In an article entitled "They Won't Know What Hit Them", The Atlantic describes the hard-ball political strategy of IT pioneer, Tim Gill, the co-founder of the publishing-software giantQuark:.

The software mogul Tim Gill has a mission: Stop the Rick Santorums of tomorrow before they get started. How a network of gay political donors is stealthily fighting sexual discrimination and reshaping American politics.

Here's the what and how of Gill's initial foray into the political fray:

While Gill participated in gay activism in college, his passions ran more toward differential calculus, and he didn’t feel particularly beset by his homosexuality. He had come out to his parents when he was a teenager and been accepted. It was the very ordinariness of his upper-middle-class upbringing, in fact, that made his political awakening such a shock. In 1992, a ballot initiative approved by Colorado voters altered the state constitution to prohibit laws aimed at protecting gays and lesbians (it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court). Gill noticed bumper stickers supporting the measure on the desks of some Quark employees. Not long afterward, he set up the Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, through which he donates to “mainstream” charities—libraries, symphonies, vaccination clinics, even a Star Trek exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science—to spread the message that gays and lesbians care about the same things as everyone else. In 2000, he sold his interest in Quark for a reported half-billion dollars in order to focus full-time on his philanthropy.

And here are his modus operandi and endgame:

Interesting that Gill would employ Biblical rhetoric like "punish the wicked" and say that the best way to achieve his goal is to "snuff out" rising pols in their cribs before they "know what hit them." Rather vicious language for a man who is only "out" for "equality". Is the ghost of Herod the Great, the original proponent of kill-them-in-the-crib politics, Gill's other political adviser?

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Joshua Green's recent piece, "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up" covers the events that precipiated the firing of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle.

No one could have predicted Barack Obama’s sudden rise, though the Clinton campaign was slower to recognize it than most. Solis Doyle’s failure is another matter. As much as Clinton touts her own “executive experience” and judgment, she made Solis Doyle her campaign manager because of Solis Doyle’s loyalty, rather than her skill, despite a trail of available evidence suggesting she was unsuited for the role.

To understand how this happened, it’s helpful to know a bit about the history of rivalry and factionalism in Hillaryland. The self-mythologizing tale most often told by its inhabitants is that during Bill Clinton’s administration, while his advisers were leaking left and right as they jockeyed for primacy and influence, Hillary’s were fiercely loyal. “My staff prided themselves on discretion, loyalty, and camaraderie, and we had our own special ethos,” Clinton wrote in her memoir, Living History. “While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, Hillaryland never did.”

But when Clinton ran for a New York Senate seat in 2000, that began to change. Without the drama of Bill Clinton’s administration to occupy the media, the spotlight fell squarely on Hillary’s advisers, who now included not just the loyal White House cadre, but others who had been added to her team, like Penn and Dwight Jewson, an advertising consultant specializing in branding who had helped sell Doritos, Red Wolf Beer, and the Taco Bell Value Menu. The arrival of these outsiders complicated the ever-shifting pecking order in Hillaryland, suddenly putting it on full display and making it more consequential than ever.

Two notable insights into Mrs. Clinton's leadership style are evident. First of all, she rightly recognizes that skills developed in the private sector an be applied to politics, not the least of which are branding, marketing, and advertising. If you can convince people "quiero" the Taco Bell Value Menu, what can't you convince them to "queiro"? The second is that like the sitting president, she may value loyalty as much, or more, than demonstrated competence. And apparently, that choice - to "yo quiero loyalty over competence"- comes at a high cost.

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In Rangoon, Burma, a rare and audacious protest by Buddhist monks against the military junta, against one the world's most repressive regimes, a regime presiding over one of the world's least free and most crisis-ridden economies.

The Burmese military junta insisted today it has no plans to crack down on Buddhist monks who took to the streets for a fourth day of protests, continuing the most sustained challenge to the government in more than a decade. Some 200 monks marched in heavy rain from the outskirts of Rangoon to the country's holiest shrine, the Shwedagon pagoda, which has served as a traditional gathering place for anti-government protests, including the failed 1988 democratic uprising.This week's marches have breathed new life into a protest movement that began when the junta raised fuel prices last month. The protests reflect the simmering discontent with the repressive regime and have become the biggest challenge to the junta since the student demonstrations of December 1996. Fears of a crackdown against the monks have been growing but a government spokesman insisted it had no plans to use force. "The Myanmar government will not declare a state of emergency. You can see the government handles the situation peacefully," the information ministry spokesman, Ye Htut, said.

