While I've occasionally thought about it, I have yet to put a tip jar on the blog -- mostly because I've already benefited in myriad ways from danieldrezner.com.

However, for those who have contemplated giving, let me redirect your energies to the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

[What, you're asking your readers to walk?--ed.] No, I'm asking them to support Political Babes, a two person team that plans to walk 39 miles in two days to support the cause. As their home page puts it: "Bethany and Melissa both are political scientists, both are committed to ending breast cancer, and both are total babes!"

Let me independently confirm that all three of these statements are true.

[Why should I take your word for this?--ed. Well, on them being political scientists, click here to read this Chicago Tribune story on Assistant Professor of Political Science Melissa Harris-Lacewell's fascinating research. Better yet, just buy her book, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Bethany Albertson -- the other political babe -- was a invaluable research assistant during the book's drafting.]

You can give by going to their home page and then clicking "Make a Gif!" by the thermometer on the right side of the page.

I've received some interesting e-mail ragarding my "Up is Down" essay for TNR Online -- now available at the CBS News web site as well!! They suggest that a lot of Republicans are less than thrilled with George W. Bush, but feel that they have no place to go.

Here's one example -- it's from Virginia conservative Lee Dise:

I’m a lifelong, moss-backed conservative -- someone who favors smaller, less intrusive government; a less rapacious IRS and less overbearing regulatory agencies; a strong national defense, but not necessarily a more adventurous one; a return to constitutional government, as defined by the philosophy of ‘original intent’, and vigilant legislatures that make activist judges pay with their positions and careers.

In short, I’m one of the guys who the Republicans always feel they can count on, but who nevertheless have always basically been told to go straight to Hades by the “establishment” Republican-types.

From my perspective, Bush got the tax cuts right. And perhaps even Afghanistan and Iraq -- I can’t say for sure that he didn’t. Pretty much everything else, he’s gotten wrong – some things, horribly wrong. Which is to say: he’s gotten them pretty much the same way Ted Kennedy would’ve.

Now, if conservatives don’t make Republicans pay for their betrayals of conservatism, who will? I probably can’t bring myself to actually vote for a Dimmycrat, but I could merrily write in Alan Keyes and then on Election Night be tickled, beer in hand, to watch another Bush go down in flames. For this to happen, all the Democrats needed to do was field a candidate who is not so flamboyantly repulsive -- someone who doesn’t so obviously despise everything his country stands for -- that he makes our gall bladders sweat. Lieberman, maybe even Edwards, would have probably earned the Democrats a non-vote from me. A few million non-votes from people like me, and the Dimmies are in like Flynn, just like in 1992 when we socked it to ol’ “Read My Lips” himself.

But, nooooo. They had to select a swivel-headed Nimrod who’s so god awful that I can’t in good conscience stand idly by while he lurches towards the nation’s control center like a B-movie monster.

Fielding a candidate that has no hope of winning has historically been a province belonging solely to the Republican, i.e., the stupid, party. Somehow, I doubt that the Democrats can possibly be that dumb forever (even though the continuing saga of McAuliffe makes a strong case to the contrary). Five weeks ago, I figured that if I already knew Kerry was unelectable, eventually even the Democrats will figure it out. And now I know this is true, since you and the Village Voice are chiming in as proof.

A few e-mails is pretty paltry evidence of a trend. Still, one wonders whether this this feeling of alienation on the right is prevalent.

UPDATE: Another e-mail from a very well-connected and disgruntled conservative:

Last night, I was having drinks with a wide variety of young right-of-center types. All were dissatisfied, and roughly 65 percent wanted to see Bush's head on a pike. Of the 65 percent, something approaching a majority were even willing to vote for Kerry (i.e., for Richard Holbrooke), and the rest were teetering on the fence....

Among the would-be reluctant Kerry voters was a friend of mine from the Standard, of all places. Suffice to say, we all hate Kerry.

Developing....

I never watched an episode of The Apprentice -- in fact, Erika and I were steamed about the show because it meant that Scrubs had been moved. However, I'll admit to having some ex post curiosity about the show, particularly the debate about the sexual office politics that the initial weeks stirred up.

