Mark Byron

Leading From the Rear

The Australian Senate voted down a cap-and-trade bill earlier today after the Liberal Party (their main conservative party, for liberal is in a European context of libertarian-leaning) switched gears under a new party leaders and opposed the bill. The Labour-led government of Kevin Rudd doesn't have a majority in the Senate

Rudd had wanted the legislation passed before he attends next week's U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen so he could portray Australia as a world leader on the issue.

Australia is a leader on the issue, leading people away from unneeded and costly change. Rudd is a but a follower of climate change conventional wisdom, but the Aussie opposition is actually leading.

Is Racism Conservative? Not in England

There was a bit of a buzz this week when British National Party leader Nick Griffin was the featured guest on the BBC show Question Time. That's going to fly doubly over most American's heads, as they've heard of neither the BNP or QT.

I hadn't heard of QT either, but it is a weekly BBC staple that seems to be a cross of a Sunday morning political show and a town-hall meeting; a panel of news makers field questions from a studio audience on Thursday evening at 8:30 and the session is shown live-to-tape as is (with the occasional bleepable or decorum breech edited out) at 10:35. Griffin was a guest on this week's edition, which had a bit-too-lively debate between he and his many critics.

Why the hoopla? Well, to put it kindly, the BNP folks make Tom Tancredo look like a member of La Raza. They are racists in that they want to end immigration and encourage non-ethnic-Brits to leave. They had a whites-only membership policy until recently; why a non-white would want to join is another matter.

However, calling them critters of the right would be a mischaracterization. Lest we forget, real fascists are leftists, and the BNP economic policy is of the left. They turn up their nose at both free-market-free-trade liberalism and socialism, wanting the economy to serve the state and to move away from big corporations and towards small mom-and-pop businesses. 

Yes, that does sound a bit like Pat Buchanan's dream world, but both share a localist tendency to like the small and distrust the big. The problem with that romantic notion is that a lot of our modern technology is made possible by large corporations that have the scale to do things that can't be done easily in a storefront shop on a six-figure budget. I'd likely not be blogging on the Web were localist economics the rule of the day. Localism has crunchycon, paleocon, and leftist versions, and the BNP vision is that of the left.

The BNP got 6% in the last EU elections in that other UK (I can tell I've been in Lexington too long when UK has me thinking John Wall before I think of John Bull) and that gives them some credence; a proportional representation system lets minor parties like the BNP and the anti-EU UK Independence Party more votes than they get in standard first-past-the-post races. If the Constitution Party (not to equate the two, but that's our closest analog, albeit much less virulently ethnocentric) got 6%, they'd be in the mix of public affairs shows, too. They got that vote largely in Labour-leaning districts, so their vote is of blue-collars with red necks behind them.

That makes the Labour folks nervous. The anti-fascist protesters are right to rail on their racism, but the BNP isn't of the right. Militant racism and ethnocentrism is a blue-collar art-form by and large; the better off tend to be more cosmopolitan than Joe Shoprat, so you see blue-collar skinheads in German and the BNP taking votes from Labour in Europe.

When Labour needs all the help it can get in not getting slaughtered in next spring's election (the five year mark of the last election is May 5th, 2010, so by custom, they'll have to go to the polls by then), the threat of losing Archie Bunker types to the BNP is rather real; let's not forget Archie's prototype was Alf Garnett from the British show Til Death Us Do Part. The analogy might not hold perfectly, since Alf was a reluctant Tory, since Labour "pretend to represent the working classes, whilst all they would do when in power is feather their own nests."

Who such disgruntled (if they were ever gruntled in the first place) folks vote for next spring will be a good question, and the BNP rednecks might sadly get a few of those votes.

"Socialism is an evil, and it can't stop regulating"

Flint's most famous human product, Michael Moore, has turned his cameras toward Wall Street in his latest big-screen foray, Capitalism: A Love Story. That's a colon in the title, and we know what the colon produces.

Anyway, the money quote from this piece is this

"Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil," the two-hour movie concludes.

"You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy."

The bad guys in Moore's mind are big banks and hedge funds which "gambled" investors' money in complex derivatives that few, if any, really understood and which belonged in the casino.

Let's tackle the low-hanging fruit first from front to back. I'm one of those few folks who understands most of those derivatives, although I'm rather green on credit default swaps. Those were designed to help people hedge risks, essentially credit insurance, but the models were ill-equipped to handle the meltdown in the housing market.

Even people who understand things can get burned badly by them. For instance, the two gentlemen who won the Nobel Econ price for their work on option pricing theory, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (the Black-Scholes formula is the standard option pricing model; Fisher Black died before the Nobel folks came a'calling), were on the payroll of Long Term Capital Management, the first hedge fund most people had ever heard of. LTCM got totaled by faulty modeling of foreign currency options during the 1998 "Asian Contagion" that rocked many developing country currencies. 

Capitalism and democracy can co-exist nicely; while there have been big-business friendly goons autocrats of the right in the past, the left tends to be more autocratic.  I can trot out another film subject as People's Exhibit A, Caesar Chavez I of Venezuela, who (put on the hasmat gear) Oliver Stone has done a documentary on. "Stone film says U.S. demonises Chavez." Nay, he does a decent job of that himself, closing any radio and TV station that disagrees with him.

However, Moore is right in part, that capitalism is evil in that it stems from greed. People should be more generous with their money. However, that greed doesn't go away in a socialist state; it just gets turned to less healthy endeavors, like political power seeking, theft and laziness ("they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work"). Give Hedrick Smith's The Russians a read to see how those issues played out in the USSR of the 1970s.

