get the facts out here," Gannon writes, and then lists the following points:

• I have been white all my life. I was born white in Minneapolis, one of the whitest cities in America. When I was growing up — in the white-bread 1950s, when "multicultural" meant that both Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics lived in the same parish — I knew only white people. There were only two kinds of people in the world, as far as I knew — Catholics and "non-Catholics." You couldn't marry non-Catholics, and you couldn't go to funerals or weddings in non-Catholic churches.

• Fact No. 2: We were Christians, though we never thought of ourselves that way. "Christian" had a vague, slightly non-Catholic feel to it, and it wasn't until after Pope John XXIII and Vatican II that Catholics began to feel comfortable being called "Christians."

• Fact No. 3, and here's where Dean has overlooked something important — we were white Christians, but we were not Republicans. Republicans were mostly Protestant, wealthy and members of country clubs. We were Catholic, middle-class and Democrats.

For most of my adult life, I considered myself a Democrat and voted for Democrats for president — from John F. Kennedy in 1960 to Bill Clinton in 1992. I began voting for Republican presidential candidates, and thinking of myself as Republican, only after it became abundantly clear that people with my views on abortion, prayer in school and other moral issues were no longer considered welcome in the Democratic Party.

A whole lot of us crossed over, taking our whiteness and our Christian beliefs into the party of the country-club set. We didn't feel so much that we had abandoned the Democratic Party as it had abandoned us. Borrowing the spirit of the "No Irish Need Apply" mentality of my grandparents' time, the Democrats posted a "no pro-lifers need apply" sign on their party doors. (emphasis added)

Although I ultimately disagree with Gannon -- yes, the Democrats are regrettably intractable when it comes to abortion, but I think the Republicans are equally intransigent on a host of other lamentable positions -- his perspective is one which Democrats need to begin heeding in earnest.

As Gannon illustrates, the Democratic Party has banished from its midst one block of conscientious voters in order to galvanize another -- its "base" -- even though that group has yet to demonstrate that it can effect meaningful results. Even worse, the moral pretext they've used to do so is exceedingly thin. What, after all, is so objectionable to favoring life? The pro-choice argument may be founded on legitimate ethical principles, but castigating the pro-life platform is not. The fact that Democratic leaders have repeatedly engaged in such rhetoric is merely acceding toa vocabulary in which they can be seen as abhorrent at worst and morally neutral at best.

Yet to return to the larger issue here, the Dems need to do a better job of accepting Christianity in its terms rather than theirs. Many liberals like to think of themselves as "enlightened" individuals as compared to "ignorant" believers, and as a result go after religion per se rather than religion as practiced in the public sphere. The line may become blurred at points, but in general the two are distinctly different. One is a faith; the other a politics. Until the Democrats can learn to react only to the latter and not the former, they're going to continue losing theJames P. Gannon's of the world.

Which is a shame, because the sincerety they practice within their belief is precisely the kind of exacting virtue American liberalism could currently use.

As if Gitmo and Abu Ghraib weren't enough, it seems a new paradox is emerging in the war on terror:

A report that US defense officials helped block a NATO demand for an international probe into last month's killing of protesters in Uzbekistan is proving an air base there to be one of the more diplomatically costly "lily pads" in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's new lean, mean restructuring of the US global military presence.

Located in southeastern Uzbekistan near the border with Afghanistan, the Khanabad base is seen as key to the US war on terror, as a Q&A on the website of the Council of Foriegn Relations, a prominent Washington-based think-tank, explains. "Officially, the role of the troops in Uzbekistan is limited to humanitarian relief and search-and-rescue missions inside Afghanistan, but a joint US Special Forces command center at Khanabad reportedly played a key role in directing the activities of US Special Forces personnel during the early phase of the fall 2001 US attacks on the Taliban [in Afghanistan]. Information about current day-to-day activities of US forces remains shrouded in secrecy."

But continued access to the base means the US must tread carefully in its criticism of Uzbekistan's leader Islam Karimov, who has routinely been accused of brutally stifling dissent, including allegedly covering up the government's shooting of hundreds of protesters last month.
The Uzbek government has admitted that 173 people were killed on May 13 in Andijan but independent witnesses and human rights organizations put the number of victims at between 500 and 1,000. Human Rights Watch, for instance, has called the incident a "massacre." Karimov has portrayed the killings as a necessary response to a revolt by Islamic extremists.

