North Korea's policy of making its people miserable

From the Independent comes this depressing story of North Korea's devaluation of its currency.   Key quote:

Famine, compounded by a series of natural disasters, is thought to have claimed 2-3 million lives inside the country since the mid-1990s. Mr Kim has responded with a series of limited Chinese-style reforms designed to loosen central control over the economy.

The reforms have increased wealth disparities and incubated a growing class of wealthier farmers and merchants who are evading state controls and using bribery to keep government officials in line, say Pyongyang watchers. In January, the government failed in its attempt to rein in the reforms by limiting or closing private market.

"Currency reform was probably the only option left to neutralise the wealthy merchant class," a North Korean defector and analyst, Cho Myong-chol, told Chosun Ilbo yesterday. "The latest measure has made everyone poor again and possibly raised the North Korean government's hopes of regaining control over its people."

This is a great example of a nation intentionally stymieing growth as a means of political control.  It's also a nice counter to those who argue that economic reform is inherently more important than political reform.  I don't see either happening in the DPRK, but it is hard to imagine a move like this taking place in a more accountable system.  

Conservative hypocrisy on budget deficits

What he said.

Failures in Journalism: Politico Edition

Shorter Manu Raju: "Al Franken promised to not be a partisan politician when he ran for Senate. Recently, he wrote an amendment that many Republicans voted against. This has caused politicians to argue over the amendment. Therefore he has failed to be bipartisan. If Franken wants to be seen as a serious legislator, he should stop proposing legislation that people may disagree on."

This once again proves that the most secure jobs in America are those that are in the political journalism profession. Once you're in, you can't be fired not matter how idiotic you are.

Failures in Journalism: Yahoo News Edition

While I was living in Egypt, I was frequently frustrated by journalists proclivity to mention Facebook groups as significant evidence of public opinion. I wish I had examples on hand, but it wasn't uncommon for a writer to end a story noting that already, a Facebook group supporting some cause had gained 15 or so members. This is pretty worthless information and sloppy journalism, that just shows how journalists need to be trained to use quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as how to distinguish between the two.

Sadly this type of work happens here in the U.S. as well. Take Yahoo News, who recently ran a story about the fake controversy surrounding Obama's planned education speech. I won't even get into the absurdity of criticizing our Head of State, for performing Head of State functions, that will be done by others. What I do want to take issue with is this articles' "research" into public opinion.

Across the blogosphere, comments covered the spectrum, from critical tosupportive, and from one student, a little anger:

"I sent my children to school to be educated NOT indoctrinated." — justamom
"The fact that people want to keep their kids from hearing the President of the United States encourage them to do well in school shows a true level of ignorance." — Firefey

That's right, scrolling through the comment section of online news sites now counts as research. I really don't care what "justamom" thinks about the speech, and not because she's just a mom, but because I don't know if she really represents anything. Quoting the head of the Florida GOP is newsworthy, because of his position, but if you want to demonstrate substantial public opinion, this is not the way to go. Also, the author noted that she took these names from the blogosphere, even though they where comments from traditional news sites. Somebody who does journalism on the internet should understand the difference between the two.

Failures in Polling: Pakistan Edition

I normally like the Atlantic, which is why I was so disappointed over this recent entry. What's so baffling is that the author, Heather Horn, manages to do a fair amount of thinking without ever coming to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe it's possible to not like both the Taliban and the United States.

Horn starts out on the wrong foot by stating:

Not only does this poll seem to contradict the last, but the numbers even within the Pew poll look extraordinarily contradictory.

I'm looking at the two poll responses: one is stating that a majority of Pakistanis view America as the greatest threat to the country, the other is expressing widespread concern that the Taliban could take over. Those may seem to overlap a bit, but they certainly don't contradict each other. Any person with a basic ability to understand political polling in the United States (and sadly most journalists seem to lack that ability) would be able to tell you how slightly different wording on a a similar question can yield very different results - these two questions are actually asking entirely different things.

I can see it as perfectly reasonable that a Pakistani may hold pretty unfavorable views about the Taliban for any number of reasons, but still view another country firing missiles inside its borders a threat. This inability to look past an American bias and assume that not trusting the Taliban should equal admiration for the US seems silly.

Even the headline: Pakistani Public Opinion: Less Extreme Than Previously Thought?, is pretty sloppy. Why should we consider a dislike of America an extreme position, at least if it's in a foreign country?

Horn follows up with a nice round up of analysis, but then sadly, ends with this

Pakistanis Oppose Taliban, Still Revile US, rang The Associated Press' headline. Yet another way to spin the data.

Hmm... for once a headline writer at the AP manages to correctly identify the story without complety distorting the data, and this is what gets labeled as spin?

Obama in Cairo, my advice

Because I love America so much, and because I care about my president, I would like to help Mr. Obama before he makes his speech to the "Muslim World" today. This is a pretty important thing to me because he's actually going to deliver this historic address mere minutes away from where I lived only last week. This knowledge of the neighborhood, along with my vast experience working with the Arab media, has given me, I feel, remarkable insight into the "pulse of the Arab street." So, without more delay, I give you my suggestion for what President Obama should say today.

