Liberals hate free speech when it's not their own

The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio - A Joint Report by the Center for American Progress and Free Press

You may have read about this report by now - perhaps this CNS article; it was published last week. Intrigued, I actually slogged through the whole report, all 40 pages. It is, as one might expect, a skillful bit of propaganda dressed up with lot of statistical fluff - much of it incapable of proving the claims asserted.

The CNS story is right to connect the dots between this report and some other recent stories linking prominent Dems to a desire for tighter broadcast censorship - Sen. James Inhofe's (R-OK) recollection of a conversation overheard between Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Senate majority leader Dick Durbin's (D-IL) support for a revival of the Fairness Doctrine, among others - and, not just Dems, even Sen. Trent Lott's (R-MS) complaint about talk radio running the Congress.

There is a hollow ring to statements in the report itself and by various authors and others speaking for its sponsors denying any such intent to support revival of the Fairness Doctrine if you read the report carefully.

"There are many potential explanations for why this gap exists. The two most frequently cited reasons are the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and simple consumer demand. As this report will detail, neither of these reasons adequately explains why conservative talk radio dominates the airwaves." [SOURCE: Center for American Progress]

But this assertion is undercut by two points.

First, the report uses phrases like "public trustee" and "public interest" - which they say the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is not enforcing adequately - as code for the nanny state mindset they want to resurrect.

Second, the report actually states on page six:

First, from a regulatory perspective, the Fairness Doctrine was never formally repealed. The FCC did announce in 1987 that it would no longer enforce certain regulations under the umbrella of the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1989 a circuit court upheld the FCC decision. The Supreme Court, however, has never overruled the cases that authorized the FCC’s enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine. Many legal experts argue that the FCC has the authority to enforce it again—thus it technically would not be considered repealed. [Footnote numbers omitted]

I will pass over trying to condense the substance, such as it is, of the report which includes such astounding findings as that minority-owned stations are more likely to carry "progressive" talk shows.

What is not in the report is much more revealing - that old elephant in the parlor that no one talks about.

The most glaring lacuna is the treatment of audience ratings. There is some tabulated data on audience shares in the report, but not what one might expect. For example, Clear Channel, the 800 pound gorilla of the radio industry - and ownership concentration is the report's main complaint, offers both progressive and conservative talk show line-ups in some major markets. How do their ratings compare? The report is silent.

Looked at across all owners, several more of these markets offer both conservative and progressive talk line-ups. How do market shares (which dictate advertising rates) compare for the two types of programming, especially at equivalent times of day? Silence.

Another intriguing omission in the report is that it simply ignores the hours of programming for hosts that it deems not classifiable as either conservative or progressive. Do moderate opinions not count? Do they not serve the public interest? The report doesn't explain this adequately.

The report also omits the hours of progressive talk programming provided by National Public Radio (NPR) by omitting from its universe of data all non-commercial licensees.

The report's recommendations are predictable: a return to a three-year license renewal cycle (it is currently eight years), a significant reduction in the number of stations owned by one company in a single market, and a fee for licensees to pay to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to distribute to NPR if they are not sufficiently progressive.

What will shorter renewal cycles do except divert FCC staff from what the report claims is already inadequate oversight?

How will the authors view a greater divesity of station ownership when there are ten or twelve major players instead of the four cited in the report and none of them has a line-up like that of the late, unlamented Air America?

If they want more money for CPB to give to NPR, shouldn't the amount be set by congressional appropriations and not by subjective evaluations of FCC bureaucrats?

GW prof blowing a little sunshine up our what's-its on the immigration issue

TCS Daily - How the Mexican Immigration Problem Will Solve Itself:

"There has been a stunning decline in the fertility rate in Mexico, which means that, in a few years there will not be many teenagers in Mexico looking for work in the United States or anywhere else. If this trend in the fertility rate continues, Mexico will resemble Japan and Italy - rapidly aging populations with too few young workers to support the economy."

He ought to know better, but Prof. Dunne - who teaches economics at George Washington University - manages to ignore the fact that what he sees as a looming labor shortage in both Mexico and the US will still come nowhere near to equalizing wages between the two countries. The US economy will still be a great magnet drawing immigrants to it for many years.

