A few weeks ago, the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing — the folks responsible for printing US paper currency — took the wraps off the refreshed $100 bill due to enter circulation in February 2011. It has a slew of new security features, including a 3D security ribbon, designed to better thwart counterfeiting. The BEP also seems to think the new $100 bill looks better than its predecessor. But in both respects the new bill is a disaster.

As long as the old $100 bills remain in circulation and remain legal tender, the new bills will have a limited effect on counterfeiting. Any criminal sophisticated enough to forge the non-trivial security features of pre-2011 $100 bills — such as the watermarked paper or color shifting ink — are probably smart enough to continue counterfeiting the pre-2011 notes. After all, as long as their forgeries are good enough and the old $100 bills remain legal tender, retailers and other parties have no choice but to take the risk that someone passes them counterfeit currency. The less sophisticated criminals who use scanners and inkjet printers, or other equally crude measures, are likely thwarted by the watermarks and microprinting alone.

The BEP and others argue that, due to wear and tear, the old $100 notes will eventually fall out of circulation, mitigating this issue. But there are two problems with this argument. First, even if the vast majority of $100 bills in circulation are of the new design, it does nothing to change the fact that US law mandates all currency ever printed remains legal tender indefinitely. So criminals have no reason to stop forging the older notes. Nor does the new currency really increase their probability of being caught

Second, unlike smaller denomination bills, the $100 bill does not experience a whole lot of wear and tear. Even today banks issue their customers $100 bills from the late 1980's or early 1990's — bills designed in the pre-Photoshop era — because so few people use $100 bills in quotidian transactions. Hence, even if this argument holds water, it would take such a long time for this phenomenon to manifest itself that it's moot. By the time counterfeiters feel compelled to forge the new notes, technology will probably have advanced to the point it's not that much of a deterrent.

The Bank of England has a much more sensible policy with respect to this issue. They're currently on the verge of switching in a new £20 note in the UK. But rather than leave the note to "organically" go out of circulation, they've mandated that 60 days after the new note is issued shop owners and other parties are no longer legally obliged to take the new £20 as payment. And, for those people who don't exchange their notes immediately, the Bank of England agrees to exchange old £20 notes for new £20 notes indefinitely. Counterfeiters are thwarted at shops, since owners don't have to accept the old notes and the new notes are difficult to forge, and they're further deterred from forging old notes as the Bank of England can more readily detect subtle forgeries of less secure notes than bank tellers or clerks.

Then there's the issue of the new $100 bill's design. It's absolutely hideous: more a haphazard pastiche of various images than something coherent. The front of the note is now graced by the aforementioned 3D security strip, which runs right down the middle of the bill, intersecting Ben Franklin's shoulder. It's definitely not subtle. The front is also covered by a mishmash of words, letters and numbers in a goldenrod that does not go well with green. A giant "100" in a similarly unpleasant hue dominates the back, printed in such large type the digits are probably visible from the International Space Station on a clear day.

In one sentence, the new $100 bill looks more like Monopoly money than something that stands as a symbol for the power of markets and capitalism.

It's not impossible to design an attractive, secure currency. The Euro has had a 3D security strip, a polychromatic look and other security features new to US currency for years. And I would contend that the Euro notes are far more attractive than US currency writ large. (Note that, for instance, the Euro notes come in different physical sizes — the 5€ note is smaller than the 200€ note — which obviates the need for features like the gigantic "100" for low vision people and allows the blind to pay with cash without the risk of being swindled.) The Bank of England has also managed to incorporate many of the features found in the new $100 bill into their new £20 note without making it hideous.

Fortunately I tend to transact with my debit or credit card, especially for large purchases, so I suspect my exposure to the new $100 bill will be limited. But even if I don't use the new notes, counterfeiting harms me and many other consumers and businesses. And, as something that stands as much as a symbol as it serves a set of economic functions, the BEP ought to have spent the time and money to make the new notes attractive. Perhaps we'll have better luck when the $100 receives another facelift in another 10 to 15 years.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this morning that subtly made the case for increasing the number of hours American students spend in the classroom during their time in primary and secondary schools. Much of the article's argumentation rests on the fact that students in countries like Japan and Korea spend more time in the classroom and thus — or so the logic goes — outscore their American peers in areas like mathematics and science.

While I don't doubt public schools could devote more time to students, I'm not convinced it's more time in the classroom that accounts for the bulk of this "achievement gap" that separates American students from their international counterparts.

Unlike the United States, most other developed countries have a much more rigid educational hierarchy. In the UK, for example, students who fail to pass at least five GCSE exams, usually around the age of 16, cannot continue on the path toward admission to university. As a result, the lowest achievers don't contribute to the average achievement of UK students in a particular age group. Compare this to the United States' educational system, which does not regularly purge classrooms of weak students.

It's as if we were comparing the relative wealth of the United States and Japan by taking the average income across the whole population in the United States, but only the top 50% of income earners in Japan.

But more than that, my own experience contradicts this premise. While I'm not sure how experts compare educational achievement across countries, I think it's safe to say I was better at math than the average student in any developed country at every point in my high school career. Yet, I attended a public high school that — so far as I know — did not require us to spend considerably more time in the classroom than the average US secondary school.

I'm convinced the real fix for our education problem has more to do with the quality of teachers and cultural norms than the number of hours students are required to spend in the classroom.

Even at the college level, teacher quality makes a big difference in my engagement, perhaps even more than my interest in the subject itself. Just this last semester I signed up for a course on the French Enlightenment to fulfill one of my graduation requirements. It's a subject I have an interest in, though not to the degree I'm fascinated by, say, economic models of drug addiction. But the professor I had for that course was so good, I would by lying if I claimed I found any of my other courses more enthralling.

As to the second part, I'm never surprised that American students don't do better in mathematics given that American culture has accepted this bizarre notion that mathematics is "hard." In some sense, math is complicated. But so is the analysis of literature or history. I've taken a variety of advanced courses in math and economics, but none has challenged me more than the French literature course I took in my first semester of college.

I don't want to argue that primary and secondary education don't need to change. But I'm not convinced more classroom hours will make all that much a difference. It makes no sense to keep students in the classroom for one or two extra hours a week if they don't have engaging teachers and the mindset that, with enough determination, they can integrate real-valued functions.

Newsweek has a story this week about the blurry line separating true climate scientists — the sorts of people with doctorates who build huge models to run on supercomputers — and the activists, so-called climate change "deniers" and advocates for change alike. The story mentions James Hensen, a pioneering climate researcher at NASA, who has become so impassioned about the issue to resort to civil disobedience tactics to convince politicians and other officials to take action. But I'm beginning to think these advocates are allocating their efforts inefficiently. Europe's cap-and-trade scheme has done little to curb carbon dioxide emissions. The Copenhagen climate talks accomplished virtually nothing. And the public has little appetite for even weak climate change mitigation policies, such as President Obama's proposed cap-and-trade system. This leads me to believe climate change activists would see more success by channeling their energy toward making carbon-free energy cheaper, instead of seeking a policy-driven solution.

As Bill Gates put it in his TED talk last week, if we can make carbon-free sources of energy cheaper than carbon-emmiting sources of energy, climate change skeptics will make no difference in our ability to protect the environment. Instead, when people go to buy a car or an HVAC system, they'll buy the cheaper, non-polluting option, and the planet will move closer to a climate change solution as people naturally reduce their consumption of carbon-emitting goods and services.

Admittedly, this kind of market-driven solution would be more effective with government involvement. Carbon dioxide emissions due to the consumption of goods and services are what economists call an externality; that is, the cost of carbon dioxide emitted by a gallon of gasoline or a flight from London to Madrid is not included in the cost of the carbon-emitting good. As such, economic theory tells us that we would be better off by internalizing that eternality by, for instance, imposing a "carbon tax" on goods like gasoline. This has the fairly obvious effect of accelerating the market-driven switch to carbon-free goods and services.

But, despite the best efforts of activists, I see little chance of the US government providing this sort of policy jumpstart to a market-driven solution to the climate change problem.

Which makes me think climate change advocates should be channeling their efforts toward driving down the cost of carbon-free goods and services relative to their polluting counterparts, rather than trying in vain to reach a policy-driven solution. I realize that support of business is anathema to the beliefs of many people advocating for climate change legislation. But unless the political climate changes, I honestly believe advocates would be more effective in staving off global warming by helping startups and researchers gain funding to develop and bring to market their ideas for cheaper, cleaner goods and services.

A few hours ago, Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate for Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, made a concession speech to her Republican opponent, Scott Brown. Frankly, I didn't pay much attention to the race, and it would be a lie if I claimed I cared who won the election. That said, the Democrats' loss in Massachusetts may doom the pending healthcare legislation wending its way through Congress. Neither the Senate nor the House version of the bill is perfect, but the effort merits at least a passing endorsement. And it's unfortunate that Ms. Coakley's loss will deprive the Democrats the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate they may well need to pass the healthcare reform package.

But this political predicament underscores a more fundamental problem. It shouldn't be necessary for the Democrats or the Republicans to have a filibuster-proof majority in the first place in order to pass important legislation. In the first place, President Obama came into office with something of a mandate. Hence, it seems to me that the GOP should respect the public's implicit support for a healthcare reform package reflected in Mr. Obama's win. In the second place, it strikes me as absurd to even imagine that each and every Republican Senator has such strong objections to the current healthcare reform push that they cannot possibly vote for it. The situation wreaks of petty politics.

By the same token, it was equally unreasonable for the Democrats to use the filibuster (or threat of a filibuster) to block Bush-era judicial nominees. While I would have appreciated a Kerry win in 2004, or a Gore victory in 2000, the voters elected Mr. Bush and his policies. The Democrats' maneuvering was petty, and came at the expense of the government dealing with more pressing problems.

I would hardly call myself a huge fan of government. But I do believe the government has an important role. It is an institution uniquely placed to help society confront big problems. Yet, at least in my lifetime, it seems the government cannot fulfill this role. It has been corrupted by the sort of petty politics that made the outcome of this one election so unnecessarily important.

Ed Glaeser has a fantastic post over on the New York Times' Economix blog about the economic lessons imparted by various fairy tales. The whole post is funny (if you're an economics geek like me), but I just had to reprint my favorite part. Writes Glaeser:

I laugh every time.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey ruffled more than a few feathers when he published an op-ed piece, "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare," in the Wall Street Journal last week. Loyal, insanely liberal Whole Foods shoppers were outraged to discover the company's CEO advocating for everything from the creation of health savings accounts to tort reform to lower doctors' medical malpractice costs. But I don't see the problem.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not the "typical" Whole Foods shopper, as much as I fetishistically shop there. Unlike most of the people I encounter at my local Whole Foods, for instance, I vociferously oppose the so-called "public option" for healthcare that President Obama has pushed so hard to make reality. I'm also not a big fan of wearing flip flops, for what it's worth.

Nevertheless, I applaud many of the company's practices that endeared Whole Foods to the liberal élite. They offer all employees healthcare, pay reasonable wages, source many of their delicious products from small, local suppliers, and donate boatloads of money to local and national charities, just for starters. (Granted, I also applaud their excellent selection of French cheeses and wide variety of imported chocolate.)

But the CEO's personal opinions with regard to healthcare have absolutely no bearing on such corporate initiatives. Even if Mr. Mackey had come out in favor of an indisputably repugnant policy, like denying healthcare to the poor, I doubt whether Whole Foods would have abandoned its programs to funnel money to local charities that promote community gardening. No person could possibly claim with any conviction that limits on medical malpractice damages would somehow alter the way community gardens function.

What really baffles me, though, is that many of Mr. Mackey's proposals both make sense and should resonate with those on the "extreme left," for want of a better term. Even people who campaign for tree suffrage cannot possibly think it reasonable that a patient whose rhinoplasty left one nostril slightly larger than the other deserves hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in medical malpractice damages. The only people who lose if that proposal — one of several in Mr. Mackey's piece — are medical malpractice attorneys, whose welfare I doubt political activists care much about.

Further, Mr. Mackey concludes his piece with a statement about the importance of eating well. (He is the CEO of a grocery store chain, after all.) This, at least as far as I can tell, meshes quite well with the whole "prevention" angle that the Democrats love to trumpet. What's not to love?

Some took particular issue with Mr. Mackey's statement regarding the "healthcare-as-intrinsic-right" issue. Unlike his supposedly left-leaning shoppers, Mr. Mackey does not buy the idea that healthcare ought to be a right. It seems clear to me, though, that none of these people actually read Mr. Mackey's piece in the Wall Street Journal. Or if they did, they should also be claiming that Mr. Mackey — who runs a grocery store chain — also opposes providing people food and shelter. He presents a more nuanced view of the matter.

In his own words, "Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care -- to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?" Not exactly cold hearted.

Mr. Mackey made an important, substantive contribution to the debate over healthcare reform. I can't see why so many people find his piece so objectionable. His opinions might not mesh perfectly with those of his shoppers, but neither do all of President Obama's views mesh perfectly with my own. That didn't stop me from voting for him in November. Now excuse me while I pour myself a glass of that delicious sparkling blood orange soda I bought at Whole Foods over the weekend.

Professor Greg Mankiw, author of my favorite introductory economics text, had a great piece in this morning's New York Times about the economics of the president's proposed healthcare reform package. Read it here.

Healthcare reform has moved back onto the nation's political radar. Earlier in the week, the President expressed his support for the so-called "public option" in a speech to the American Medical Association. The AMA, of course, is one of the leading voices in opposition to such a proposal.

If a healthcare reform package were to include this public option, then, as I understand it, the government would allow all citizens to opt-in to an alternative health insurance system operated by the government. The provision's proponents claim that this benefits consumers because it creates more competition in the market for health insurance, thus driving down prices and driving up quality. But this is lunacy.

First, if the government creates a health insurance product that abides by the same rules and regulations, and is constrained by the same economic realities as all the nation's other health insurers, I hardly see how the government plan would bolster competition. The government has no particular advantage when it comes to providing health insurance compared to any other provider. A public healthcare plan would be nothing more than one more homogeneous choice, neither much better nor much worse than the other options available to consumers.

On the other hand, if the government decides to subsidize its healthcare product, then it is quite probable — perhaps even certain — that the public plan would offer consumers a bargain on face. Of course, if the government subsidizes its plan, then it doesn't create competition in the true sense of the word. The government would have a cost advantage available to no other provider. In fact, many of the same groups in favor of the public option have called similar arrangements anti-competitive in other circumstances.

The only real benefit from healthcare reform would come about if whatever changes the government make have an impact on the portability of coverage. In the long run, we will pay just as much for healthcare if we pay for it through a single-payer government run system or through our present arrangement, where groups and individuals buy from privative insurers. Portability, on the other hand, would reduce a worker's cost of moving from one job to another, which allows labor to be reallocated more quickly — a very good thing indeed.

In short, the a public plan would do nothing but give customers one more choice in an already crowded market. The only real economic benefit would come about if we reduce costs and make coverage portable. And if that requires a single payer system, that's fine with me.

Now Delta Airlines has decided to levy a $50 fee on fliers zipping off to far-flung international destinations. This is, of course, on top of the fee Delta and most other domestic carriers charge for the first and second bags on domestic routes.

The airlines and other supporters of such plans love to tout the fact that these new baggage fees are more just. Outwardly, I suppose, this argument makes sense. Why shouldn't passengers who carry more baggage pay more to fly?

Unfortunately, the myriad other costs imposed on passengers make this plan a bad deal for consumers.

