Michelle Obama

is an intelligent, accomplished woman, and yet, the media insists on only talking about her dresses. I think she should have worn jeans.

Speaking of Atheism...

It is mentioned in Obama's inaugural address:

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof mentions that this is the first time he can recall that "non-believers" have been acknowledged by a president. And the foreign policy section of the speech...

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

To those...

(APPLAUSE)

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

(APPLAUSE)

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

...brought tears to my eyes as I read it. He is my president.

Blowback

As they say, hindsight is 20/20. A New York Times article is saying that Pakistani intelligence has been supporting Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that carried out the horrific attacks in Mumbai. What the article forgets to mention is where ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) picked up the habit of independently aiding/funding outside groups, often times without direct approval from the government. This began during the 1980s when the US used to use ISI as a method for funneling funds and other forms of support to Afghan guerrilla groups fighting the Soviet invasion. Other ramifications of these same actions and, more importantly, abandonment of Afghanistan following Soviet withdrawal, also led to the rise of the Taliban and its subsequent harboring of Al-Qaeda.

Unintended, negative future consequences of present political actions are often referred to as "blowback." One of the quintessential examples of blowback is the 1979 Iranian revolution, which has root causes of the 1950s CIA-led coup, which overthrew a democratically elected leader and returned the very undemocratic Shah to power. Blowback and unintended consequences seem to be hitting the US pretty hard recently, and while I am in no way saying that any of it is deserved, these incidents should at least be a clear sign that we need to consider long-term consequences of US foreign policy endeavers.

In today's world, there has to be some sort of method for analyzing possible future ramifications for present actions. And to some extent at least, this is possible. State Department research before the Iraq War rather correctly predicted some of the disastrous outcomes caused by that invasion (not that it did us much good). Hopefully Obama's government will make a more concerted effort to consider long-term effects, even though it has been an American tradition not to.

Proposition 8

Yesterday was a good day for Democrats/liberals, no matter what Karl Rove had to say about the state of the country's political leanings. Barack Obama was elected president, and the Democrats made huge gains in both the House and the Senate. The one major disappointment was Proposition 8, a ballot proposition in California that would change the state constitution to ban gay marriage. These propositions have popped up all over the country and passed, however California was supposed to be different.

Thanks to huge sums of money spent by those supporting the proposition as well as general prejudice, it passed. When thinking about this, I realized what the biggest problem is. Civil rights, an idea so ingrained in the fabric of our country's history, should not be put to a popular vote. Essential rights are guaranteed in our constitution - in the bill of rights and the 14h Amendment. In the Civil Rights movement, the Supreme Court played an essential role in upholding these rights for African Americans. In the states, courts have also played a role in upholding marriage rights for homosexuals, but they are also being overruled by the above-mentioned ballot measures, which have been writing intolerance into state constitutions.

There is a reason why it is so difficult to amend our federal constitution - because there are many elements essential to the fabric of our democracy - including equal rights - that should not be allowed to be changed easily. In this light, I call on the Supreme Court to take on the issue of marriage rights (or at least the right to civil unions), just as it took on the issue of equal rights for African-Americans 50+ years ago. This is the only way to guarantee that such rights are upheld and that the states stop infringing upon them.

Faith in my country again

At 11pm EST, exactly noon Beijing time, Barack Obama was declared the next president of the US. As Thomas Friedman wrote in a NYTimes editorial,

"Let every child and every citizen and every new immigrant know that from this day forward: Everything really is possible in America."

I have faith in my country again. Though the difficult part is just beginning for Obama. He has ridden to election on people's hopes, and he will most likely end up letting a lot of people down. He has so many constraints - chaos in Iraq, a financial crisis, huge budget deficits. Sure it is an opportunity for greatness, but that greatness will have to come through compromise and sacrifice. Still, I have hope for the future.

Interesting articles

Two very good, but kind of long (so I'm not posting the whole thing) articles below:

There is a Silver Lining
I had forgotten how great Fareed Zakaria was until I saw him on Colbert. This article is about how the financial crisis will hopefully teach Americans (both citizens and government) to adopt responsible spending habits.