At least in a market economy, people have a healthy outlet for their greed by making stuff or selling services that people can use; the creativity that gets spent in unproductive activities in a command economy can be used to make new things that people like, like movies bashing AIG.

If I can borrow Churchill's line on democracy, a free market broadly defined (our friends on the libertarian right would argue it isn't free enough, but we'll ignore them for the moment) is the worst form of economy... with the exception of everything else we tried. Economy democracy is where 51% of the voters can rape and pillage the other 49%; People's Exhibit B is Bobby Mugabe; well, he only claimed to have a majority, but give me some poetic license.

Neither are pure; Capitalism is good at creating wealth while government intervention/socialism is good at getting wealth to people who have problems getting enough to get by. You need a blend.

By the way, Mike. If you hate Capitalism so much, why not put your love story in the public domain rather than sell tickets? People invest money in your projects and get nice returns. Let's do our best Church Lady and say "Could it be..... Capitalism?"

Hatoyama or Hatobama?

Interesting news on the other side of the Pacific, where the long-ruling LDP got nuked in last week's election. The opposition Democratic Party, headed up by Bridgestone tire heir Yukio Hatoyama, ran the LDP out of power with a vengeance, with the DPJ getting about 300 seats in the lower house to about 100 for the LDP.

Here's the interesting part for watchers of international econ and finance; here's part of the BBC's overview of Hatoyama

Mr Hatoyama says he wants to raise spending on healthcare, child support and subsidies for farmers.

But he has ruled out raising taxes to do this - prompting critics to ask where the money will come from.

Is that spelled Hatoyama or Hatobama? Here's a pre-election summary of DPJconomics

The DPJ says it will not raise the consumption tax for at least four years. It also plans to lower fuel tax and corporate tax for small businesses. It says it can finance spending pledges by cutting waste within the bureaucracy - both in terms of budgetary controls and by reducing the size of the civil service itself.

Its spending plans include the introduction of a child benefit of $3,300 per annum until the child reaches the age of 15. It also plans to introduce a minimum guaranteed pension and abolish compulsory health insurance payments for people over the age of 75.

Lots of spending and tax cuts to boot. So much for those near-zero Japanese interest rates and fighting off deflation. We'll have a crowding out effect like a team of sumo wrestlers at a buffet.

Seriously, when the US is running massive deficits and the Japanese are seemingly following suit, that will lead to more competition for loanable funds and may do a number on interest rates worldwide. Chinese investors might opt to keep their money closer to home and plunk more of their loanable funds in Japanese treasuries.

We should also see the Yen go down in value in the long term. The yen went up in the forex markets today, but if interest rates and inflation go up, long-term exchange rates will go down, which will be bad news for US exporters.

Madam People Power, RIP

Former Filipino president Cory Aquino died early this morning, losing a fight with colon cancer. Time does fly; it's been 23 years when the People Power movement kept Marcos from stealing the 1986 presidential election.

It's hard to tell how much influence that event had on world history. You can see echos of that in the Czech Velvet Revolution and the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, with the latter having the strongest echos of the people insisting that an election not be stolen from their choice. The Filipinos showed that the good guys can win if they have enough support an a little luck; key generals opted to support Aquino, making it harder for Marcos to pull martial law off.

Of course, the bad guys don't always lose scuffles with the people. The Tiananmen Square Massacre is one case where the powers that be held sway (coming only three years later, it would have been fresh in the protestors' memories), and Zimbabwe is another. Iran is looking like yet another where the official losers in an election went to the streets in protest but the powers that be got to "steal it fair and square."

Another factoid from the obit was that Aquino was "Asia's first female president." It turns out to be true; there were lady prime minsters before her (Indira Gandhi and Golda Mier) in Asia, but no presidents.

Does the UPS Whiteboard Guy Have Special Drawing Rights?

[Update 10:45PM-I'm getting some Google hits for the UPS Whiteboard guy-his name is Andy Azula, who works for the Martin Agency; he came up with the idea for the ad and his demo as the whiteboard guy worked better than any of the actors they brought in. It reminds me of Crush the turtle from Finding Nemo; it was voiced by director Andrew Stanton, who couldn't find anyone who did a better surfer dude voice for Crush]

One of the stories in finance that has gotten legs the last few weeks is a move to create a global super-currency based loosely on the IMF's Special Drawing Rights; here's a Motley Fool piece in the issue. Right now, an SDR is set to be worth 0.632 US dollars+0.41 Euros+18.4 Yen + 0.0903 British Pounds; they redo the weightings every five years, and this set is good through 2010; the percentages are 44% dollar, 33% Euro and 11% each for pound and yen; the yen's only worth roughly a penny, so they have a relatively big coefficient.

Would an SDR bank account be useful for firms to stash their cash him, if you could have a SDR-based account? Yes, for it would give you decent diversification across the four major players in international finance. You wouldn't need to have actually SDR coins and bills to do that; you had Euro-based bank accounts at the turn of the millennium when the old currencies were locked in to their exchange rates but before actual Euros were printed out in 2002.

The trick would be to have a monetary policy for such a critter. Right now, the IMF doesn't have to do macro monetary policy per se; they help out countries who are short on hard currency, but don't have to manage the supply of SDRs. You'd likely need some other sort of entity to be the central banker for the new currency, which might include a broader basket of currencies that the four in the SDRs.

