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Now that's a voter purge

Apparently Florida isn't the only place on earth where elections get screwed up.

Termites have chewed up much of Nigeria's voter register, biting into efforts to organise the next election, the chief electoral officer said on Friday.

"We have no database for the electoral process," electoral commission chairman Abel Guobadia told AIT television.

I'm sure the U.S. Civil Rights Commission will find some way to blame this on George Bush.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/17/2002 05:09:00 PM |

 

Yes, but how does Abraham Lincoln feel?

This just in: The New York Times is opposed to war with Iraq. Sheesh, why don't they just change their name to Arab News and get it over with? Today's tasty morsel comes from the headline writers who claim that Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy. Wow. That could be really serious. Who is it -- Trent Lott, Denny Hastert, and Dick Cheney? Well, as Hertz would say, not exactly:

These senior Republicans include former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush's national security adviser. All say they favor the eventual removal of Saddam Hussein, but some say they are concerned that Mr. Bush is proceeding in a way that risks alienating allies, creating greater instability in the Middle East, and harming long-term American interests. They add that the administration has not shown that Iraq poses an urgent threat to the United States.

Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft? I know that to the New York Times they're well-respected (read: retired) Republicans, but since when do a couple of never-elected guys who haven't held any office in a decade comprise "top Republicans?"

A more significant question is this: how in the hell did the New York Times conclude the Kissinger's comments constituted a break with the president? Kissinger declared that eliminating Iraq's capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction is a necessary goal and rejected the strategy of containment. He also said that the restoration of the previous inspection system was inadequate. He also rejected the idea that the U.S. must solve the Israeli-Arab war before we take on Saddam Hussein. He suggested that the U.S. propose a much stricter inspection program, with a firm deadline, and that the U.S. deploy troops in advance to show that we're serious. If (when) Hussein refuses, then the U.S. should use force. Where did the reporters get the idea that this was not the Bush position?

And then a light dawns?:

At the same time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who summoned Mr. Kissinger for a meeting on Tuesday, and his advisers have decided that they should focus international discussion on how Iraq would be governed after Mr. Hussein — not only in an effort to assure a democracy but as a way to outflank administration hawks and slow the rush to war, which many in the department oppose.

The article, which quotes liberally from unnamed administration officials, was written by Todd Purdum, the same Times reporter who wrote the sycophantic piece about Colin Powell in the Times a couple of weeks ago. The Times has abandoned any pretense of journalism, and is simply acting as a mouthpiece for Colin Powell, who opposes military action in Iraq. (Come to think of it, didn't he oppose it last time, also? Whose side is he on, exactly?)
posted by David Nieporent at 8/16/2002 04:30:00 PM |

 

The cliches get cliched...

Virginia Postrel notes that, contrary to semi-popular belief, the poor aren't getting poorer.

"When I started looking at the numbers, I saw a lot of mistakes," says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, an economist at Columbia. Some were departures from standard economic procedures, like not correcting for price levels from country to country.

"Some agencies didn't adjust for the fact that Ethiopia is cheaper than the U.S.," he said. "Some of them were hiding numbers that we know exist." For instance, the report included data from only 19 of the 29 industrialized countries then in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But the biggest problem was not so technical. It was hidden in plain sight. The United Nations report and others looked at gaps in income of the richest and poorest countries — not rich and poor individuals.

That means the formerly poor citizens of giant countries could become a lot richer and still barely show up in the data.

"Treating countries like China and Grenada as two data points with equal weight does not seem reasonable because there are about 12,000 Chinese citizens for each person living in Grenada," writes Professor Sala-i-Martin in "The World Distribution of Income (Estimated from Individual Country Distributions)." That is one of two related working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research. (The papers are available on Professor Sala-i-Martin's Web site at http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/home.html.)

The news isn't uniformly good; Africa is in bad shape. Many of the countries in Africa are not only basket cases, but actually getting worse. But it's rather difficult to blame globalization for the problems of Africa, given that Africa has been largely left out of the world's economy. But for the most part, we should be celebrating economic news.

The rich did get richer faster than the poor did. But for the most part the poor did not get poorer. They got richer, too. In exchange for significantly rising living standards, a little more internal inequality is not such a bad thing.

"One would like to think that it is unambiguously good that more than a third of the poorest citizens see their incomes grow and converge to the levels enjoyed by the richest people in the world," writes Professor Sala-i-Martin. "And if our indexes say that inequality rises, then rising inequality must be good, and we should not worry about it!"