Our story begins with the prototypical cash-strapped American consumer. Naturally, this person, who simply wants to fly from point A to point B at the lowest possible dollar cost, would do his or her best to avoid paying the checked baggage fees. So fliers who would have brought nothing more than a small backpack or purse onto the plane now lug their backpack in addition to an enormous, unwieldy bag. A bag just small enough to fit into an overhead bin but just large enough to hold a two week's worth of clothes.

At the individual level, every passenger who carries a bag onto the plane instead of checking it incurs a number of costs. They expend more energy lugging their extra carry-on bags from the parking lot through the terminal and onto the airplane. At the security screening area, they have more to unpack and more for agents to rifle through if they are marked for extra scrutiny.

Fliers also either spend more time waiting in line to be screened — so they have to spend even more of their time at the airport — or pay more to hire more security screeners to compensate for the extra stress on the screening system.

Other fliers also suffer when one person carries a bag onto the plane in lieu of checking it. Even when I pay the fee to check my bag, I inevitably spend an eternity waiting behind a hoard of people who resemble sherpas more than leisure travelers. It likely takes more time to load passengers onto the plane, since people spend more time battling over the space in overhead compartments. This, of course, either makes the flight more expensive. Either the airline wastes more money by keeping the plane and its crew sitting on the ground for more time than necessary, or passengers have a worse experience in the cabin because the crew has less time to vacuum or otherwise clean.

I'm also convinced I spend more time waiting to disembark after landing because of the checked baggage fee. Invariably, the people in front of me take a several millennia to deplane as they first recall which bin they crammed their luggage into and then try to pry it out without giving any of the other passengers a concussion.

Airlines should have just raised fares by $10 or $15 and kept their "check two bags free" policy. Even given the current economic mess, I find it immensely hard to believe that the demand for air travel is so elastic that a three or four percent difference in airfares makes that much of a difference. And that ignores the fact that travelers would probably have a better experience if they and everyone else didn't have a huge incentive to avoid checking bags.

Four finals later and I've wrapped up obligatory academic actives for the semester. Thank goodness! I only hope intermediate microeconomics makes use of some delicious multivariable calculus goodness. Otherwise I will spend another semester complaining about America's dysfunctional relationship with the glorious field of Mathematics.

But enough about me. Apparently the global economic downturn has given Russians reason to be more pessimistic than usual. According to Bloomberg, Russian consumers have so little faith in the ruble they're liquidating bank deposits to purchase foreign currency or real, tangible assets, like gold, silver and real estate. I suppose, given the current economic situation this is nothing unusual. People often hoard precious metals to hedge against economic uncertainty.

Russian consumers, however, have also begun using their newly liquid bank deposits to purchase consumer goods, like an extra flat-screen television set or a third refrigerator. This has some interesting implications. Unlike a gold bar or a diamond, consumer goods are an awful store of value. Even adjusted for inflation, an ounce of gold is worth far more today than it was worth 100 years ago. The same can be said for a diamond. On the other hand, consumer goods almost always depreciate in value over time. A high-end television from the 1990s would be worth a fraction of its original value today, both in real and nominal terms.

That Russian consumers consider a television or microwave a better store of value than their own currency implies that, on the whole, Russian consumers expect their currency to depreciate more quickly than consumer goods. Think what that means! Russians expect the ruble to depreciate more quickly than my laptop computer — purchased September 2006 — which now sells on eBay for less than half of its original purchase price. It would be equivalent to the dollar, currently trading at about .75 dollars per euro, falling by half against the euro to .375 dollars per euro in the next two years. At that rate, an Hermès Birkin bag, currently starting at around $7,500, would cost an American over $15,000 by 2010. A seven quart Le Creuset French Oven, now about $260, would run some $520. Or maybe Russian consumers still haven't shaken off 70 years of socialism.

Perhaps I should short some rubles.

I hadn't realized that Venice was flooded. But apparently it is, according to The New York Times. I particularly loved this paragraph from the Times article:

Work began on the $5.5 billion project five years ago and is expected to be completed around 2011. Had the dam system been in place, "it would have prevented what happened yesterday and also today," said Flavia Faccioli, a spokeswoman for the state consortium that is building the dams.

This is just more evidence that rich countries probably won't have too hard a time coping with most of the effects of global warming. Even if sea levels rise by ten feet, I doubt whether the US Government or the City of New York would hesitate to build some elaborate system to keep Manhattan dry. I also see this as more evidence that the real economic problem posed to the developed world by global warming is the influx of refugees from countries that can't afford the same kinds of sophisticated systems.

For some reason or another, I have income inequality on my mind. A few weeks ago I read an article somewhere (I honestly can't remember where, nor could I find it, much to my annoyance — if anyone out there remembers reading the article, please remind me of its provenance) that proposed the United States deal with its income inequality problem by indexing tax rates to the level of income inequality. In other words, if income inequality in the US were to increase, the marginal tax rate would increase for those in tax brackets above the median, decrease for those below, and vice versa if inequality were to decrease.

Initially I thought this was a somewhat sensible idea. It would, in theory anyway, be a fantastic way to keep income inequality in check. But, as I mulled the idea over, I realized the plan has a few problems. At least in my mind, this plan necessitates that the United States government establish some kind of ideal level of income inequality. Otherwise, the IRS would have a difficult time determining how much to change marginal tax rates or when to even take action to adjust them. I suppose the ideal level of inequality would maximize the incentives to become more productive created by high incomes (which are diminished when a marginal dollar of income is taxed at a higher level) while minimizing the harms to society imposed by too large a gap in income inequality, like obesity, high healthcare costs and violent crime. I don't claim to be an expert economist, but I suspect actually finding that optimal point would be tricky. And, even if someone more brilliant than I could find an ideal income inequality ratio, I shudder even to consider the political fallout from setting a national income inequality target.

Like most voters, I find negative attack advertisements that air on television obnoxious and somewhat insulting; as if I have so little cognitive power the McCain camp will manage to convince me the eight-year-old Obama spent his time making time bombs with some crazy radical rather than building castles with LEGO. In my daily read of political blogs, I discovered the Obama campaign's latest advert taking a shot at Senator John McCain:

While I wouldn't call it my favorite advert, it's a much less obnoxious negative advert than it could have been. As political campaigns ostensibly have no choice but to run these sorts of advertisements, it would make me happier if they all looked like that one. It doesn't have some spooky voice in the background. It doesn't have overly dramatic scary music playing to give it that "you should be scared of this other guy" quality. Instead, it lays out a reasonably clear logical path that leads a voter to chose Obama-Biden, not McCain-Palin. Not too bad.

As one of my economics professors put it, the American auto industry "shouldn't exist." Therefore, it was with great dismay that I read the increasingly nonsensical US Congress may move to bail out the US auto industry. Again. Of all the programs and projects that merit or simply need better funding in this country, saving the US auto industry would not make the top five quadrillion. We could invest in education, in infrastructure or in healthcare. Anything but the auto industry!

With the move toward greener modes of transport — provided the nose dive in oil prices doesn't push people back to their Hummers — the American auto industry cannot compete. The Chevy Volt is lovely. But, as is so often the case, it's too little too late. The Japanese and the Europeans have an enormous lead in the short run. Ford actually pays Toyota a license fee to use its Hybrid Synergy Drive software for its hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles. Audi, BMW and Mercedes now sell cars that use cleaner diesel engines to burn as much fuel as a much smaller vehicles. The American automakers can't compete in the short run. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to spend valuable government dollars just to make sure that a few thousand people don't lose their jobs tomorrow.

Which is not to say I don't care about those autoworkers who will lose their jobs should the US auto industry collapse. Such an event would qualify as unfortunate. I do care quite a bit, however, that those autoworkers keep their jobs at the expense of a much more important program. With $50 billion, the United States could, for instance, make a good effort at modernizing its ancient, decaying power grid. Not only would that create a fair number of good jobs in and of itself, it would also put the United States in a better position to harness clean, renewable energy that also creates jobs, reduces our dependence on foreign oil and keeps more polar bears alive.

In the long run, America could lead the way in clean transport. A number of US firms have promising battery technology that could become vital to the production of tomorrows vehicles. Companies like Tesla Motors have the potential to become the Google of clean transport, creating good high-skill jobs, propelling our economy forward and making the planet cleaner. Ford, Chrysler and GM offer nothing but a huge bill to save a few unfortunate people at the expense of the whole country. Let's put that money to use somewhere useful.

On the heels of Governor Palin's assertion that some parts of the country are more "pro-American" than others, came Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann's recommendation that the Congress establish a committee to investigate anti-Americanism in our nation's government. To their credit, both Representative Bachmann and Governor Palin have apologized for their questionable remarks.

But it seems Rep. Bachmann has a few more skeletons secreted away in her xenophobic armoire. The Huffington Post writes about another episode of intolerance from late 2005. In the wake of the youth riots in the Paris suburbs, Rep. Bachmann claimed the unrest in the French capitol came about as a result of laziness and propaganda disseminated by al Jazeera. She commented, "It's suburbanites, the kids, that are watching cable TV, Did you know that? In a lot of these high rises where a lot of the suburban youth are doing writing or doing they have cable TV in their apartments." Yes, the rioters probably had cable television. Yes, they lived in what one might call the Paris suburbs.

But Rep. Bachmann makes two fallacious assumptions. First, she assumes that having cable television implies a person lives in some kind of palatial penthouse apartment. In the United States, only a tiny minority of people receive their television over-the-air. I would venture a guess that more than half of US citizens below the poverty line have cable television. Second, she assumes suburbs in the United States are comparable to suburbs in France. When someone says "American suburban teen," I think of a college-bound child who drives a Volkswagen Jetta, shops at J. Crew and goes to movies with friends on the weekend. When someone says "French suburban teen," I think of a struggling child of immigrant workers who could succeed with just a touch more equality and a touch more opportunity. Big difference.

Worse still, she goes on to assert, "Not all cultures are equal. Not all values are equal." It is as if she wants to commit US troops to some kind of Victorian era imperialist quest to impose our moral beliefs upon other cultures. It frightens me to think these are the people running our government.

I have expressed my doubts about Governor Palin on more than one occassion. Her interviews this week and last with CBS News' Katie Couric have only sewn more seeds of doubt in my mind. More than anything, though, I cannot help but express disbelief that the Alaska governor cannot name a single periodical she reads regularly:

Why is she so reluctant to name a magazine? Perhaps she doesn't want to admit she reads Newsweek, whose foreign affairs columnist wrote a scathing article denouncing her this week.

The President of the United States may not command the same salary as Fortune 500 executive, but it would be difficult to argue that the nation's head of the executive branch has any less responsibility. Thus my argument. No corporation would ever hire Governor Palin or Senator McCain* as its CEO, therefore it's laughable to even consider either of them becoming, effectively, the CEO of the United States Federal Government.

Now imagine my surprise when former HP CEO turned senior McCain economic advisor, Carly Fiorina, made these comments on a radio program this morning:

* I can, however, imagine a corporation hiring McCain as either a lobbyist or some kind of political consultant. He would be very, very good at either of those jobs with his CV and Rolodex.

Image courtesy AlaskaPodshow.com

Without a doubt, John McCain's choice to make Governor Sarah Palin his running mate has shaken up the 2008 Race to the Oval Office. But, as I continue to think about the implications of Sarah Palin's nomination, the more worried I become.

Call me an elitist, a snob or whatever. I just don't think she has the qualifications to become the next vice-president, especially given, as Frank Rich pointed out this morning, "if we've learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it's that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America's chief executive."

This woman thinks faith in faith, not faith in facts, has a place in our nation's public schools. Not only will that sort of policy make Americans more xenophobic and crazy, it will also condemn those unsuspecting children to unemployment or minimum wage work because they will not have the education or the scientific skill set to become a part of today's economy.

This woman believes climate change is not the result of man's negligence, but rather the will of God. And, consequently, she puts oil extraction, not innovation, at the center of America's energy strategy. What a shame, given the way renewable energy can revitalize our economy, protect our Earth and keep money out of the hands of "evildoers" all at the same time.

Above all else, however, it worries me that Sarah Palin hopes to erode whatever shred of a meritocracy remains in the United States. The New York Times ran a story this morning titled, "Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes." The accompanying photo's caption says it all: "The Wasilla City Council, with Sarah Palin, the future governor and vice-presidential nominee, at the center, in a 1998 photograph. Throughout her career, Ms. Palin has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and blurred the line between government and personal grievance."

Political scientists call this nepotistic, vendetta-driven style of governance neopatrimonialism. I call it stupid. In many ways, it reveals just how many similarities exist between the State of Alaska and some of the world's nastier petrodictatorships. A number of analysts have noted that Alaska's executive (governor) has more power than every other state's executive, save for the governor of Massachusetts. Thus, Alaska's government, flush with tax dollars from oil drillers, can essentially quash any political unrest in the Land of the Midnight Sun by doling out ever larger tax rebates, without confronting the fact that a group of incompetent nitwits has control of the government. It's the same way Hugo Chavez maintains his grip on power.

In her acceptance speech, Governor Palin spoke of her small town compatriots, saying, "I grew up with those people. They're the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America." It almost suggests she believes a factory worker with no college degree, no experience in government and umpteen years experience growing corn more merits one of our nation's highest offices than a highly educated Harvard Law grad with years of experience in government and in leadership.

That position is not elitist. It's common sense! It's as if Sarah Palin would be outraged to think an MBA with 20 years of management and computer programming experience was picked over an ex-autoworker with no college degree and limited experience with email to become the next CEO of Google.

The way the GOP has turned this election into a clash of personalities, of patriotism and of values, rather than one that pits the two candidates' qualifications against one another, saddens me.

Some of history's most remarkable leaders have come from the unlikeliest places. Who would have thought a one term Illinois Senator could free millions of people from the bondage of enslavement? Who would have thought a member of the New York political and economic élite would become one of this nation's most zealous advocates for the poor during the Great Depression?

But history has also taught us that bad leadership creates problems. Ulysses Grant undoubtedly put his country first by leading the Union to victory. His lack of vision, judgement and experience, however, has left historians no choice but to call him one of the nation's worst presidents.

Image courtesy 416style

While The New York Times Magazine's piece on Senator Obama's economic policies quelled my remaining doubts with regard to his positions on economic issues, I feel like the Senator has lost steam in the last two or three weeks. His campaign has gone from one that enraptured voters and appealed to voters with a sense of vision, to something much more insipid.

Just today, the campaign released two new television commercials to counteract the Sarah Palin effect on the media's coverage of the campaign. Neither one caught my attention. The first, "Real Change," features the Junior Senator from Illinois explaining his views on a variety of issues. It's not awful, but it's not inspiring, interesting or particularly captivating.

The second, "Still," lambasts Senator McCain for his lack of technological literacy and facile understanding of economic issues. Unlike "Real Change," the second advertisement looks unfinished and unpolished. A 16-year-old with a MacBook and a copy of Final Cut Pro could have made a more polished looking advertisement. And, while it cannot quite match the latest McCain ad in terms of negativity and ad hominem attacks, "Still," doesn't strike me as particularly positive or forward looking. (Incidentally, I feel compelled to point out that YouTube's search suggestions put John Mayer before John McCain.)

Senator Obama needs to shake up the race. He needs to take our attention away from Governor Palin and Senator McCain. A new pair of iffy campaign commercials will not cut it. We need the Barack Obama who inspires, not the Barack Obama trying to beguile Middle America with specific policy prescriptions. As much as those voters claim they want to hear specifics, hear more than inspiring rhetoric, it is not the dull, Barack Obama — who, it seems, spends hours repeating the mundane details of his healthcare proposal or tax plan — that drove droves to the polls in the Democratic primary to make him the Democrat's nominee.