Farmer in Chief
A very long but worth it article by Michael Pollan about agriculture and food policy in the US and how it is costly, unsustainable, and unhealthy.

On a totally different note, the Phillies won the first game of the World Series! Three more wins and the '08 Phils will be the heroes of a championship starved city that hasn't won a championship since before I was born. How I wish I were back home where I could watch the games. Even if the Phils don't win this year, they've had a great season.

McCain competitive in Pennsylvania?

At least his campaign thinks so.

I tend to highly doubt this claim. Pennsylvania has becoming more and more blue in recent elections, and I think the campaign he is running and his choice of a running mate will not play well in the crucial Philly suburbs mentioned in the article. The NYTimes argues that it is very possible that he is just running out of places to campaign, which could easily be true.

I'm going to predict that Pennsylvania votes solidly Democrat in this election. But either way, make sure you vote!

The death of the Republican Party?

I've had a few things that I've wanted to write about recently but didn't find the time as well as a few articles I've wanted to post, which I will do.

The first topic is a recent op-ed column by David Brooks in the Nytimes: The Class War Before Palin. At the end, Brooks seems to imply that the Republican Party is in mortal danger because it is losing its intellectual base (thanks to people like GW Bush and Palin who criticize any sort of intellectualism as elitist) and is now losing those from the working class that would have voted Republican thanks to a lack of good economic proposals to help this sector.

While I certainly detest the recent Republican Party's disdain for intellectualism, I think Brooks is being a bit over dramatic about the future fate of the party. Let's think back 4 years to the last presidential election. At that time, pundits were questioning whether Democrats could ever appeal to "values voters" and spelling out the coming end of that party in apocalyptic fashion. How things turned around in four years, as Democrats took back both houses of congress 2 years ago and appear poised for a big victory this year. If the Democrats could make such a huge comeback in 4 years, it could certainly happen the other way, and I certainly believe that the GOP is capable of re-grouping after this election. And I hope that they do so in a fashion that allows for more honest debate about the issues.

As implied above, while I don't agree with the GOP on the issues and I resent a lot of the party's tactics in recent years, I still have some faith in the two party system that America has built, so I would not want any of the prognostications about the death of the Republican party to come true.

It Takes a School, Not Missiles

Op-ed from probably my favorite NYTimes columnist. Here.

By Nicholas Kristof

Since 9/11, Westerners have tried two approaches to fight terrorism in Pakistan, President Bush’s and Greg Mortenson’s.

Mr. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion — an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world — to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: the backlash has radicalized Pakistan’s tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before 9/11.

Mr. Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.

The only thing that Mr. Mortenson blows up are boulders that fall onto remote roads and block access to his schools.

Mr. Mortenson has become a legend in the region, his picture sometimes dangling like a talisman from rearview mirrors, and his work has struck a chord in America as well. His superb book about his schools, “Three Cups of Tea,” came out in 2006 and initially wasn’t reviewed by most major newspapers. Yet propelled by word of mouth, the book became a publishing sensation: it has spent the last 74 weeks on the paperback best-seller list, regularly in the No. 1 spot.

Now Mr. Mortenson is fending off several dozen film offers. “My concern is that a movie might endanger the well-being of our students,” he explains.

Mr. Mortenson found his calling in 1993 after he failed in an attempt to climb K2, a Himalayan peak, and stumbled weakly into a poor Muslim village. The peasants nursed him back to health, and he promised to repay them by building the village a school.

Scrounging the money was a nightmare — his 580 fund-raising letters to prominent people generated one check, from Tom Brokaw — and Mr. Mortenson ended up selling his beloved climbing equipment and car. But when the school was built, he kept going. Now his aid group, the Central Asia Institute, has 74 schools in operation. His focus is educating girls.

To get a school, villagers must provide the land and the labor to assure a local “buy-in,” and so far the Taliban have not bothered his schools. One anti-American mob rampaged through Baharak, Afghanistan, attacking aid groups — but stopped at the school that local people had just built with Mr. Mortenson. “This is our school,” the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact.