So I'm just going to reproduce this tidbit of Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth gossip from MSNBC's Jeanette Walls and leave it at that:

Omarosa continues to lose friends and alienate people.

The much-loathed reject from “The Apprentice” was scheduled to appear on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last week, but refused to go on air when she saw a lie detector test backstage.

“The lie-detector test wasn’t even for her,” a spokeswoman for the show told the Scoop. “It was intended for Jimmy’s Uncle Frank [a regular character on the show], but when Omarosa saw it, she just freaked.” Some fellow contestants have accused Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth of lying when she said one of them used the N-word. “We tried and tried to calm her down, but she just kept saying ‘I’m not going on stage with that lie detector test’ then she just walked out."

Feel free to apply to be an Apprentice on the next season by clicking here.

The Economist -- and the Thai government, apparently -- seems stumped about the latest violence in the south of Thailand:

On Thursday, hundreds of extra troops poured into southern Thailand to try to pacify the region. The trouble is, the authorities still do not seem to have any clear idea whom they are fighting or why the violence has escalated so quickly. At various times, different officials have described the attackers as Muslim separatists, mafiosi, and arms smugglers. Some have accused parliamentarians from Mr [Prime Minister Shinawatra] Thaksin’s own party of abetting the insurgents, while others have criticised Malaysia for allowing suspects to escape over the border. Many consider the militants terrorists, and have hinted at connections with outfits like al-Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiah.

Mr Thaksin, however, insists that the problem is purely domestic. Though pictures of the dead militants in the Thai media showed that many had Islamic slogans on their clothes, the prime minister insisted that they were nothing more than drug-crazed “bandits” on a crime spree, blaming local politicians for supporting them. But he has provided so many pat explanations of the violence, and promised so many times to bring it to a swift conclusion, that his assurance is beginning to look like bluster.

Reuters reports that despite some anger among the Thai Muslim minority, the religious establishment in the country has backed the government's show of force:

Critics were quick to question the insistence of Thaksin and his cousin and army chief, General Chaiyasidh Shinawatra, that drugs and crime rather than religious or separatist ideology lay at the root of the violence.

"What the two leaders do not see, or pretend not to see, is that this is not about addiction or banditry; this is about a fanatical ideology that none of us knew existed on such a grand scale," the Nation newspaper said in a front page editorial.

In the worst violence, troops fired teargas and stormed a centuries-old mosque, killing 34 gunmen holed up inside. An angry crowd gathered to watch as soldiers dragged bodies from the bullet-riddled building.

With Muslim sentiment divided between anger and support for military action at the mosque, Thailand's top Muslim cleric, speaking on national television, backed the operation.

"The authorities exercised reasonable restraint in dealing with the situation. They were patient and waited for a long time outside the mosque," spiritual leader Sawat Sumalayasak said.

"It was reasonable for the government to take such action."

Others disagreed.

"If the officers had waited for another couple of days they could have caught them alive, but they didn't. They killed them all," Uma Meah, secretary of the Central Islamic Committee of Pattani, said after a meeting of residents.

It's far from clear just what is driving the violence in the south. I'll leave it to the commenters to suggest whether the problem is local or transnational.

UPDATE: Hmmm... Indonesia is having problems with Muslim extremists as well.

Expect to read "Muslim extremism in Southeast Asia" stories for the next week.

That's the title of George Packer's story about blogs in the May/June issue of Mother Jones, which I've read but haven't fully digested yet. The parts I found particularly appetizing:

The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive — that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume, and so endlessly available. Their second-by-second proliferation means that far more is written than needs to be said about any one thing. To change metaphors for a moment (and to deepen the shame), I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so much candy into a bloated — yet nervous, sugar-jangled — stupor. Those hours of out-of-body drift leave me with few, if any, tangible thoughts. Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There's a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere — every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or "fisk" (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) — is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another....

So far this year, bloggers have been remarkably unadept at predicting events (as have reporters, who occupy a different part of the same habitat). Most of them failed to foresee Dean's rise, Dean's fall, Kerry's resurgence, Bush's slippage. Above all, they didn't grasp the intensity of feeling among Democratic primary voters — the resentments still glowing hot from Florida 2000, the overwhelming interest in economic and domestic issues, the personal antipathy toward Bush, the resurgence of activism, the longing for a win. The blogosphere was often caught surprised by these passions and the electoral turns they caused. Rather than imitating or reproducing external reality, it exists alongside, detached, self-encased, in a stance of ironic or combative appraisal....