"Peacefully" only so long as the world is watching.

Tags: burma

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When you aspire to the role of a leading man on the world stage, to being the political equivalent of a rock star, you have your work cut out for you. And that work is never done. One such would-be leading man would be Russian President Vlad Putin. With just eight months of the year completed Putin has claimed the North Pole for Mother Russia, found time to pose shirtless in Siberia (Think of all the hours in the gym it took to pump up his pecs to those prodigious proportions- eat your heart out Obama and Sarkozy), restarted Cold War era nuclear bomber runs, smacked down some pesky Persian theocrats over the status of their nuclear "power" plants, (possibly) went nuclear on a loud-mouthed dissident in the UK, bagged the 2014 Winter Olympics and just this weekend announced plans to plant the hammer and sickle on the moon. And as if that weren't enough, today comes news that Vladimir the Great is also hard at work (re)educating the Motherland's children:

Russia is to launch the country's first TV project aimed at children on Saturday, the start of the new academic year, in an initiative personally backed by President Vladimir Putin. The "Bibigon" project has a 39-million-dollar (29-million-euro) budget and will air more than five hours of children's programming a day on the state-run Rossiya, Kultura and Sport channels, government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta announced Friday. Funding for the channel, named after a children's literature character, will come from advertising revenues on public television, the newspaper said. Russian-produced programming will be favoured over imports. "Bibigon was created at the personal demand of Vladimir Putin," Rossiiskaya Gazeta said. Kommersant daily quoted Oleg Dobrodeyev, head of Russia's public Rossiya channel, as saying that Putin "took part in the creation (of the project) and in debates on a number of details."

And should Mr. Putin decide cast himself in a leading or supporting role on Bibigon, one introducing kids to his re-expanding neighborhood, I know the perfect fashion accessory: Mr. Roger's red sweater. Besides having the obvious virtue of being red, it was hand-knitted by Mr. Roger's mother. It's currently on display at the National Museum of American History, but given all that's been accomplished this year, it ought to be a cinch to have some appartatchik nick it at night.

Not linked to The Carnival of the Insanities

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Here's how Answers.com defines a popular idiom about fish, fowl, and flesh:

Also, neither fish nor flesh; neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Not one or the other, not something fitting any category under discussion. For example, They felt he was neither fish nor fowl--not qualified to lead the department, yet not appropriate to work as a staff member either. This expression appeared in slightly different form in John Heywood's 1546 proverb collection ("Neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring") and is thought to allude to food for monks ( fish, because they abstained from meat), for the people (flesh, or meat), and for the poor (red herring, a very cheap fish).

Today the economic blog of the Middle East Media Research Institute has a fascinating and utterly tragic post about fish and flesh in today's Baghdad. It is entitled "Consumption of Fish in Iraq and its Drawbacks"

Continue reading "Neither Fish Nor Flesh" »

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JTA reports on passage of the Foreign Investment and National Security Act, aka, the "Dubai Ports Bill."

A bill passed by Congress that creates greater oversight of foreign investment in the United States calls for scrutiny of companies cooperating with the Arab boycott. The Foreign Investment and National Security Act is also known as the "Dubai ports bill" because it was inspired in part by the controversy in 2006 over the Bush administration's decision to sell control of some U.S. ports to a company based in the United Arab Emirates.

Much of the controversy concerned fears about the possibility of infiltration into ports management by Al-Qaeda or other groups, but the UAE's nominal adherence to the Arab League boycott of Israel also sparked anger.

The bill, initiated by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), mandates the secretaries of state, treasury and commerce to report on U.S. investments by "foreign governments, entities controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government, or persons of foreign countries which comply with any boycott of Israel" and "foreign governments, entities controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government, or persons of foreign countries which do not ban organizations designated by the secretary of state as foreign terrorist organizations."

The bill's final reading passed the U.S. House of Representatives this week and it now goes to President Bush for signing.

Commentary

I think the Arab boycott of Israel is counter-productive, wrong-headed, and bad for the economy of the Middle East as a whole, let alone the Palestinian people who would surely benefit more from increased foreign direct investment than from increased foreign aid. That having been said, what little I know of this bill leads me to conclude it is also counter-productive, wrong-headed and bad for both the economy of the Middle East, let alone that of the US. My prediction is that President Bush will veto it, assuming it ever even makes it through the Senate in anything resembling it's present form- something that I think is highly unlikely.