Like many of my peers, I felt drawn to the Senator by his inspiring rhetoric and his perhaps chimerical vision of an America once again at its acme. He represented someone who, even if I disagreed with some of his policies, seemed to posses the willpower to unstick the gears of government and remove whatever negative connotation we have come to associate with the word bureaucrat. In this case, change is not the solution, but rather the problem.

I failed to mention in my previous post that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin served as the Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska for six years. On first glance, this might sound impressive. But, considering the town of Wasilla has fewer residents than Duke University does undergraduate students, it might be said that a four-year member of the Duke Student Government has nearly as much if not more experience in terms of executive management.

Also, a few of the better comments about the Palin nomination from the BBC News website:

Image courtesy the real cjs

According to The New York Times, and a variety of other sources, Senator John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. The Obama people must be elated. Senator McCain could not possibly have chosen a worse person to convince Americans he should become the nation's next commander-in-chief.

First and foremost, Governor Palin completely, totally and utterly undercuts the McCain camp's principal well-reasoned argument against an Obama presidency, that of Senator Obama's relative inexperience versus Senator McCain's. Unlike Senator Obama — who at least worked as a community organizer, served as the president of the Harvard Law Review, won a seat in the Illinois state Senate, lectured at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote two best-selling books and won a seat in the U.S. Senate — Governor Palin's only experience comes from a brief stint as a city commissioner, another stint as an appointed ethics reform tsar and two years as Alaska's governor. I suppose we needn't worry she will exert Cheneyesque control over Senator McCain. Or perhaps we should, given that her frighteningly short CV might lead her to make more than a few misguided choices. Regardless, the fact that Senator McCain believes her capable of becoming the nation's vice president shows the Arizona Senator cannot care as much as he professes to about experience.

More importantly, though, from a policy standpoint, Governor Palin supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Either Governor Palin doesn't understand how markets work, or Governor Palin wants to feed the nation's continued addiction to the very carbon-based fuels that have ravaged our environment and compromised our security. Or perhaps both. Given the relatively meager returns the U.S. would realize by drilling in the Refuge at the cost of disturbing, however gently, a magnificent preserve of the Earth's awesome biological diversity, and the fact such drilling only aids and abets economic stagnation, environmental destruction and petro-authoritarian regimes, drilling in the Refuge makes no sense.

It seems to me Senator John McCain has reached the point of desperation. While, when I last looked, the polls still had Senator Obama in a dead-heat with Senator McCain, the man must be worried. Without a doubt, Senator McCain chose Governor Palin as his running mate for two reasons. On the one hand, she appeals to the one-issue religious extremist vote, by staunchly opposing abortion and claiming to uphold "traditional values." On the other, as a female, the McCain campaign must have some irrational hope they will be able to persuade one-time Hillary Clinton supporters to cast their votes for the Republicans. She succeeds on the first count, though I have a hard time believing any supporter of Senator Clinton would be idiotic enough to support a ticket that so diametrically opposes Senator Clinton's views.

Joe Biden will have a field day at the vice presidential debate.

Image courtesy Alexis Matsui of the NewsHour

I liked Senator Clinton's speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. It was forceful, energetic and, above all, brilliantly delivered. I enjoyed it all the more thanks to Politico, who posted the full prepared text of her speech a few moments after the end of her banal documentary film introduction. She deviated from the prepared text a number of times — most notably at the end when she inserted another call to vote for Senator Obama in November — and clearly lost her spot on the teleprompter at one point. That said, she covered the lapse beautifully.

Rhetorically, the one piece of her speech — and of the Democrat's platform generally — I disliked was the constant reference to "Green Collar" jobs. Obviously, it alludes to the blue- and white-collar labels many attached to certain types of jobs in decades past, and, to a lesser extent today. Even so, I doubt many people in the burgeoning alternative energy industry wear shirts with green collars on a regular basis. Couldn't they have come up with something a little more creative? Clean room jobs? T-shirt and jeans jobs?

Regardless, it was a brilliant speech. I only hope the topics turn away from the lingering Obama-Clinton animosity and more toward the issues that swing voters actually care about.

Image courtesy Hamed Saber

But this week, out of nowhere, Senator Obama decided to espouse two brand new, disastrously dumb ideas. First, the Senator declared he hoped to use a new tax on oil companies' windfall profits to put yet another stimulus check in the hands of "average" Americans. Second, he proposed we augment the nation's supply of oil by releasing fuel from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

To the first proposal, I see no reason the oil companies should face a larger tax burden than they already do simply because they happen to provide something consumers want. The price of other equally — if not more — essential commodities, such as wheat and corn, has also climbed quite steeply in the last 12 months due to high demand. Yet, I doubt even the most dyed-in-the-wool socialist would argue we should tax farmers' boosted revenue at a steeper rate to provide families with discount vouchers for bread.

For obvious reasons, people want to blame Wall Street speculators or big oil, however, they should really blame themselves. Unlike the oil crisis of the 1970's, this year's oil crisis is a story of supply and demand. People in the United States keep buying bigger cars, bigger homes and bigger burgers, just as people in the developing world abandon their bicycles for Buicks.

I dislike the Senator's second proposal precisely because it alters the supply-demand equation in a way that lowers prices at the pump. If anything, in the wake of falling oil prices, the Senator should have proposed the United States phase in a new $2-a-gallon gasoline tax to keep prices high and give consumers an incentive to use less petrol and make the move to alternatives. As Tom Friedman so sagely put it, "When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction. Ditto for us."

Back when the Democratic primary still grabbed headlines, I threw myself into the Obama camp for one reason. I want a leader who will lead: someone who, when the situation merits it, will adopt an unpopular position, in spite of the political cost. Neither the wiretap immunity nor the Supreme Court decision merited the political cost of pursuing the right path with unwavering dedication.

America's addiction to fossil fuels, however, does merit that kind of political sacrifice and leadership. While I will not cast my vote for Senator McCain come November — his scorecard on leadership, frankness and our petroleum problem make Obama look like a straight-A student — I would feel much less uncomfortable putting Senator Obama in the Oval Office if I knew he took our energy problems more seriously.

Image courtesy casasroger

Of course, Ms. Hilton's brief foray into the realm of politics was meant as a joke. Nevertheless, those battle-hardened soldiers over in Camp McCain leapt at the chance to use the socialite's latest stunt to score a few points. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds commented: "It sounds like Paris Hilton supports John McCain's 'all of the above' approach to America's energy crisis - including both alternatives and drilling. Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan."

Meanwhile, in Florida, Barack Obama softened his opposition to the idiotic offshore drilling proposal McCain never ceases to extol. From a political standpoint it makes sense. The American people seem to like this ill-conceived offshore drilling idea and Senator Obama would rather not lose the election. Naturally, the media — and the McCain brigade — took the opportunity to label Senator Obama a "flip-flopper."

These two incidents have pushed me over the edge. Why must politics in this country consist of nothing more than the exchange of petty insults? Is it really too much to ask the two candidates to have an intelligent debate?

Of the three presidential debates scheduled to take place between now and November, not a single one allows the two candidates to speak to one another. Instead, two will feature some hopelessly dull moderator and the other a cast of undecided voters who pose the questions. Ugh.

I remember watching the 2005 pre-runoff debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal with some fondness. The two candidates sat, one across from the other, at a table. They had no "moderator" per se, just a timer and a charming television personality to make sure neither one hogged the limelight. While their exchange veered off course on a few occasions, they managed, for the most part, to have a serious discussion of the issues. One would bring up his or her proposal, give a basis for it and the other would respond with a logical rebuttal. No one cared about flip-flops or expensive loafers. Instead, they raised concerns about the cost of certain projects, or the moral issues surrounding providing a set of services to one group, but not another.

I have no doubt Barack Obama and John McCain could have that kind of discussion. And, to both of their credit, they have both made at least a minimal effort to move in that direction. At the same time, however, both Camp McCain and the Obamites have stooped to crying "flip-flop" on at least one occasion.

The issues have nuance. None of the proposals put forth by Senator Obama and Senator McCain have no merit whatsoever, nor do all of their proposals have no demerits whatsoever. Given the job of weighing an idea's merits against its demerits, and a changing temporal, political, economic and social climate, it seems perfectly reasonable and perfectly natural that both candidates would change some of their positions in the course of this unbelievably long campaign. I wish our politics better reflected that reality.

This will be brief. I just read the Times' latest article in its "Long Run" series, chronicling the lives of our two potential Presidents prior to their current positions. Knowing that Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago's Law School, I have wondered what students exposed to Barack Obama the intellectual had to say.

I think the article's last paragraph sums it up nicely:

Fine. I will admit that constitutional law, especially as taught at U Chicago, is probably not something the average person could ever be expected to understand. But still I wonder, have we become so afraid or so reluctant to think that we have decided to so blindly follow others?

While it would be derisible to suggest Senator Obama has yet to earn my vote come November, it would make me much less worried, checking that box, as it were, to see Barack Obama the professor.

I have writer's block. A few weeks ago I learned that I had been nominated for some award or another and, as such, I needed to write an essay to cement my place as a recipient of said award. After staring at my computer screen for an hour and a half, unable to find the inspiration to write the essay's conclusion, I figured I would watch Sunday's edition of Meet the Press. And, as it happened, the lovely and talented Junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama had Tom Brokaw's ear for the duration of this Sunday's program.

Senator Obama did not choose Meet the Press as the venue for any exciting announcements. By and large, he took the opportunity to reiterate his past statements and clear up some lasting ambiguities. I thought the Senator could have handled his response to the Surge questions with a tad more directness and clarity, but, otherwise, Senator Obama continues to improve as an extemporaneous speaker.

About two-thirds of the way through the broadcast, however, Tom Brokaw switched gears turned his questioning toward the United States' economy. Most of what the Senator said made sense. But then Mr. Brokaw brought up this line of questioning:

I wish Senator Obama had agreed, as Tom Brokaw suggested in his question, that the high price of oil — while painful in the short run for the mythical Average American — will eventually serve to benefit not only the nation's well-to-do, but everyone on every rung of the economic ladder. For a professed supporter of the Free Market, Senator Obama seems hesitant to allow the market to work its magic.

The longer the United States takes measures to soften the blow of high gasoline prices — whether by sending taxpayers another stimulus check or by expanding the potential for offshore drilling — the longer it will take for the United States to kick its oil habit.

Image courtesy Tony the Misfit

A recession, as those who have taken an introductory macroeconomics course know, is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Some might claim the United States is "in the midst of recession," however, the numbers are not there to support such an erroneous claim. Yes, GDP growth in the United States has slowed as of late. But, as our GDP has grown every quarter for the last seven years, the United States is hardly in the midst of a recession.

As Mr. Gramm said to CNN, many politicians, "blame speculators and oil companies for our problems, instead of presenting concrete programs for using energy more efficiently."

It's almost unfortunate John McCain did not endorse Mr. Gramm's views. They make far more sense than Senator McCain's loony economic strategy.

Image courtesy archie4oz

Every manufacturer of battery-powered goods already has a huge incentive to develop better battery technology.

Toyota expects to deliver some 64,000 Prius hybrid-electric vehicles this year, which use batteries at a core component of their hybrid system, each worth about $24,000 in revenue to the automaker. Given that Prius sales alone account for about $1.5 billion in yearly revenue for Toyota, the company has a huge incentive to improve their battery technology. What's more Prius sales alone do not take into account the half-dozen or so other hybrid vehicles Toyota could make more appealing to the consumer by improving their battery technology, and thus their vehicles.

Of course, Toyota is just the tip of the iceberg. Computer manufacturers love better battery technology too because it means they can make laptops thinner, lighter and more powerful, all without decreasing the amount of time the computers can operate unplugged. Industry analysts predict consumers and corporations will buy some 297 million laptop computers this year. Even conservatively assuming that the average laptop sells for $500, 297 million units represents $148.5 billion dollars in revenue. The $300 million McCain battery prize represents a whopping 0.2% of the laptop market alone, which would boost the marginal revenue on a laptop to $501 from $500.

Given the size of the existing market for batteries, the huge existing incentives and the lack of oomph $300 million would provide, John McCain's proposal has no merit. The money probably would do more good funding one of his much maligned "pork barrel projects" or, better yet, paying down the Federal Debt to aid the beleaguered greenback.

If John McCain — or Barack Obama, for that matter — is serious about taking on the climate change issue, he needs to take much bolder action. The US government's fleet of cars, trucks and vans is enormous. Senator McCain could have promised the first automaker to develop a viable zero-emissions vehicle a monopoly on vehicle sales to the government. That's an incentive that might make a difference.

Why would anyone buy this?

Image courtesy truebluetitan

One of those assertions concerned the South Korean auto industry. As the senator correctly notes, the US imports far more cars from South Korea than South Korea imports from the US. Of course, as the Times article explains, South Korea imports very few cars to begin with, and US automakers — well-known for making cars with big engines — suffer from South Korean restrictions designed to minimize the country's environmental impact. European and Japanese automakers, attuned to their domestic markets' demand for small, gas-sipping vehicles, fare better.

But, more than anything, I was shocked that the South Koreans even imported American cars in the first place. In my mind, the American automobile occupies an ugly gray area.

Most cars from Japan or South Korea have stellar reliability, though offer only an adequate driving experience. Cars from Europe, meanwhile, are a dream to drive, but tend to have subpar reliability and cost a bundle to maintain. Of course, the Japanese — especially Toyota's Lexus division — have made huge improvements in their car's handling, and the Europeans, save perhaps Mercedes-Benz, have made reliability improvements.

The American car offers neither amenity: it usually has mediocre reliability and offers a flat, unremarkable driving experience. At the same time, the car usually costs more, lacks essential safety features and has a generally unfinished, cheap feeling. Even people in America seem to agree. Last quarter saw Asian automakers, led by Toyota, sold more cars in the United States than our domestic corporations for the first time. In the high-end market, US consumers clearly view domestic luxury cars as inferior goods, as only now, faced with skyrocketing commodities prices, are they so much as considering the purchase of an American vehicle.

With such a mediocre product on offer, it surprises me that American manufacturers manage to sell cars in the first place. American automakers would probably fare better internationally if they actually produced a product people wanted to buy. People in emerging markets dream of owning an Audi or a BMW, but I have never heard a rising Chinese businessman lust after, say, a Lincoln.

It would take a miracle on the order of The Loaves and the Fishes to convince me I should buy a Ford. Unless some brave American engineer starts her own car company, making remarkable, lust-after-able vehicles I actually want to buy, I doubt I shall ever own an American car.

Just under a month ago, I commented on John McCain's loony idea to give the Federal gasoline tax a summer vacation. Since then, the people in Hillaryland decided to support the same nonsensical idea. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, came out in strong opposition to the temporary gas tax hiatus. They cite, among many other excellent reasons, the fact that most mainstream economists do not support the gas-tax hiatus because it makes virtually no economic sense as a basis for their position.

What disturbs me most about the current debate between the Obamites and the Hillaranians, though, is the Clinton campaign's constant dismissal of economists' ideas. (See this excellent post on the Freakonomics blog.) Economists, the Clinton campaign opines, tend to be the sort of people whose incomes make the whopping $30 savings insignificant and unimportant. As the Freakonomics folks note, this is probably true, given that the average economist makes about 85% more than John Q. Employee.