President Obama:

"Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here at Cairo University today with such a diverse group of Egyptians. As I look out at this audience I see liberals, conservatives, even quite a few Ikhwan members. In fact, I haven't spoken in front of this many brothers since the last NAACP convention.

(hold for laughter)

But seriously, it's great to be in such a wonderful country. People are so friendly here, not like back home. On my cab ride over here - and by the way what do you guys think of these new white cabs, pretty nice huh? - anyway my driver...he told me that America was number one. And he wasn't even the first taxi driver today to tell me that. In fact, I think if I stay here another day, I can find all the people who have a favorable opinion of the US; because according to John Zogby and USA Today, it's only 14% of you.

(hold for laughter)

But I'm not going to let this discourage me and my mission. Partly because I bring a message of hope, and partly because I don't trust Zogby tracking polls. If we all trusted Zogby, John Kerry would be president and Hillary would have won the primaries...but neither of those things happened did they?....plus our internal polling shows that our approval rating is hovering around 70%, although we won't release crosstabs on that, you just have to take our word for it. Not that I look at polls of course, but you know, they're our there.

But back to my taxi ride. I talked to my driver about what he though about America. Apparently the government is bad but the people are good. So I guess he voted for Reagen.

(hold for laughter)

But what was so striking was when I asked him what were the issues that mattered to him most in life. And you know, they were the same things that matter to Americans as well: Affordable health care, education, a good job. See we tend to think in the US that every little action in the Arab world is a referendum on US policy, but I know things are quite a bit different then that. At the end of the day, the average Egyptian isn't worrying about Barack Obama, they're thinking about the same bread and butter, or aiesh and butter, issues that Americans are everyday. We tend to simplify US-Arab relations in a narrative that encourages the "Clash of Civilization" concept, but this is neither productive nor accurate. Most people in both our nations don't have time to hate people they've never even met, who live across the world; they're too busy taking their son to soccer practice.

So that's my take home message to you all today, yes we have our differences, and no they will not all be resolved, but we can all agree we deserve affordable health care. Sorry, I'm hoping that issue is as hot here as it is back in the US - it's really big in the US right now.

Thank you for your hospitality and your generosity, and goodnight.

Terrorism in America, Newt Gingrich is an idiot edition

One of the only reason's I have a twitter account is so I have instant access to Newt Gingrich's latest ideas for revitalizing the Republican Party. This is because whatever type of day I'm having, I can always read his latest musings and take comfort in the fact that the revitalization of the Republican Party will not happen in our lifetime. The most recent example of this is Newt announcing his appearance on Fox News where he covers 'releasing terrorists into the U.S." His quote: "Just had remarkable interview with chris wallace on foxnews sunday. I asserted releasing terrorist trainees into america on welfare is insane "

I do agree that putting terrorist into American society and then paying for their unemployment would be a pretty stupid policy. The only thing worse than someone who is trying to kill Americans, is someone who is trying to kill Americans while using food stamps to pay for their crack habit. This might come as a surprise to those of you who have yet to hear about President Obama's plan to subsidize terrorism (Republican's want to privatize it), but of course, the reality of the proposal is a bit different.

We all (most of us) want to close down Guantanamo. Only problem is that we don't really have a place to send a lot of the prisoners too. They will be tortured or killed in their own countries and nobody else seems to want them. Therefore, we have to put them in prisons right here in the U.S. Republicans, who I guess are of the belief that these terrorists have some prison escaping ability that the average inmate lacks, are screaming about how this will endanger the U.S. now that we have terrorists on our soil. I really wish I was making this up. Even assuming one of these guys managed to escape, he would still face the issue of being an Arab, who doesn't speak much English, running around an area where the local news would alert everybody to the presence of an Arab who doesn't speak English. Do Republican's really think he would manage to hijack a plane in those circumstances? Or maybe he can pull off a suicide bombing?

I'm also not so sure what Newt means about the welfare part. Is he implying that by feeding terrorists while in prison, we're putting them on welfare? Does he hope if we take them off "welfare" maybe they will go out and find a job? If this is his logic, would he support legalizing marijuana so we would have less people on "welfare?" Or should we just let all prisoners starve?

But in case you thought using this idea as a way to destroy Obama was limited to Newt, listen to what Michael Goldfarb had to say about comparisons to our internment of Nazi POW's on American soil during WWII:

“Here’s a clip of Rep. Pete Hoekstra at the presser this morning explaining to a particularly thick reporter why the threat posed by al Qaeda detainees is different, and far more serious, that that posed by German prisoners of war. As Hoekstra explains, the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work."

I really want to come up with a devastating takedown that's not weaker than simply posting the statement and leaving it as is. It is true that the Germans didn't kill that many American civilians when they went to work, although they almost took over the world, which would make them far more dangerous than Al-Qaeda who have a lose hold on a part of Pakistan that nobody even really wants. This would seem fairly obvious to most people, altough it flys over the head of Goldfarb. My advice to the GOP - drop the "Al Qaeda is more dangerous than the Nazi's" line, not even Al Qaeda thinks its true.