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For years now, ever since the fall of the Shah, chants of "Death to America" have become a staple of Iranian political rallies. In "Mullah's Gone Wild" John Mauldin explains how the Iranian government is committing "economic suicide" by ignoring the kinds of management principles of which the Great Satan is the world's leading exponent. Quoting a report by Roger Stern of New York University:

Despite mismanagement, the Islamic Republic's real oil revenues are nearly their highest ever as rising price compensates for stagnant energy production and declining oil exports. Despite high price, however, population growth has resulted in a 44% decline of real oil revenue per capita since the 1980 price peak. Moreover, virtually all revenue growth has been applied to pet projects, loss-making industries, etc.

If price were to decline, political power sustained by the quadrupling of government spending since 1999 may not be sustainable. Yet we found no evidence that Iran plans fiscal retrenchment or any scheme to sustain oil investment.

"Rather, the government promises 'to put oil revenues on every table,' as if monopoly rents were not already the entree. Backing this promise is a welfare state built on the Soviet model widely understood as a formula for long-run economic suicide.

This includes the five-year plans, misallocation of resources, loss-making state enterprises, subsidized consumption, corruption and oil export dependence that doomed the Soviet experiment. Therefore, the regime's ability to contend with the export decline we project seems limited."

Commentary

The Iranians are within their right to say anything they want about America. They can and should feel free to call it Great Satan and to wish death upon it at every available opportunity. They are also within their rights to manage their prodigious natural resources in whatever way that seems best. That having been said, the Iranians may want to consider giving the Devil his due. One of the reasons the Great Satan is doing so great, at least economically, is because his minions follow with near religious passion the law of Supply and Demand. They also know that allocating resources with an eye toward maximizing profits and shareholder wealth is a better organizing principle than the industry-as-personal-slush-fund approach. And I have a feeling that when called to account for their apparent mishandling of the country's major source of foreign earnings, laying blame and saying "the devil made do it" isn't going to suffice.

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According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary , the word "exploitation" can carry two distinct meanings. The first is the "use or utilization, esp. for profit, e.g. the exploitation of newly discovered oil fields" . The second is "selfish utilization, e.g. He got ahead through the exploitation of his friends." As the first definition suggests, "exploitation" carries a specific meaning in the oil industry. In short, it means to extract oil reserves and is contrasted with "exploration", the preceding search for said reserves. An AP story out today about negotiations between oil giant ConocoPhillips and the government of Venezuela embodies all of these meanings. In short, an old idiomatic expression is literally and figurative appropriate here: Venezuela has ConocoPhillips over a barrel- actually several million of them:

ConocoPhillips held last-minute negotiations with President Hugo Chavez's government before Tuesday's deadline to decide whether to accept tougher terms or give up on Venezuelan oil. Most of the five other major energy companies involved appeared likely to accept the government's terms and sign deals Tuesday formally reducing their ownership positions to minority stakes in state-run joint ventures to keep pumping heavy crude in the lucrative Orinoco River basin. Venezuela is taking at least 60 percent of each Orinoco venture, and gave the companies until Tuesday to negotiate the terms of their remaining stakes. Chavez's government already took over operational control of Venezuela's last privately run oil fields on May 1 as part of its nationalization drive. ConocoPhillips is the third-largest U.S. oil company, and its Venezuelan projects account for about 4 percent of the company's daily global oil and gas production. It is the only major firm in Venezuela that has not agreed in principle to state control. Venezuela has claimed that foreign oil companies owe billions of dollars in back taxes related to oil projects.

So, Venezuela feels exploited by those it allowed to exploit its resources. One of those exploiters is thinking about pulling up stakes, of pulling out of the country. This should be called "Exploit Us, Interrupt Us."

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The Nation, a weekly political magazine founded 1865, describes itself as the flagship of left-wing politics. It's editor and co-owner, Katrina vanden Heuvel, is both a long-standing, articulate, and steadfast advocate of leftist causes and a recipient of many of their highest accolades.