If these economists were taking their positions based solely upon their individual self-interest — that is to say, if economists oppose the gas tax hiatus because their individual financial circumstances make the cost (fewer dollars in the hands of the government for infrastructure) higher than the gain ($30 that would otherwise have paid for gasoline) — then the Clinton campaign's logic might hold. But these economists believe, based upon their apolitical economic analysis, not through an analysis of their personal finances, the broad macroeconomic impact of this absurd gas tax hiatus will have a bigger negative than positive impact. So, in essence, the Clinton campaign discounts the ideas of highly-trained experts (economists) not because their actual economic analysis is somehow flawed or incorrect, but rather because the experts themselves happen to be more affluent than the average person.

That some voters go along with this logic is also worrisome. Of all the people who could make a high-impact decision, a qualified expert in the field — say an economist, in the case of tax policy — seems to me the best choice. Some voters, however, appear to believe someone less-qualified, but more amenable to throwing a backyard barbeque, is the best candidate. By that logic, it would make more sense for a law firm to take a fifth grader, rather than me, as an intern, because the fifth grader is cuter and somehow friendlier. Does this make sense? I think not.

Addendum: Perhaps my favorite politician, Michael Bloomberg, chimed in with an astonishingly insightful analysis of the gas tax holiday: "Michael Bloomberg said giving drivers a break from the gas tax is 'the dumbest thing I've heard in an awful long time.' "

Dead at Last?
Image courtesy Elfieda

In another blow to corporate America, it looks as if the FCC may force sneaky ISPs to disclose the true speed of their Internet access and the restrictions they put on that access. Never have I heard of a customer receiving the "potential maximum possible" speed cited in ISP advertisements. Most people celebrate when their access moves at even half of the promised speed.

More importantly, though, it is essential that customers know which types of network traffic their ISPs either retard or stop altogether. Peer-to-peer file sharing systems, such as BitTorrent, have a bad reputation for allowing unscrupulous people to trade music without a penny going to the artist whose blood and sweat produced the work. In reality, they have the potential to make the Internet much more efficient, and allow innovators to make the Internet even more useful and powerful. Many people use peer-to-peer technology in completely legitimate ways.

The VCR too can be used to violate the intellectual property rights of a television studio or some other such organization. Yet, fortunately for consumers, the Supreme Court ruled that the Sony Corporation could continue selling the VCR because so many completely legitimate uses exist. I find it quite saddening that our nation's lawmakers has become so obsequious to their financial backers that peer-to-peer technology has suffered the opposite fate.

If consumers know their service provider prohibits their legitimate use of technologies with a plethora of legitimate legal uses, they can abandon those tyrannical providers. With any luck, those backward-thinking providers will, through the power of competition, be forced to open their lines to the use of powerful technologies with a potential for illegitimate use.

Cynics take note! Martha Stewart's kitchen is not the sole province of good things.

Image courtesy dbking

For someone who means to take a strong stance with respect to climate change, the environment and government spending, this hardly seems a good idea.

On the climate change issue, I see any increase in the price of gasoline, especially in a direct way to the consumer as very good indeed. Higher gas prices do not benefit the economy in the short run, to be sure. They do, however, have a fantastic long run effect on the environment, and our national and economic security. It would be folly to make a marginal improvement to our economy now at the expense of the environment and our long run economic future. Cheaper gasoline means more invisible greenhouse gasses nebulously floating around in the atmosphere at the environment' expense and a less competitive market for alternative energy solutions.

As for government spending, it hardly strikes me as financially prudent to remove another chunk of government revenue without a replacement at hand. Mr. McCain speaks of balancing America's budget, while simultaneously giving every American individual and corporation a tax cut. Any reduction in so-called "pork barrel spending" he manages to effect will quickly be offset by the gigantic tax cuts he proposes, which — working under the wildly speculative assumption that the cuts equal one another in size — still leaves America with a budget deficit deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Climate change is, to use the almost platitudinous phrase, not a partisan issue. While I hope Mr. Obama manages to scrape together a victory in November, I think the dialogue and discussion needs to emphasize change now, rather than change in 2025. Perhaps I should have said, "John, Don't Even Think About Thinking About Doing It."

Image courtesy FLY!

I always think of Southwest Airlines' now-infamous questionable ensemble incident. Whether the wonky woman's choice of clothing justified the airline employee's action or not, the simple fact that she was wearing something that prompted an employee to think twice about allowing her onto the aircraft says something less than positive. I do not mean to say people should don their Sunday Best just to board an aircraft. It would, however, be nice if people would — as much for their own sake as for the comfort of the other passengers — think twice before boarding the plane in a mini-mini-mini skirt. Granted, I suppose that example speaks more to some Americans' questionable taste — a societal problem of sorts — than to something directly related to the airlines. Not that people wearing mini-mini-mini skirts make my life at 35,000 feet any more pleasant.

Certainly, high jet fuel prices, health insurance costs and post-9/11 security superfluity contribute to the dismal quality of US commercial aviation. But those three costs alone cannot explain the enormous chasm that lies between US carriers and their far superior foreign rivals. It is not as if Air New Zealand has some kind of special agreement with oil producing nations to buy jet fuel at below-market prices. Or, if they do, I don't know about it.

Of course, I will concede that healthcare costs and superfluous security spending do not burden the rest of the industrialized world — one of the many reasons I, the loony free market devotee, support a universal healthcare system. And I will admit that many top-notch foreign carriers receive generous subsidies from their respective governments, which give them some insulation from fuel costs. Curiously, though, as Western European governments have adopted more laissez-faire rules and moved further from their old socialist policies, their airlines have, by all accounts, suffered very little or even improved. In other words, as partial or wholly owned government airlines receive fewer government dollars, their products' quality has either diminished marginally or improved. If state subsidies were the root of these foreign airlines' high-quality product, then, logically, their high-quality product should have either worsened or, at best, remained identical.

That said, I am not the Oracle of Delphi: I have no idea what business wizardry makes flying Lufthansa so much less painful than suffering through torture on United. I do, however, have a suggestion.

As it stands, all airlines flying domestic routes in the US (i.e., New York to Los Angeles or Portland to Atlanta) may not have more than 25% foreign ownership. That nasty little regulation explains why British Airways flies from O'Hare to Heathrow, but not from O'Hare to San Francisco International. Thus, at least on domestic routes, American carriers face no genuine competition. JetBlue, I will admit, does a far better job than U.S. Airways, but I would switch my allegiance to Lufthansa in a heartbeat if they flew domestic routes in the United States. As the people in Frankfurt like to say, "There's no better way to fly."

A healthy dose of competition would do the US carriers a favor. In the one space where US airlines must lock horns with their vastly superior foreign counterparts — on international routes — US carriers step up to the plate and offer a much better product. Take the Miami-Seattle and Boston-London routes. Miami, Florida sits about 2,700 miles from Seattle, Washington, and Boston, Massachusetts lies some 3,300 miles from London, England. The jet stream, however, evens out their flight times, such that each flight takes about six hours to complete. Nonetheless, not a single US carrier offers "international-grade" business- or first-class — the sort of swanky cabin with lie-flat hybrid bed-cum-seat apparatuses and snazzy snacks — on their Miami-Seattle route. On the other hand, virtually all US airlines offer those sorts of amenities on their Boston-London routes, and those who do not are in the process of making those services available. Why? Competition from foreign airlines, who all offer those kinds of amenities to their first- and business-class passengers on international routes. (Note: This paragraph has been edited for factual accuracy post-publish. See the extended entry for the original language.)

No doubt, some lunatics would oppose such a brilliant stroke of deregulation either for fear that Qatar Airways will conspire to destroy Mount Rushmore on an Atlanta-Portland run, or that a handful of American jobs will be lost in the transition. To the conspiracy theorists, I say, buck up and tolerate. From what I hear, Qatar Airways — official sponsor of the weather on England's Sky News — does a marvelous job moving people in flying metal tubes. To the protectionists, I say deal with it. People in the agriculture business (i.e., farmers) were probably none to happy when the industrial revolution reduced the nation's need for farm laborers a hundred some odd years ago. But with a dollop of education and a sprinkling of determination those people managed to migrate — for the better — into the emerging industrial sectors, such as automobile or textile manufacture.

So what are we waiting for? Deregulate already!

Image courtesy Justin Shearer

Given Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton's nearly identical policy prescriptions and political positions, some might point to Mr. Obama's charisma or his "electability" in a potential McCain-Obama "death-match" as reason enough to make him, not Mrs. Clinton, the Democrat's choice for November. Frankly, though, I hardly see those as the most important factors to consider. Rather, I feel he ought become the Democratic nominee because his supporters are several orders of magnitude more insane than Mrs. Clinton's.

Ask one of Mrs. Clinton's supporters why he or she supports the New York Senator and, from my experience, one receives an enthusiastic, but somewhat tempered response. The same question posed to an Obama supporter, on the other hand, elicits an avalanche of exuberance. His eyes dart skyward, as if to catch a glimpse of Mr. Obama's divine presence, and his hands wave excitedly in a burst of avid gesturing.

It says quite a bit about a candidate when he can inspire so-called "young people" to spend thirty minutes of their precious time watching him speak about race, in lieu of zoning out to a "Friends" rerun or a meaningless mélange of sport statistics on ESPN. People discussed (and, for that matter, continue to discuss) Mr. Obama's race and unity speech in Philadelphia with the same kind of unbridled enthusiasm as the latest episode of Lost. And goodness knows many people speak about that program with an astounding amount of zeal. (Not that I have a problem with the Lost-obsessed set; in many ways I count myself among them.)

Whether Mr. Obama merits the level of enthusiasm his supporters display, I cannot be sure. (Though I would not complain if he took the Oath of Office in January.) From a pragmatic political perspective, however, that is unimportant. If Mr. Obama becomes the Democrats' nominee, the party will have access to his relatively more well-educated, more financially powerful base of insane supporters to make sure he receives enough votes to put him in the Oval Office.

With Mrs. Clinton, the party has a base of enthusiastic supporters, to be sure, but not the kind of hyper-committed folks Mr. Obama's campaign brings to the table. Meanwhile, the Democrats have to contend with a group of ex-Obama supporters who will likely not crisscross the country with the same ardor to support Mrs. Clinton.

If the Democrats intend to exploit this golden opportunity to turn the political tables, they need to learn from their past errors and realize the electorate will not simply hand them the presidency on a silver platter. Howard Dean and his cohorts need to work to win it. And it seems clear to me that the Obamamaniacs will be far more willing to go that chimerical extra mile to ensure Mr. Obama's wife has final say on the White House Christmas décor.

At this week's climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, the negotiations boiled down to this:

Most of the World: We should all agree to legally binding climate change targets.
The United States: We won't do anything unless China and India do something.

On one level, I understand the United States's argument. It makes no sense to allow China and India to continue growing at a breakneck pace with little or no regard for the environment. But that does not mean the United States should stick to the status quo. Despite what Barack Obama or Mitt Romney might argue, spending a few billion dollars to fund dead-end ethanol projects in Iowa does not amount to strong action to combat climate change.

Rather, the United States should take the lead. We should stop acting like a spoiled two-year-old and take clear, decisive action. George W. Bush might have a legitimate reason to call himself the "leader of the free world" if he actually took the lead on climate change, or, for that matter, any other issue. It makes infinitely more sense for the United States to, say, impose a two dollar per gallon gasoline tax, which would help the environment and then some, than to sit around and whine about China.

As I have opined on more than one occasion, the United States stands to gain far more than cleaner air by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. By reducing our demand for oil, and subsequently driving down the price of crude, we could significantly weaken the grips of the world's petro-dictators, which would put backward-thinking men like Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez out of power and make the world a safer, friendlier place for everyone. We would also give a much-needed jolt of capital investment and competitive edge to our nascent green technology firms.

What's more, though, by taking the moral high ground on the climate change issue, rather than continuing to trudge around in moral limbo, the United States would do wonders for its battered image. Our strong stance vis-à-vis global warming might also compel India and China to take action. Whatever flaws we may have, many people in China and India look up to us, and, more importantly, the governments of those countries have a strong desire to engage us in a bout of one-upsmanship.

Fortunately, though, an environmental superiority complex has none of the security risks that come along with a nuclear arms superiority complex.

So, Mr. Bush, skip your Sunday morning bike ride, put on a few extra ounces of weight, and take the lead on climate change. You will be thanked.

Christmas — whoops, "holiday" — music tends to make me sick. Hearing the same overly treacly lyrics and conspicuously upbeat music over and over at every turn should make anyone sick. (Even when Frosty is on the brink of a meltdown, the song stays in major!) But, for whatever reasons, as soon as Thanksgiving has ended and people begin eating turkey sandwiches for a month, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer rears its obnoxious head. Or, in the case of Costco, the ballads and dancing Santa displays come out in August.

Nonetheless, at my family's behest, I began looking for some cheerful holiday music to play on the piano to spare them from the usual classical and jazz compositions I play. Trying to find something tasteful, or, at the very least, not overplayed, posed something of a challenge. After a few hours of auditioning songs in iTunes, though, I stumbled upon the only Christmas album I genuinely enjoy listening to: Lee Mendleson and Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Thrilled at my discovery, I rushed to sheetmusicdirect.us — my favorite source for downloadable compositions — and bought a few pieces from the Charlie Brown songbook.

Whatever the difficulty label may have said to the contrary, playing "Christmas Time is Here" is no walk in the park. I could not play some of the chords, like the C13 that requires the player to stretch his or her hand an eleventh from C to E flat.

Fast forward a day or two to this morning. Reading The New York Times Magazine, I came across this article about the Guitar Hero-Rock Band phenomenon sweeping the United States. I have never understood why someone would rather pick up a dinky plastic guitar-cum-game console controller and press a series of multicolored buttons instead of picking up a real guitar and playing real music.

Of all the impossible, fantastic places a video game could take a person, the land of Playing a Guitar seems very unimaginative. It is not legal to carry a machine gun through a deserted part of the American heartland and engage friends in a kill-to-win game of tag, nor is it possible for a plumber to fly through interstellar space and engage whimsical robots in an intergalactic epée. On the other hand, guitars of questionable quality can be found at any big box retailer.

But, as I continued to contemplate "Guitar Hero," I realized that it can and does take people somewhere they would not ordinarily go: to a place where they can play the guitar.

I find it incredibly depressing to think that a sizable chunk my fellow countrymen have grown so tired of physical and mental exertion that they must now resort to a simplified method of playing the guitar. I cannot play the instrument, but given the relative simplicity of most popular music — like the rock and roll anthems immortalized in Guitar Hero — I doubt it could be that taxing for the body or the mind to play on the guitar.

It seems to me like attaching a gyroscopic stabilization system and a motor to a bicycle with training wheels.

Of course, some people will probably write me angry emails asking me why I have never made the same statements about other "simulation" games, like Madden NFL of NBA Live.

Those games, however — unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band — take the player somewhere fantastic. Few people ever have the chance to play football for the NFL or manage a professional basketball team. But anyone with an instrument and a desire to learn can play a rock song. Even The Sims — in which players do nothing more than tell simulated people whether or not to laugh at another character's joke — allows a person to transcend reality and live life as a werewolf or a crazy cat lady.

Sorry Lou Dobbs. We need to mend our broken minds before we even begin to contemplate (if indeed we would even dare do that before taking action) our broken borders. Some have compared our current era to the Dark Ages, with people questioning sound science — intelligent design, anyone? — and demanding our politicians provide easy-to-comprehend sound bites. If people require their music spoon-fed to them via a series of multicolored dots, I may be inclined to agree. For my part, though, I will go back to the ivories and try to master "Christmas Time is Here."