Many countries and organizations, including the US, have called for an independent investigation. But The Washington Post reports that US defense officials – together with their Russian counterparts – "helped block a new demand for an international probe" last week.

Personally, I have to confess that I'm not entirely against this, provided that the Uzbek base is as vital as the military seems to think. Further, if used properly, we could use the aid we give Karimov to pressure him into making reforms more consistent with international human rights.

The main trouble arises when U.S. policies towards Karimov are compared with Bush's absolutist rhetoric. Remember his State of the Union address? All that lofty praise for freedom? It's hard to see how supporting one of the few dictators still around is at all accordant with Bush's democracy-at-all-costs doctrine.

In the end, Bush's problem is that, given the manifold exigencies of the world, there's no way to maintain a dogmatic approach to foreign policy and not expose yourself as either hopelessly naive or boldly duplicitous. So if Bush is going to take a nuanced approach with regimes like Karimov's, he had better cut out the rhetoric: as is, he's undermining American foreign policy as a whole.

Humph. Evidently the post that I thought I'd published just before work today never went through. As my dad would say, such is life.

Thus, an abridged version of the post: Proctor and Gamble, which spends more on advertising than any other company (some $3 billion), decided recently to cut back on upfront purchases of television advertising, particularly when it comes to cable. The reason is twofold: partly to wait and see which shows actually catch on, but mostly to increase spending on product placement.

And I don't like product placement.

There are various reasons why, but the gist is that it collapses, quite blatantly, the creative and financial impulses of a film. To believe that the two are ever fully separate contingencies is of course nonsense, but to consciously and quite conspicuously synthesize the two is only madness of a different kind: it is to communicate to your audience that you don't particularly care if they believe in the reality of the narrative at hand.

In certain instances that can be forgivable, but in general it erodes a kind of cultural trust that underpins the industry as a whole. So while product placement may boost profits in the short-term, in the long run it's going to hurt Hollywood more than it thinks.

Truth and politics have always been rather curiously intertwined, but in a democratic state they are especially so: the truth becomes a political ideal even as it remains, at most, a political instrument. The result is both a populus and a press which are left to grapple constantly with political facts that never quite seem to matter as much as they should.

I was reminded of this again over the weekend, when I encountered two works that either noted or tried to account for an absence of political truth. The first was a superb commencement speech delivered this year at Berkeley by Mark Danner, who mentioned -- albeit largely in passing -- that "never in my experience has frank mendacity so dominated our public life." The second came from yesterday's Times Magazine cover-story on torture, in which Joseph Lelyveld writes that

An implicit understanding has been reached, or so I would argue, between the governed and those who govern: that the prime task is the prevention of future attacks on our own soil as opposed to the punishment of past attacks; that extralegal excesses, not excluding kidnappings and physical abuse, may be necessary in the effort to suppress terrorists seeking to implant sleeper cells in our midst and equip them with deathly substances and bombs; that in pursuit of this goal, much can be forgiven, including big mistakes (the abuse and indefinite detention of innocent people, the tacit annulment -- for foreigners, anyway -- of legal guarantees, not to mention a costly war of dubious relation to the larger struggle); and that the less we know as a people about our secret counterterrorism struggles and strategies, the less we contemplate the possibly ugly consequences, the easier it will be for those in authority to get on with the job of protecting us.

As the story on torture implies, our principal political concern is not with truth but security. The American public is willing to cede its concern with truth provided that either the resultant ignorance or mendacity ensure its safety.

Yet this can only ever be a short-term mandate, and one, furthermore, that must be restricted to a military or investigative sphere. The reason has to do with the proper function of political truth in a democratic society: namely, to foster trust between public representatives and the public itself. Propagate ignorance or dishonesty for too long or in too many ways, and eventually you will erode the public trust in your ability to govern, regardless of whether or not you provided the requisite security.