Blogs, by contrast, are atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to turn an election into a story. When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary. Marshall couldn't turn his gift for parsing the news of the moment to the more patient task of turning reportage into scenes and characters so that the candidates and the voters take life online. He didn't function as a reporter; there was, as there often is with blogs, too much description of where he was sitting, what he was thinking, who'd just walked into the room, as if the enclosed space in which bloggers carry out their work had followed Marshall to New Hampshire and kept him encased in its bubble. He might as well have been writing from his apartment in Washington. But the failure wasn't personal; this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them enough and any subject will go dead.

Reactions -- as you would expect -- from David Adesnik, Kevin Drum, Wonkette, and Matthew Yglesias.

My half-digested thoughts:

1) Almost against his will, Packer reveals an essential truth for why blogs do matter -- the press reads them. Why does the press read them? Because, apparently, the political press will read anything about politics.

2) In the sections where Packer criticizes blogs, conduct a mental experiment -- replace the word "blogosphere" with "New York Times op-ed columnists" or "David Broder." See if the criticism about lack of predictive capabilities or incestuousness still hold up. Indeed, short of a "Letter from New Hampshire"-length essay in The New Yorker, Packer's expectations of blogs seem well-nigh impossible to meet.

3) One wonders what Packer thinks of commenters on blogs.

UPDATE: One additional thought -- I think Packer wants to keep the blogosphere and the mediasphere separate, when in fact a lot of bloggers can cross the great divide. For me, the utility of the blog is that it functions as a kind of ongoing link-filled notebook about interesting political and economic trends -- well, that and an excuse to link to Salma Hayek, of course. The stuff I write for the mediasphere starts off as half-formed thoughts in blog posts. Once they're fully thought out, they can have the coherence, texture and craft that Packer seems to crave after reading blogs (I would never have written "The Outsourcing Bogeyman" if I hadn't been tracking the issue closely in blog posts, for example).

Which might explain why one of Packer's colleagues at Mother Jones is quite willing to link to my writings.

Eduardo Porter's report in today's New York Times reinforces what I said in Foreign Affairs about outsourcing and the tech sector -- that while more low-skill jobs will undoubtedly be created overseas, the complex tasks are going to stay in the United States. The good parts:

As more companies in the United States rush to take advantage of India's ample supply of cheap yet highly trained workers, even some of the most motivated American companies — ones set up or run by executives born and trained in India — are concluding that the cost advantage does not always justify the effort.

For many of the most crucial technology tasks, they find that a work force operating within the American business environment better suits their needs.

"Only certain kinds of tasks can be outsourced — what can be set down as a set of rules," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of Global Insight, a forecasting and consulting firm based in Waltham, Mass. "That which requires more creativity is more difficult to manage at a distance."

Another Indian executive in the United States who has soured on outsourcing is Dev Ittycheria, the chief executive of Bladelogic, a designer of network management software with 70 workers, also in Waltham. Bladelogic, whose client list includes General Electric and Sprint, outsourced work to India within months of going into business in 2001. But it concluded that projects it farmed out — one to install an operating system across a network, another to keep tabs on changes done to the system — could be done faster and at a lower cost in the United States.

That was true even though programmers in India cost Bladelogic $3,500 a month versus a monthly cost of $10,000 for programmers in the United States. "The cost savings in India were three to one," Mr. Ittycheria said . "But the difference in productivity was six to one."

Bladelogic's chief technology officer, Vijay Manwani, born and educated in India, predicts that once the "hype cycle" about Indian outsourcing runs its course, projects will come back to the United States "when people find that their productivity goals have not been met."

The upshot is that high-technology corporations are likely to ship more and more business functions to India to take advantage of its well-trained work force. However, even as they do so they will keep many essential tasks here....

In the end, many say the advantages of keeping some of the most sophisticated work in the United States are related to the factors that draw technology entrepreneurs from India and elsewhere to this country in the first place: Indian engineers and software designers in this country know that the businesses whose needs are driving technological innovation are mostly in the United States. It comes down to being where the customers are. (emphasis added)

Read the whole thing.