Watching the Republican presidential candidates in their quasi-debate Tuesday was, in a word, painful. CNBC billed it as a debate about economic issues, which remained the case until Chris "Softball" Matthews spontaneously decided, "We're branching out into other topics," about forty-five minutes in.

For all I could tell, none of the candidates had any idea how the economy works. Representative Duncan Hunter, for instance, seemed to think that the United States should revert to mercantilism, an economic theory debunked in Adam Smith's 1776 bestseller, The Wealth of Nations. Hopefully he realizes that most of Europe abandoned the policy a few centuries ago before he becomes the president of the world's largest economy.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, proved he does not understand the purpose of trade. Asked whether or not he supported trade, Mr. Romney immediately responded with:

But Mr. Romney's incomprehensible economic ignorance does not end there. He also seems to think that imported products should not have an advantage over goods produced domestically. That, of course, would completely defeat the purpose of the trade he so wholeheartedly endorsed. He who proclaimed, "I understand the economy," needs to open a basic economics textbook to the chapter marked "comparative advantage" and read.

Popular CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo was the debate's one bright spot. Unlike Chris Matthews, she came down hard on the candidates who gave facile or non-responsive answers. At one point, Ms. Bartiromo asked Senator John McCain whether he thought the tax system treated the middle class fairly. Mr. McCain, like any good politician, launched into some tirade about outsourcing and Medicare instead. But Ms. Bartiromo cut him off and, in a very lawyer-esque way, repeated the question:

Sadly, I doubt the Democrats will manage a better showing. Everyone from Hilary Clinton to Dennis Kucinich seems to think that free trade will damage, not improve, America's economy, which is absolutely ludicrous.

The Wall Street Journal ran a very interesting piece on its front page today detailing the decline of Wal-Mart's puissance in the retail industry and in the American economy as a whole. It was an interesting analysis of Wal-Mart's current struggle to continue its success in a market that has, in many respects, moved to become less homogenous and more quality-centric. I found one statistic particularly interesting: according to the article, Wal-Mart has scaled back its plans for expansion in the United States, "because its new stores were stealing too much revenue from existing ones."

I have the sense that Wal-Mart has caught Affluenza — the highly contagious retail virus that possesses retailers to move up-market — from some of its other low-price competitors. Admittedly, Affluenza does not necessarily condemn the infected company to a slow painful death by share price decline. With the right treatment, it can be — and has been — a boon, not a bust for the infected company.

Target, for one, has been enormously successful in its quest to seduce more affluent consumers. Their clever advertising campaigns have won countless awards and high-praise, and partnerships with well-known designers, like Michael Graves and Isaac Mizrahi, have imbibed the brand with a more hip, design-centric aura. People now associate products at Target with relatively high-quality, low prices and thoughtful design. Target has also gone to great lengths to promote their philanthropic efforts, which helps lend a façade of kindness to their ruthless corporate efficiency.

Wal-Mart has fared less well, due in large part to their insane obsession with ultra-low prices.

They have made attempts to change their corporate identity. In January 2007 alone they worked with — and later fired — three advertising agencies. Wal-Mart also tried to lend their image a touch of class by piloting a program to outfit employees in navy blue polo shirts, rather than navy blue vests. But neither the ad campaigns nor the more polished uniform resonated with more affluent consumers because Wal-Mart did not back up their claims.

I cannot name a single notable designer whose products grace the hallowed shelves of the Supercenter, nor can I name a single product available exclusively at Wal-Mart that has sparked interest among the aesthetically-concerned. Instead, I think of low-priced, low-quality merchandise manufactured in China by underpaid employees in a factory that wreaks havoc on the environment.

The age of Wal-Mart may be drawing to a close. My inner-investor hopes that Wal-Mart will put its act together and improve. But the good neighbor and environmentally-conscious consumer in me hopes that Wal-Mart will finally stop overtaking the now-dead American Main Street.

Saving the Planet,
One Shoulder at a Time

But, in its journey from niche-market to mass-market, a radical change has taken place in the world of green products. Unlike the Prius die-hards who immediately sought to purchase the first mass-produced hybrid gasoline-electric car in 2001, the Prius buyer of 2007 views the car more as the automotive equivalent of a Fendi clutch than as an instrument of social and environmental change. Today people buy green, think green and do green to be "Eco-Chic."

Solar power firms regularly outfit the curb-facing gables of drab suburban McMansions with a smattering of cells. Celebrated handbag designer Anya Hindmarch launched the "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" tote bag — a white leather tote emblazoned with the aforementioned phrase in highly conspicuous brown script — to great success. Even NetJets Europe, the company that pioneered the idea of fractional private jet ownership, has announced plans to be "carbon-neutral" by 2012.

It is fitting to see the same forces that popularized the gas-guzzling Chevrolet Suburban ignite sales of more environmentally-friendly vehicles, like the Toyota Prius. At the same time, however, I cannot help but wonder whether the Eco-Chic phenomenon detracts from the true goal of green products and services.

After all, it would be far more environmentally sound for someone to travel aboard a commercial jet than to charter their own Glufstream V through NetJets, regardless of whatever "carbon-offsets" NetJets intends to offer. And the idea that a leather tote bag — which requires a cow to be raised, killed and skinned before the hide is treated, dyed and fashioned into a bag — has less of a carbon footprint than one two-gram plastic shopping bag seems perfectly ludicrous.

I have no complaints that the environmentally-sound practices of 7 for All Mankind and Paul Smith add a touch of Eco-Chic to my wardrobe. But people should think of the environment first and their vanity second. Offsetting a flight from Dallas to Milan on a private jet with the purchase of an acre of protected wildness still dumps an extra ton or two of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere.

After watching a week of protests and violence in Burma, the public has decided that the United States and the rest of the Occidental world needs to impose sanctions on the military state. But sanctions — at least on the part of the United States and Western Europe — will do nothing to affect the military government. Burma, a very resource-rich nation, will manage to find at least one country or corporation to buy its natural gas and oil. As most analysts have pointed out, China's influence is likely the only reason the Burmese military has not done more to quash protest. Russia — not exactly a staunch ally of the West — also has no interest in putting pressure on Burma: the Burmese military regime sources most of its military equipment from Russian aerospace and defense contractors.

On the other hand, the Burmese people have very little contact with and even less access to the outside world. According to the CIA World Factbook, Burma has a whopping two radio stations and another two television stations. Less than 31,000 people — out of 43 million — have access to the Internet from a whole 42 Internet hosts. (Compare that to the 195 million in the United States.) The Factbook also mentions that the Burmese telecommunications infrastructure, "barely meets minimum requirements for local and intercity service for business and government."

In fact, the protests in Burma were catalyzed by an increase in fuel prices, which proved too much for the already cash-strapped Burmese people. They came about not, as one might have expected, because the Burmese were unhappy with their military overlords.

Bearing that in mind, I think the United States and European Union ought to impose reverse sanctions on Burma. We should encourage our citizens to tour Burma and expose the oppressed, information-deprived population to human rights, freedom and the social contract theory of government. We should feed and encourage a Burmese hunger for Western literature, entertainment and journalism. If a modest increase in fuel prices can spur action that merits above-the-fold coverage in The New York Times, then it does not seem inconceivable to think that the Burmese, with the right information, might have their own American-style revolutionary war.

For a backward country, we need to adopt a backward strategy.

America has pulled the welcome mat out from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad feet. It seems that everyone from editorial directors to randomly selected interviewees on the street have nothing nice to say about Iran's sixth president. And I share their belief that Mr. Ahmadinejad ought not to receive any kind of special treatment if he wishes to visit "ground-zero," as the pundits would call it. But I have a difficult time believing that all of these people who claim to so vehemently detest the Iranian president actually have a foundation for their beliefs. Nor do I see why allowing him the same access granted to any tourist or American citizen should create such a kerfuffle.

From what I have seen on television, and read on print and online, most people struggle to pronounce the man's name, let alone produce any shred of evidence to support their position. One bedraggled New Yorker interviewed on CNN said that Mr. Ahmadinejad ought to be denied access to New York, "because he probably had something to do with the terrorist attack." An argument supported like a castle built on a stack of invisible toothpicks.

Granted, Mr. Ahmadinejad would not be at the top of my list of potential dinner guests. His strange views on the Holocaust and his actions to suppress women's rights — so severe in some cases that even the ultra-conservative Iranian governing counsel asked him to ratchet back the discrimination — do little to engender him support, at least from me and the rest of the Western world. But it cannot be denied that he has done at least a little good. His actions to fight poverty, while relatively facile, have still stood to benefit Iran. And one cannot help but wonder whether Mr. Ahmadinejad is merely playing the role of insane Middle Eastern dictator to rouse more support on his home turf by adopting the persona ascribed to him by dear Mr. Bush.

Denying the Iranian president normal access to the lower Manhattan site where the World Trade Center once stood, also seems unfounded and, quite frankly, un-American. How can we call our society tolerant if we deny normal access to a man simply because of his position and the radical views that he holds? And what evidence demonstrates that Mr. Ahmadinejad would do something dangerous if he were to visit the site? He has never actively participated in acts of violence or brutality and there is no reason to believe that he will suddenly take up the hobby upon arriving in the United States.

I have no problem with anyone who dislikes the Iranian president. But it bothers me to think that people want to strip him of his rights or disparage him based on hearsay or nothing at all. It does nothing but paint America as an intolerant society and further inflame people who already dislike us quite a bit. Next time America, know your Ahmadinejad.

Greener pastures ahead?
Image courtesy L'Etrusco

Certainly Barack Obama would do a better job than our current president, but even his plan stops far short of what is truly necessary. In a speech he delivered early in 2006, just after the president's State of the Union address, Mr. Obama advocated that the United States, "raise fuel economy standards by 3% a year over the next fifteen years, starting in 2008." In practice, Mr. Obama's policy would take a GMC Suburban, which currently manages a meager 11 miles to the gallon, and push its fuel economy up to an unimpressive 17 miles per gallon. Hardly something to write home about.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, England's Liberal Democrats have proposed a much more radical, and much more appropriate, set of policies designed to combat climate change. Their policies, simply put, aim to make the United Kingdom a carbon-neutral country by the year 2050. In practice this includes a proposed ban on all petrol-powered vehicles starting in 2040 and specialized "green mortgages" designed to incentives the construction of eco-friendly homes. Admittedly the pace of the Lib Dem's proposed reforms are much slower than might be ideal, but such a policy does a far better job of correctly identifying the scope and the immediacy of climate change.

Unfortunately, though, the Lib Dems have little chance of putting their policies into effect, at least for the foreseeable future: they have neither the numbers in the British Parliament nor sufficient support from other MPs. Still, their policies signal a marked departure from the ineffectual and rather wishy-washy policies set out by other political parties or individual politicians, especially those in the United States, with regard to the environment. I still have reservations about the current crop of presidential hopefuls here in the states, but, given the somewhat unexpected and decidedly bold shift in policy overseas, the seeds of hope have been planted in my mind. Much can — and undoubtedly will — change in the next fourteen months.

Iowans have more power than they ought to. Their caucus — the first in the nation — has so much influence on the race to the White House that any politician even contemplating a stab at the presidency has no choice but to back ludicrous policies, simply because they appeal to Iowans. More troubling still, the politicians who generally consider presidential runs are senior politicians, who also happen to greatly influence the broader policy of their political parties. As a result, the entire legislative branch winds up supporting some truly idiotic ideas because the Iowans like them.

America's policy vis-à-vis ethanol epitomizes this problem. Rather than integrate the American ethanol market with the global ethanol market, the United States has built the Great Trade Wall of Iowa. Essentially, any ethanol coming from any other country has such an enormous tariff imposed upon it by the government that it becomes woefully uncompetitive with other, US produced, ethanol. Naturally, Iowa produces a great deal of corn. The same corn, in fact, used to create corn-based ethanol fuels. Good for Iowans, terrible for the rest of the world.

For, while injecting some cash into the Iowan economy is not necessarily a bad move, a de facto US monopoly on ethanol in the US has disastrous environmental, political, security and economic effects to every person on earth. Brazil, for one, has already worked itself into a tizzy over the fact that they, effectively, cannot sell their sugar-based ethanol products in the US, straining our diplomatic ties with that particular southern neighbor.

In the mean time, other US states have taken notice of this phenomenon and have, accordingly, scheduled their primaries to take place earlier in the year. California, for one, will now hold its primary on 5 February 2008, while New Hampshire — whose state constitution mandates that its primary be first &mash; has moved theirs back to 22 January, just a few weeks into the new year.

The net result is even more attention drawn to the so-called political "horse race" (i.e., who trumped whom in the latest poll) and away from a discussion from actual issues. I cannot remember the last time (or any time) Meet the Press had a panel of medical school professors, say, on the program to discuss which candidates possessed the best healthcare policy. Instead, the Chris Matthews Show features its segment, "Tell Me Something I Don't Know," where the assembled panel of journalists digs up some new piece of dirt on a politician and assesses its impact on their polling.

So, I propose the United States have one day in a presidential election year where every state in the nation simultaneously holds its primary. Preferably, this date would fall somewhere in the middle of the year — say on Saturday — and take place on a Saturday, to encourage people to participate by removing their obligation to take time off from work. I say the date is 5 April 2008, the first Saturday of that month. And, for a little extra zeal, why not give the day a catchy, interesting title to attract younger voters and shrug off that pesky air of stodginess? Say hello to Swashbuckling Saturday, the day America chooses its presidential candidates.

The candidates would likely not actually engage in swordplay (though, admittedly, an épée between Obama and Guilliani would be interesting) or physically hurt one another in any way. They would, however, no longer support the ludicrous policies that benefit a handful of states with influential primaries, in favor of looking more macroscopically at which policies best serve the entire country.

Detractors might argue that this would prompt candidates to visit states with population centers, like New York or Ohio, instead of focusing their attention on smaller states, like Iowa. In all likelihood, such detractors would be correct. But to view that as a something undesired would be foolish. It makes infinitely more sense to have the populations of California and New York — whose combined population weighs in at around 56 million or nearly 20% of America's population — dictate national policy than the much smaller population of Iowa.

Hopefully, by removing Iowa's stranglehold on presidential positions, this country would finally adopt policies on their merits, rather than on their impact to Iowans. Yes, in the short run, Iowans will suffer. But, in the long run, the increased competition will force them to innovate, which has rarely hurt any economy. Swashbuckling Saturday would probably have a small impact on the media, but it would, at least, confines their coverage of the horce race to one, rather than dozens, of different days.

Tonight's mildly absurd CNN + YouTube Democratic presidential debate really underlined how ignorant most of America is. Forget the candidates' inability to truly differentiate themselves in any way, despite what they asserted. In fact, I would go so far as to pardon or forgive their facile responses. The questions posed by these uninformed YouTube activists were, with some exceptions, dreadful.

For the sake and health of my fingers, I will stick with one such example of just how misinformed the American public is. An indication, perhaps, of the urgent need not only to improve education in this country, but also a sign that we must foster a culture that loves to learn. Because, after all, what purpose would we serve by simply spending a fortune on education if the children fail to engage themselves?

But back to the idiotic video. In some meaningless jibber-jabber about the minimum wage, two young women asked the assembled panel of Democratic presidential hopefuls whether or not they would be willing to work for minimum wage.

In theory, this could prove a useful exercise to show the candidates how difficult it is to support one's self or one's family on such a meager income. I know, for instance, that upper management at Burger King in the United Kingdom greatly improved business after they spent a week working the front lines at a Burger King restaurant.