Would that be a slap in the face of the US? Yes, but if they keep something akin to the current weights, the US dollar would be 40% or so of the new currency. Better that they hang on to 40 cents than zero cents if they opt to go to a Euro or a not-so-free-world alternative; China and Russia are major sponsors of this alternative, which might be the beginnings of some sort of Second World movement.

More on that later.

"Everyone has the right to think about politics."

It isn't often that I'm going to agree with something Hugo Chavez says. This is one of them. Tiger right fielder Magglio Ordonez is a Chavez-supporter, who was getting ripped by anti-Chavez fans in Miami where Venezuela is through to the second round winner's bracket title game against a hot Puerto Rico team who mercied the US 11-1 yesterday.

"Everyone has the right to think about politics," Chavez said after reading an article about the incident from The Associated Press. "This is shameful.

"Viva Magglio, and all our patriots!" Chavez added.

Well, Chavez is half right. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if it's wrong. That doesn't mean that they're immune to criticism. I'm not a fan of booing players in the first place,  but I can see where someone who has been exiled to Miami to avoid the downsides of the Bolivarians would want to give Ordonez both rhetorical barrels.

Here's a question; are those ex-pat Venezuelans booing Ordonez/Chavez or Cuban-American hot-heads? There are a lot of Cubans in Little Havana who may well see Chavez as Fidel 2.0 and may be taking their long-standing dislike of Castro out on Chavez and his fans.

This article notes that there were 17,000 ex-pats in the Southeast eligable to vote in the 2004 presidential election. This piece on an 80K strong anti-Chavez rally in 2002 notes that was "staged by the mostly business- and professionally oriented Venezuelan community in South Florida." How much of that group are people who would naturally gravitate to the de facto capital of Latin America and how many have moved to steer clear of Chavez is a good question.

Carying things to the point of firing people for backing the wrong candidate (or wrong issue, as some CA Prop-8 backers have found) or terrorizing them is wrong, but booing someone for their politics is within the realm of political discourse. Booing them off the stage, as some leftists are want to do, is bad form, but expressing your displeasure is still everyone's right.

At least in the US, it is.

Shoe Carnival

I've been getting a steady dribble of Googleadge for Jaime "Shoes" Huffman the last few weeks; I just realized we've come up on the 30th anniversary of his 15 minutes of fame on Michigan State's 1979 title team. Tempus doth Fugit big time.

Meanwhile, over in Iraq, Muntazer "Shoes" al-Zaidi got three years in jail for his protest efforts; I don't think we'd be as harsh with the guy were he to have done that here stateside, especially when he went 0-for-2.

It's not fair to the FPOTUS, but I'm reminded of the old Soviet era joke about poor Sergei, who got 12 years in the gulag for calling the general an idiot. It seems harsh, but he only got six months for insulting a superior officer; the rest was for revealing a state secret.

Swing Your Partners

They had the Israeli elections today and the result appears to be a near-dead-heat between Likud and Kadima; early results have Kadima with a 23-22% lead. Here's the BBC tag-team live-blog of the results. As expected, Labor got knocked into fourth by hawkish Russian-centric Yisrael Beiteinu; YB got 13% and Labor got 10%.

The next stop will be to figure out who gets first crack at forming a coalition. Even if Likud winds up a close second, former PM Benjamin Netanyahu might be in a better position to patch together a majority; the question will be whether it will be a Likud-Kadima grand coalition of the center-right or a more hawkish package of Likud, YB and some other nationalist parties on the right.

The politics now goes personal and behind the scenes. We should see something develop in the next few days as we get hard numbers of which parties have how many seats.

Two Leaders Out, One Still In

It isn't often that you see an impeachment vote go 59-0. Usually, if the case is that much of a slam dunk, the perp has resigned weeks ago, expressing a strong desire to spend time with his family. If the accused wants to fight it out, he usually has some support in the legislature.

Not so with Mr. Blagojevich; he went out with a East Coast media blitz instead. It isn't often that I want to question the sanity of elected officials, but this is one of them. At least he is off of the public stage for now, at least as an elected official; he can now go to being a cheap side show on the legal circuit, unless he manages to bring other Illinois officials down with him.

That might be a wish for some folks on the right, but not for me. I don't want to see the president dragged down by this (if perchance he was doing something illegal, which seems unlikely); that only gives us a President Biden, which isn't an improvement.

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Interesting stuff happening in Iceland, where protests surrounding a very bad financial collapse, including the tanking of the countries three major banks, forced a center-right government out. Now, we have a minority left-of-center government serving as a caretaker government until May elections. The Independence Party-Progressive Party (think the Aussie Liberal-National combo as a good analog) coalition has a majority of seats (just barely, 32 out of 63), but not a majority of public opinion, so the last government was a Independence-Social Democrat grand coalition; not grand enough.

So, the Social Democrats and Left-Greens, who have 27 seats between them, get a shot at ruling. The Social Democrat's leader is recovering from a brain tumor issue, so social affairs minister Johanna Sigurdardottir will take the helm. She'll try to put a finger in the dike of this financial crisis.

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Speaking of minority parliaments, Canada's lived to fight another day. New Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff signed off on the Conservative's budget with some minor reservations, much to the chagrin of his erstwhile coalition partners. There's a whole post on that one, but it will keep until after the MSU game.

Moving Forward

One key bit of news should help Israel along; PM Olmert is stepping aside. He'll stay around until his Kadima party elects a replacement, who will then have to either patch together a majority government or head to new elections.

