Why not quotas in the House and Senate?

I was reading the Poverty Action Lab’s suggestions for the “best buys” to help meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and was instantly struck by number four on the list:
4. Quotas for women in politics costs [sic] practically nothing. Yet, it increases women’s political participation and shift spending towards women’s priorities, such as [...]

Read Full Post »

Obligatory Afghanistan post

It’s what all the cool kids are talking about tonight. I won’t pretend to know what’s in Obama’s heart regarding his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan with the intention of starting to withdraw in 2011. All I can judge him by is what he actually does, and I think what he actually [...]

Read Full Post »

Pics or it didn’t happen

How charming. The Supreme Court, as expected, reversed a lower court ruling with an unsigned decision, forcing photos of American soldiers mistreating detainees to remain under wraps.
The reasoning by the Court is fairly straightforward — the photos put soldiers in harm’s way:
In a brief, unsigned decision issued Monday without elaboration, the court cited a provision [...]

Read Full Post »

If you don’t care about it…

they’ll take your freedom away from you.
Case in point: Switzerland’s minaret ban.
By a stunning 59% vote, the Swiss public has voted to ban all future minarets, thanks to a petition and direct democracy campaign by the local xenophobia party, the SVP.
What’s surprising, though, is how much this contradicts recent public polling, which showed narrow opposition [...]

Read Full Post »

Git no mo’ Gitmo

With the recent hubbub over the closing of Guantanamo Bay’s prison camp and the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I found it increasingly weird that the United States had a big naval base in Cuba. After all, Cuba is a Communist country, with which we have limited diplomatic ties, as well as a country that [...]

Read Full Post »

Clinton says we have no interest in making our perpetual war “long-term”

From CNN:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday the primary U.S. mission in Afghanistan is defeating al Qaeda, rather than making a long-term commitment to rebuild the country.
“We’re not interested in staying in Afghanistan; we’re not interested in any long-term presence there.”
Oh, so does the last 8 years we’ve spent in Afghanistan not count, then?

Read Full Post »

A peek behind the curtain

A criminal investigation into an Iraq security contractor has revealed some ugly truths about our current occupation/reconstruction efforts there. It’s easy to say that this is one bad apple, but given the report’s detail of the scope of the malfeasance, I doubt that this was an isolated case.
The amount of miscommunication and incompetence-disguised-as-pragmatism is outrageous:
The [...]

Read Full Post »

Chopped and screwed

One part of T.R. Reid’s recent piece talking up his new book stuck out to me as a point often missed in the health care debate.
American health care is not any more “free-market” than, say, America’s telecommunications networks (another problem entirely), but both left and right often treat the system as a cruel and brutal [...]

Read Full Post »

UPDATED: The real trouble with Clinton’s trip

UPDATE: Already several conservative commentators are jumping on this as appeasement, but that’s not really the problem at all. The problem is that South Korea, already chagrined at the idea of being frozen out of agreements, will need to be coaxed back into believing that the United States will not sacrifice South Korean security for [...]

Read Full Post »

International relations theory vis-a-vis Jay-Z

As I am in Taiwan, I have limited blogging to do. Nevertheless, I did want to comment briefly on this quite virtuostic post by Marc Lynch aka Abu Aardvark, about the application of international relations theory to the current “beef” (if it can honestly be described as such) between The Game and Jay-Z.
The post meanders [...]

Read Full Post »