But in reality, making — or even permitting — these people to work for what, relative to their current salaries, amounts to very little, has terrible consequences. Firstly, such a move would further cement the stranglehold of the wealthy on such political offices. As anyone who knows anything about history ought to know, the Romans had the same problem. Office holders were, in that case, paid absolutely nothing, which, despite the fact that the members of the lower Plebeian caste could run and hold office, effectively barred the Plebeians from taking such positions and cemented power in the hands of the old-money Patrician families.

Secondly, forcing members of Congress or the executive branch to work for minimum wage would drive smart, intelligent people away from public service. It has been shown that countries which pay their civil servants wages comparable, or even better, than the wages they might earn with a similar skill set in the private sector, generally have better civil servants. Japan does just that with its teachers. In fact, teachers are paid so much more that the competition to become a teacher in Japan is incredibly fierce. The Japanese, then, can choose the very best teachers to educate their children. And, as a result, the Japanese have stupendous teachers.

Singapore too pays its civil servants well to great effect. The Singaporean Prime Minister's salary comes in at just over 3 million American dollars. Compare that with our president's current salary of just $400,000. Granted, the Singaporean government can be brutal and immoral, but one cannot deny that it is extremely well run.

Just as people generally would not want to work their entire life as a gas station attendant making minimum wage, very few people would see public office as a viable career choice unless they either had money or they had no other choices. That would, effectively, put either very wealthy or very stupid people in office. While the former option might work, the latter is undesirable.

It is a noble notion that public servants should sacrifice a good wage in order to serve their nation. But, as both history and modern economics demonstrate, it is, at best, a chimera. The people who posted this question should probably keep their day jobs.

For years I have shopped the Nordstrom Anniversary sale: the clothing is superb and the prices better. Recently, however, I have been unable to find clothing in my size: not huge. I would, for instance, see something interesting, meander over to the display containing said item and discover that, unfortunately, it was only available in extra extra large. Initially, I attributed this sudden inability to find clothes in my size to the fact that I usually shopped the sale a week or two weeks after its beginning. This, of course, meant that thousands of other people could easily have picked over the clothes deigned to fit humans, leaving me with the whale-sized offerings. And it made sense: people who wear extra extra large clothing probably do not possess the best dress sense.

With this analysis in mind, I devised my strategy for this year's anniversary sale: shop early, find clothes. But, alas, my plan failed. Shopping on the first day of the sale I still found almost nothing. I did, however, find the foible in my logic. Apparently, the growing girth of the modern American has prompted Nordstrom and other department stores from stocking more than one or two items in something smaller than a large.

Smoking, it seems, is not the only vice that negatively affects the healthy and innocent. Now the obesity of others threatens not just healthcare costs and the comfort of spectators at Cirque du Soleil performances, but also Americans' already stunted sense of style (Crocs anyone?). The madness must end. Stop second hand obesity!

Delicious and So Simple
Pancakes are a chinch to prepare, yet Bisquick still graces the shelves of lesser supermarkets. (Image courtesy LynnInSingapore)

In general, I have a hard time understanding why people buy pre-prepared food. Granted, for the sake of your sanity, some items, like puff pastry, really should not be prepared by the home chef. Other items, however, are so bafflingly simple to prepare that I cannot understand why people bother to buy them.

Then again, according to The New York Times, our culture has spawned such laziness that six-year-olds now gain the most weight in the summer, when they are supposedly outside swimming and swinging. The article begins, "Summer. The perfect time for children to play outside, swim -- and get fatter?" But why should that laziness stop at the kitchen?

Americans, it seems, will stop at nothing to avoid work. Just look at the popularity of margarita mix. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have never had a margarita. I have, however, read enough cookbooks and cooking magazines to know that margaritas are dead-simple to make. One recipe I found at Epicurious.com, has a whopping six ingredients, including such hard-to-find items as salt and ice cubes. The third of America's population that can now officially call itself "obese" would stand to benefit from burning the extra two calories of energy needed to cut and squeeze a lime, rather than dumping the tequila and Tripple Sec into a bucket of powder.

Pancakes too epitomize this trend. As Mark Bittman would say, it is a matter of ones: one egg, one cup of milk, one cup of flour and so on. Is it really that much easier to pour water into a bowl of potentially tasteless processed powder? Just as comfort is no excuse for bad fashion, laziness is no excuse for insipidity.

I just love the irony: some Americans are so lazy they cannot even stop to make food to fatten themselves. We need to stop giving the rest of the world something else to make fun of. Our Fed chairman is bad enough.

I have never understood why Brian Williams bothers to read viewer mail on-air. Especially since the usual feedback consists of some overly treacly comment about a special report or a scathing criticism of some very unimportant detail. Tonight, however, a viewer comment opened my eyes to the latest method that the lovely folks over at Fox News have begun to employ to further calumniate their least favorite politician, former President Bill Clinton.

The viewer wrote to the NBC News program complaining that, in his recent interview with the former president, Brian Williams erroneously addressed former President Clinton as, "Mister President." Said viewer continued by saying that said title was reserved for our current president, the illustrious W, and also that he or she would go back to the real journalists at the Fox News Channel. Fortunately, Mr. Williams corrected the disrespectful viewer by informing the viewer that the title of "President" is, to use Mr. Williams' phrase, "for life." *

But the latter part of the viewer's comment disturbed me. He or she, with the help of the Fox News Channel, genuinely believed that it was disrespectful to President Bush to call a former president, "Mr. President." That kind of thinking is far more dangerous than a conscious choice to demean someone through impoliteness.

The viewer's blind adherence to the ideas set forth by Fox News also underlines the fact that Americans do not think for themselves. Rather, many of them rely on the tainted information spoon-fed to them by politicians and the left- and right-wing news media. That too, seems very dangerous.

Though, in this case, the viewer would only have needed to consult Miss Manners to see the error in his or her ways.

MSNBC managed to redeem itself, at least a little, this evening with its second debate between 2008 presidential candidates, in 2007. The candidates actually disagreed on certain points and Chris Matthews did a much better job forcing candidates to answer the questions asked of them. None of the Republicans, however, offered a particularly compelling platform.

I find that I agree with most Democrats on social issues, but I take issue with their insane attempts to make our economy more Swedish. Conversely, I tend to agree with traditional, Republicans on economic issues, but I consider their stances on so-called "moral issues" ridiculous. Of course Republican candidates like Mike Huckabee — who wants the government to enforce morality and despises free-trade — are impossible to endorse.

In this debate, however, the Republicans almost never spoke about economic policy or anything else of substance. Instead, they focused on security and "moral issues." So I found myself constantly annoyed with their statements. I see no purpose in discussing the candidate's positions on abortion, gay marriage, evolution or anything else of the sort. It has no impact on their ability to actually solve problems. It would be akin to saying that an engineer might build a faulty tunnel because he supported abortion rights and, by some ludicrous extrapolation, did not care about life. It's absurd and it needs to end now.

Mitt Romney did manage to make the debate interesting because he was so articulate. If I were casting my vote based solely upon who communicated the most effectively, I would vote for Mr. Romney. Unlike the other candidates, he almost never used fillers — um, and, uh, like, et al — choosing instead to do what any competent speaker would: pause. I may disagree with him almost completely, but at least I can disagree agreeably. He is a breath of fresh air in a sea of politicians, like our current president, who cannot speak to save their lives.

My worst-speaker-of-the-night award goes to Sam Brownback, the Senator from Kansas. O the inarticulateness! It makes me wince.

I will begin with the classic run-on sentence technique, in which the incompetent speaker strings together two or more sentences that should be discrete:

Unfortunately, those are but a few choice examples. Almost every one of Mr. Brownback's statements during the debate used the word "and" at least twice, if not more frequently.

Then come the annoying grammatical problems:

Note the fact that even the transcriptionist thought the grammatical errors in the second excerpt were so obvious, he or she added a "sic" to the end to indicate that it was Mr. Brownback's error, not the transcriptionist's.

Some of Mr. Brownback's speech was blatantly bad:

Granted, that last one may be a clever political tactic to skirt the question by using pronouns so as to make people forget the question's subject.

But the candidates galled me most with their so-called "visions." Not one candidate has put forth anything particularly bold. In fact, the word "oil" was only used in the context of Iraq, not in relation to any sort of visionary energy policy. The word "energy" was mentioned a pitiful seven times, whereas "abortion" and "Iraq" received sixteen and thrity-seven mentions, respectively.

None of the candidates had a visionary education policy designed to put the US back ahead in science and technology. Mike Huckabee made reference to "school," though that statement concerned our progress in Iraq, not actual schools in the United States. Tommy Thompson, the former governor of Wisconsin, spoke about "educational diplomacy," again, in relation to the Iraq war. And Representative Duncan Hunter came the closest, still missing the mark by a mile (or a light-year) with his statement emphasizing his belief that colleges and universities should work with private industry to combat climate change.

John F. Kennedy had a vision when he said America would put a man on the moon. Tonight, the Republican candidates had Ronald Reagan. It's going to be an interesting election.

S'Wonderful
Capitalism: It's a beautiful thing (Photo courtesy Stuck in Cusomts)

Admittedly, unemployment, especially among persons 18-25, has become a real problem in Europe. In the more socialist economies of Spain, France and Italy, unemployment in that age group hovers around 25%. But the lack of work stems not from a lack of governmental regulation, but rather an excess of it.

Employers in France, for example, hesitate to hire new workers because obscene regulations make it very expensive to replace a worker, regardless of how little work the old worker does. Perhaps making it easier to fire people would mean more jobs because employers might actually posses the means to pay them. Quelle bonne idée!

But the real problem lies in education and innovation. When the French government realized that, just maybe, there was money to be made in online search, they did not make funds available for smart people to bring their smart ideas to market. Instead, they created a government-owned search engine, "Quaero." I doubt whether one in ten-thousand Americans has ever heard of Quaero. But even people living in rural China know what it means to "Google" something. Unsuccessful? Just a little.

And when it comes to education, just look at what students do during their free time. Do they sit in class and take advantage of a resource that millions of children would love to have, a free education? No. Instead they hold protests to advocate for change that will ultimately hurt them.

Admittedly, French students probably spend most of their time in class, though the whole "learn instead of protest" bit does make for a nice title. No, the real problem with education concerns the education itself: tests determine far too much of their fate. Rather than learning to think creatively or just learn in the first place, most students just learn enough to pass a test. The result is not terribly appealing.

When I spent a month in France over the summer, I met dozens of high school students who had taken five or more years of English. Only two of them, however, could actually string together a complete sentence. One university student explained that some university-level courses spend over a month teaching students something as simple as telling time.

France, Italy, Spain, Germany and every other socialist country in Europe needs their own Margaret Thatcher to break down the oppressive walls of protectionism and open Europe's eyes to the beauty of capitalism. To the French, then, vote for Mr. Sarkozy.

The Next French President (I Hope)
French presidential front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy addresses "un meeting" in Tours (Photo courtesy Francois Lafite)

French politics are to American politics as Escoffier-style cuisine is to a fast-food at McDonald's. From what I have seen, watching the campaign on French television, it certainly trumps the American system. The French participate in politics the same way they participate in the World Cup; political rallies, or, as they call them in France, "les meetings," resemble something closer to a rock concert or sporting event than the dry, insipid political gatherings American office-seekers put together. Perhaps that could explain the record 84% voter turnout in the runoff election to choose France's two primary candidates.

But more importantly, nearly everything that the French discuss actually concerns policies and politics. I have yet to hear Ségolène Royal, the socialist candidate, attack her opponent, the more conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, on a personal level. Instead, she denounces his economic policies, or explains why his immigration plan would hurt the country. And, for that matter, most of the rhetoric the candidates use focuses on the positive aspects of their policies, not the negative aspects of their opponent's plan.

The French media also does a much better job of covering the elections. Instead of giving candidates the opportunity to attack their opponent's character flaws or evade the question, French interviewers ask tough questions and demand answers. Just yesterday on "A Vous de Juger" — a Larry King Live-style interview program, but without the softball Larry King questions — Ségolène Royal was forced to answer a number of questions that, based on her attempts to evade the questions, she did not want to answer.

Even the way the candidates dress seems more thoughtful. American politicians look like American politicians. Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, however, would not look out of place on the runway in Milan, give or take a few pounds and a few years.

In America, the picture is much more bleak. Earlier this evening I plopped myself down on the couch to endure a ninety-minute debate on MSNBC between the eight (six, really) men and women who hope to become the Democratic presidential nominee next year.

To begin, I doubt whether the candidates answered half the questions. Brian Williams, the debate's so-called "moderator" even remarked at one point how absurd it was that his question about global warming somehow led to five speeches about Iraq. He should have done something about it. He seemed very timid, like a small child being bullied by "the big kids." It's really no wonder he could never cajole the candidates into answering questions with one word when he asked for it. I hope that his timidness was an editorial choice by a facile-minded MSNBC executive, not the choice of Mr. Williams.

The candidates were also more inarticulate than I would have liked. I would give Barack Obama a pass, barely, and the other candidates, in my mind at least, failed miserably. I tend to measure a candidate's articulateness against my own, which, admittedly, is not difficult threshold to overcome. But few American politicians manage to do it. I often ask to myself, "Could I have done a better job of delivering that message?" and, more often than not, the answer is "yes." Alternately, if I look at someone who can genuinely speak, like outgoing British PM Tony Blair, I find myself struggling to even begin drawing a comparison.

All eight presidential hopefuls also had a bizarre fixation on the Iraq issue. It almost seemed pointless for Brian Williams to even raise the question. Every candidate had the same response: we need to pull our troops out of Iraq. The candidates, however, put Iraq in the spotlight, at the expense of many other important issues, like the environment or innovation. Undoubtedly it was some charade to illustrate Bush's missteps. But I cannot understand how knowing not to vote for President Bush, who cannot even run, makes me want to vote for them.

Someone from Evanston, Illinois (read: Northwestern University) asked, in an email question, what the candidates would do to increase the number of American students pursuing careers in science and technology. One candidate said something about paying teachers more — not something that would help the situation — and the rest managed to contort the question into something related to Iraq.

Later in the debate, Brian Williams confronted Delaware Senator Joseph Biden with an observation from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: of the myriad of presidential hopefuls who have entered the race so far, not one has a serious energy policy. Senator Biden countered by presenting his not-serious energy plan. If elected, the senator would implement such bold measures as ensuring that ten percent of American gas stations could pump ethanol by 2009. In space-race terms, Biden's proposal would be the equivalent of John Kennedy saying that the United States would have a launch pad built by 1975.

At this point I would probably support Barack Obama, though not enthusiastically. He definitely has the most poise and the most brainpower of primary candidates. And I admire his genuine effort to clean up the mess in politics. But I worry about his inexperience and his lack of a real energy policy. Still, considering the other choices, I hope Barack takes the cake.

By the end of this week the US House of Representatives will likely pass a non-binding resolution, which condemns the presidents so-called "Surge," yet supports the troops in Iraq. This does not seem like the action you would expect from a group of politicians dedicated to accomplishing something substantive in Washington.

The simple fact that the resolution does not bind the president, means that the resolution has no guaranteed effect on the nation's Iraq policy. And, as the president has expressed no interest in changing his course of action, it seems unlikely that it will have any effect at all. Furthermore, the resolution's message contradicts itself. It seems to me that you can either support the war and, by extension, the troops, or you can oppose the war and, by extension, not support the troops. Someone cannot take one piece of both positions and still maintain a well-supported position. Once again, the Democrats refuse to take a real position.