At present, Bush has expanded the sphere of what might be termed "acceptable prevarication" well beyond its "acceptable" limit. As the Clooney affair demonstrates, mendacity is now a part of his administration's general modus operandi rather than one specific to security concerns only. It may not show now, but in time this will catch up to him: he is eroding not the trust in his performance, but the very possibility of such trust.

Call me an optimist, but I have an abiding faith that that will, in fact, prove his downfall.

Argument #1 for why blogs won't fully eclipse the traditional editorial media: when it comes to weekly, page-length columns, blogs are not commercially viable. To keep up internet traffic -- and to get sufficient hits on advertising links -- bloggers need to post frequently throughout the day. Yet to compose a formal column, you need the luxury of a weekly or even bi-weekly deadline.

The reason I bring this up is Frank Rich's current column in The New York Times. Over the past week, the blogosphere has done a thorough job of dissecting and analysing the Deep Throat / Mark Felt story. But none of the bloggers I've read have been able to put the story in both its historical and present context as well as Rich has. Doing what Rich does takes time, both in the sense of having several days to write a piece and of knowing that you have 1,000 words to state your case. Neither of those luxuries apply to bloggers, or at least not to those who blog for an income.

I realize to some extent I'm stating the obvious here, but with all the hoopla surrounding blogs lately -- one author I met last week described blogs as having 'reinvented the book' -- I just felt the need today to stress that there are some things blogs cannot do, at least not as effectively as other platforms. Blogs are wonderful things, but so are editorial columns. Formal and professional analysis is just as necessary to a productive national debate as the democratic, informal commentary that blogs provide.

For bloggers to be as efficacious as possible, they really need to keep that in mind.

At long last:

The finance ministers of the world's eight wealthiest nations agreed Saturday on a deal for immediate 100 percent multilateral debt relief totaling $40 billion (33 billion euros) for 18 of the world's poorest countries...

The G8, comprising Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States, agreed to immediately write off $40 billion of debt owed by 18 countries to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the African Development Bank.

The 18 nations include Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

They are the first to qualify for eligibility for a debt relief joint initiative backed by the three financial institutions. The HIPC initiative offers debt relief to the world's most impoverished nations that agree to undertake economic reform.

For those who haven't been following the story, the 18 HIPCs essentially spend so much of their income paying off former debts -- often taken out, furthermore, by previous non-democratic regimes -- that they have little to no income left to combat the health and productivity losses which frequently result from abject poverty.

The only thing I would add: as great as the debt write-off is in theory, the specific nature of the "economic reforms" in question will determine its true value. After all, should the structural reforms turn out to be just as inhibitive as the debt payments, then today's celebratory announcements will seem risible in retrospect.

Perhaps that sentiment will prove inappropriately cynical, but the U.S., the World Bank and the IMF have all insisted on ill-advised reforms in the past (think Argentina). Here's to hoping that this time they prove far more judicious.

When it comes to the Times columnist David Brooks, I tend to disagree with his viewpoints but respect, appreciate and even enjoy his style.

After reading his column yesterday, however, I can't help but wonder: is Brooks on the government payroll?

In large part I ask the question in jest. From both his columns and a few interviews I've seen, I get the impression that Brooks is someone whose journalistic and personal integrity would proscribe even the idea of receiving payment in exchange for espousing specific political programs.

Nonetheless, at the end of his latest piece on AIDS in Africa, there's a singularly telling line:

This is a world of people trying everything, of doctors from Russia, Egypt, Cuba, Germany and Zimbabwe. Many are backed by money from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, finally doing the work they've always dreamed of doing.

We could be on the verge of a recovery boom.

Does anyone else find the emphasized line -- especially in its context -- the least bit curious?

As Brooks touches on elsewhere, President Bush has quite often been criticized (and in my view, rightly so) for actively promoting policies which facilitate rather than hamper the spread of AIDS. Further, his insistence on unilateral aid delayed its delivery for years, thereby preventing many AIDS victims from receiving what little relief they sought.

Yet what grates me most is the implication that both the money and the relief program are somehow singularly attributable to the President. That is sheer poppycock. Not only has Bush worked against AIDS relief, but the money in question comes from U.S. taxpayers, and the program itself is administered by the U.S. government. If anything, that line should have read "money from the U.S. Emergency Program for AIDS Relief."