Olmert had very little personal power, as Kadima was essentially Ariel Sharon's creation and Olmert was more of a caretaker once Sharon's stroke put him out of commission. I had to check if Sharon was still living; he is, but barely, in a near-coma.

A bribery scandal has crippled Olmert, and with little personal popularity and with Labor poised to bolt the cabinet if Olmert wasn't replaced, something had to give. If Kadima was to live up to it's name, it needed to move forward.

One of the folks the BBC mentions as the frontrunner for the party boss position is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni; her name looks like a pair of bad Scrabble racks (you could get Ziti or Zip out of her first name, but would you have free space to use it in an end-game with five tiles left?) but she would give Argentina's Christina Fernandez a run for her money as best-looking head-of-government.

Mr. Ma

No, that's not a paean to Lileks, it's a reference to the new Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou. It's interesting in that Ma was the candidate of the KMT party, the old nationalist party of Chiang Kai-shek, who ran the country after fleeing the mainland in the 1940s. It wasn't until 2000 that someone from outside the KMT was allowed to run the country.

Thus, Ma represents a revamped KMT that doesn't have to do tricks like have mainland congressman be essentially elected to life terms since their seats were in rebel-held (a.k.a. PRC) territory and new elections were impossible. This would be somewhat akin to the PRI regaining power in Mexico after stacking the deck in their favor for decades, then being honest and ceding power to the opposition.

The key difference would seem to be that Ma still clings to a one-China policy of eventual reunification with the mainland, while outgoing president Chen Shui-bian was looking towards an independent Taiwan. Ma will be less likely to do stuff to anger Beijing.

World Politics Catch-Up

Lots of interesting things happening in the last while that I've neglected to blog on.

While it's only local elections, they weren't good news for Labour; the Conservatives won a lot of seats in local elections, with Labour actually falling behind the Liberal Democrats for second place in the popular vote nationwide.

The highlight of the voting from a Tory perspective was the win of Boris Johnson over "Red" Ken Livingston for London mayor. Johnson is a Young Turk in more ways than one; he's 43 and is of Turkish descent.

Boris the Bird or Boris the Spider? That mop of blond hair reminds me more than a bit of Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, the Tiger phenom of the mid 70s, but his first name has a Who earwig going.

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The Italian right got back into power last month. A retooled "People of Freedom" coalition headed by former PM and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi got a solid 47-38% plurality win over the main party of the left. It's not a bad time to be a person of the right in Europe, with the right in charge in Germany, Italy and France and Labour on the ropes in the UK.

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Semi-good news out of Zimbabwe; they finally announced the presidential results, and had opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai with a 48-43% first-round win. The problem is that he didn't get 50%, and goes into a runoff with Mugabe; Captain Morgan's MDC party will have to figure out whether they want to swallow hard and go into a runoff or insist that they were deprived of a clear majority by ZANU chicanery and take to the streets.

At least the ZANU folks didn't try to steal the election outright and allowed the MDC to have a majority of the lower house and a 50-50 split of the senate. The MDC's fear is that the ZANU folks will do a Kill-off-the-vote campaign in pro-MDC areas leading up to the runoff; the question in the long run is whether the ZANU hard-cases will go quietly if they do lose or start a civil war.

Evita 2.0 Has Some Bugs

I'm used to seeing taxes on imports, but this ongoing story from Argentina is the first time I recall seeing export tariffs imposed by the country stuff was coming from. Normally, countries bend over backwards in order to get people to buy their stuff, finding ways to subsidize exports. The only exception that comes to mind is that the US is leery of sending computer equipment and other military-useful stuff to unfreindly countries.

However, Argentina has had a system of taxing food exports with the goal of keeping domestic food prices low; if farmers get taxed selling to foreigners, they'll be more likely to sell cheap locally. Those taxes were raised last month by the left-leaning government. Farmers responded by boycotts and blockades, withholding food from the market; the news of the day was that they's put the boycott on hold while they talk to the Christina Fernandez de Kirchner administration.

Not the greatest start to La Hillary del Sur; Ferndandez took over from husband Nestor after serving as a senator, so there are some interesting paralells to our current presidential race. However, in senator Clinton's defence, she isn't a fire-breathing lefty and understands free market economics enough to not do anything quite that dense here.

Got a Little Captian in You, Zimbabwe?

It doesn't seem like it's been six years already since we had the last Zimbabwe elections that Robert Mugabe stole from the opposition; that was one of the first major items I recall blogging about when this blog started in 2002.

Well, we have good news coming out of Zimbabwe for a change; the opposition is leading and will have a majority of seats in the new parliament per the official Electoral Commission. 

In addition, unofficial returns have opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai with a clear lead over Mugabe in the presidential race; the question will be whether Tsvangirai will have a plurality or majority. Tsvangirai's MDC party's figures have him with 50.3%, just avoiding a runoff, but independent figures have him with only 49% and would need a runoff with Mugabe if those numbers hold up.

The results are slow coming in, so there may be some attempts from Mugabe backers to cook the books, like Cook County coming in slowly to figure out how many votes they need to steal to win.

May Mugabe go quietly. Other African Big Men have step aside after clearly losing at the polls, and it's well past Mugabe's freshness date, to put it kindly. He should hand the ship of state over to Captain Morgan.

GDH-Gross Domestic Happiness

Bhutan isn't a country I recall blogging on before, but they had their first elections as a constitutional monarchy. It's enough of a democracy where the king's brother-in-law was allowed to get thumped in the polls.

