Office of the Independent Blogger

I often declare on this blog that I love Slate magazine, and this entry demonstrates exactly why.

“Right here, over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military’s smart bombs to their targets,” Hillary Clinton says in a TV spot currently airing in Indiana. The camera zooms in on a shuttered factory in Valparaiso, Ind., formerly operated by a defense contractor called Magnequench—one of two Indiana facilities the company closed down after it was purchased by a Chinese consortium. Clinton’s voice-over continues:

They were good jobs. But now, they’re gone to China, and America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts. George Bush could’ve stopped it, but he didn’t. As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here and to turn this economy around. … American workers should build America’s defense.

Just one little problem. As blogger David Sirota points out, the Chinese consortium’s acquisition of Magnequench occurred way back in 1995, when Hillary’s husband was president. Before the sale could go through, it had to be approved by an executive-branch panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Apparently it was, partly in deference to highly implausible promises by the Chinese that the weapons parts would continue to be built in the United States. (The takeover was also greased by participation in the deal by Archibald Cox Jr., son of the revered Watergate prosecutor and Common Cause chairman, now deceased.) In 2003 the Chinese welshed on its promises and moved production to China, prompting Sen. Evan Bayh, D.-Ind., to ask President Bush to intercede. Apparently Bush had some legal authority to force Magnequench’s return to U.S. ownership, but even Hillary seemed to concede, in a speech two weeks ago in Pennsylvania, that such a move was impractical at that late date. (“Couldn’t do it.”) The point is that no such divestiture would have been necessary had Hillary’s husband disallowed the deal eight years earlier.

Hillary’s chutzpah in flagging this issue is compounded by her criticism of the sale on national-security grounds (“They’re building up their military. They want to compete with us every step of the way. And we’re basically helping them.”) In the late 1990s, Republicans in Congress decided that U.S.-approved technology transfers to China under Clinton were creating a disastrous national-security breach, and conservatives tried to stir anxieties about imminent U.S. surrender to the Middle Kingdom to defeat presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. Now, to win Indiana, Hillary Clinton seems to be saying that the wingers were right all along about that no-good husband of hers.

It’s an irony that should be pointed out, and I’m glad Slate did it for the record. I likely would have noticed it myself, but I haven’t seen any of the advertisements of late as I have been busy with historical research and studying for the finals that are a week away. And that has been an emotional and intellectual drain. I don’t necessarily want the term to end, as I love being in school and taking classes, but I hate ultimately-superficial examinations. If I had my way, our final exam in our International Relations course would consist of a game of Risk!

This headline bothered me: “Death Toll Mounts In Zimbabwe As UN Security Council Mulls Action.” Listen. I believe in the United Nations. I think the organization is relevant and useful in a variety of ways. But I hate reading news stories about how the UN is “mull[ing]” action while terrible things are being done inside of one of its member states. Of course, there are institutional impediments to action, but the UN is constantly looking for a reason not to act and so are a great deal of their member states, including the USA. I think that is wrong and shameful.

On a different note, Barack Obama is angry today, furious with his preacher for making a spectacle of himself and for, more to the point, claiming that Obama had no choice but to publicly chastise him because he is a politician. Obama came awfully close to severing all ties with his pastor today, although I doubt they have half as much an animus toward each other as it might publicly seem. I’m sure Obama is upset at his good friend for the embarrassment and political baggage he is bringing him, but does he truly disown him? Probably not. If he does, he’s going to be called a phony. If he doesn’t, people are going to be upset that Obama continues to associate with that lunatic.

Barack Obama will be fighting Jeremiah Wright all year.

This news story floored me when I read it this morning:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Sunday called Democratic rival Barack Obama insensitive to poor people and out of touch on economic issues. The GOP nominee-in-waiting rapped his Democratic rival for opposing his idea to suspend the tax on fuel during the summer, a proposal that McCain believes will particularly help low-income people who usually have older cars that guzzle more gas.

“I noticed again today that Sen. Obama repeated his opposition to giving low-income Americans a tax break, a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and a little longer, and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives,” McCain said. “Obviously Sen. Obama does not understand that this would be a nice thing for Americans, and the special interests should not be dictating this policy.”