To return to my initial point, the fact that a writer as acutely discerning as Brooks should be so atypically exuberant -- and so specific in his praise -- makes me wonder, given the Armstrong scandal earlier this year, whether he isn't perhaps being paid to shill for one the President's programs. Odds are, I'm just being overly cynical, and David Brooks is simply drawing attention to a program he sincerely believes in. But even if that's the case, the fact that I'm doubting Brooks at all illustrates just how much damage the Bush administration's tactics have caused: even someone as reputed as Brooks can now be legitimately associated with one of the administrations more perfidious scandals.

When I was in the local Barnes & Noble a few days ago, I came across an unexpected site: a storefront display filled with a trilogy of Faulkner novels. Piqued, I looked closer. Turns out, as the world now knows, that Oprah has selected Faulkner as her novelist du mois for June, July, and August.

Although Oprah has since been lambasted by some, I can't help but tip my hat to her on this one. Faulkner is arguably America's most innovative author, one whose effusive style and illicit narratives chronicled the post-bellum South in a way that no historian dared broach until well over a generation later.* If the result is that his prose is often arduous or even inaccessible, I would argue that such difficulty is simply a matter of form following function: Faulkner was delving into a national consciousness that had, to that point, patently refused to confront a set of local mores that were starkly at odds with its national ideals. In that sense, Faulkner anticipated and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement that emerged at the very close of his career, some twenty-five years after he had published his most reputed works.

How anyone can deride Oprah for her choice is beyond me. Yes, many of her readers will be daunted by the difficulty of Faulkner's novels, particularly when it comes to The Sound and the Fury. But at least she's going to get people to try Faulkner, rather than neglect him altogether. And in the meantime, I have to believe that at least a small percentage of her readers will stick it out, and in so doing realize that Faulkner's difficulty only makes him all the more rewarding once you grasp his central concerns.

Summoning the audacity to lead a mass audience headlong into one of America's most well-known but least read authors is no small accomplishment. For that reason -- and believe me, I never thought I would be uttering these words -- I say, God Bless Oprah.
___
*I'm thinking here specifically of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, but also of the large body of work in general on the both the Reconstruction and Jim Crowe eras that has proliferated since the 1960s.

I'm going to get into this more over the next few weeks. But one of the main realizations I had while living in Europe is that economic growth is a principal moral good, and that consequently any liberal platform needs to have at its core policies which foster economic growth. If liberals fail to realize this, then they are ceding a cardinal moral ground to conservatives.

To illustrate this, just look at what's happening today in Germany. According to Deutsche-Welle,

Loud are the cries that youngsters up and down the country are displaying signs of the very conservative values their emancipated parents educated them against. Trend researcher and analyst Roman Retzbach said there is every reason to suggest that Germany is rekindling its relationship with the bourgeoisie...

"What we see now has a lot to do with German unification. The current economic crisis has pushed interest in individual circumstances to the foreground," Boehnke said. "It is easier to be generous about the world and society when everyone is doing well than when people are struggling."

As the passage shows, if liberalism is grounded only in social rights and foreign aid, then its fortunes will be contingent on those of the economy. By contrast, liberalism needs to have pro-growth policies which drive the economy rather than follow it, so that its economic success will grant it both the practical and moral authority to implement and secure its social platform.

I'll articulate how that's feasible a little later. But since many liberals see pro-business policies as utterly anathema to a liberal agenda, for now I just wanted to get the idea that economic growth is a paramount moral good out there.

I used to disagree with Justice Scalia's opinions but respect the consistency and integrity with which he adhered to a specific legal philosophy. Not so any longer. Although Scalia voted against the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act on the grounds that the federal government lacked the constitutional authority to regulate those issues locally, Scalia upheld federal authority yesterday in the Court's 6-3 decision to effectively overturn a California state law that allows for the medicinal use of marijuana.

In typically supercilious style, Scalia didn't sign the majority opinion, but instead wrote a concurring opinion of his own. His main rational: "Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce." To say the least, that's a rather weak argument for rather sweeping federal powers. What intrastate activity wouldn't qualify with that standard? At least Justice Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion, refered only to "Congress's power to regulate purely local activities that are part of an economic 'class of activities' that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce." Thus even Stevens left room for some local purview, depending on how any given 'class of activities' is defined.