So what a surprise it was for me to see her magazine do something that many left-wing journalists have failed to do of late: criticize Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez's shut down of a popular opposition-owned television station, one that he feels has unfairly criticized his rule:

Hugo Chávez has committed a grave error in closing down the opposition TV station, which has been on the air a half-century. Like it or not, this was not a frontal attack on the economic elite but rather a blow to the cultural identity of millions of Venezuelans--and it will have severe consequences for the government. Trying to replace popular soap operas and game shows watched by the poor with pathetic "revolutionary" programming is as bad as leaving them without food.

But as I continued to read, I realized that the criticism was not motivated by a desire to see a more participative democracy, freedom of speech, freer markets, and greater individual liberty. The real problem that The Nation has with Chavez' actions is made clear by the use of scare quotes around the word revolutionary. If I read the article correctly, the Nation's problem with Chavez is that he's a poseur:

Anticapitalist revolutions are fueled more by dictatorships than by poverty. In Venezuela there was no dictatorship, and poverty was not key to Chávez's ascent. Every revolution imposes austerity, and this is something to which Venezuelans on the right and left remain immune. Venezuela is not an industrial capitalist state but rather one of export and consumerism. Chávez is strengthening the economic role of the state, redistributing oil income and forming new economic elites, all mixed with doses of populism, corruption and business opportunities. All this is new--but it is not revolution and it is not socialism.

That last line is quite extraordinary because Chavez has proclaimed for some time that his mission is to advance "21st century socialism" in Venezuela. The Nation clearly doesn't see it that way. To them, Chavez is like the soap opera doctor turned cough-syrup pitch-man: "I am not socialist, I just play one on state-run TV."

Links: Carnival of the Insanities

See also: Policing Hate Speech

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Historians, both French and not, will be the final judge of the legacy of outgoing French President Jacque Chirac. Today, however, the punditocracy has their say. One of the best, fairest analyses I've seen or heard today comes from the BBC's Alan Little.

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"Fourchette" is French for "fork." According to Simon Heffer, columnist of the Times (UK), there's an enormous one in the road that the French have traveled the last six decades. A choice has to be made and the consequences, particularly the economic ones, are equal part profound and unavoidable:

It rarely happens to a country that a clear opportunity is presented to it to save itself from ruin. ...The decision France has to take tomorrow, when it chooses between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal for its new president, is whether it finally has the courage to move out of the 1940s, or is determined to stay there to the point of utter economic destruction. Ask any Frenchman or woman, and they will tell you of the three great economic difficulties facing their country: and they are all, of course, related to each other. The first is chomage, or unemployment. The second is the absence of croissance, or growth. And the third is the weakness of pouvoir d'achat, or purchasing power. What money people earn doesn't seem to go very far in France.

One of Sarkozy's proposals is to scrap the infamous 35-hour work week, the effect of which has been dampening and hampering to the French economy and worker productivity:

Unlike in Britain, small businesses are not engines of growth, because bureaucracy and high taxes make it very hard for them to grow. ... The other factor that makes it so hard for energetic and enterprising French people to prosper is that they are usually prevented by law from working more than 35 hours a week. This law, brought in under the socialist government of Lionel Jospin, is now widely condemned, even by some supporters of Miss Royal, for the effect it has had on suppressing growth, living standards, wealth creation and productivity. That Mr Sarkozy has said that he will not only scrap it, but will make the earnings for work done in excess of the 35 hours free of taxes both for the employee and the employer, is indicative of the hand grenade he intends to throw into the dormant French economy. But will they let him?

With a 10% lead in the polls for Sarkozy, it seems the answer is "oui." We who promote the economic liberalism and the free-enterprise system certainly hope so.

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How do you say Entrepreneur in French? According to Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, you don't. Or at least you don't in France these days:

To anyone steeped in the thousand-year history of Anglo-French enmity...the highlight of France's presidential election campaign was surely the speech that Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate (and now the very precarious front-runner) gave this year in London. Standing in the heart of London's financial district, Sarkozy heaped compliments upon his country's historic enemy. The British capital was, he said, a "town that seems more and more prosperous and dynamic every time I come here." More important, it had become "one of the great French cities." He understood, furthermore, that hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen had moved to Britain because "they are risk-takers, and risk is a bad word" in France.