The Arizona senator deflected questions about his record on the Bush administration’s tax cuts — he initially opposed them but now supports extending them — by again criticizing Obama. “Sen. Obama wants to raise the capital gains tax, which would have a direct effect on 100 million Americans,” McCain said. “That means he has no understanding of the economy and that he is totally insensitive to the hopes and dreams and ambitions of 100 million Americans who will be affected by his almost doubling of the capital gains tax.”

Can you believe that?

There exists the possibility that Zimbabwe’s opposition might have to accept a coalition government without their own candidate at the top. If there is going to be a so-called “unity government,” it must be one that allows the opposition government to lead it or else it won’t have legitimacy and will signify the selling-out of the Zimbabwean people. That is all I have to say about the sad farce that has been this election, and I will comment as news develops.

Closer to home, an Indiana Republican visited with a neo-Nazi group to speak on Hitler’s birthday, and then he compared it to appearing on a black radio station in Atlanta. At that page, there is a picture of the smarmy-looking candidate and a few other incidents he has been involved with, if you’re interested in finding out just how repugnant a human being Tony Zirkle is.

In Tibet, the Chinese government has offered to have talks with the Dalai Lama, even as they condemn him as a source of violence. The Dalai Lama, for his part, says that the talks are welcome but will be futile if they are just a PR-move. So, forgive me if I predict that they’re going to be futile.

I direct you to this opinion piece on John McCain’s shameful handling of the Fair Pay Act, Dear Reader. Know what’s one of the worst things about poverty — living in poverty, falling into poverty, being born into poverty? You only get one or two opportunities to break free of it, and if you fail you’re done. Someone with money can turn to their family and their family’s friends and screw up until they’re forty yet wind up President of the United States. A poor person does not have that luxury, and for that reason it is absolutely shameful for John McCain and all other opponents of fair pay legislation to take the position that they do. We must help working-class people so that they may be able to raise themselves and the nation they comprise.

Tragedies like this one make me grateful to be alive, and stories like this one cause a deep disappointment to build inside of me. The first story is simple enough: a tractor-trailor crashed into a train station and killed two people. It is especially striking to me because it occurred at a station that I can be found by with frequency. The other story makes me sick to my stomach for fairly self-explanatory reasons:

A Queens judge on Friday acquitted three detectives charged in the shooting of Sean Bell, who died on his wedding day in a hail of 50 police bullets. He said that prosecutors had failed to prove their case and that wounded friends of the slain man had given testimony that he did not believe.The top-to-bottom acquittals of Detectives Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper were delivered by Justice Arthur J. Cooperman in an essay form bearing little resemblance to a standard jury verdict, and were met momentarily with silence in court as spectators looked at one another to be sure they had grasped what he was saying.

The detectives, all but obscured behind a human wall of courthouse officers, finally seemed to exhale deeply, even crumple, with relief. Detective Oliver — who reloaded his gun to fire a total of 31 shots and helped catapult the shooting from tragic mistake to a symbol, for many, of police abuse of force and poor training — closed his eyes and cried. Except for a few scuffles outside the Queens Criminal Court building and shouted displays of disbelief and outrage, the day passed peacefully amid calls for calm delivered by the mayor, the police commissioner and other officials. Still, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a spokesman for the Bell family, called for street protests and said people should get themselves arrested, “whether it is on Wall Street, the judge’s house or at 1 Police Plaza.”

Legal hurdles remain for the officers: federal authorities said they would now investigate the case, and the Police Department is mulling internal charges. A $50 million lawsuit against the city, filed last year by Mr. Bell’s fiancée, who had two children with him, and the two men wounded in the shooting, may now begin moving forward. The shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, outside a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, early on Nov. 25, 2006, the morning of the day he was to be married, was the city’s latest crucible for distilling questions about police treatment of people of color and the use of excessive force on unarmed black men. The shooting lasted seconds, but offered a glimpse of what it is to live in a neighborhood where black men and women are stopped and frisked at a higher rate than elsewhere in the city.

How on Earth a fifty-bullet killing can be justified in the eyes of anyone is beyond me.