The Chicago Tribune interviews Northeastern Illinois University accounting professor Yass Alkafaji, and Iraqi émigré who went to Baghdad in January to "serve in the Coalition Provisional Authority as the director of finance for the Ministry of Higher Education." Read the whole interview -- but here are some of his thoughts:

Q. What is your take on the mood of the Iraqi people?

A. They are thankful to the U.S. for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and they are content that the military needs to be there. But after that, they are divided between how long should the U.S. military stay and whether they are doing a good job or not. The U.S. military presence is very visible, and they [the soldiers] are really scared, so their posture is very offensive. They see Iraqis, and they put guns in your face. They move in convoys, and they tell people to get away from them. When the convoys are in a traffic jam in the middle of Baghdad, that is the most dangerous thing. So they shout at people to get out of the way, and they drive up on the sidewalk of some stores. That creates a lot of hard feelings for the Iraqis.

Q. What about the economic and employment situation with ordinary Iraqis?

A. Most of the people are not informed of what the U.S. is doing because they don't see the visible improvement of their livelihood, especially those who don't have a government job . . . I think there is still a lot of confusion about who is the good Iraqi and who is the bad Iraqi. I think [the U.S.] has shown to the rest of the world that we are really ignorant when it comes to dealing with other cultures. We have a great military power, but when it comes to building nations we have no idea. You can see the tension in the clashes between the British and Americans in the palace. The Americans will say `do this or do that' and the British will just be shaking their head. But the British have a much longer history in the Middle East, and they know how to deal with the Arab mentality. They feel very marginalized....

Q. Depending on how people want to spin it, they characterize the recent violence as a few bad apples or a popular uprising. How do you see it?

A. Surveys show about 70 percent of the Iraqi people accept that there is a need for the American military to be in Iraq, otherwise it will be chaotic and there will be no security on the ground. Of course, if you talk to someone in Sadr City with a first-grade education, they will say otherwise. One day I was waiting seven hours to try to leave the compound to try to see my sister. We had some thugs from the Sadr group demonstrating 15 feet away saying, "We want the U.S. out." So I said, "OK, the U.S. is out and then what next? Who is going to control the country?" They don't think about the implications of what they say.

David Adesnik also has some good links on Iraq.

Curious about information and evidence showing that for Bush and Kerry's political fortunes, up is down on Iraq? You can find a very embryonic version of this argument in this blog post of ten days ago.

The article was based on the polling data that has flummoxed DC insiders for the last ten days. Here's a link to the April 19th Washington Post-ABC News Poll, and here's a link to the USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll taken during the same week (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, who linked to both articles).

Kerry's answers about the U.N. to Tim Russert on the April 18th Meet the Press can be found in this transcript. Krauthammer's spot-on essay on Kerry's Iraq position appeared last Friday in the Washington Post. Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Kerry to scold the anti-war movement in this Daily Dish post (you need to scroll down a bit). I discussed the constraints Kerry faces in taking a more assertive position in the Middle East in my last TNR Online essay, "Cornered."

I mentioned Howard Dean's desire to send more troops to Iraq last summer in last summer's TNR Online essay about Dean. Richard Clarke discusses the Somalia debacle -- and the mistake of pulling out following the Black Hawk Down incident -- in chapter four of Against All Enemies.

A final caveat -- the observation that Bush does better and Kerry does worse if there is trouble in Iraq falls apart if the trouble gets really serious. For all of the bad news coming out of that country, the fact remains that U.S. casualties remain quite low for such an occupation -- especially one with such a low ratio of occupying troops to population. If casualty numbers per week move from the tens into the hundreds or thousands, then calls for withdrawal will become more tempting for Kerry to make -- and the political logic discussed in the article won't hold.

My latest TNR Online essay is now up and running. It makes an effort to explain the seeming oddity of why Bush's poll numbers versus Kerry have improved in the last six weeks despite the difficulties in Iraq.

Go check it out!

For me, the biggest frustration about Iraq is not that everything is going wrong, but that the things that are going wrong are important enough to undercut everything that has gone right in the U.S. occupation.