Compounding the problem is the fact that a real train wreck is coming in the form of the collapse of Mexico's status as a significant oil exporter. The loss of oil export revenues will severely curtail Mexican government spending on social services, health care and other programs that must expand to make staying in Mexico a more attractive proposition.

The second coming of the Napoleon of South America

Chavez hints at nuclear future for Venezuela | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited:

"During his three-day visit to Russia, Mr Chavez is expected to buy more military hardware, including as many as five submarines."

Yet more evidence that the leader of what he himself calls the Bolivarian revolution is in deadly earnest. A country with little justification for a blue ocean surface navy is buying submarines and talking about building nuclear weapons.

Simon Bolivar - Chavez' inspiration - was a complicated man who began his career in public life as a fairly typical creole aristocrat revolutionary. During a sojourn in France he was briefly associated with Napoleon Bonaparte, although he later sided with Spanish legitimists against Napoleon's placing his brother on the throne of Spain.

In his early military campaigns back in South America, he claimed to be establishing a federation of republics more or less modeled on the US but progressed to the point of attempting to establish himself as dictator for life of a unitary republic of continental scale more on the order of Napoleon but without the imperial court trappings. His later battles were fought, not for independence from Spain, but to consolidate his personal power. He died en route to exile, of tuberculosis, at the age of 47.

It is the latter part of Bolivar's career - the part that came years after he was hailed as El Libertador, the part that alone would never have justified all those statues and memorials to him from Canada to Bolivia - that Chavez seeks to emulate. There is no Spanish empire to fight, and despite some of Chavez' more fanciful claims, no US empire frustrating the will of independent countries in Latin America. Yet, he needs the cloak of anti-Americanism to justify his growing dictatorship at home and his projection of power into other nations in the region. (See, for example, my recent post on Cuban and Venezuelan meddling in the internal affairs of Bolivia.)

Just as Napoleon turned from defender of republicanism in France to imperial despotism, so Bolivar turned from democrat to dictator. And, as Hitler was the bastard offspring of Napoleon in his vision of a continental empire, so Chavez is Bolivar's.

Make no mistake, the formation of the Havana-Caracas axis should be treated as seriously as the Rome-Berlin axis that led to World War Two.

The media magnate the establishment loves to hate

Exclusive: Rupert Murdoch Speaks - TIME:

"Murdoch has invested billions in newspapers when few others were willing, but he has also kept them alive through a lowest-common denominator approach typified by the trashy Sun, with its topless Page 3 girls on the breakfast tables of a million Britons. Murdoch wouldn't be Murdoch if he didn't love sticking it to sanctimonious J-school toffs. 'When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,' he jokes late one night, 'we'll make sure they have M.B.A.s.'"

An excellent assessment of Rupert Murdoch emphasizing not only his recent battle for control of the Wall Street Journal but how it fits into his long-term internet-based interests. Read it.

Crisis in Iran deepens

Unrest grows amid gas rationing in Iran - Print Version - International Herald Tribune:

"'Iran is in a bind,' said Vera de Ladoucette, an energy analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Paris. 'They have acted too late and too harshly.'

"According to de Ladoucette, Iran is also seeking to increase its gasoline production and has outlined plans to spend $18 billion by 2012 to increase its refining capacity by 1.5 million barrels a day from about 1.6 million. The government's plan is to build four refineries and expand older ones. But, she added, it is unlikely to achieve that goal by 2012. 'The problem will be financing all this,' she said."

No wonder Iran has trouble financing refinery expansion. For years they have been selling gasoline at prices not seen here since the 1970s while buying it from refineries in 16 other countries for a wholesale price that is now about $2 per gallon.

The parlous condition of Iran's government is illustrated by a passing mention in the article that the gasoline rationing scheme is hitting hard at lower paid government employees who moonlight using their personal vehicles as taxicabs.

All this pain appears to be a calculated effort to get the citizenry prepared for real suffering if and when the UN security council gets around to actually imposing economic sanctions to retaliate for Iran's nuclear weapons program.