This is why I like our relationship with Israel:

The White House says Syria was covertly building a nuclear reactor, with clandestine North Korean assistance, capable of producing plutonium. A statement from the White House, and an unusual release of photographic intelligence, followed briefings for members of Congress about what the White House says were Syria’s illicit nuclear activities. VOA’s Dan Robinson reports from Capitol Hill.

Calling the issue one of great international concern, the White House says North Korea helped Syria develop and build the reactor, which the White House says was probably damaged beyond repair in an Israeli air strike last September. “We have good reason to believe,” the statement continues, “that the reactor was not intended for peaceful purposes, was carefully hidden from view, and that Syria’s government moved quickly to bury evidence of its existence after the Israeli strike,” in what the White House statement calls a cover-up.

We work in conjunction with that government, but as Osirak and the Syrian reactor demonstrate, we are willing to work separately and together when appropriate. Besides the British and the Canadians, I do not think we have a greater ally.

In 1960, Richard Nixon refused to allow criticisms or insinuations relating to John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism to stand without challenging them. He went out of his way to denounce these attacks at every corner, for a variety of reasons, the most notable being his own personal decency (a reference not often made with Nixon) and his religion itself being a minority religion (Quaker). It might well have cost him the election, and it certainly had more to do with his loss than the memorable-but-insignificant first debate between the candidates. When I read this story, I was reminded of Nixon’s campaign against Kennedy:

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on Wednesday urged GOP officials in North Carolina to remove a new television ad that brands Democratic candidate Barack Obama as “too extreme for North Carolina.”

“We asked them not to run it. I’m sending them an e-mail as we speak, asking them to take it down,” the Arizona senator told reporters aboard his campaign bus as he traveled to a town-hall-style meeting in Inez, where President Johnson launched his 1964 campaign on poverty. “I don’t know why they do it, and obviously I don’t control them. But I’m making it very clear, as I have a couple of times in the past, that there’s no place for that kind of campaigning — and the American people don’t want it, period,” McCain said.

McCain said he had not seen the North Carolina ad, which states that Obama is too extreme and shows footage of the Illinois senator’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., shouting: “Not God bless America, God damn America.” In a March speech on race, Obama condemned Wright’s controversial remarks, but said the pastor was part of his life and he could not disown him. “I hope that I don’t see [it],” McCain said of the ad. “I had enough of a description of it to know that that’s the kind of campaigning that I have told the American people we’re not going to do.”

Aides to McCain said campaign manager Rick Davis called the North Carolina Republican chairman Tuesday and left a long message urging the state party not to run the ad. The campaign also recruited North Carolina Sen. Richard M. Burr, a McCain supporter, to make the same request — but the effort was apparently unsuccessful.

A more cynical part of me wonders if McCain is simply attempting to distance himself from the advertisements without being connected to them explicitly or if he does have a problem with the attacks. On the one hand, he has nothing but contempt for Barack Obama, as cited in the New Republic. On the other, McCain himself has been the victim of nasty smear campaigns before and so he might not desire such shameless politics. Time will tell, as “losing” makes the noblest of men into monsters.

Despite Barack Obama’s outspending of Clinton by a three or four to one margin in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton has beaten him by a significant margin and lives to continue the fight. In two weeks, she will be facing Obama in Indiana and North Carolina, and she needs to win Indiana. Bold prediction: she will win Indiana. That is the sort of state that Obama has had trouble with, and there is no reason to believe he will be able to defeat her there. Clinton declared in her victory speech tonight that the tide is turning in this election, and I happen to believe that. Clinton still has an uphill battle, but Indiana is going to go her way and she will remain competitive in all the remaining states.

Unless superdelegates intervene on Obama’s behalf, this election is nowhere near decided. Obama would like you to believe that that event is right around the corner — that Hillary Clinton is, as Dick Cheney would put it, in her “last throes” — but that is not the case. I imagine superdelegates sitting around, ripping their hair out wondering whether or not Obama can win in November and if not, then how can they best justify their decision to choose Hillary?

I could not believe this story when I read it. People are throwing ten thousand dollar birthday parties for children? A friend of mine believes that the biggest problem facing this country is the lack of discipline within families, manifesting itself most prominently in work ethic and money. How can a household expect its children to grow into successful members of the world community when they are spending thousands of dollars on birthday parties for people who are barely three years old!