Mr. Mortenson has had setbacks, including being kidnapped for eight days in Pakistan’s wild Waziristan region. It would be naïve to think that a few dozen schools will turn the tide in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Still, he notes that the Taliban recruits the poor and illiterate, and he also argues that when women are educated they are more likely to restrain their sons. Five of his teachers are former Taliban, and he says it was their mothers who persuaded them to leave the Taliban; that is one reason he is passionate about educating girls.

So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. There would be no immediate payback, but a better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would probably be more resistant to extremism.

“Schools are a much more effective bang for the buck than missiles or chasing some Taliban around the country,” says Mr. Mortenson, who is an Army veteran.

Each Tomahawk missile that the United States fires in Afghanistan costs at least $500,000. That’s enough for local aid groups to build more than 20 schools, and in the long run those schools probably do more to destroy the Taliban.

The Pentagon, which has a much better appreciation for the limits of military power than the Bush administration as a whole, placed large orders for “Three Cups of Tea” and invited Mr. Mortenson to speak.

“I am convinced that the long-term solution to terrorism in general, and Afghanistan specifically, is education,” Lt. Col. Christopher Kolenda, who works on the Afghan front lines, said in an e-mail in which he raved about Mr. Mortenson’s work. “The conflict here will not be won with bombs but with books. ... The thirst for education here is palpable.”

Military force is essential in Afghanistan to combat the Taliban. But over time, in Pakistan and Afghanistan alike, the best tonic against militant fundamentalism will be education and economic opportunity.

So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration.

Behind the reluctance of China and Africa to criticize Mugabe

So in celebration of the 4th of July, I'm posting what some would consider an "unpatriotic" article about the dubious morality of American involvement in Africa by Howard French, a NYtimes columnist who spent a lot of time there. Though I'm still craving bbq. also here.

By Howard French

SHANGHAI: For a crisis involving African despotism, the decibel readings in the West over Zimbabwe have reached almost unprecedented levels.

Beyond the din of condemnations of Robert Mugabe, that country's aging, power-obsessed tyrant, however, a great many questions have gone unexamined.

Western governments led by London and Washington look at Mugabe's rule and see such a clear-cut case of evil that they are at a loss to understand why the rest of Africa - or China, for that matter, a Security Council member with fast-deepening ties with the continent - doesn't rush to join in on their condemnation.

The Zimbabwe case should be more, though, than a tragedy for its own people, for it presents an invaluable opportunity to think about how differently the world can look from different vantage points. And far from an idle thought exercise, this might helpfully lead to a rethinking of diplomatic strategy in Africa and in other parts of the world.

As the second most important country in southern Africa, Zimbabwe, like that region itself, has long functioned like a kaleidoscope, serving up dramatically different perspectives to different viewers.

I was reminded of this fact by the recent news that a South African citizen of Chinese ancestry, Patrick Chong, had won a lawsuit enabling him to be legally considered black. The outcome was a triumph over a history of double discrimination. Like other ethnic Chinese, the plaintiff, who is chairman of the Chinese Association of South Africa, was denied many basic rights during the apartheid era, and he had also been denied the compensation won by the country's black majority with the demise of a system of legally enshrined racism.

As the perverse language of apartheid would have put it, Chong has now become an "honorary black."

What does this all have to do with Zimbabwe? Before Zimbabwe became a majority-ruled, independent country in 1980, and during the long years of apartheid in South Africa, both of those countries were treated with similar perversity as honorary members of the West.

While China was building the Tazara Railroad, to connect Zambia's mines to Tanzania's ports in order to loosen white-ruled South Africa's economic grip on the southern half of the continent, the United States and Britain were running diplomatic interference for apartheid rule in Pretoria.

Washington often went further, backing South African guerrilla proxies in places like Angola, prolonging devastating wars there and elsewhere, and staving off independence for South African-occupied Namibia in the name of fighting communism.

Short memories abound, but in Africa this is not yet ancient history. In 1987, while South Africa was actively pursuing a policy of sabotage against its neighbors, devastating vital infrastructure and supporting mass killers like the Renamo rebels in Mozambique, Washington reserved most of its indignation for "necklacing," a small-bore terror tactic practiced by blacks in South Africa. An amendment passed with overwhelming support in the U.S. Senate requiring southern African countries to condemn these lynchings or lose American aid.