Amen. The real problem with cliches is that they allow people to avoid thinking. Thus we encounter people who talk about "the gap between rich and poor" without stopping to think about what their complaint actually is. Whenever I hear the phrase, my first thought is "So, you'd be happy if a bunch of the rich people went bankrupt?" Generally -- readers of the Nation excepted -- this isn't true, of course. But they've picked a statistic which doesn't measure what they really care about, which is the standard of living of the poor. And so we hear silly comments about inequality, instead of talking about how the poor are doing.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/16/2002 04:45:00 AM |

 

If you laid the world's economists end to end, would they reach a conclusion?

What should be done about the sluggish economy? Here's an answer the New York Times would never put on the front page:

Those are the questions a dozen economists who were not invited to Waco said they would have tried to answer had they been at the conference. While their responses in interviews differed, most shared the view that the private sector, for all its frailty, still had enough momentum to carry the economy to full recovery with modest additional help from government.

Even that could be delayed, said the Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow, who served in the Kennedy administration, in an era when stepped-up government spending to support a weak economy was standard practice.

"I would recommend waiting until fall to see what happens," Mr. Solow said. If the Federal Reserve's sharp reduction in interest rates turns out to be insufficient, then he would accelerate the spending of already appropriated money, but, to avoid running up a budget deficit larger than necessary, would not appropriate more.

Of course, you can find economists to say the opposite, too. But the point is, the attacks on Bush because he isn't Doing Something are just knee-jerk Democratic reactions, not reasoned arguments. When Bush does nothing, he's accused of not demonstrating concern to inspire confidence. When he holds a conference, he's accused of "stage-managing" a conference. Eventually, you have to get the impression that people are criticizing Bush's policies because they don't like Bush, not because they have any substantive complaints.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/14/2002 09:41:00 PM |

 

You can say that again

The New York Times' editors keep trying to create opposition to an attack on Iraq, complaining repeatedly that nobody will explain to them why such an attack would be a good idea. (Though, as Jack Shafer explains in Slate, if they were really interested in learning more about the subject, they could just ask the people who keep leaking strategy stories to them.) Well, perhaps the Times' editors should read the editorial page of the Washington Post, which explains, clearly and succinctly, why Iraq needs to be dealt with:

Much of the recent debate about possible U.S. military action against Iraq has centered on the propriety of a "preemptive strike," as if more than a decade of history counted for nothing. In fact, the legal, moral and practical grounds for action against Saddam Hussein have their roots back in 1990, and they are not relevant to the United States alone. Saddam Hussein sent his army into the sovereign nation of Kuwait; a broad coalition, led by the United States, resolved that such lawlessness could not stand; Saddam Hussein refused to back down, fought a war and lost. As one condition for maintaining his power in defeat, the dictator promised the U.N. Security Council that he would rid Iraq of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the missiles that can deliver them. He promised also to allow the United Nations to see for itself that he had complied.

Today no one other than Saddam Hussein and his toady ministers would claim that he has fulfilled these promises. His refusal to disarm and his brazen flouting of U.N. resolutions are slaps not at the United States but at every nation that claims to value international law and the U.N. system. Yet month after month, year after year, those nations, along with U.N. leaders, have been willing to tolerate his lawlessness. U.S. allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East that routinely oppose military action also routinely say they will insist on robust inspection. Well, yesterday they got an answer, the same one they've been receiving for a long time. Now what?

It's true that Saddam Hussein isn't the only evil tyrant in the world. He's not even the sole tyrant seeking or possessing weapons of mass destruction. Neither the United States nor the United Nations can or should contemplate military action against every such tyrant who might qualify for membership in the axis of evil. But Saddam Hussein is in a class of his own, and not only because he has hideously used chemical weapons against his own people and others. The world already has considered his case and formed a judgment. If nations prove incapable of enforcing that judgment, the harm will spread far beyond the Middle East.

Not that I expect this to convince the Times. But when the Post, no friend to the Bush administration, gets it, you have to wonder why the Times doesn't.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/14/2002 05:29:00 AM |

 

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 634 times, I must be a member of the U.N.

Here's a shocker: despite all the optimistic words from the Eurocrat crowd over the last few days, Iraq is not going to allow U.N. weapons inspections to proceed.

The Iraqi information minister said today the mission of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq is "finished," the strongest official suggestion to date that President Saddam Hussein has no intention of allowing the inspectors to return.

What would be stronger? Iraq actually dropping an atomic bomb on U.N. headquarters? Sheesh. (Not that I'd object to that. Heck, if he did that, maybe we'd call the score even.)

Even so, some refuse to believe Iraq, insisting that there's some chance that he might let inspectors back -- if the moon is in the right phase, and if they guess his favorite color, and if they say "pretty please." Which means that Saddam can keep stringing people along for months, if not years, as they think, "This time it will be different." Editorial boards across the New York Times will be filled with comments about how we need to "exhaust all diplomatic possibilities."