In World War Two in this country, rationing helped to bind the folks on the homefront to the vigorous prosecution of the government's war policy. In Iran, it seems to be having the opposite effect - riots, arson, and angry editorials even though news media have been ordered not to report on the extent of the popular reaction against the rationing effort.

Lead and anti-freeze join Chicom poisoning of America

My Way News - US: Chinese Seafood Detained for Safety:

"'In order to get cancer in lab animals you have to feed fairly high levels of the drug over a long term,' said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection. 'We're talking not days, weeks, not even months but years. At these levels you might not reach that level, but we don't want to take a chance.'"

Melamine poisoning of pet food from Red China was only the tip of the iceberg. Despite protestations from the Chinese commerce ministry, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the perpetrators have assurance their government will not prosecute them for adulterated products exported to the West.

Long-term, low-level exposure of target populations could be a stealth warfare strategy. As the examples accumulate, the odds that this is just a string of unfortunate, but unconnected, examples of sloth or greed diminish. Somewhat ironically, China's best argument for the latter, an argument they are unlikely to offer publicly, is that the shortcomings of their legal system encourage such corner-cutting - where is China's equivalent of John Edwards when you need to file a product liability suit there?

The hidden element of the immigration debate

"Honduras today survives on remittances, but mass migration also causes enormous damage," said Julio Velásquez, an official of the Honduran National Human Rights Commission. "Those who manage to reach the U.S. can lift their families a little out of poverty, but often the families fall apart and the kids end up in gangs or on drugs. We need to create the conditions so people don't need to leave, instead of thinking of migration as something to admire."

Broken families - this is the hidden element of the immigration debate. And it is a problem which will not improve much, if at all, by passage of the type of expanded guest worker program that is so dear to El Presidente Arbusto and all the liberals in the Congress.

The immigration "reform" bill currently in the Senate, the last I heard anyway, wants to double the H1 visa quotas (there are separate quotas for professionals and seasonal or temporary workers) to something over 300,000 per hear. No one talks about the damage such long separations do to the families involved, at least not yet. Watch for this issue to surface after the amnesty and expanded guest worker programs become law. This will be a powerful emotional argument for expanding family unification, thereby admitting even more people who will strain the social safety net.

There is a misconception that temporary guest workers are concentrated in seasonal occupations in fields like agriculture and construction. Some do, but many do not. Moreover, construction is a year-round business even here in Pennsylvania where the only segment of the business that shuts down altogether in winter is highway construction and maintenance. In some of the more southerly parts of the country even a lot of agricultural employment is year-round. Here in southeastern Pennsylvania, mushroom growing, which is done indoors, is an intermittent but year-round employer of large numbers of foreign, largely illegal, labor. A producer of sod in the deep south lobbying for easier access to foreign seasonal labor complained last year that he hade trouble recruiting local labor because his farm needed workers only 11 months out of the year.

And, the guest worker programs on the books and in the bill are not seasonal. They admit workers for about two years straight then send them home - in theory. Of course, those who go home can re-apply and many do, often requested by their prior employer to return to the same job if their work was satisfactory. This compounds the negative effects on children growing up without fathers in their home countries.

Money sent directly to Honduran families from relatives working in the United States, both legally and illegally, provides nearly one-third of the national income -- $1.8 billion in 2005, $2.3 billion last year.

The same is true for other countries in the region. For Mexico, with it's vastly larger number of workers (mostly illegal) in the US, the value of remittances is much larger. Throw in the billions we spend on food stamps and other subsidies for Puerto Rico and the cost of US dollar support of the region is staggering.

Ten percent is the usual figure cited for the proportion of the combined populations of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean islands already in the US. Here is the Honduran situation in a nutshell (all from this Washington Post article):
Population - about 7.5 million
Attempting US border crossing - 90,000 per year
Number deported from US - about 14,000 so far in 2007, up from 18,941 for the entire year of 2005

Fragmenting the community of scholars

Let the Segregation Commence by John Leo:

"But the core reason for separatist graduations is the obvious one: on campus, assimilation is a hostile force, the domestic version of American imperialism. On many campuses, identity-group training begins with separate freshman orientation programs for nonwhites, who arrive earlier and are encouraged to bond before the first Caucasian freshmen arrive."