Mugabe said it himself when he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1987: "Political and material support of desperate bandit groups, dissidents and self-seeking, discredited individuals by a superpower like the United States is a prescription for chaos and instability in the international political system. Calling such a hodgepodge of individuals 'freedom fighters' does not make them any such thing."

Looking back, it isn't hard to conclude that China was in many ways closer to being on the right side of history in southern Africa than the United States, for all of America's vaunted attachment to freedom, democracy and human rights.

It is anything but clear that China has maintained that position today, as it pursues neo-mercantilist policies and abstains from pressuring Mugabe to end the campaign of terror and economic devastation waged against his own people.

Still, if one pauses to consider, it is relatively easy to grasp why African leaders might question the good faith behind the West's admirable sounding values and abstain from the chorus of condemnations, or why the Chinese might themselves be skeptical.

An African journalist wrote me this week, comparing the vociferous Western response to Mugabe to the customary silence that attends atrocities, political hijackings and despotism on the continent, especially where critical Western interests are in play. A former U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe had told her: "Everyone felt they had invested something in the success of Zimbabwe, so when it all began unraveling, everyone felt personally disappointed and let down."

This looks too easy by half, and it is hard to avoid the heretical question whether the vociferous response, especially by Britain, isn't somehow related to race?

Unlike most of the continent, Rhodesia, like South Africa and Kenya, were places where whites settled and became attached.

Ivory Coast, another erstwhile showcase, was allowed to cycle through stolen elections, coups, ethnic cleansing and civil war, registering scarcely a ripple on the global agenda.

But telling Africans they will be judged by how they line up on Zimbabwe is counterproductive for other reasons, too. The West's constant search for African leaders to anoint or vilify is resented on the continent, and its track record, moreover, is riddled with spots.

Paranoid African dictators look at the calls to denounce Mugabe and worry they might be next. The more democratically inclined know better. They see Washington's embrace of dictators in places like Equatorial Guinea, or even former enemies, like the robber baron former Marxists who run Angola, and see a pattern of highly selective outrage. Might the fact that these countries - to name but two - are swimming in oil have something to do with escaping the Mugabe treatment?

China looks at this inconsistency, too, and naturally suspects it is being discriminated against. The only African country that has drawn more Western critical fire than Zimbabwe recently is Sudan, for its genocidal campaign in Darfur. It's an emerging oil power, too, but unlike so many African kleptocracies, its product flows east, not west.

美国选举 Presidential Politics

So the primary is finally over, and as we have known for awhile, Obama emerged the victor. Ever since Bill Richardson (hands down the most qualified candidate) dropped out of the race, I have been a Clinton supporter. Her policy positions are so similar to Obama's, and on policy, I am split between the two, but I honestly believe that Clinton would be a better leader and president than Obama would, and I greatly admire her perseverance.

Still, I am not an avid Clinton supporter. I did not request an absentee ballot and vote in the Pennsylvania primaries (even though I see it as my civic duty to do so) because I was tired of the long horse race, as well as some of the tactics her campaign used. I admire Obama and understand how he inspires so many people. And I will happily vote for him in November.

And yes I think there was an implicit element of gender in the race, and as a feminist I find this disappointing and insulting. And yes I think Hillary should have addressed this, as Obama addressed the racial element. Women still have a long way to go to actually achieve equality, and I will forever look up to Clinton as a model for what strong women can achieve, as well as a symbol for the barriers women face.

Still, I do not think Obama is sexist. If he is, he is still much less so than McCain is, plus his policies are obviously more progressive and in the interest of the common people than McCain's. That's why I find it disappointing that some Clinton supporters are saying that they will not support Obama in the fall. I hope that they take the time to consider the policies and histories of the two candidates and realize that Obama is the smarter choice. Yes, women often lost opportunities to others, but we should also be able to celebrate Obama's historic achievement as well. Let bygones be bygones and support the Democratic Party's chance to take back the White House.