Category Archives: Politics

Going to Berlin: Mostly business, a little pleasure

In a little less than two weeks, I will be taking the Foreign Service Officer Test, which is used to determine a person’s eligibility to serve the State Department at overseas embassies and consulates in tenure-track work. I wanted to take the test in February and the only place I could do it by the time I was able to register was the U.S. embassy in Berlin.

I’ve been to Berlin before and I read German very well — I sound dumb trying to speak it, but I just haven’t had the practice in a long time — so I wasn’t terribly worried to go back. It’ll be like a mini adventure!

I’m going to have to skip a Tuesday class, but my teacher understood what I was doing and said it wasn’t a problem. I’m taking the train from Canterbury to St. Pancras, then another train to Luton airport, then hopping on a plane to Berlin Schoenefeld and then taking an express train from the airport to the Hauptbahnhof (the main city train station). I’m spending the night, then taking the U-bahn (subway) to the embassy in the morning, taking the test, grabbing a bite to eat and flying back to London. Piece of cake, right?

The exam itself is split into four parts. One part is mixed bag of questions about U.S. history, world geography, economics, culture, government, computer literacy and management skills. The second part is all about written expression, including grammar, reading comprehension and editing. A third part is unassessed and asks you to give biographical information. The fourth part is a critical essay, which is graded in the event that you pass the multiple choice portion.

If you pass the exam, you’re invited to complete a broader biographical survey. If that’s sufficient, a panel of current foreign service officers looks over your full package and determines if you’re fit for an oral examination. Following that, then you may be offered a post off of a list, depending on your qualifications. Whew. So as important as the upcoming test is, it’s really just the first part of the gauntlet.

I’m hoping I have time to get a nice German meal that isn’t from a train station cart, and can maybe run over to Brandenburg Gate and/or the Reichstag again for some quick photos.

Wish me luck!

A possible dissertation topic

I said the D word, run for your lives!

Since we had a brainstorming session in my research methods class last week, I’ve been trying to think of a possible dissertation topic. This is especially important because, even though we don’t begin formal work on the paper itself until this summer, a lot of prep work for it is due in November (a research methods outline) and January (a formal proposal that must be department-approved).

After slightly stressing out over it, I think I may finally have a topic — foreign aid. Namely, aid that the United States gives to developing countries. While I’m going to do more in-depth reading before choosing a precise angle on the topic, I’m considering writing about aid’s effectiveness, or lack thereof. What does the U.S. hope to accomplish by distributing aid — security, goodwill, humanitarian success — and what does it actually accomplish? How efficient is aid? Would another form of assistance or demonstration of soft power be more practical or successful? How much aid actually gets to people who need it, and how much ends up on the black market? How much does the U.S. actually distribute versus what it says it will?

A final, streamlined approach, which may very well be just a single question listed above, will probably have to wait until I’ve done more research and had a chance to chat with a supervisor. But for now I’m fairly confident that the final product will be something to do with developmental economics and aid.

From ballot box to iPhone

Today my mother and I had one of our afternoon discussions, which I’m going to miss having when I move away next month. The topic turned to voting and how to get people my age to do it. My mother’s worried that young people won’t show up properly in the 2010 midterms.

Before I really even thought about it, I said, “People should be able to vote using their iPhones or Androids.”

I voted in the Kansas primary a couple of weeks ago. I went to a Methodist (or maybe it was Lutheran?) church not too far away from my house. Even with my spry age of 23, the average age of people in the room had to be 60+. The Lawrence Journal-World reported that Burge Union, on the University of Kansas campus, had only three voters as of 5 p.m.

Is it that people my age don’t care? That may be part of it, although I think we care more than we let on. But I think a lot of it is down to the fact that the act of voting hasn’t evolved enough to match our current technology. Some places still use paper; I voted using a big, boxy touch-screen. Yes, many constituencies allow online voting, but you have to be at a computer. You know, sitting in one place.