Institutional racism, in my long ago student days, was the idea that universities and other institutions ignored minorities and their special needs or desires. Things have now flipped 180 degrees/ John Leo notes that UCLA now offers, in addition to the mass graduation ceremony for all student, so many special ceremonies for various ethnicities, orientations and niche subject matter that avoiding schedule conflicts is difficult. One could hardly argue with Leo's conclusion:

As in so many areas of American life, the preposterous is now normal.

Chicoms arming insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq

Inside the Ring�-�Nation/Politics�-�The Washington Times, America's Newspaper:

"Some arms were sent by aircraft directly from Chinese factories to Afghanistan and included large-caliber sniper rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and components for roadside bombs, as well as other small arms."

Weapons from Red China also go by air to Iran for infiltration into Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran is also, of course, the principal patron of Hamas which has just consolidated its hold on Gaza by defeating Fatah in a short civil war.

Bush, like Clinton, refuses to take any action that might irritate the Chinese Communists. Commercial ties and pretended cooperation in the GWOT seem to be more important than the well-being of our and our allies' troops or the long-suffering civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

ChiCom cooperation against terror has been a one-way street anyway, putting the US on the wrong side of the Uighur separatist movement in Xinjiang. The Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic ethnic minority in China have long chafed at being a subject people of the Han-dominated Chinese empire.

25th anniversary of Argentine surrender to be observed tomorrow, June 14, in Stanley

Minister: UK would defend Falklands - Yahoo! News UK:

"... despite renewed noises from Buenos Aires pressing Argentina's claim and 'diplomatic and economic pressure' on the British Overseas Territory, there was 'no prospect' of a repeat of the 1982 conflict."

UK dignitaries arrive in Stanley for celebration of British victory in the 1982 Falklands War. US support of Britain at that time did much to cement the close working relationship between then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher and president Ronald Reagan.

Stanley has become a tourism mecca as a popular stopover for cruise ships in the South Atlantic providing an alternative to sheep herding for the local economy

And now for something entirely different

India "bigfoot" sightings prompt official probe - Yahoo! News UK:

"One local farmer, 40-year-old Wallen Sangma, said he had seen an entire family of the creatures -- possibly a lowland relative of the Himalayan Yeti, or a cousin of the North American bigfoot and Sasquatch, or Australia's Yowie."

Nigeria to increase LNG exports ... maybe

THISDAY ONLINE:

"The award of the engineering and procurement contract to a privately owned US company (Bechtel) last week, the report said, indicates that the Brass LNG project would definitely go ahead despite the challenges."

Before you call your broker, keep in mind that ongoing attacks on petroleum facilities and kidnappings of personnel in Bayelsa state, site of the proposed project, have already pushed off a decision on financing construction from last fall to perhaps next winter.

It isn't just in the Middle East where violence and political instability contribute to problems with meeting the world's growing demand for petroleum.

Rocky record on human rights in India

Probe ordered against Pune orphanage-India-The Times of India:

"Indian children are 'popular' for inter-country adoption. The US tops the list of overseas adoptions from India with 945 Indian children having found homes in that country over the past three years.

Italy comes next with 419 Indian children being adopted in the past three years. Spain follows with 301 adoptions and Denmark with 194."

This story, which also reports that a documentary film aired on Indian television this week shows an orphanage director in Pune quoting a price of $7,000 for an orphan, appeared on the same day as the announcement that India for the fourth straight year had been placed on the US State Department's watch list for human trafficking.

Inflation comes to China

Rise in China’s Pork Prices Signals End to Cheap Output - New York Times:

"Business executives say that with wages rising 10 percent or more a year in many Chinese cities, the country’s days are numbered as the world’s lowest-cost producer of many cheap labor-intensive products, like toys and shoes."

A crisis in China as pork prices rise might sound a bit over the top from our perspective, but pork accounts for a significant part of the protein in the diets of Chinese, especially the poor, in a nation which consumes over three ounces of pork daily for every man, woman and child - over 90 billion pounds.