How odd and tragic that the language and people that gave us the word "entrepreneur" (someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it) so excels at placing institutional barriers in entrepreneurs way and denies the inherent value of their defining characteristic- calculated risking-taking. The consequences for the French economy of such behavior is hard to understate:

With distinctly un-English passion (some things never change) he pleaded with them: "Come home, because together we will make France a great country where everything will be possible, where fathers won't fear for the future of their children, and where everyone will be able to make their plans come true, and be responsible for their own destiny."Unfortunately, it seems that even a Sarkozy victory in the final round of voting on Sunday won't persuade all of the 2 million-plus French exiles to go home. Asked by a French polling company, TNS Sofres, "Are you satisfied with your life abroad?" 93 percent of French emigres surveyed recently said "yes." Asked, "When do you expect to return to France?" 25 percent answered "never."

But Royal too knows that no country can afford to lose 2 million of its most able and enterprising citizens.

Countries such as Poland and France may soon be forced to scrap those regulations and taxes that hamper employment, however much the French unions and the Polish bureaucracy want to keep them: If they don't, their young people won't come home. Leaders in those countries may also have to alter their rhetoric. Sarkozy's Socialist opponent, Segolene Royal, now uses words such as "entrepreneurship" at least some of the time, too.

Should she win, Ms. Royal should use it more, and follow the words up with deeds if she hopes to avoid hearing a million or so more "Au revoirs" minus the "a demains."

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Can France be Saved? So asks Michel Gurfinkiel in this month's Commentary Online. His analysis of the symptoms and causes of France's prolonged social and economic malaise, as well as the prospects for her recovery, struck this reader as fair, informed, and insightful. The symptoms include "demographic upheaval"

But the French population as a whole is aging: in 2005, almost one-fourth of the population was above sixty, while citizens between the ages of twenty and fifty-nine—i.e., those whose labor supports the rest of the population, either directly or indirectly—amounted to just 50 percent.

and "immigration shock"

Six million legal immigrants, 90 percent of them from the Islamic lands of the southern Mediterranean or from sub-Saharan Africa, have entered France over the past 30 years. ... The immigrant and post-immigrant community is estimated today at more than 15 million. It is much younger than the native French population, and it tends to have a much higher birthrate.

Among the causes are the "disintegration" of the nuclear family, the collapse of the Catholic Church, "the feminization of the teacher corps", the deterioration of the university system (not a single French academic institution ranks among the world's top 100 universities), the loss of farmers and farmland, a vanishing middle class, spiraling crime rates, and looming bankruptcy:

In fact, the true public debt amounts to something like 2.7 trillion euros, or 130 percent of GDP. Marseille warns that it may double over the next fifteen years. This is on the scale of the debt of the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century.

But chief among the culprits, Gurfinkiel contends, is the decades long march of statist policies, policies advanced and reinforced by enarchs- graduates of the presitigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA):

The post-1958 Fifth Republic went much farther, embarking on large-scale industrial schemes that blurred most distinctions between state-run and private companies. The latter became so dependent on government contracts as to behave like de-facto divisions of the former. Some government contracts were also tailored to help favored private companies against their competitors. ... One need not be familiar with Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to surmise that such comprehensive sway over a country will gradually become counterproductive, and worse. The more absolute their power, the more the enarchs have tended to run France in their own interest, while assuaging the citizenry with bribes of all sorts. One such bribe, rhetorical but no less effective for that, has taken the form of nationalistic posturing, usually directed against the United States; a favorite slogan of the enarchs is that France’s mission is to uphold and protect a superior continental civilization based on the welfare state against the Anglo-Saxon model of “predatory” free-market capitalism. Structural problems—an aging population, swelling immigration, the public debt—have been ignored.

The challenges facing a would-be reformer are succinctly summed up in the question that ends the piece.

But suppose a reforming, anti-statist president were actually elected. Who would assist him in carrying out his declared program, when enarchs and other state servants are all there is?

Commentary

Excluding stopovers in Charles De Gaulle Airport, I have spent a grande total of fewer than seven days in France. Thus, I can offer no additional insight into its malaise or what it would take to overcome it. That said, I do find two things notable.

First, the moderately pro-American, front-runner Nicolas Sarcozy appears remarkably Reaganesque in the above photo. Reagan, as well as his ideological soul mate, Margaret Thatcher, were acolytes of Austrian economist Friederich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom. I've been re-reading Hayek a great deal these days and what now ails France strikes me as just what he described in painstaking detail over 60 years ago.

It is equally notable, at least for those of us old enough to remember, that Sarcozy inspires the same vitriol from his political rivals that the Great Communicator and the Iron Lady did.