Take, for example, Colin McMahon's account in today's Chicago Tribune about the rebuilding of Iraq's court system. The good part:

Under Hussein, the accused had few rights and were subjected to tremendous abuse while awaiting trial. Sentences were harsh for even minor offenses. More than 150 crimes from prostitution to murder were subject to the death penalty, for example. And by making his every utterance the final word on all matters, Hussein destroyed the concept of legal fairness and turned what was left of the rule of law into the rule of whim....

Radhi Hamza al-Radhi is among those judges who suffered Hussein's wrath but survived his regime.

Al-Radhi was the chief of a three-judge panel presiding over a counterfeiting trial that found two men guilty late last month. One man, who had no criminal record, got three years in prison. The other, who previously had served 20 years for murder, got five years. Under Hussein, the judge said, the sentence for counterfeiting probably would have been life.

Tweaked by occupation lawyers, the Iraqi criminal code now is a point of pride, al-Radhi said.

Defendants have the right not to testify, and their silence cannot be used against them at trial. They have the right to an attorney from the beginning of the investigation, and in the case last month the court appointed and paid a lawyer to represent one of the men. Those found guilty can appeal.

There are important cosmetic changes as well. Al-Radhi's courtroom and chambers are gracefully appointed but not lush, and the mood is serious but not somber. Best of all, they are located in the towering steel hall that Baghdadis call "the clock tower." It used to be the museum for all the gifts Hussein had received from world dignitaries.

Al-Radhi said the overhaul to the legal system had won the Iraqis' confidence.

But Sindi said the court system still is only about halfway to where it needs to be. A state prosecutor said his office has too many cases to properly investigate and pursue at trial. And there remains a backlog of cases in which Iraqis arrested by occupation forces on any number of charges have yet to face trial.

But the biggest problem, Sindi and others said, remains the police. Bribery, incompetence and inexperience are allowing too many criminals to walk.

"My uncle was robbed and shot," said Ayser Malik, 21, who works at a grocery in central Baghdad. "The major crimes unit captured the gang responsible, but they were released. It's bribery. They are paying money to get released, and they are back out committing crimes."

The rebuilding of Iraq's legal system would be a fantastic, shout-from-the-rooftops-kind of accomplishment -- but without a general improvement in the order half of the equation, the achievement will have little effect.

Larry Diamond -- one of the biggest supporters of the notion that democracy can travel across cultures -- was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq starting in January. No longer. The San Francisco Chronicle has a long story about Diamond's experiences in the field. He's still optimistic about democracy promotion -- but not about Iraq:

The story of Iraq, this onetime optimist believes, is a tale of missed opportunities.

"We just bungled this so badly," said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country."

Diamond was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and spent several initially hopeful months in Iraq -- lecturing on democracy, even in mosques, encouraging people to participate and helping shape laws that embodied his vision. He returned to Palo Alto in early April for a short break, then ran into an emotional brick wall, he said, when he contemplated the mess he had left behind.

Last Thursday, when it came time for Diamond to return, he did not get on the plane.

Instead, he was in his office at the Hoover Tower, disillusioned over the desperate turn of events he had witnessed and what he feels was a country allowed to spin out of control, in large part, he says, because of the Bush administration's unwillingness to commit a big enough force to protect Iraqis from militias and insurgents.

"You can't develop democracy without security," he said. "In Iraq, it's really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don't get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that."....

His recommendations for rescuing the situation run counter to some of the policies that the Bush administration insists it will not alter. Diamond said that, in his view, the United States must more than double its current military force of about 135,000 and confront the violent Iraqi militias consistently, while offering political benefits to those who lay down their arms and accept democratic institutions.

The best he can say about the prospects in Iraq now is that, as he puts it, "civil war is not inevitable."

Read the whole thing.

One of the more amusing responses I get from the outsourcing essay is the reader's fervent desire that my profession be the next one vulnerable to outsourcing.