And while we’re on the subject of waste, how about the manner in which we allow and encourage high dropout rates in our country?

It’s a lot later than we think. We’re raising an illiterate and uneducated generation, and there’s more to come. On April 1, America’s Promise Alliance released a detailed study revealing that fewer than half of the teenagers in 17 of the largest U.S. cities drop out of high school before they graduate — more than 1.2 million of them. The cost of this is enormous: billions of dollars in lost productivity for expensive social services and (because ignorance begets crime) to build more prisons. This report sounded like an April Fool’s joke on the growing number of fools, meaning all of us.

The high school dropout resembles the fool depicted on Tarot cards — standing at the edge of a precipice, with no idea how far he’ll fall, when fall he will. It’s no coincidence that the number symbol for the fool is a zero. A hundred times zero is still zero. “When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem, it’s a catastrophe,” says Colin Powell, the former secretary of State and founding chairman of America’s Promise Alliance. His wife Alma chairs the Alliance now. Speaking as the old soldier he is, he describes these statistics as “a call to arms.” The Powells are joining Margaret Spellings, secretary of Education, to call for summits in every state to figure out how to halt the decline in graduation rates, as well as to better prepare public school graduates for work and college.

But do we really need more meetings to talk endlessly (and tediously) about shopworn educational ideas and stale theories? Alma Powell answers the question before someone asks it: The summits won’t be jabber-jabber sessions. “They will be about action,” and demand that local, state and federal policymakers, grass roots communities, parents, students and advocates confront the reality now. The statistics show what seems obvious to everybody: City kids are far more likely to live on the precipice than kids from the suburbs. The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center finds that graduation rates in city schools are 15 percentage points lower than those in the suburbs. In some cities, the disparity is as wide as 35 percent. It’s the kids in the largest cities who can’t see the value of an education. Life on the street and the grunt jobs found there ought to make even homework look attractive.

Knowledge is power, and this is the lesson we have to find a way to teach. Only by identifying horrific statistical disparities can we begin to demand change. But, we must be careful about what kind of change to make.

No Child Left Behind legislation has left troublesome, unintended consequences. When the legislation imposed rigid standards, teachers began to “teach to the test” instead of imparting actual knowledge. Secretary Spellings wants to require states to provide more uniform graduation data, but this will require careful monitoring, too. States sometimes inflate graduation rates, so they won’t invite sanctions from the federal bureaucrats who dole out the money.

I listen to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talk about healthcare or the economy and I hear John McCain laud the war in Iraq while my classmates hiss at the subject and Al Gore changes slides to focus on the polar ice caps, but for my money there is nothing more important facing this country than the deep educational crisis. This is a nation that has strived for efficiency through its existence, and now we are wasting energy as if oil will never run out, cash as if there is an endless supply, and children as if we can or should skip an entire generation of human beings who have not been provided adequate educational opportunity due to inadequate funding systems and familial relationships. If we are not careful and prudent in educating our people, we will suffer from significant brain-drain and what makes this especially frustrating is that doctors, scientists, engineers, philosophers, lawyers, businessmen won’t be leaving this country because it is repressive or there is little opportunity for advancement as a result of bureaucracy or censorship.

No, our national will experience brain-drain because our government has flushed its children’s brains, and that is simply unacceptable.

First we will get to the fun: Tuesday, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, inside Stevenson Hall’s Humanities Institute, will be a conference on international relations (theme is: “The Global in the Local — The Local in the Global”) from 9:30 to 6:00, with breaks here and there as time allows. My panel will be at 9:45, going until noon, and I am thoroughly looking forward to presenting my paper: “The Importance of Appearance: A Paper on Legitimacy and Elections in Non-Democratic States.” On another, different fun note, the Nintendo Wii, which I once wrote an opinion piece on praising Nintendo for its refusal to conform to societal norms, continues to sit atop videogames. I don’t particularly care, but I do admire Nintendo and I did just return from gaming with a good friend I haven’t seen in awhile. Besides, if I didn’t link to that article, would my headline make sense?