As dire as the situation is now, the government is still hesitating to release supplies of pampered pigs from the subsidized strategic pork reserves.

The commerce ministry keeps a national reserve of frozen pork and live pigs, and local governments keep their own reserves as well, constantly selling older supplies and procuring fresh stock. Government agencies pay a pig subsidy to farmers to keep their animals in the program.

“The sties are very roomy, there is heat in the winter and fans in the summer,” the television program said, describing conditions very different from those endured by many other pigs in China, including those here in Gaoyao, 50 miles west of Guangzhou.

I can understand the dilemma facing the Chinese government. Long ago I did an analysis of a proposed anthracite coal stockpile for the US government. Forcing prices lower now will discourage producers from making the investments needed to create greater supplies in future. On the other hand, continuing high prices may undermine public health and contribute to social unrest in the short run.

The NYTimes article makes the point of comparing the Chinese pork reserves to our own Strategic Petroleum reserve but misses the parallel between the way Chinese media hint that pork producers are to blame for rising prices while our own media make similar claims about the oil companies. Yet, in both situations, it is clear that demand is outrunning supply and costs are also rising for wages and raw materials.

Demographic shift udermining British identity

Rising immigration fuels 26-year fertility high | Uk News | News | Telegraph :

"As Britain's demographics change, Mohammed is expected soon to replace Jack as the most popular boy's name. It has already pushed Thomas into third place."

Immigration has profoundly altered Britain in the past - and not always in a good way. What will be the impact of changes currently under way?

Ancient Celtic Britain was altered by the Roman conquests which began with Julius Caesar in the mid-first century BC and went on for a few centuries. Piecemeal integration of a large portion of the island into the Roman Empire had profound impacts on commerce, architecture, public works, social organization, and religion. While the Romans brought their pagan gods and goddesses with them, it is also possible that Britain's inclusion in the empire may have facilitated the extension of Christianity into the island beginning in the first century AD.

As the Roman empire began to collapse in upon itself, the legions left and so did their brand of pagan religion, but another sort of paganism arrived with the Jutes, Angles and Saxons which proved even more hostile to Christianity driving most of the bishops and clergy into Wales. This created the opening for Roman Catholic influence which arrived with Augustine in 597.

Raids and limited conquests, mostly in the north and east, from Scandinavians had limited direct impact but helped to weaken the island's defences in the face of its greatest challenge since Roman times. In 1066, King Harold Godwinson had to fight off another invasion from the Scandinavians and immediately turn his forces south to face Duke Willliam of Normandy in the decisive battle at Senlac.

The Norman conquest not only upset old social and political structures and revolutionized the language, it also buttressed the influence of Rome in religion. As the Normans extended and consolidated their rule over most of what is now England, Wales and Ireland, the Christian churches were united under the tutelage of Rome in the 14th century. a situation that would last for two centuries and play a major role in later upheavals both social and political.

What can we expect of the accelerating changes in Britain that trace back to the end of empire following WW2? A part of the current situation traces to the conversion of the old empire into the commonwealth. The wholesale granting of British passports to former colonials had the effect of greatly increasing immigration, especially non-white immigration, by people seeking better economic opportunities and/or fleeing political and social chaos in their newly-independent countries.

The race riots that once plagued places like Brixton have largely abated, but a new, and less tractable, problem than race relations has arisen. As the Muslim component of immigration has increased, there have been increasing calls for Britons to allow for the parallel functioning of Sharia law as an interim measure until Britain becomes part of Dar al Islam. This is a challenge facing much of Europe including France, Germany and the Low Countries. In the case of the UK it is exacerbated by the large number of Hindus living there with their traditional rivalry with Islam fed by continuing conflict between India and Pakistan and periodic outbreaks of inter-communal conflict within India.

An almost unreported crisis in Brazilian law enforcement

Brazil Has Two Polices: One Shines, the Other Puts the Country to Shame:

"... the best story is that PF-2 wants nothing to do with the other Police, the PF-1 - the one with the strikes, the airport lines, all those police stations, the 40-day wait to get a passport, all those inquests wandering like moribund zombies without an end in sight ..."