To return to Scalia, however, this is surely one of the more flagitious decisions of his Supreme Court career. The federal government may well have a right to implement a national drug policy, but Scalia's rationale is a long way from adequately justifying why. Worse, his opinion betrays himself as fickle: a Justice whose reason, at least in this case, was deliberately manipulated to satisfy one particular personal belief.

Forgive me for interjecting here, but isn't such behavior the very definition of judicial activism?

Yesterday I noted how the American military -- and Rumsfeld in particular -- has recently exaggerated the threat which China poses.

Today I want to look at how the media is amplifying that distortion. The two clearest examples of this are the ones I mentioned yesterday: the May Atlantic Monthly and Saturday's lead story in The Times. In each case, what bothered me wasn't so much the writing itself as the apparent lack of editorial judgment with which it was published.

Take the May Atlantic: the article was written by Robert D. Kaplan, who has spent the last few years touring military installations throughout the CENTCOM and PACOM theatres in order to research his latest book, Imperial Grunts. With the exception of Iraq, anyone in either of those theatres is going to be concerned first and foremost with China. The country is now and will be for the foreseeable future our principal competitor in those regions.

The trouble is, Kaplan seems to have gone along, rather uncritically, with the military's automatic conflation of competitor with threat. As I wrote yesterday, China has reasons to compete with us, but it does not have reasons to endanger its relations with us -- after all, they are as dependent on our economy (and perhaps even more so) as we are on theirs.

The worst part about this is that no one at the Atlantic seems to have been concerned with Kaplan's objectivity. Although Kaplan has worked extensively within the American military, not only did the Atlantic not pause to wonder if perhaps his views were a little biased, they apparently ran his story carte blanche. Further, they ran it on the front cover, alongside what is surely one of the more nocuous caricatures they have ever printed. The result? The Atlantic as a whole, and not just Kaplan, ended up looking like nothing more than a propaganda arm of the U.S. military.

Saturday's Times doesn't go nearly as far, but it again does represent a serious editorial midjudgment. Undoubtedly, when the Secretary of Defense chastises a country for its arms build-up, that constitutes news. But unless the arms build-up is either particulary sudden or particularly threatening, it does not constitute frontpage news, let alone lead-story news. Rumsfeld's statements at the security conference in Singapore were only news because he was the one speaking, not because nobody previously knew that China's military was expanding. As a result, his comments should have shown up on page four or five.

Yet the Times ran it as the lead story anyway. Why? All I can think of is that the DoD is treating China somewhat like the President treated Iraq: keep hammering away at the idea that a country represents a more urgent threat than it really is, and eventually the media -- even The Times -- will let its guard down.

Again, I don't think the Times is nearly as at fault here as the Atlantic, but they did fall for some of the military's more blatant propaganda. Hopefully they'll return to their more discerning ways in future.

When I returned to the States yesterday, the first magazine I came across was the May Atlantic Monthly. For those who haven't viewed it, the cover features a Chinese soldier whose minacious glare perfectly compliments the headline, "How We Would Fight China: The Next Cold War, by Robert D. Kaplan."

Since the issue came out a while ago, ordinarily I wouldn't bring it up now. But then I came across yesterday's lead story in The Times, entitled "Rumsfeld Issues a Sharp Rebuke to China on Arms":

In a keynote address at an Asian security conference here [Singapore], Mr. Rumsfeld argued that China's investment in missiles and up-to-date military technology posed a risk not only to Taiwan and to American interests, but also to nations across Asia that view themselves as China's trading partners, not rivals.

He said no "candid discussion of China" could neglect to address these military concerns directly, and criticized China for not admitting the full extent of what he described as its worrisome military expansion.

"Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: why this growing investment?" Mr. Rumsfeld asked.

His remarks come as Washington's stance regarding Beijing appears to be growing more critical. The United States has accused China of manipulating the value of its currency, for example, in order to increase exports, and of exerting heavy-handed pressure on Taiwan.