Finally, I would note that CNN International, BBC World, and Al-Jazeera International all are loathe to mention Sarkozy's front runner status. Instead of mentioning that he has been leading every opinion poll of late, they continue to emphasize the number of undecided voters. While I have no empirical basis for saying so, were the photogenic Segolene Royal I suspect the reporting would be quite different.

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According to AP writer Nasser Karimi, many Iranians apparently think the international box-office phenomenon, The 300, is an insult to their Persian heritage.

TEHRAN, Iran -- The hit American movie "300" has angered Iranians who say the Greeks-vs-Persians action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran. "Hollywood declares war on Iranians," blared a headline in Tuesday's edition of the independent Ayende-No newspaper. The movie, which raked in $70 million in its opening weekend, is based on a comic-book fantasy version of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days. Javad Shamghadri, cultural adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said the United States tries to "humiliate" Iran in order to reverse historical reality and "compensate for its wrongdoings in order to provoke American soldiers and warmongers" against Iran. State-run television has run several commentaries the past two days calling the film insulting and has brought on Iranian film directors to point out its historical inaccuracies."

Commentary

I have seen more than my fair share of movies about Iran. During the seven years l lived in Boston, I regularly attended the yearly Iranian Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts. It's where I met some of my Iranian friends in Boston. Two things upon which serious film buffs agree is that Iranian make some remarkably fine films and that they manage to do so despite heavy censorship. What the Iranian cultural advisor either doesn't know or doesn't care to admit is that American films are not written and produced at the behest of the US government. Nor are they routinely positioned as vehicles for the advancement of US foreign policy. US filmmakers have other prerogatives, first and foremost of which is the profit motive. They are allowed to make movies about anyone and everyone they see fit. They are not Washington's tool.

That "The 300" is released right at the point of especially heightened tensions between Iran and the West is merely a coincidence and, incidentally, an a profitable one for the producers. It is not, however, part of any Western conspiracy to denigrate Iranians or their heritage. It's just a comic book/ graphic novel adapted for the big screen. Not that one would expect officials from a country with no respect for free speech or individual rights to understand that. The battle at Thermopylae was, after all, about self-determination and the battle against subjugation to rule of a foreign despot. Some didn't get it then and some still don't get it now.

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In a recent Times online (UK) piece entitled "Here's a way to deal with the scorpion", Middle East analyst Amir Taheri offers his advice about how to deal with Iran. In short, he is one of a growing number advocating the use of economic weapons:

The Western democracies could give the Islamic republic a taste of its own medicine — and engage it in the kind of low-intensity warfare that Iran itself indulges in. The mischief must not be cost-free. It would be resisted though diplomatic and economic means as well as through support for the democratic and reformist forces inside Iran. Throughout history, adversaries end up by adopting aspects of each other’s strategy.

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"What should we make of the Iranians' behavior?" So asks historian Victor Davis Hanson in an recent essay. His answer:

Namely that the country's leadership is in deep political trouble. The Iranian government is desperate to provoke the West to win back friends in the Islamic world, and to quell growing unrest at home. Subsidizing food and gas, providing billions for terrorists and building nukes all cost money at a time when the state-run Iranian economy is in shambles.Because of incompetence in their oil industry, the Iranian mullahs have achieved the impossible: Despite having among the world's largest petroleum reserves, their production is shrinking and they have managed to earn increasingly less petrodollars even as the world price has soared.

And what to do about their bad behavior? Hanson suggests economic measures, i.e. giving the Mullahs gas pains:

It is undeniable that the U.S., without either invading or suffering many casualties, could use its air power to send the Iranian economy and military back to the mullahs' cherished 7th century. But there is no need to do so. Instead, if the EU would cease all its trade with Iran, and if the West would divest entirely from the country - that is, boycott all companies that do any business with Tehran - the theocracy would face bankruptcy within months.

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Pieter Dorsman's has a provocative and eye-opening piece at Pajamas Media today. Entitled "Time to Get Out", Dorsman discusses Holland's "largest net outflow of people since the post-war emigration boom of the 1950s." He attributes the exodus of "young, affluent, well-educated, entrepreneurial" and English-speaking Dutch to several factors including "high population density, an over-regulated society, a significant tax burden, soaring crime rates, a general sense of ‘dilapidation’ and a huge unintegrated pool of Muslim immigrants." These factors have origins, he asserts, in the social and cultural liberalization of the 1960's and have been exacerbated by a feckless bureaucracy.

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