However, it wasn't the nascent democracy that pulled my chatty ring when I read this piece earlier today, but this paragraph on the ruling philosophy of the country-

The monarchy remains popular in Bhutan partly because of its focus on promoting what it calls "gross national happiness" - based on the idea that economic growth should be balanced by respect for traditions and the environment.

I've discussed my ideal macroeconomic policy as seeking to maximize the commonweal, looking for a peak on a modified Laffer curve that maximizes the collective well-being of the country rather than tax revenue.

Since commonweal is a very highbrow term, might the Bhutanese concept of Gross Domestic Happiness be a better phrase? Since we tend to use Gross Domestic Product these days rather than Gross National Product in macroeconomics (GDP looks at where something's produced rather than GNP, where it measures which country owns the company producing it; the Toyota plant in Georgetown counts on US GDP but Japanese GNP), I'd rather go with GDH rather than GNH for our mythical measure of commonweal.

There are a number of things that are good for GDP but aren't good for the country; we all can rattle off a number of vices that we'd be better off without. There are also some things that are bad for GDP but are good for the country; stay-at-home moms are a great example.

• They aren't earning an income, reducing GDP.
• They do more cooking from scratch, reducing the grocery bill, reducing GDP; the value added from their labor doesn't count towards GDP.
• They don't use as much daycare services, reducing GDP; the care they give their own kids at home isn't sold, so it doesn't count as GDP.
• They don't use as much gas or buy as much business attire, reducing GDP
• Their families tend to eat in more, further reducing GDP
• If they're home-schooling, there will be less need for teachers, reducing GDP.

In addition, we can look at the ideas of tradition and the environment as the piece does. Economic development can have a lot of negative externalities that may reduce GDH while increasing GDP.

For instance, one discussion here in Lexington revolves around building a big hotel-condo-retail space skyscraper downtown. The development would take out some nightclubs and do a number on the skyline, but it sure would add to the tax base, and many mayors and city councils start to drool when they see the extra property tax dollars from such a project.

As a suburban newcomer (I have a Lexington address, but live well away from downtown) who has no attachment to the existing skyline and who goes downtown only when I have to, I don't have a dog in the aesthetic fight. However, there are lots of folks who would have their quality of life impacted by having their bohemian part of downtown torn down to put up a hotel for the big-shots who come to town for the Keeneland meets, UK games and major events at the Kentucky Horse Park like the world equestrian championships slated for 2010.

Would the hotel increase Gross Civic Product? Yes. Will it increase Gross Civic Happiness? Good question; the powers that be say yes, but a lot of activists say no.

Gross Domestic Happiness. You can't quantify it, but it's something we need to focus on.

What sayeth the Peanut Gallery?

Around the World in 15 Minutes

The world news is actually encouraging for a change.

The Pakistani elections seem to have gone off well, with Musharraf's party finishing third.

Benazir Bhutto's PPP party got a plurality of seats, with the party of the last freely-elected PM, Nawaz Sharif (a.k.a. the guy Musharraf kicked out), coming in second. Those two parties are talking coalition.

It's encouraging that Musharraf allowed his butt to get kicked in the election rather than try to steal it in some way.

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I'm a bit late to this news, but Kosovo declared its independence over the weekend. It seemed to be inevitable, given the enmity between the Serbs and the Albanian majority in Kosovo and the US-led military invasion to keep the Serbs from crapping on the Albanians. The problem becomes that (1) the Albanians are crapping on the Kosovar Serbs and (2) there's a lot of Serb history in Kosovo that predates the Albanians moving in later in the second millennium.

Kosovo goes the way of Panama a century ago in getting US muscle to back up an independence claim; it's not going to happen otherwise. However, we're merely working on humanitarian grounds in Kosovo rather than clearing the deck for the Panama Canal.

The Russians don't like it, partly out of Orthodox Slavic solidarity with the Serbs and partly  in fear that the world might do to them in Chechnya and other minority regions of Russia what they did to Serbia here.

The Kosovar Serbs don't like it either, as they tried to take out border crossings into Serbia.

OK, what's "Get over it" in Russian and Serbo-Croatian?

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Thirdly, Fidel finally hung it up as Cuban president. It won't change much, since brother Raul Castro has been in charge since Fidel's health went south in 2006; however, Raul will be officially be elected president later this week.

Berluscromney

Two news items caught my eye at lunch just now. The first was the FCC OKing the purchase of Clear Channel, the big radio and TV station owner, "by private-equity companies Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners."

Bain Capital... Mitt Romney's Bain Capital? Yep. The deal had been announced back in November, but just got finalized today.

So, here you have a guy seriously in the hunt for the presidential nomination as a partner in buying the biggest network of radio stations in the country.

The other somewhat related news item was the fall of the current Italian government; PM Prodi lost a confidence vote in the Italian Senate. What does that have to do with Mitt Romney and Clear Channel? Well, the opposition leader, conservative former (and likely future) PM Silvio Berlusconi, is a media magnate. Here's a summary from his Wikipedia page-

Berlusconi is the founder and main shareholder of Fininvest, among the ten largest Italian privately-owned companies, operating in media and finance including three national TV channels. Together these account for nearly half the Italian TV market. He owns three (out of seven) national television channels as well as some of the country's most important newspapers. He is also well known for being, since 1986, the president of A.C. Milan, a prominent Italian football team.

The best analogy I can think of is to cross Ted Turner and Rudy Giuliani, giving him Turner's media holdings pre-sale-to-Time-Warner and Atlanta Braves teams with Rudy's politics, attitude and love life (he was having kids with the lady who would become wife #2 before divorcing wife #1). His party's name, Forza Italia, would loosely translate as "Let's Go, Italy;" it replaced the old Christian Democrats as the main party of the center-right.