Yesterday's New York Times Education section raises a valuable point -- college education via the Internet is already place, in the form of continuing ed. This cover story points out:

Today, 1 in 12 college students attends a for-profit institution, and the business has grown to $23 billion in annual revenue for 2002, the latest year analyzed by Eduventures, an education market research company in Boston. The University of Phoenix alone has about 201,000 full-time adult students at 142 campuses and learning centers. Enrollment in for-profit institutions is growing at three times the rate of nonprofit colleges and universities, says Sean Gallagher, an analyst with Eduventures.

A big part of that growth is in online education. ''Each time we update our forecasts, we find that the online education market is growing a little bit larger than we anticipated,'' Mr. Gallagher says.

According to a study last year by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit association whose mission is to improve online education, more than 1.6 million students took online courses in 2002; nearly 600,000 of them took all their classes in cyberspace. More than a third of higher education institutions offer online courses, and 97 percent of public universities do....

Fitting perfectly is what continuing education strives for. A big part of the business plan is to strip away the elements of a traditional college that cost so much: fancy campuses, dormitories, athletic complexes, tenured faculty and the pond that shows up in every brochure. At the same time, the institutions strip away things that can be frustrating to students -- the commute, parking woes, long lines at registration, inconvenient class times. They focus on what in the business world is called customer service, often nonexistent at traditional colleges. ''They tend to be better at student services than traditional institutions are,'' Dr. Twigg says. ''Adult students are more demanding. You can still push kids around.''

Even Ph.D. defenses are going digital. It's just a matter of time before the educators on the other end of the network are based in countries other than the United States.

I for one, welcome our new online overlords competitors. While these schools provide a similar service, as this point they're expanding the market rather than cutting into a stagnant one. If offshore outsourcing means anything, it means that a lot more people are going to have to get a lot more education. As far as I'm concerned, the more schools, the better.

Back from a lovely conference in Hamburg, Germany, and trying to stay awake so that I can get back on Chicago time. Jacob -- I'm home!!

I've been out of the loop watching German music videos when not conferencing -- but I did see that Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. You can read what I said about Tillman last year in this post.

My media whoring continues. Tune in to NBC Nightly News tomorrow (Friday) to see me on network television. Again, possibility this will fall through.

[More on outsourcing, huh?--ed. Nope -- this appearance has nothing to do with outsourcing. You're gonna have to watch to find out.]

UPDATE: Well, they apparently used it (What, you didn't see it? Don't give us that false modesty BS!--ed. No, I haven't seen it because I'm in Hamburg, Germany for a conference).

And to answer a commenter question, yes, they found me via the blog. An NBC researcher told me as much.

I can actually make a valid claim to expertise here, since I've read all the collections and been reading the strip on and off since 1980.

Daniel Drezner... he's intelligent and cute, and I'd sleep with him.

This according to Meryl Yourish.

Woo-hoo! Yes, I'm happily married -- but as a complete geek who could never get girls in high school, this kind of information always nice to know.

Oh, wait... Yourish was just satirizing this John Hawkins post of the top ten bloggers he would want to be stranded on a desert island with. Yourish was just kidding.

I feel so... cheap and used. Sniff.

Excuse me, I gotta go watch Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan again.

At the risk of posting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict again, Walter Russell Mead made a trenchant point in yesterday's New York Times op-ed page:

or the last five weeks I have been traveling through the Middle East, meeting diplomats, officials, policy experts, military leaders, students and ordinary citizens. I learned something very important: the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the Middle East today is not the war in Iraq; more surprisingly, it is not even American support for Israel, per se. Rather, it is a widespread belief that the United States simply does not care about the rights or needs of the Palestinian people.

"The Palestinian issue is really what discredits the United States throughout the region," a senior Western diplomat with years of experience in the Middle East told me. Or, as one student after another put it after the university lectures I conducted across the region: "Why do Americans have to be so biased?"

In Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries, the large majority of people I spoke with are ready to tolerate the Jewish state — most even understand that the final boundaries of Israel will include some of the heavily settled areas beyond the pre-1967 borders. They also understand that few if any Palestinians will return to the homes they lost after the war that erupted when Israel declared its independence in 1948. And they are prepared to accept, though not to relish, America's close relations with Israel. Beyond that, they want increased American support for their domestic political reforms and for initiatives to enhance regional cooperation for economic growth and fighting terrorism.