But the real problem with the resolution lies, not with the resolution itself, but rather, with the way in which the House plans to debate it. Most people believe that the House will spend this entire week discussing this pointless resolution. They could easily make more productive use of their time. In the first hundred hours of its existence the new Democratic House managed to pass several pieces of legislation that would implement the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, increase the minimum wage, provide Federal funding for stem-cell research, help reduce the cost of prescription drugs, cut interest rates on student loans and fund the development of alternative energy. With this resolution the house will spend over forty hours debating something, which amounts to nothing. It would be much more prudent to spend time debating something that might have a lasting impact on the country, like an initiative to modernize the nation's telecommunications infrastructure.

Hopefully, at least one presidential candidate will take a real position in the next election. I do not care whether he or she is a Republican or a Democrat and I do not care if the candidate changes his or her position, so long as the candidate has one.

The “Good Guys”
What a great way to differentiate the Iraqi justice system from Islamic extremists (Image courtesy Al-Iraqiya)

But amidst the analysis and looped video clips, one aspect of Mr. Hussein's execution struck me as imbecilic — at least on the part of the Iraqi government — and incongruous: the men who hanged Hussein looked like run-of-the-mill extremists. And, of course, the executioner's choice to shoot the video with a low-quality camcorder — again, like the extremists — further casts them in the same light. If Mr. Hussein's face were blurred, I never would've guessed that the video came from the Iraqi government.

This event will probably plunge Iraq further into chaos and violence, now that the government has essentially equated itself with the same people who try to destabilize it day and night. The government should have put Mr. Hussien in prison for life or developed some other, more humane punishment, to set it apart from the extremist groups and put itself on the moral high ground.

When evaluating the president's popularity, pollsters often ask voters how likable they consider the president. At the moment, W's approval rating remains at very low levels indeed. I cannot speak for the entire country, however, I know my unfavorable disposition towards Mr. Bush stems, in part, from the simple fact that I do not find him very personable. He seems insincere. Even when he steps up to the metaphorical plate and fields questions from reporters at press conferences, W sounds more like a broken pull-string toy than a living, breathing, likable human being.

I have never understood why the public responds well to Mr. Bush in a "town hall" setting. Whenever I have watched his performances in such an arena, the president has made a fairly overt effort to dodge undesirable questions. I remember, during the second presidential debate in 2004, Mr. Bush completely — and probably intentionally — misinterpreting one of the audience members' questions.

Mr. Bush also has an obnoxious habit of haphazardly tossing in his questioner's first name, when responding to his or her question. It sounds very disingenuous, especially when W simply appends the questioner's first name to the beginning of a memorized sound bite.

So, since the president has, in my view, failed to come across as personable in nearly every medium — print, television, radio, and even blog — he should start an informal "presidential podcast."

The crucial element, of course, is informal. If the presidential podcast becomes a rehashed presidential radio address, then it loses its purpose. He needs to seem frank and forthcoming, rather than on-message and obdurate, as he almost always does. Otherwise, he may as well call Condi and go for a bike ride.

A story on the BBC recently caught my attention, not because it revealed anything particularly alarming, but rather because it contained a strange analysis of statistics. The article, "One in 20 Latinos 'goes hungry,'" details the findings of a new report, released today by the National Council of La Raza. According to the article, the new report claims that one in every twenty Hispanics living in the United States regularly lacks food. The article goes on to comment that such a rate, "is substantially greater than that of non-Hispanic whites," citing a government statistic, which puts hunger rate of non-Hispanic whites at 5%.

That analysis makes absolutely no sense. If the National Council of La Raza claims that one in every twenty Hispanics is hungry, then it could be said that five in every hundred — or five percent of — Hispanics are, unfortunately, hungry. How remarkable: the same percentage of non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites are hungry, according to these two sources.

And this is why, my readers dear, statistics lie: dare not go near!

Nearly a month ago, Qatar-based Aljazeera launched its English-language news channel, after many years of planning. But much to my dismay Aljazeera's English channel is virtually impossible to receive or even watch in the United States. None of the major - or for that matter, minor - cable or satellite television companies in the United States have agreed to carry the new network, doubtlessly out of fear that Washington politicians will deprive them of their special treatment. The Internet too, is an Aljazeera-free zone, at least for Americans. Both RealNetworks and JumpTV stream Aljazeera to subscribers, just not those located in the United States.

I would like to have Aljazeera's English-lanugage channel available to me, either on my television or through broadband video. This afternoon, I watched a low-quality Real stream of Aljazeera. And, true to their word, they put many stories on-air that other news channels do not. For instance, I learned a great deal about the breakdown of Mexico's police force. Apparently, Mexico's law enforcement operation has allowed a few small pockets of crime to spread. Now, rampant crime has penetrated all but the most isolated parts of Mexico. I have yet to see a similar report on CNN, MSNBC, BBC World, France 24, or Fox News.

Aljazeera also airs a fantastic program, called the "Listening Post," which spent the first seven minutes of its Sunday program deriding Fox News' attacks aimed at NBC's decision to call the Iraq situation a civil war. The program's content really made me think.

But, sadly, I doubt that Americans will have easy access to Aljazeera, at least in the short term. Most of the public knows Aljazeera as only the radical network, which broadcasts Osama bin Laden's communiqués. And, as a number of media analysts have noted, so-called "influential people" comprise the bulk of Aljazeera English's viewers. In other words, Aljazeera does not have much appeal to the broader public.

An Allegory on the Banks of the Nile?
The writing experts at Toys R Us have done it again. It's unleashed, not unleased! (Photo courtesy engadget)

Bobakabobit, the eBay red-star power-seller who listed the console, is making a killing. The retail value of dear Bobakabobit's top-end PlayStation 3 package (complete with receipts, two games and one rather unimpressive Blu-Ray movie) falls somewhere between the comparatively small sums of $700 and $800. Thus, Bobakabobit - just one of the many people selling the console on eBay, amazon.com, and other popular Internet shopping sites - stands to profit nearly $4200.

I would have gladly spent several hours in an over-caffinated hoard of video game fanatics for $4200. I must almost pause to wonder why I didn't slog out to Best Buy at 4am on Thursday.

Bobakabobit's auction also makes me question why anyone who managed to snatch a PlayStation 3 at list price would open the box. Gwendolyn Gamer or Pete Playstation could redeem his or her respective pre-order voucher, sell the console on eBay, and, by waiting for a few weeks or months, buy a PlayStation 3 console and fifty games! Yes, the game-fanatic in question would have to spend another three months without Deadly Death Duel 12 or Crazy Car Capers 8, but that warm, fuzzy TV time cannot possibly be worth $4200.

Nintendo's Wii console made less of a splash. Nobody was maimed or killed, though the Toys R Us outlet in New York's Times Square committed the almost-as-agregious act of putting, "A New Style of Gaming is Unleased," instead of the slightly more logical, "A New Style of Gaming is Unleashed," onto its Jumbotron facing 42nd Street. But then, the store is called Toys R Us.

From what I have read, supply shortages will probably not impact Nintendo's Wii as much as Sony's PlayStation 3: Nintendo expects to sell 2 million Wii consoles in Q1, whereas Sony has forecasted PlayStation 3 sales in the hundreds of thousands. As such, the Wii has appeared with only slightly inflated prices online. eBay seller Good-Guyz has a Wii with game listed for $710, meaning that he stands to make a paltry $450 on his transaction - only 11% of Bobakabobit's.

The law of supply, demand and Christmas shopping habits at work.

Image courtesy sfslim

The new restrictions on air travel merely serve to benefit pharmaceutical corporations, who can now broker deals with airlines to sell overpriced lotions and lip balm on board the aircraft for those passengers who parted with their skin-care products at the security checkpoint. Perhaps this explains the airlines surprising lack of complaint over the new security measures. With musicians and businesspeople forced to find alternatives to air travel due to the restrictions on their hand baggage, one would expect the struggling airline industry to make more of a fuss about the potential loss of a major revenue source.

Furthermore, from my experience at the airport shortly after the Department of Homeland Security put the new restrictions on gels and liquids in place, the implementation of the new measures will not, in any way, prevent a determined person from bringing liquids on board. Aside from random baggage checks at the gate, which probably screen less than 10% of passengers, other passengers could easily bring liquids onto the plane.

Opposite day is such fun.

President #43
He was right. Okay ?

As so often happens, I seem to have jinxed everything by simply thinking those thoughts. Just a few hours later the beginnings of a controversy emerged. Both Republicans and Democrats began to express their concerns that the deal somehow compromised national security. As Representative Peter King (R - NY) said on NBC's Meet the Press today, "[It] was only four and a half, five years ago that they [the government in the UAE] were very close to bin Laden, they were supporting the Taliban. And unless there's been a complete transformation, I have real concerns (link)."

Prior to the outburst of unfounded criticism, no threat to our national security existed - as the often incorrect Bush people correctly realized. After all, everything would still undergo inspection by US officials and the Coast Guard would continue to monitor threats. Of course, this is working under the worst-case-scenario that Dubai Ports World would even consider doing anything to compromise our national security. In all likelihood, the UAE would do nothing of the sort: by ruining their relations with the US they would also deal a heavy blow to their economy.

However, the imbecilic outburst of criticism may have a huge impact on our national security. This outburst of discontent over having a few ports turned over to an Arab country could easily be construed as racist. The US taking a potentially racist stance in its foreign policy, unlike allowing a UAE-based country to manage some of our ports, may compromise our national security. Bin Laden and his cohorts could easily use their impressive public relations machine, which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently called, "highly successful (link)," to incite violence against the Untied States.

It is quite remarkable that when the Bush Administration most deserves to be praised for its actions, its critics tear it apart. For once, the Bush people have genuinely tried to protect our national security. Critics of the policy should stop bickering now, or risk compromising our security more.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA - President Bush today unveiled his latest initiative for improving education in inner-city schools. The new plan would direct two hundred billion dollars towards vocational education for students in grades seven through eleven, if approved by Congress. However, in an unanticipated move, Mr. Bush indicated that the vast majority of this money would be directed towards programs for training inner city youths to become professional rap music artists. "Today's inner-city children have many hopes, many dreams," said Bush in his speech, "Fifty years ago our children might have wanted to become doctors, policemen, or scientists. Today, though, many youngsters hope to be more like Ice-T or Fifty Cent."

According to the official White House report, titled "Taking the Raps Off Success, Yo," over three billion dollars would go towards purchasing so-called "bling," or jewelry, for students in the program. At a press conference after the speech, Mr. Bush responded to press inquiries concerning this somewhat uncharacteristic spending behavior. Mr. Bush indicated that the so-called "bling provision" was added to help small jewelry stores, "I - the administration - cares about small businesses," added Bush.

The proposed legislation has received a mixed reaction from figures inside the rap music industry. One music label executive, who wished to remain anonymous, commented that the new legislation would flood the market with, "cut-rate, awful, painful, and downright drab rap content," and, "make my life very, very painful." Popular rap artists, on the other hand, seemed far more optimistic about the president's plan. "I will be selling a lot of clothes," commented professional rap artist Sean Combs, "This will give me a great opportunity to create some great new clothes." When pressed further about his views Mr. Combs stated, "I like clothes."

Many politicians were unwilling to comment on the plan. Representative Tom Delay (R-TX), who had traveled with the president to unveil the plan, would not respond to press inquires. However, it was apparent he felt uncomfortable. Mr. Delay wore a look of utter shock following the president's speech. Democrats remained mostly silent on the issue, which many political strategists feel could help them win conservative votes. The office of Senator Barack Obama (D - IL), though, issued a press release stating, "This simply confirms our fears that the president has no clue what he is doing running the country. If the Democrats do not win in 2008, then God have mercy on us."

Political commentators found themselves in a veritable role reversal after hearing the news. Conservative TV host Bill O'Reilly, who traditionally sides with Mr. Bush, denounced the president's plans on his Friday night, O'Reilly Factor. "I cannot possibly support an administration filled with dumb heads that are going to be giving money to people like Ludicrous," commented O'Reilly, "I told you to boycott Pepsi when they hired him, so I am telling you now: boycott the United States. In fact, I am so outraged, I am moving to France." Liberal author and radio show host, Al Franken, had a different take. "I think this is the best thing W's ever done," said Franken, wearing a big smile, "Though this just goes to prove what a big fat liar the president is. When he said he listened to George Jones we all knew he was lying. He has probably been harboring a secret obsession with Eminem for the past four years."

Whatever commentators or politicians may say, students in cities, like Atlanta or Los Angeles, may experience a drastic change of pace when they return to school this September.

Today I received a letter. Not just any letter, but a letter professing to be from the superintendent of my school district. While the letter was probably written by the junior undersecretary of the secretary of the secretary of education, it was nonetheless "interesting" reading. Apparently, in an effort to improve standards, the school district will implement a series of standardized "anchor assignments," which every student will be coerced into completing. However, upon reading the assignment sheet I found myself quite nonplussed. The assignments provided seemed more like the bare minimum than something elevating the standards. Here, for example, is the task set to eleventh and twelfth graders:

Any social science teacher who does not already do something similar to this in one form or another ought to be fired. The discussion of topical issues forms part of the basis for a social science class. Learning about the history and context of a particular set of social science issues and then being able to discuss them intelligently should be a given. The discussion of history, civics, economics or politics are to social science classes as addition is to a math class.

Furthermore, the assignment set to eleventh and twelfth graders could not be easier. The assignment should be at least marginally difficult. After all, this is being assigned to people in their last years of high school. Though, perhaps the best example of the assignment's exceptional simplicity is this very blog. I have been writing about politics, history, et al for at least three years right here. In fact, one could easily argue that I am doing it right now. What is more, I could almost write said assignment in French.

If this is raising the standards for education, then I am Louis XVI. These "anchor assignments" make about as much sense as the school district's recent plan to force all high school students to take algebra. Their logic being that students taking algebra classes score higher on math tests. In my mind, this should be about as obvious as the fact that the sky is blue. Of course they are going to get better test scores - they are better at math ! Why else would they be in algebra ?

However, I was able to derive a miniscule morsel of usefulness out of this mess. I know exactly what I will be writing my "anchor paper" on, come April: standards in education.

In All His Glory
Ted Stevens spewing pith at some group of very unfortunate people.

His first misstep concerns the so-called "bridge to nowhere," a part of the ten bazillion dollar highway bill Congress approved last summer. The bridge, which will connect a tiny remote island to an almost equally small town, in some remote part of Alaska, will cost taxpayers around $225 million all together. One congressperson figures the government could buy a Learjet for every person living on the miniscule land mass with the money appropriated for the bridge.

So, when hurricanes ravished parts of the Southern United States, some sharp senators had the bright idea to prune some pet projects from the pet project laden highway bill. This, they reasoned, would help pay for hurricane relief and reconstruction. Quite logical indeed.

Some senators succumbed to the spirit of helpfulness by relinquishing the funds their states had been designated to receive in order to build new tree lined streets and avenues. But Ted Stevens shot down the idea with the speed of a cheetah on steroids. "I will put the Senate on notice, and I don't kid people," stated Stevens, continuing, "If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state and take money only from our state, I'll resign from this body." He should have just been allowed to resign.

The second slip happened this week during a Congressional hearing about the record profits oil companies had in the fourth quarter. Five of the CEO's from the nation's largest oil companies were in Washington to answer questions put forth by senators. At first glance, this has the air of a great opportunity for politicians to really drill the CEO's and get some real answers. But Ted Stevens sat in on the meeting. First, Stevens imposed a time-limit on each senator's questioning, preventing them from really accomplishing anything. Stevens also squashed a motion to place the five executives under oath. thus saving them from potential embarrassment. There is nothing wrong with corporations making lots of money, but there is a problem when they are making money in an illegal, or superbly sneaky way.