In my view, this story illustrates the current state of the American military and the American media far more than it does the threat China poses.

Let's start with the military first. No doubt it has access to intelligence that I do not, but I still get the feeling that they've crossed the thin line between necessary diligence and excessive paranoia. Just look at Rumsfeld's rhetoric: "Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: why this growing investment?" Surely Rumsfeld knows, however, that regional threats to China do exist. India's billion-plus democracy lies on its southwestern border, and in the northeast it has to deal with a nuclear North Korea. Then, of course, there's Japan. If these countries do not constitute security concerns from China's perspective, then I'm not sure what would. (Further, even if they didn't qualify, there are still legitimate reasons for a military build-up; if not, then America itself needs to re-explain a significant proportion of its own military expenditures.)

Given the clear reality of China's geopolitical context, the question becomes this: why is Rumsfeld arguing against a Chinese military build-up if he knows full well that they have legitimate reasons for doing so?

Here, again, lies the tenuous balance between diligence and paranoia. It is Rumsfeld's job to identify and address any threat to American sovereignty. Clearly, China's demographics, economic growth, and surging nationalism constitute such a threat, particulary to American sovereignty as exercised in the Pacific. But it is neither an imminent nor a particularly parlous threat. It simply is not in China's interest, either idealogically, politically, or economically, to attack American interests -- the country is beset with internal conflicts that it can only resolve through U.S. trade, so jeapordizing its access to American markets via an impolitic military exercise makes little to no sense.

To return to Rumsfeld, this means one of two things. Either he thinks there's a significant chance China will behave irrationally, in which case he's paranoid, or he knows that he's overreacting, in which case he's playing the fool in order to an achieve an ulterior agenda. My guess is that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. He probably sincerely does believe China is capable of behaving recklessly. But he is also probably aware of the cuts to the military made in the 1990s, when there was a lack of any conventional threat. Although we've begun a war on terror since then, the problem for the military is that it needs there to be a conventional threat -- one over which we must maintain a technological advantage -- for it to continue receiving funding for many of its more expensive weapons programs. That is not to say that defense appropriations are the sole impetus behind Rumsfeld's comments, but they do go a long way towards explaining his recent overzealousness.

* * *

Initially I mentioned that The Times story also illustrates the current state of the American media. Alas, I don't have the time to get into that now, but stay tuned for it tomorrow.

Last week I responded to David Adesnik's censorious post on the latest Amnesty International human rights report. Although many commentators were just as indignant, Adesnik's rebuttal was particularly objectionable because it couched in scholatistic terms an argument no more developed than the 'how dare they?' rejoinder of pre-literate discourse.

Amnesty itself, however, has simply cut to the chase. In response to President Bush's equally jejune contention that the report was simply "absurd", William Shulz, Amnesty's executive director, wrote the following:

If our reports are so "absurd," why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war? Why does it welcome our criticisms of Cuba, China and North Korea? And why does it cite our research in its own annual human rights reports?

No amount of spin can erase the myriad human rights abuses committed by United States officials in the "war on terror." The United States cannot simultaneously claim that it "promotes freedom around the world" while detaining tens of thousands at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and in Iraq and other locations without charge or trial and allowing those civilian and military officials responsible for orchestrating a systematic policy of torture to escape accountability.

Admittedly, what Shulz doesn't mention is that Bush's criticism owed as much to the report's "gulag" reference as to its findings of U.S. human rights abuse in general. But even that reference is at best hyperbolic, not illogical or absurd. For as Shultz does in fact note, persons detained in U.S. camps have consistently been deprived of the right to due process. Such willful deprivation is in flagrant violation of international common law and, further, provides legitimate ground for structural comparison with the Soviet gulags, which were infamous precisely because of the due process violations that occurred within them.

I may have my own criticisms of Amnesty, but I find it hard to see how anyone could side against them on this. The U.S. government has systematically, expressly, and unapologetically violated the individual rights of persons throughout the world. How could it possibly be surprised -- let alone find it absurd -- when organizations devoted to monitoring those rights should find fault with it?