But one thing sticks in their craw: Why doesn't America care more about the Palestinians' future?

They have a point. America's Middle East policy is unnecessarily zero-sum. We can be more pro-Palestinian without being less pro-Israeli. Indeed, to the degree that American policies help create support for compromise among Palestinians, pro-Palestinian initiatives can help Israel too. (emphasis added)

Read the whole thing for Mead's policy prescriptions.

Greg Djerejian also has a lengthy post on the Bush-Sharon summit that elaborates on this point in much greater detail. Shorter Djerejian: It's one thing to favor the Israelis in the conflict -- it's another thing to do it while simultaneously kicking the Palestinians in the balls.

The Financial Times reports that China has made numerous trade concessions in a deal with the United States:

China agreed to delay indefinitely a plan to impose a security standard for wireless communications that would have forced US telecommunications companies to license the technology from Chinese competitors. The US believed the plan signalled that China was clinging to government-led industrial policies designed to aid its own technology companies at the expense of US rivals.

China also agreed to renew efforts to crack down on illegal pirating of US movies, software and music, with Beijing pledging to step up criminal actions against companies that produce, import or export counterfeited goods. China presented US trade officials with an action plan designed to "significantly reduce" infringement of intellectual property rights.

In addition, China agreed to accelerate plans to make it easier for US companies to export and sell directly into China by eliminating laws that forced foreign firms to work through Chinese state trading enterprises.

The agreement is the strongest sign yet of the countries' maturing trade relationship. Unlike the US-Japan trade talks of the 1980s and early 1990s in which Japan would grudgingly accede to pressure to open its markets to US goods, yesterday's deal involved concessions on both sides.

The Chinese won US agreement to ease national-security-related export controls on sales of high-technology goods to China. Beijing has argued that the US is hurting its exports by refusing to sell China products such as machine tools.

Chinese central bank officials have also indicated that they plan to shift the renminbi from a fixed rate to a floating rate:

Guo Shuqing, administrator of China's foreign exchange reserves of $440bn, told the Financial Times Beijing no longer favoured a fixed exchange rate and would move toward a floating system as part of reforms to loosen up capital controls and give market forces more scope.

"We don't think that a fixed system is good. We think that a floating system is good," said Mr Guo, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and a deputy governor of the central bank. He did not specify a timetable for the shift to a new exchange rate mechanism.

Question to those advocating greater protectionism towards China -- are these concessions sufficient? If not, what else?

Given how important education is in the global economy, it's worth finding out whether school choice/vouchers/greater market competition can improve the quality of primary and secondary education in the United States.

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse links to a Caroline Minter Hoxby paper in the Swedish Economic Policy Review that examines the effect Milwaukee's voucher program had on school performance. Brighouse has some questions about the paper, but closes with the following:

[V]ouchers and choice are increasingly hard for the left in the US to dismiss. The second best objection to well-designed and targeted voucher programs is that they leave the children remaining in the public schools worse off. If that objection can be met, progressives are left only with the best objection – that they will set in train a dynamic that will undermine the principle of public schooling. But in America, where public schooling is savagely unjust in its internal workings, that objection rings a bit hollow unless coupled with a substantial and politically feasible plan for improving the public schools which the least advantaged Americans attend.

Blender magazine has compiled a list of the 50 worst songs ever, according to bad melodies, bad performances, or incoherent lyrics. According to the Associated Press:

Starship's "We Built This City," from 1985 topped the list.

"The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar," the magazine said of the tune.

Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" was second, followed by Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight." "If this song was a party, you'd lock yourself in a bathroom and cry," quipped Blender.

Rounding out the top ten worst songs ever are Huey Lewis and the News with "The Heart of Rock and Roll," "Don't Worry, Be Happy," by Bobby McFerrin, Eddie Murphy's "Party All the Time," "American Life," by Madonna and "Ebony and Ivory," the duet by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney.

Fine entrants, all [C'mon, admit that you like the Wang Chung song!--ed. Well, yeah, if I'm appropriately liquored up.] However, I'm not sure the folks at Blender have children -- in which case there's a whole new list of galactically cloying songs that make "We Built this City" sound like Beethoven's Fifth. How 'bout the Barney theme? The Dragon Tales theme? Raffi's completed works?