When 2008 rolls around, Alaskan voters had better come to their senses and prevent this senator - who, by the way, has already served for forty years - from getting re-elected again.

SAT scores were released today. Suffice to say, I did rather poorly. While I cannot recall my exact score at the moment, it came in around the high 1800's or low 1900's. This, according to the College Board, means I fall into the exceedingly low 80th percentile overall. Awful. Some of this, of course, must be attributed to my actual performance on the test; some questions were marginally more mystifying than others. However, I am still in an uproar about the galling goof-ball who coughed, wheezed, sneezed and spewed for the better part of the test. It was decidedly distracting! As such, I have composed this small tune, meant to be recited before leaving to take the SAT.

To the tune of "If You're Happy and Your Know It Clap Your Hands"

If you're sick and you know it stay at home
(clap clap)
Si vous êtes malade et vous le savez séjour chez vous
(clap clap)
If you're sick and you know it, then your physique will surely manifest it;
Se siete ammalati e lo conoscete soggiorno nel paese
(clap clap)

If people remember to sing that witty little number prior to taking the SAT, then neither I, nor anyone else, will have to suffer from the sounds of sniffling ever again. It even covers multiple languages to save French and Italian speaking people from the purgatory.

Ideally, though, the College Board would just bar people who would cause a distraction with their superfluous sniffling from taking the test. They do not allow you to put water bottles on your desk, or even wear clothing related to the subject matter. What sets sniffling apart? If anything, it causes more distraction and disturbance than goofy SAT shirts.

Harriet E. Miers, the president's newest pick for the Supreme Court, has proved, in the few days since her nomination, to be quite an interesting choice. For one thing, it clearly demonstrates the president's weakened political position. 43 is no longer pursuing the hard-line conservative agenda many predicted he would after his so-called election mandate. Miers may be a conservative in some regards, though one cannot put her in the same category as Antonin Scalia. In fact, W. has deviated enough from his crazy pseudo far right policies to force Dick Cheney into calling Rush Limbaugh's radio "show" to defend the nomination.

Granted, even if Miers proves to be a genius her nomination still seems slightly suspect. While her prior experience may not involve judging Arabian Horses, she is still, nonetheless, an old pal of W. It would have been far more comforting if W had found another John Roberts to put on the court. Roberts may not share all of my beliefs, but he is decidedly qualified, and seems up to the job.

On a somewhat unrelated tangent, I noticed, in doing some light research for this article, how unprofessional the Supreme Court's website is. For a body which has such an impact on so many people's lives, they really have a rather atrocious website.

Bill O'Reilly seems to love giving people labels and then arguing endlessly about them. While it may not be very substantive, it is pure genius if you are trying to assassinate someone's character. At least, this is the conclusion I came to while watching the O'Reilly Factor earlier today before the movie I was going to watch came on HBO 2.

I did not get to see a whole lot of the Bill-O Show, but the first fifteen minutes was mostly an interview with Joe Trippi, the former Howard Dean advisor, and now the conference call guru for protesting mother Cindy Sheehan. The entire interview - or as Bill called it a "discussion" - consisted of O'Reilly trying to call Sheehan someone from the, "far-left," and Trippi explaining why that was not necessarily true.

While Ms. Sheehan's comments have not exactly been mainstream, there is no reason to spend fifteen minutes discussing a label. They could have spent some time discussing the real issues surrounding the camp-out protest. I love it when people like Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter say they are trying to, "elevate the discourse," and then they pull a stunt like that.

So much for the no spin zone.

Sadly the movie was not much better than the Factor. Though, if Spin-Mater Bill ever calls The Day After Tomorrow a piece of leftist Hollywood propaganda, I might be able to see his point. But to counter, only Dubaya would not realize global warming was a problem if half the northern hemisphere was covered in ice due to global warming.

For the people offended at the last sentence, it is called hyperbole.

In my entry Broadband Woes I detail, to some degree, the problems the US has with their broadband system. However, in just the last few days, things have gotten worse.

On 5 August 2005, the FCC put in place new rules that would allow phone companies to do as cable companies do and restrict who can access their phone lines for DSL service. How stupid could the FCC possibly be ?

It is, for the most part, because the Japanese and South Koreans forced the phone companies to open up their networks to any provider who wanted to do anything that they have such great DSL. Now the FCC has done the exact opposite. There still could be some hope in some weird miracle, but usually doing the exact opposite thing will yield different results.

Come on America, we need to pull it together.

Finally Murdoch Does Something Good
Unlike launching FNC, buying MySpace is great for just about everyone but Murdoch. (Photo from the Center for American Progress)

So what does this have to do with Rupert Murdoch ? Well, Rupert Murdoch is known for his conservativization of the various arms of his media empire. Anyone who has ever watched Fox News Channel will know what I am talking about. At any rate, Murdoch will undoubtedly try to crack down on these users posting what he considers to be posting inappropriate photos. Subsequently, since most people using MySpace are probably pretty progressive, users will scoff at the idea of censorship and disband their MySpaces.

Hopefully in just a few months after Murdoch's takeover MySpace will be the tattered remains of what it formerly was. Then I will not have to sit through people raving or whining about their pointless and incredibly hideous online blogphotopages, or whatever they are supposed to be called.

There are far better ways to show off your photos, share your thoughts and allow people to comment on them. This blog is a great example. Hopefully this great MySpace exodus will open people's eyes to the vastly superior services available that do the same thing.

Plus, come to think of it, Rupert Murdoch might lose money. It's win-win (in a sense).

In Japan, South Korea, Singapore and other developed Asian countries, high-quality broadband internet service is about as expensive as tap water. It is possible to get a 20 megabit per second internet connection, along with unlimited international internet telephone service, for about $25 a month. In contrast $25 a month in the United States barely gets you a .25 (one-quarter) megabit internet connection, which is not even fast enough to support unlimited international internet telephone service, which would be another $40 more dollars a month - if it even worked.

For some time I wondered why many of these countries were leaps and bounds ahead of the United States in these fields, since, after all, the vast majority of the technologies used were developed in the United States. My first thought was the density of the population, which is partly the cause, but not to the extent I thought.

It was not until I saw a technology analyst on Charlie Rose that the whole thing clicked. In the countries with such great broadband the government not only helped, they developed an entire strategy for broadbandifying the country. This is likely why South Korea has the most broadband subscribers in the world.

So, while South Korean government officials were busy passing legislation forcing phone companies to open their lines, and encouraging competition, the bureaucrats in Washington were busy passing legislation doing exactly the opposite. It as if every time a good idea for bringing broadband inexpensively to the masses pops up, some corporate big wig decides to crash the party.

Take the project to blanket Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in WiFi that would have been connected to a high-speed fiber line. It was brilliant. Blanket the whole metro area with free high-speed WiFi. Then not only could law enforcement, fire, and other institutions take advantage of it, but any citizen in the giant hot spot could get a WiFi computer and get online.

However Verizon, the local telco in that area, and Comcast, the cable company, did not like the idea. So, they whined about it endlessly. Eventually, a law was passed which squashed the entire project. Brilliant ! As John C. Dvorak said in his most recent column relating to this subject, "Just make the CEO of Comcast the governor. Cut out the middleman. You'll save money."

Now people I used to think were halfway decent politicians, such as John McCain, are doing more to protect the phone and cable companies, but this time at the national level. The Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act is essentially going to ensure the cable companies and telcos can continue to charge outrageous amount of money for very little product.

If the United States is going to remain competitive in the global marketplace we need to be on the cutting edge, or at the very least a whole lot closer to the cutting edge than we are now.

Is This Man to Blame for the Non-Launch ?
It would really be funny if it were, because that would be really unpatriotic. Irony in the case of Mr. Fox New Channel. (Brit Hume photo from Fox New Channel)

So, here is my new theory as to why the little sensor broke on the Space Shuttle Discovery a week or two ago when they tried, unsuccessfully to launch it. The insane amount of media-fueled hype (the three minute MSNBC commercial comes to mind) probably scared the engineers stiff and took some key people off of doing actual work to go and do live interviews with Paula Zahn and Brit Hume.

I could be wrong, but it makes sense to some degree. I have never actually worked on a project which was covered quite as much as the Space Shuttle launch. However, whenever I am working or doing things under pressure, more mistakes seem to happen than when I am left alone.

Though, regardless of whether the media did or did not mess up the shuttle launch for NASA, it really does show what the American media thinks of people. Rather than covering stories that have potential to affect us, they are off covering the thing they think will give them the highest ratings. Then, they spend hour after hour covering the story. I guess that is why I watch the BBC.

What is the Big Deal ?
Why does driving two miles and hour under the speed limit really matter ?

A fantastic example : during my woefully unproductive Driver's Education course, the driving instructor kept a close watch on my speedometer. Had I gone one or two miles an hour under the set speed limit, the instructor would chastise me saying it was, "unsafe to be going at that speed." But if I was going one or two miles over the speed limit they would not think twice.

So why is America obsessed with going as fast as legally possible ? It may save time, but the amount of time saved is quite negligible. Say there was a fifteen mile trip to be taken. Then, suppose the average speed limit on the trip was thirty miles an hour. Going at the speed limit for the entire trip it would take about thirty minutes to get there, supposing things were mostly clear.

If the same trip was driven two miles under or over the speed limit, twenty eight and thirty two miles an hour, respectively, you would stand to gain or lose a whopping two and a half minutes. That is a negligible eight per cent difference from the baseline thirty minutes.

It is things like this, coupled with blatantly bad drivers, who make the roadways more dangerous for everyone, killing about forty thousand people every year. I really do not see why two and a half minutes is worth risking someone's life.

On a slightly more cheerful note, the latest installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is darker, but nonetheless excellent. There are a good deal of plot twists and very unexpected events. Of course my favorite part of the Harry Potter books are the quirky, imaginative words and names dreamed up by Joanne Rowling, the author of the series. I would name some of my favorites from this latest installment, but that might give things away.

The Liftoff That Wasn't
Space Shuttle Discovery rolls to its launch pad at a zippy one mile an hour. (State Dept. Photo)

Man did the space shuttle get a lot of attention ! By my rudimentary news-importance tracking method (the number of articles on Google News) the Space Shuttle story is 82% as important as the London bombs. To compare, the, "Is Karl Rove involved in the leak?" story is only about 29% as popular.

At any rate, I was forced to watch a whole lot of "Return to Flight" news. CNN even interrupted the one hour of CNN I can tolerate to watch (that is, the one hour of every day they show CNN International) to cover the shuttle, even though it was not set to lift off until several hours later.

However, I did get something out of watching the space shuttle, perched on its launch pad, framed by an uncertain Florida sky. I realized how much of a parallel there is between the space shuttle and most US-based airlines.

Consider it, if I described something as, "...an underfunded body with an aging fleet of vehicles, who has also suffered major setbacks due to improper safety procedures," it would be pretty hard to distinguish between NASA and a US-based airline.

Another thing I came to think of was the weird inverse state of transportation and population age in Europe and the US. While Europe has a very old population, they also have one of the most modern transport systems in the world. The US on the other hand, is younger, but has an archaic transportation system.

I still wish I had gotten some slightly more substantive news out of the hour I watched, but realizing these two very unimportant things made it at least somewhat productive.

Not to bash the people who fought in Vietnam, but this is ridiculous. I am still watching Hannity and Colmes and Ross Perot has just come on to tell Hannity and Colmes viewers about his latest project : Operation Homecoming USA - The homecoming you never received. There nothing wrong with supporting veterans, but it just seems like it would be more supportive to do something like push for legislation to give veterans more after the service they provided to the US. It might also be noted that technically there would never have been a giant homecoming for Vietnam vets, since, unlike in World War II for instance, the troops did not stay in Vietnam for the duration of the conflict. Furthermore, could they have possibly made the event sound more cheesy ? The title of the project sounds more like something I might find when I check my junk mail box in Mail.

I am still watching Hannity and Colmes and now Hannity is criticizing people about not supporting wars in this country's history. Somebody really should point out how much Hannity bashed BIll Clinton's plan to go into Bosnia and Kosovo. Also, Perot has just used FNC as a vehicle to bash the mainstream so-called liberal media by talking about how horrible that incorrect Newsweek article was. Newsweek was a little off, but attacking the media on FNC is just fishyish.

Just for kicks since today was my last day of school I decided to watch some high-quality programming by the name of Hannity and Colmes. It is a pretty strange show usually, but today it is supremely strange. I figured their top story might be the EU negotiations between France and Great Britain or maybe the statement made that Iraq is no saver today than it was in 2003. It was neither. Nor was it some new revelation about Michael Jackson, or even the latest in Kylie Minogue's cancer struggle. No, the top story on Hannity and Colmes is a story about an 18 year old from Alabama who is missing in Aruba. They call this real news ?

Furthermore, Hannity and Colmes is supposed to be a debate show. What on earth is there to debate about a girl who went missing ? All they seem to be able to "debate" is how horrible the search for this girl is going because it is not being done by the United States. They have turned a relatively unimportant, yet tragicish, story about a girl in Aruba into a way to bash other countries.

Boy do I love Fox News.

For the last few weeks British PM Tony Blair has been pushing his plan to end poverty in Africa by 2015 by getting the richest nations of the world to help out. Some progress has been made on his plan - the G8 just approved a plan to relive debt in Africa. However, Mr. Blair seems to think the primary way to eliminate poverty in Africa is by simply giving the Africans larger and larger sums of aid. This is not the most sensible plan to eliminate poverty. The G8 and other wealthy nations cannot endlessly dole out money to these countries. For that matter, most European countries are having trouble keeping their own unemployment low because they give out so much money in their own social programs.

So what should the G8 leaders do to get rid of poverty ? They should trade with the impoverished countries and integrate them into the global economy. Debt relief - not aid - is an important step in accomplishing this goal. Without the burden of copious amounts of debt governments can improve their infrastructure and make their country a more competitive place for corporations - both foreign and domestic - to invest.

China is a fantastic example of how capital investment eliminates poverty. The number of impoverished people in China living in poverty is declining exponentially because all sorts of companies are investing in China. It should be noted that wealthy countries did not have to give China obscene amounts of aid to accomplish this. China has the investment because China has the cheap labor and the infrastructure to make investing there possible. Labor might be cheap in Africa, but if you cannot get constant electricity, why go there ?

Instead of aid, why not encourage capital investment ?

I was reminded last night when I read Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times of my intent to write a blog entry about the "No" vote on the E.U. Constitution.

When the E.U. Constitution was put into its current form last year, I saw it as Europe finally waking up, coming to its senses and reforming to stay competitive in the new global economy. However, it seems as if the populous of the E.U. is still stuck in their pseudo Cold War era mindset. I really do not understand how on earth people in Europe expect to survive when they demand a 35-hour work week and insane government benefits, like years of maternity leave for the mother and father.

In my mind Sweden sticks out as the first country where extremely socialist policies are starting to hurt the economy. For the past few decades most Swedes have lived a very comfortable life. The government subsidizes or pays for everything from doctors to dentists. However in the past few years this has begun to catch up with Sweden. Its economy is slowing down and citizens are not particularly happy about it.

As such, by voting "Non" and "Nee" on the E.U. Constitution, the Europeans didn't safeguard their way of life. They're just going to make it worse in the long run.