He's been able to have political coverage slanted in Forza's direction, which gives the Italian left no little bit of consternation.

Would the Bain-held Clear Channel do that, slant their news coverage Romney's way? Probably not, but the question would be posed.

Any slanting might not be that blatant; it might be that the news-talk stations in their flock tend to keep the talkers in the Rush-Hannity universe that tends to stick to a conservative Republican line and away from various heterodox thoughts, be it various liberals or maverick conservatives.

That might make business sense as well as political since, since the primary motivation for the purchase is to make a buck. This isn't going to evolve into an Air America of the right, for the right doesn't need it; conservative talkers seem to do better in ratings than liberal talkers, and radio station's favorite color isn't red or blue, it's green.

I channel surfed into Rush on my way back from campus this afternoon, and he was pooh-poohing that other Sullivan's (other than my big bosses) piece stating that the race was McCain versus Rush. However, it seems to be boiling down to McCain versus the new owner of one of Rush's major patrons; quite a few Clear Channel stations carry El Rushbo.

Venezuela to Chavez-"Why Don't You Shut Up."

Ceasar Chavez can lose an election; a constitutional referendum that would allow him to become essentially president-for-life and give him indefinite emergency powers if desired went down 51-49. That's with all the power and bluster he could muster.

The dual good newses is that the Venezuelan people had the courage to vote him down and that the Chavez folks had the grace to accept defeat rather than try and cook the books to conjure up another 2%; they may well have cooked it to some point, but didn't get the Bolivarian fans to vote often enough.

That means, that barring a successful new effort, that Chavez is term-limited and will need to step down as of 2012. Four years too long, but in a democracy, we have the right to elect power-hungry and clueless jerks if we want to.

Howard's End

Some good news out of France, where President Sarkozy seems to have successfully stared down a transit worker's strike.

High-speed TGV services from Paris are running as usual. In the capital, metro services were being restored, though few lines were back to 100% operation.

"The worst of the crisis is over," presidential aide Raymond Soubie told radio station Europe-1.

The historical pattern in France is (1) government proposes reforms (2) unions take to the streets and (3) government backs down from reforms. Sarkozy didn't play the traditional song-and-dance routing.

________

Some less-good news out of Australia, where PM John Howard not only will get voted out of office as prime minister but even lost his MP seat.

With 70% of votes counted, Labor were on course to win the 76 seats needed to form a government. More than 20 constituencies from a total of 150 are still to produce a result, but Labor already has 72 seats compared with 48 for Mr Howard's Liberal-National coalition.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd will be the presumptive incoming prime minister. Howard had been in power for 11 years and was a bit to the right of the Australian public on Iraq and other issues; people often want to give the other guys a shot after a decade with one side.

Rudd is sounding the conciliatory tones that winners always seem to make, wanting to be "a leader for all [insert plural form of nationality]." We'll see if he governs that way, or is just giving the standard post-election reconciling with the losing side speech.

[Update 4PM-Rudd actually uttered my stock winner's line (italics added)

Mr Rudd said he would be "a prime minister for ‘all Australians’’. He said he would be a leader for indigenous Australians, migrants, town and country, farmers afflicted by drought and for men and women serving in uniform. "I will be prime minister for all Australians,’’ he said "And I make this solemn pledge for the nation I will always govern in the national interest. "

At least until the party activists get a hold of him.

 

Two out of Three ain't Bad

Maybe Lebanon can take a page from Jack Nicholson's president in Mars Attacks; after the visitors take out Congress, he notes that "I want the people to know that they still have two out of three branches of the government working for them, and that ain't bad."

Lebanese president Emile Lahoud's term off office expired at midnight Saturday (it's early Sunday already in Lebanon) and there has not been a replacement named, for the Lebanese opposition took a page out of Turkey's book and refused to provide a 2/3rds quorum to elect a new president. Lahoud's in the pro-Syrian camp and wants the military chief to take over for him.

Minor problem- the constitution has the presidential powers flowing to the prime minister in the absence of a president; the PM is the anti-Syrian camp's Fouad Siniora. If former president Lahoud has his way, he'll have essentially done a coup.

If that can be avoided, and the military lets the rule of law apply, they'll still have still have two out of three branches of the government working for them, and that ain't bad, especially when the third branch was in bed with the Assads. Pray that it be so.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

That might not be the best title, as it's what John Wilkes Booth is supposed to have hollered after assassinating Lincoln ("Thus always to tyrants" is the translation from Latin), but it came to mind in this week's dust-up between Hugo Chavez and Spain's King Juan Carlos. Chavez dissed the right-of-center former PM Aznar (who was with the US on Iraq) as a subhuman fascist in league with Dubya; later, current Spanish PM Zapatero, a man of the left and no neocon, came to Aznar's defense.

Mr Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, despite his microphone being turned off. The king leaned forward and said: "Why don't you shut up?"

According to reports, the king used a familiar term normally used only for close acquaintances - or children.

My Spanish is a bit rusty, but Spanish has two forms of you, a intimate tu form used from friends, family and loved ones, and a formal usted form used for superiors and strangers; if you're listening to a song at a Mexican restaurant, the love songs won't be using usted, but a head of state addressing a fellow leader probably would.

Using the intimate form would be considered a bit cheeky, like our current president using a diminutive of an head of state's first name (e.g. calling Canadian PM Harper "Steve"). When used in a dressing down, it might seem like you're chewing out a child.