I don't know how long they want to wait, or when they'll finally admit that diplomatic possibilities have utterly failed. After Hussein uses weapons of mass destruction again?
posted by David Nieporent at 8/12/2002 09:52:00 PM |

 

Biting the hand that feeds you

You've really got to love the limousine liberals at the New York Times. They just provide so much fodder, whenever they start getting generous with other people's money.

Long hidden by the puffed-up image of abundance, a crisis of hunger in New York City has been worsened by rising unemployment and underemployment since Sept. 11. According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, more than one million city residents depend on hard-pressed food pantries and soup kitchens for their basic needs. One-quarter of them are from households with one or more members who have jobs but not enough income to survive. They have turned to charity because all else has failed them.

Step one: declare that there's a problem. If people question its existence, just say that it's a "hidden" problem.

Step two: cite an inflated statistic from a group whose funding is based upon the statistic being inflated.

Step three: insist that only a big government program can solve the "hidden problem."

And, of course, the obligatory step four: mislabel government redistribution of wealth as "charity."

In this picture, one major failure has been the city's handling of the food stamp program. More than 800,000 low-income New Yorkers get food stamp assistance, but there are at least that many, by conservative estimates, who do not get food stamps even though they could qualify.

Step five: make yourself seem reasonable by claiming your estimates are "conservative." (Of course, since all the numbers are made up, why not? A million people died of anthrax. A billion people died of anthrax. A trillion people died of anthrax. By conservative estimates, a million people died of anthrax. See how easy it is?)

The compassion gap had its roots in the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, which never appreciated what an economic boon the program could be for the city. The federal government pays all food stamp benefits and half the cost of administering the program; the city and state pay the rest. But the benefit to the city, at an average $94 a month per recipient, far outweighs the expense. The Community Food Resource Center, a not-for-profit group that studies issues of poverty, estimates that the city is losing $1 billion a year by not trying to make sure that everyone who qualifies for food stamps receives them.

Two howlers in one paragraph. Of course, there's the old standby of complaining that people lack "compassion" if they don't forcibly take money from other people and give it to a third group of people. There's a word for that, but "compassion" ain't it.

But the funnier part is the Times' portrayal of the food stamp program as a profitable enterprise. According to the Times, the city should take money from city taxpayers to give to city non-taxpayers because then the federal and state governments will take more money from other taxpayers and give that money to city non-taxpayers, and this will be good for the city. An economic boon! A few more "boons" like that, and the whole country could be as rich as North Korea.

The numbers of people receiving food stamp aid increased slightly during the first six months after Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, but have again gone down in recent weeks, perhaps because of insufficient outreach efforts and unduly complicated procedures required to apply for benefits.

I see. If people aren't collecting food stamps, it's not because the "conservative estimates" of need weren't conservative enough. It's because the city isn't doing enough "outreach." Apparently the Times takes the position that the mayor of New York City ought to go door to door, demanding that people start using food stamps. It's the responsibility of taxpayers not merely to provide the opportunity for the poor to get welfare, but to force them to take advantage of this opportunity. Nothing is ever the responsibility of anybody -- the government is responsible for everything.

Verna Eggleston, commissioner of the city's Human Resources Administration, exacerbated the situation when she adopted the ideologically driven decision by her predecessor, Jason Turner, and rejected the opportunity to extend food stamp benefits for some 24,000 jobless and childless New Yorkers, who are now limited to three months' assistance in any three-year period. The waiver, offered by the federal government to help parts of the country with insufficient employment opportunities, was accepted by two dozen other regions of the state, including several with better employment outlooks than New York City's.

Note that the Times' positions are based on "compassion," while positions in opposition to those of the Times are "ideologically driven." The Times has no ideology. In fact, liberals don't have ideology. Liberals have principles. Conservatives have ideology.

Ms. Eggleston's agency has withdrawn for now a proposal to drastically cut city funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which helps food banks. But Mr. Bloomberg and his team should see hunger for what it is, a problem that threatens to become a millstone as the city tries to emerge from the fiscal depths. A well-administered food stamp program will not only lift the neediest New Yorkers to more self-sufficiency, it will provide much-needed revenues for the city. Most important, it will help end a heartless approach to a shameful situation.

Ooh! Now the Times' opponents aren't just "ideologically driven" and lacking "compassion." Now we're "heartless," too.

But you really couldn't make this stuff up -- giving welfare to people "lifts" them to "more self-sufficiency." What exactly would less self-sufficiency consist of?
posted by David Nieporent at 8/11/2002 07:14:00 AM |