From a recent interview with Gerhard Schroder:

The most important thing is to understand that Germany is a country in which, for a very long time, there was sufficient room for redistributing wealth. This is no longer the case, for two reasons. First, globalization and the economic changes it has caused, and second, a long-term development that affects the aging of the German population. These two developments have cast doubt on our old certainties and security. The job that Agenda 2010 sets out to accomplish is to make clear, to people who have lost this certainty, that the measure of social security that is objectively possible is only achievable through change. Only through the reform process that we have begun can the old certainties be replaced with new certainties and security.

Ironically, in rejecting Schroder's coalition precisely because of the reforms he's made, the German electorate is flocking to a party whose platform revolves around accelerating the pace of those reforms.

The clear lesson here: the DNC needs to launch some kind of educational program on the causes and even merits of globalization.

Granted, I don't think the American left has nearly as little grasp of what the global economy entails as does the left in France or Germany. But manufacturing unions and other interests negatively impacted by globalization form enough of the party's base that it makes a lot of sense to address the issue preemptively, before it leads to proposals or even policies that (as in continental Europe) only exacerbate the problem.

The globalized economy is here to stay, whether we like it or not. Rather than fighting it -- as a few Senators and Congressmen already have -- Democrats should learn from the losses of Chirac and Schroder and do everything they can to allay its arrival.

Archives ... As you can see, this site is a relatively recent one. I also just updated it and revised the format, so please note that the titles of each post won't actually appear for anything prior to mid-June.

July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005

About the Author ... Chris Meserole studied at Harvard and the University of Cape Town. He is the author of Democratic Vista and a contributor to the Huffington Post.

About Me ... In 1996 I received a full scholarship to Phillips Academy. This was, to say the least, a great blessing: not only had an illness left my family in bankruptcy, but I was blown away by the school itself.

Two years later I went to Harvard. Alas, I didn't like it much. So I left. I enrolled at the University of Cape Town, traveled regionally as much as I could, and learned what it truly means to listen. A year later I finally returned to Harvard. Still didn't feel comfortable there, so I just put my head down and wrote a thesis. When I looked up I'd somehow graduated with highest honors and a Hoopes Prize (other recent winners include Dustin Thomason, author of The Rule of Four, and Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club).

Thereafter life has been the typical postcollegiate mess. One year spent struggling in Los Angeles, another teaching in Europe, several odd jobs in between. The common thread has been writing -- mostly in the form of imposingly long emails, but also, at the encouragement of some friends, this site.

At this point I doubt if my friends are still reading, but I have to give them credit. It has at least cut down on the imposing emails.

First, from Josh Marshall today over at the just-launched TPMCafe:

The great challenge of progressive reform today is finding ways to counterbalance and reverse the pervasive privatization of risk we see across our society. (That is almost synonomous with the concentration and ossification of power and wealth among the few since they are the ones most able to thrive in a world of individualized risk.) That is not only a bad thing in itself, it also undermines the quality of life and, though this is not always seen as clearly, opportunity itself.

Second, from Roger Cohen today in the International Herald Tribune:

Everyone knows the central nature of the problem [in France and Germany]: Systems that are too rigid, that encourage people to collect unemployment benefits while working in the cash-only underground economy and that are burdened with taxes making hiring prohibitively expensive and investment elsewhere attractive.

On the surface, these two quotes may not seem related -- Josh Marshall is talking about the ridiculous fashion in which risk has been leveraged against individuals in America, while Roger Cohen is talking about the ridiculous fashion by which 'stability' has been achieved in France and Germany.

Yet the two are, in my view, flip sides of the same coin. If risk is to be managed equally (and, I dare say, justly), then only the state has the wherewithal necessary to manage that risk. But for the state to truly distribute risk evenly throughout society, then the measures it would have to take -- such as nationalizing health care, or increasing welfare appropriations -- would very likely provide individual security at the expense of economic opportunity. In which case, the responsibility of the government would be to revert some of that risk back onto individuals themselves.

In the end, it seems, the question becomes this: what is the appropriate midpoint between individual risk and individual security? how far on either side should the government intervene?

Clearly, that's not an easy question to resolve. But it's one the Democrats in particular need to begin answering -- all the while bearing in mind that if they push too far economic growth could very well stagnate, and individual opportunity along with it.