Juan Carlos knows about fascists. He was raised to be one and turned his back on it. He was groomed to be the successor to strongman Francisco Franco. Franco didn't trust Juan Carlos' father, but groomed Juan Carlos to restore the monarchy and keep things away from the leftists that Franco beat in the Civil War of the 1930s.

However, Juan Carlos turned the tables on the fascists (loosely defined, for the Franco bunch was more folks of the right than the authoritarian left that Mussolini represented) and restored full democracy, giving power to a popularly-elected Socialist government and becoming a UK-style ceremonial-only monarch; Franco must have been doing 10000 RPMs in his grave.

He knows fascists and tyrants; Chavez might well look more the part far more than Aznar ever did.

Tusk!

Every time I deal with modern Polish politics, I keep getting a Fleetwood Mac earwig, for the libertarian-leaning Civic Platform party is headed by one Donald Tusk.

Cue the USC band for Prime Minister Tusk, as they got the plurality of votes in today's election, replacing (once Tusk gets coalition talks with the Peasant Party done) the theocon-ish Jaroslaw Kaczynski, whose Law and Justice Party dropped back to second place.

You have to like Poland, for when you get the moral equivalent of Sam Brownback getting ousted by Steve Forbes as PM with Steve Brownback (Kaczynski's twin brother Lech is president) in the White House, you're well ahead of the game.

"Hot dogs, get your hot dogs!"

One long quip of mine of long standing-"The height of American decadence is diet dog food. Not only are we fat, but so are our pets."

It seems like the height of Zimbabwean decadence will be diet dog. Peking Pekinese? Chili con Chihuahua?

AK-07

Andy Jackson has this retort to my post on Turkey's new president Gul-

Since I have been traveling to and through Turkey since 1989, there has been a very overt campaign against Turkish Christians since the AK Party has been in the lead.  Christians are under constant watch, and a pro-active campaign against Turkish Christians has been very prominent.  I do not see this changing, just increasing, with Gul’s addition. This does not mean, however, that AK control might not be what is needed for church growth, it will simply come through harassment and even martyrdom.   

Mark writes: “If Gul and the AK can make things work while keeping the generals content if not happy, that will be another American-style conservative party that can be an economic and geopolitical ally down the line. That’s a promising prospect.”   A very, very optimistic conclusion.

Mr. Jackson has a closer view of Turkey than I do; I'm like the 21st century Will Rogers who knows what he "reads in the papers." Our old church in Florida had an active ministry in Istanbul, and I don't recall any violence against their ministry there. However, that was back in 2005 when I last heard from them on that issue.

The analogy that struck me as I read Jackson's reply was the BJP party in India, which is militantly Hindu; many BJP-friendly groups had killed Christians and Muslims. While the party wasn't directly to blame, the staunchly pro-Hindu and anti-special-rights-to-religious-minorities rhetoric was not overly helpful.

Is the AK party the Turkish analog to the BJP? The BJP was more of a US ally than the socialist-leaning and secular Congress party and more of a free-market party, so there could be some loose analogies.

However, there isn't a significant religious minority in Turkey that I know of; the Christian church there is well under 1% of the population, despite a big chunk of the New Testament story happening in Turkey. There's far less of a political goal in Christian-bashing. Gul wants to be in the EU down the line, and encouraging the murder of minorities wouldn't be prudent. There's also less of a political issue with minority religions; the political issue is the ability to be devoutly Islamic in the public square, as I understand the lay of the land.

I'll stand by my prediction of a lack of a brain drain; I don't think the Gul team will do enough to merge mosque and state to cause an exodus of secular folks. However, what remains to be seen is if whether a majority-Islamic government will improve Muslim-Christian relations or see them deteriorate. Given their desire to be part of the EU, that might lean them in the direction of cracking down on anti-Christian violence.

Optimistic? Yes. Pollyanna? Possibly. I majored in poli-sci, not Pollyanna. However, I'll still put my mythical money on things improving rather than deteriorating.

See Gul in Charge

One of the big news items of the week was the election of Abdullah Gul as Turkish president. It's the first time that an Islamic (rather than secular) leaning politician has headed up the country. The new First Lady wears a scarf, a no-no for secular Turks; it's far from a burqa. The one in the BBC piece is something that I could see Laura Bush wearing on the right occasion; a modern woman making a bow for Islamic modesty without looking like a Taliban throwback.

Gul's AK (Justice and Development in English) party is describe by the WaPo as "mildly Islamic." From what I've read of modern Turkish history, the AK's predecessor Welfare party was a bit more on the theocon side of things than the AK, which comes across as akin to the US Republicans if you substitute Christian for Muslim; no calls for sharia, but for more tolerance of Islam in the public square.

The AK's Wikipedia describes the change from the Welfare Party that the military (who sees itself as the guardian of secularism) booted from power in 1997 as altering "the traditional focus of religiously-affiliated politics from concern over Turkey’s lack of Islamic characteristics to pushing for democratic and economic reforms in addition to stressing moral values through the communitarian-liberal consensus." That has allowed the AK to oversee economic reforms that have boosted Turkish GDP in the 00's. Many swing voters went with their pocketbooks and went with the AK, similar to the libertarian-theocon coalition that makes the GOP tick.

Andy Jackson had this take on the election

Look for a “brain drain” effect in Turkey over the next few years.