Readers are invited to submit their worst songs. And, while being in a musical mood, go check out Brad DeLong's post about songs where the cover version is superior to the original. You can see my contribution in the comments section.

The Chicago Tribune reports a puzzling finding regarding investors attitudes towards mutual funds in the wake of scandals involving late trading and market timing:

While mutual fund trading scandals have captured the attention of regulators, investors remain relatively unconcerned, according to a study released Tuesday by a Chicago-based consulting firm.

In a survey of 402 mutual fund investors by the Spectrem Group, less than half said they were at all concerned about allegations of improper trading in the mutual fund industry. A little more than 20 percent said they were "very concerned."

Just over one-third of investors said they were "concerned" or "very concerned" about late trading and market timing, the two practices that have spawned the scandal roiling the $7.6 trillion mutual fund industry. Meanwhile, nearly 1 in 5 investors said that as long as they earned a high rate of return on their investments, they didn't care about claims of favoritism for big investors.

"There's an overall lack of knowledge on the allegations," said Ann Mahrdt, a director at the Spectrem Group, and one reason for the lack of concern is "they don't see it affecting their bottom lines."

In fact, nearly 60 percent of investors said they were concerned about fee disclosures, compared with 37 percent for market timing or late trading.

For the record, I haven't been following the scandals/investigations involving mutual funds, even though all of my stock investments are in such funds. Mostly that's because these funds haven't tanked -- and even if there was a downturn, I try not to get too exercised about fluctuations in the short-term.

Those who have more information about this scandal should comment away -- I'm hoping that this is one of those episodes in which the system actually worked, and these abuses were caught before they could dramatically affect market integrity.

[You're just an assistant professor -- maybe people with real money do care about this?--ed. Not according to the Trib piece:

The wealthiest investors--those with incomes of over $100,000--display significantly less concern over improper trading allegations, and are less likely to demand action, such as seeking reimbursements from improper trading or participating in class action lawsuits against fund companies.

You can take a look at Spectrem's press release about the survey by clicking here.]

I just received the following e-mail from an avid reader:

Ok, Dan, it's been 3 days now. How come no response to Woodward's Plan of Attack ?

The plain and simple answer is, I'm swamped. These books are coming fast and furious, and I only have so many hours in the day. I'll try to get to it sometime soon. [Oh, sure you're swamped -- on things that don't sit well with your political views--ed. No -- I haven't had time to blog about either the oil-for-food scandal or Iran's role in the Shiite uprising. Really, I'm swamped.]

Parenthetically, there is another reason -- they're expensive to get in hardcover, dammit. Thankfully, one or two publishers have started sending me the occasional review copy -- and have I mentioned recently Ivo Daalder and James Lindsey's America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Brookings, 2003) is a hell of a good read? However, publishers are unlikely to send bestsellers like the Susskind, Clarke, or Woodward books to bloggers -- they don't need us. [Jayson Blair needs you!--ed. Yes, but we don't want him.]

Apparently, I'm in the minority on even getting the occasional review book. David Bernstein's not getting review copies -- and he thinks that since he blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy, book companies should be sending him gratis review copies. Tyler Cowen points out that there may be a reason why this won't happen:

[I]f you read about a book on a blog, you may think you don't need to read the book. If I think about myself, I now read more blogs and (slightly) fewer books as a result. You can tell all the stories you want about complementary uses of books and blogs, but at some margins differing activities are likely to be substitutes.

Kevin Keith offers an amusing but illegal solution to the problem.

Back to main point: feel free to discuss the Woodward book here.

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard's Richard Starr e-mails a useful suggestion on the question of review copies:

I suspect bloggers waiting for review copies to show up in the mail are going to wait a long time. However, they might want to try what publications do, which is asking the publicity department of a publisher for a review copy of titles that interest them. Then they should make sure when they write about a book (for good or ill) to send a copy back to those same publicists.

Eventually stuff might start turning up unbidden, but I suspect the direct ask will bear fruit sooner. Also helpful is to get oneself added to the mailing lists for the publishers catalogues of future titles, which usually include a check-off sheet to be returned to the publisher noting the titles one is especially interested in.