Here’s the bad news: Zimbabwe is still in crisis, and now their opposition is calling on the western world to intervene and help ensure their victory. I would certainly like to see that, but I am worried that we won’t and that is a shame. My paper is, in large part, a look at how vote monitors judge elections and what effects they have in those countries from within and without. But at least the opposition is winning in Paraguay and as far as I’m concerned, anytime a party has been in power for sixty years it deserves to be booted.

There are two stories I would like to note from the non-democratic world. First is this article, from England on Russia:

A NEWSPAPER that defied the Kremlin by reporting that President Vladimir Putin was planning to marry an Olympic gold medal-winning rhythmic gymnast half his age was shut down yesterday. The closure of Moskovski Korrespondent, whose editor Grigori Nekhoroshev was forced to resign, was a sharp reminder of the perils of invoking Kremlin displeasure. Rumours of a romance between Putin, 55, and Alina Kabaeva, 24, who is also an MP in his party, have been circulating in Moscow for months, but until last week no one had dared to print them.

The paper admitted there was no factual basis for its claim that Putin had already divorced Ludmilla, 50, his wife of 24 years, and would marry Kabaeva in June, shortly after standing down as president and becoming prime minister. It cited information from a party planner who claimed to be bidding to organise the lavish reception. Both Putin and Kabaeva denied the report, which was followed up by European newspapers but ignored by Russia’s media, which do not delve into the private lives of politicians.

“I thought we should run the story to help break the taboo,” said Nekhoroshev. He paid a swift penalty for his daring: the paper, owned by Alexander Lebedev, the billionaire tycoon, ceased publication immediately. Its parent firm blamed “costs” and “conceptual disagreements with the newsroom” but insisted in a statement that “this has nothing to do with politics and is solely a business decision”.

I recently had a conversation with an anti-war “radical” who knows little, by her own admission, about “old white men’s history” about a declaration she’d made on her angst over authoritarianism in America. I told her that she didn’t have a clue what it means to live under tyranny, and it is stories like these that I would point to to further the point. The other article I would like to discuss, briefly, is this one. No excerpt is necessary: the Chinese government has been caught shipping arms to Zimbabwe, even now, even as they desperately seek international approval and recognition for their Olympics and the Zimbabwean government works overtime to steal the election. What a shame.

Yeah, this is an embarrassment.

It’s a good thing Osama wasn’t walking through SoHo yesterday morning.

Two sets of confidential blueprints for the planned Freedom Tower, which is set to rise at Ground Zero, were carelessly dumped in a city garbage can on the corner of West Houston and Sullivan streets, The Post has learned. Experts said the detailed, floor-by-floor schematics contain enough detail for terrorists to plot a devastating attack. “Secure Document - Confidential,” warns the title page on each of the two copies of the 150-page schematic that a homeless, recovering drug addict discovered in the public trash can. “Any time a sensitive document is unintentionally left behind, it’s a treasure trove for a potential adversary,” aid Robert Strang, CEO of Investigative Management Group, a global security firm. “It enables them to look for vulnerabilities in design that they can target - an age-old military tactic.”

I commented to the publisher of my college newspaper recently that I wish our newspaper were a tabloid because it is so much easier to write headlines and copy for a tabloid. I stand by that, though I am thinking of a New York Daily News-type of tabloid and not a New York Post or National Enquirer.

John McCain is accusing the Russian government of interfering with Georgian affairs, and he’s right, but I wonder what sort of relationship we will have with that nation if McCain becomes President. He is known for his fiery temper and it is not too difficult to imagine him as a reactionary in foreign policy. Might he re-ignite the Cold War, if elected President? No one is more opposed to Russian imperialism and tyranny than I, as I wish those people could live in a peaceful democracy and its neighbors wouldn’t have to worry about its aims (not to mention American concerns in the security council and otherwise), but I am certainly not in favor of returning to the 1970s because Brezhnev has been elected to lead America.

I watched the debate tonight, and have to agree with Greg Mitchell that it was a shameful display. Clinton is fighting Obama like the worst stereotypes of Republican campaigners; Obama was evasive and did not command any of the issues presented (genuine or hyped); the media asked almost no serious questions, and while I believe Reverend Wright is an honest issue I do not believe “Do you think he loves America?” to be a serious question. I can not see this being a good thing for the Obama campaign, but it was a disgrace unto reporters everywhere, myself included.