I'm not sure that's going to happen. Plenty of US liberals she-dogged about moving overseas if Bush won, but the Canadian and British embassies weren't swamped with visa applications post-election. If Gul's AK folks keep the economic reforms coming, Turkey may become a more interesting place to be from an economic standpoint.

The secular military will keep the separation of mosque and state intact; they have a track record of stepping in if they think they're needed, most recently 10 years ago when they gave the Welfare party the heave-ho. If Turkey starts to become anything resembling a theocracy, the tanks will be on the street before the intelligentsia starts to go ex-pat on them.

It's cheap talk on the secular left about picking up and leaving if the Islamists take over. While there might be a few militant secularists that will bail, you may well see a reverse brain drain of smart Muslims going to Turkey where they can be free, modern and Muslim at the same time, something that is pick-two-of-three in the rest of the Islamic world.

What does that mean for Christians in Turkey and elsewhere? I think it might help on two levels. One, if hard-core Muslims have their political frustrations lowered, they might not be looking to Christian-bash quite as much.

Secondly, the AK party may show both nominally Muslim and Christian countries how you can have a modern and devout party. It may be too late for Dubya to spend much geopolitical capital, but Bush and the AK have quite a bit in common, leading free-market traditional-morality parties; yes, not free market enough, I hear the right end of the Peanut Gallery holler, but he beats the heck out of Barack or Hillary.

If Gul and the AK can make things work while keeping the generals content if not happy, that will be another American-style conservative party that can be an economic and geopolitical ally down the line. That's a promising prospect.

Talking Turkey

Turkey had parliamentary elections today, and the Islamic-flavored AKP ruling party looks like it will continue to have a majority in parliament. They seem more like the US Republican Party if you turn the Christian "Religious Right" into a Muslim one, rather than a sharia-preaching party. The Turkish constitution is an avowedly secular one, and the military has made rumbling that they might intervene to stop a pro-Islamic majority from getting away from the hard-core secular tradition.

With about 80% of the vote in, the AKP's getting 47%, the secular-left CHP is getting 21% and the nativist and anti-Kurd MHP is getting 14%. All three seem likely to break the 10% threshold to get proportional-based seats in the parliament. A number of Kurdish-autonomy candidates are likely to get elected as independents in the Kurdish areas in the SE of the country.

The key issue is whether a AKP-Kurd coalition can break the 2/3rds barrier needed to elect a new president; the two opposition parties have been blocking an AKP-backed candidate from being elected, which precipitated a new election. The election may not have changed that dynamic, but final results have yet to come in.

Flush Fund

Interesting piece on the wife of Argentina's president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner; she's already a senator and is trying to out-Hillary Hillary by directly succeeding her husband Nestor. However, the Kirchner administration has a scandal that sounds more like William Jefferson than William Jefferson Clinton.

On Monday, the economy minister resigned after an investigation was ordered into the discovery of $64,000 (£31,000) in cash in the toilet in her office. She denied any wrongdoing.

Could we call that a flush fund? Yes, the BBC would rub it in by reminding us that the pound cracked the $2 barrier back in April.

Crackberry Crepes

When Stephen Harper took over as Canadian prime minister last year, he showed that he wasn't Dubya's lap dog by asserting sovereignty over the Northwest Passage straights. Not exactly an front-burner issue, although many folks are looking at more sea traffic if climate change makes the Artic more ice-free than in the past.

New French president Nicolas Sarkozy must have picked up some pointers from Stevie at the G8 summit as how to ritually distance himself from the US; his folks have banned Blackberries from sensitive government offices-"France's SGDN security service is worried because Blackberries use US- and UK-based servers."

Well, French servers tend to be slower, since the clay tends to slow the ball down. UK servers are faster; Federer has a shot there.

"Kouchner" ; French for Lieberman?

[Update 5/5/09-I'm getting some Google hits for this post. The reference is to US senator Joe Lieberman, a hawkish liberal who was read out of the Democratic party for his backing of President Bush on Iraq much as Kouchner was de-Socialisted for working with Sarkozy. Now that the Israelis have a rather hawkish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, it makes things squirrelly]

They don't waste time getting a new president going in France; we have two and a half months between the presidential election and inauguration (six weeks if you get technical and start the clock when the Electoral College votes), while the French get it done in two weeks.

One of the interesting cabinet picks for incoming US-friendly president Nicolas Sarkozy was Doctors Without Borders founder Bernard Kouchner as his foreign minister. Kouchner's a Socialist, but he was one of the few folks on the French left in favor of the US invasion of Iraq "on the grounds that it would topple Saddam Hussein." The Socialists have disowned him for joining the Sarkozy cabinet.

The BBC piece notes that Sarkozy has women in key roles, including interior minister; unlike the US, where the relatively minor Interior department runs herd over national parks and other wilderness areas, it's in charge of the various police forces, the issuing of passports, and supervision of elections.

Thus, if the new government has to knock heads with protesters in the Muslim-dominated suburbs, it will have a woman's face in Michele Alliot-Marie, a former defense minister. When they're prosecuted, it will be a daughter of North African immigrants, Rachida Dati, in charge of putting them behind bars as justice minister; Dati is the first person of non-European stock to head a major department.

We'll see if Sarkozy is able to revamp France in ways that are more able to promote economic growth and reduction of unemployment, especially in the minority neighborhoods. He's pushing a French version of affirmative action, which might not sit well with American conservatives who are otherwise rooting him on. However, that might well be needed to combat some bad anti-Arab bigotry in ethnically French folks and give the kids in the Arab ghettos a shot at meaningful employment.