An interesting commentary on the curious situation in Brazil of a portion of the Federal Police (PF-2 in the author's terminology) which operates independently of the main body of the PF (which he calls PF-1). The author's gripe is that it is this PF-2 that operates efficiently and has cracked several major cases recently, yet the press reports generally credit the PF generally without acknowledging that this force-within-the-force exists even though it operates with distinct personnel and from different office locations than PF-1,

Costa Rica drops diplomatic ties with the Republic of China

Mercopress:

"Central America in particular has been a bulwark of support for Taiwan, and Taiwan had expressed fears that if Costa Rica were to shift its recognition to Beijing, other nations such as Nicaragua and Panama could soon follow suit."

Forty years ago, the Republic of China had diplomatic recognition from nearly seventy nations, now it is down to two dozen and the withdrawal by Costa Rica seriously questions how long the quarter of them in Latin America will continue to recognize that nation.

The usual suspects gather in Havana

granma.cu -Chavez calls for expanding ALBA throughout Latin America :

"The president gave the closing remarks at the first meeting here of the Council of Ministers of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). The council was created a month ago at the 5th ALBA Summit, a process formed by Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua."

Fidel, Daniel, Hugo and Evo (Granma routinely refers to political leaders by their first names, so consider this a nod to the customs of the source of this story) have held the first ministerial conference of their fledgling organization. Note that one of their stated goals is to withdraw from the Inter-American Defense Board and set up their own joint military and intelligence agencies. Can you guess who the enemy is?

Self-criticism - just like the "good old days" in Stalin's Russia

NASA chief regrets remarks on global warming - Climate Change - MSNBC.com :

"NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in the closed-door meeting Monday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that “unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical, and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it.”"

The groveling in front of one's peers, the confession of crimes that are not crimes, the exaggeration of one's offenses, the apologies to those who have not deviated from the "party line" - all this has more than a whiff of the old-style Communist self-criticism sessions. But what was NASA administrator Griffin's offense?

“I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists,” Griffin said on NPR. “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”

That's it? There is a warming trend, but it might not mean the end of the world as we know it. Compare this to some rather candid comments from the alarmists about the need for their rhetoric to punch above the weight class of their evidence. Seems to me the apologies ought to be demanded of the other side.

The strange contradictions of Islamic law in UAE

Aussie businessmen set to face UAE court - Breaking News - National - Breaking News:

"'The most interesting charge that we find the gentlemen are facing is drinking alcohol on a flight as non-Muslims without a permit,' Mr Mulcahy told AAP from Abu Dhabi.

'I'd be very concerned if I was flying Etihad at this point in time as a passenger if you did have your ticket booked that you had your alcohol drinking permit.'"

The three Australian businessmen were arrested as they got off a scheduled flight of Etihad, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates.

The airline, it seems, is quite willing to serve alcohol to infidels in flight, but not warn them of the need for a permit to consume it.

Champagne
If you have a reason to celebrate on board an Etihad flight (birthdays, honeymoon, anniversaries, etc) a bottle of champagne can be made available for the occasion.

The only other reference to alcohol I found on the Etihad website was this item in the list of things not to include in your baggage: "Flammable liquid fuel such as petrol/ gasoline, diesel, lighter fluid, alcohol, ethanol." The site does not include a search feature.

And this is an airline that serves such hard-drinking cities as Sydney, Munich, Paris, Dublin and New York. You would think they would offer warnings about alcohol to their customers. The website helpfully offers special meals for Hindus, Jains, various sorts of vegetarians and others on special diets (that's all on the page where I lifted the quote about Champagne) but no word I could find about alcohol consumption permits for non-Muslim customers.

Parties change, but Italian malaise continues

Corriere.it:

"Criticism of the government targets all areas of activity, to a greater or lesser extent. Three sectors do, however, come in for special censure: tax policies, pensions and justice."

One year after a switch in the national leadership to the Center-Left, Romano Prodi's government is no more popular than his predecessor Silvio Belusconi of the Center-Right was at the one year mark of his administration. The disaffection crosses party lines, however, and the recent municipal and provincial elections produced few significant shifts in partisan alignment.

“For fifteen years, Italy has been hostage to a transition that shows no signs of ending. For fifteen years, the country has been seeking a way out of the political crisis into which it has sunk”. But [outgoing head of the Confindustria business association] Luca Cordero di Montezemolo sees no signs of a much-needed change.

Three thousand assembled business and political leaders cheered Montezemolo's remarks which included such gems as: "The real Italy is better that some politicians think it is." Politics, he said, should no longer be “Italy’s leading industry with 180,000 elected representatives, more than France, the United Kingdom and Spain put together, for a total cost of four billion euros." Montezemolo also called for an end to political leaders “bobbing on the water waiting for the next elections” and spoke of the “duty to build today the country of tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, as if to illustrate Montezemolo's point, we read of the landfill crisis in Naples where the local authorities have let their municipal landfill reach the point where it must be closed without finding a suitable substitute. The result is 15,000 tons of trash piling up on the region's streets and angry residents setting fire to the rubbish piles while others engage in protest marches to express opposition to each of several replacement landfill sites. This is not the sort of crisis that occurs overnight. The paralysis of politics in Italy could not be demonstrated more starkly.

Who shares your views?

Issues2000.org - VoteMatch Quizzes :

"The OnTheIssues.org quizzes are now operational for the 2008 Presidential race. Please try out our older quizzes ..."

You can have some fun with this site's political questionnaires. Fill one out and have your views compared to the major and minor parties, 2008 candidates (Democrat and Republican) or a list of political leaders.

My responses vs. the parties were not too surprising: Constitution 60%, Republican (where I have been most of my life) 55%, and Libertarian (where I was briefly in the 70s) 35%. Ranging from 25% down to 10% were, in order, Democrat, Natural Law, Socialist, and Green.

For those who insist, in George Wallace's famous phrase, that "there's not a dime's worth of difference between the major parties," this could be an eye opener.

Among their list of "political leaders," my responses were a 63% match to Pat Buchanan, 60% to Alan Keyes, 53% to Steve Forbes, and 50% to both John Ashcroft and (surprise!) George W. Bush. At the bottom of the list (all under 20%) were Hillary Clinton, Jesse Ventura, and Bill Clinton.

This exercise has its limits, though. Among the 2008 candidates, my closest match was Duncan Hunter who is my fourth choice at this stage while my favorite, Jim Gilmore, ranked fourth in matching my views.

The price of biofuels isn't paid only at the pump

Food prices rise as more crops go into producing biofuels | The Japan Times Online:

"Many countries, including Japan, see biofuel, mainly ethanol, as an eco-friendly replacement for petroleum, but experts doubt it can be a sustainable alternative energy resource."

Hold the mayo! That seems to be one result of the push for biofuels in Japan. A leading producer of that critical condiment is raising prices by ten percent in response to higher raw matierial prices linked to the competition between biofuel and food production.

This will mostly pass under the radar, but look carefully and you will see other examples of this phenomenon; and not just in Japan, but around the world.

Colombia's unhelpful economic policies

Latin Business Chronicle:

"... the country does not generate sufficient export earnings to cover the costs of its imports, and it constantly reports a trade deficit. Colombia, for example, posted a trade deficit of $272 million in March; meanwhile, most of its peers were reporting huge trade surpluses."

The elephant in the parlor is never mentioned. In this case, of course, I mean the huge trade surplus from the illegal narcotics trade which escapes the official statistics.

This omission is doubly curious here since one of the reasons the US government has helped Colombia to keep a foothold in the US textile and apparel market is the War on Drugs.

Chavez and Castro: the Bolivarian Revolution in action in Bolivia

Latin Business Chronicle:

"Nowadays, seeing Venezuelan helicopters flying around Bolivian skies, or seeing the Venezuelan ambassador and his Cuban colleague actively taking part in official events is not surprising at all. However, these are unprecedented facts in Bolivian history and verify the intrusion of Venezuela and Cuba in the internal affairs of the country."

The old Cold War pattern repeats itself. Cuban, and now Venezuelan, "advisors" nosing about in the internal affairs of another once-sovereign nation. An interesting report by a former Bolivian legislator.