So here’s what I propose: Tie voting into today’s technology. Partner with Apple and Android (the big two) to develop official, state-sanctioned voting apps. Download the app, register and sign in using information from your voting registration and vote when the app goes live at the appointed time on the correct day. It could even be rigged to an alarm, or set as a promo on iTunes. The security required would obviously be immense, but then again I just went up to a table, gave a nice old lady my name and signed right in.

Geo-tagging outfits like Foursquare and Gowalla could get in on it as well. Check in, vote, get a badge. It works the same way with campaign work and activism. Did you canvass thirty houses? Get a badge, sponsored by the DNC or RNC. Do Starbucks and American Eagle want to sell coffee and polos while rewarding good citizenship? Take your smartphone in, show them your “I Voted” badge, get a free small coffee or 15% off your jeans.

Barack Obama’s campaign, it could be argued, was largely won through savvy use of social media. But that was two whole years ago, and the DNC and RNC’s idea that so-fake-you-can-smell them “blogs,” robot-like Twitter accounts and lots of Facebook “Likes” equates to smart social-media strategy seems woefully outdated. It takes little to no energy to hit the “Like” button or the “Follow” button. That doesn’t equal engagement. The best way to engage us is to meet us where we live, in the cloud.

My voting motto is typically, “I don’t care how you vote, but please vote some way.” And yes, not voting is just as emphatic a political statement as voting. But I think our elected officials and election gatekeepers might be pleasantly surprised if they took a little initiative.

Call it iVote.

Time, Afghanistan and Conflicts of Interest

A couple of weeks ago, when I saw Time’s cover story about women in Afghanistan, something about it seemed … off … to me. It’s difficult to describe, but as soon as I saw the cover, my Spidey sense went off.

The cover in question features a young Afghan woman named Aisha, whose husband’s family cut off her nose and ears after she attempted to run away. The sell line on the cover states (not asks) “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.”

I remember thinking that it seemed to have a vein of demagoguery. With opposition to the Afghan war rising (or, at the very least, more people asking critical questions about why the U.S. and NATO remain there), this article seemed like a punch in the gut. “If we leave,” it seems to imply, “this will happen.”

The problems with that are A) while women’s rights are obviously important, that’s not why the U.S. is there, B) the U.S. being there didn’t prevent Aisha’s mutilation and C) the Hamid Karzai government has passed laws that are decidedly anti-women, apparently with the U.S.’s implicit blessing. So using the dangers Afghan women might face in the U.S.’s absence to frame the debate of involvement seems like a red herring. Surely the U.N., local advocacy groups, NGOs, missionary groups or other bodies would be better suited than the U.S. military to go to the mattresses for Afghan women.

After reading the article and making the aforementioned mental notes, I set the story aside. Yesterday, however, I saw a piece from the New York Observer questioning whether Aryn Baker, the Time reporter who wrote the story and had (she’s since been reassigned) the magazine’s Afghanistan/Pakistan beat, might have had an ulterior motive or conflict of interest in writing the story.

It turns out that Baker’s husband works on a board with the Afghan government that pushes to get foreign direct investment into the country. He had also worked with and ran companies in the past that solicited development contracts from both militaries and private companies.

In other words, at face value, it looks like Baker’s husband, and by extension Baker herself, would be gaining monetarily from continued U.S./NATO involvement in the region, and it looks curious at best and dishonest at worst that Baker happened to write a magazine piece that seems to advocate continued military involvement.

Time has, of course, defended Baker and denied a conflict existed (its full statement is included at the tail end of the Observer story). But the issue here, I’d say, is the appearance of a conflict. It may be that Baker has no monetary stake in the Afghan operation, or that it didn’t cross her mind when she wrote the story. In fact that’s probably the case; I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

Perception is reality. If it looks like something is rotten in Denmark, then that will color people’s perceptions. Time had the opportunity to actually fuel a solid, grounded debate about implications of a U.S. withdrawal. Instead it finds itself hustling to defend a reporter’s integrity, and in a worst-case scenario, any further reporting it does on Afghanistan will be somewhat soured by this. Any number of writers could have taken on the story; that it was someone in Baker’s precise position was unfortunate.

Which brings me back to my Spidey sense going off. Now I know I wasn’t expecting a conflict-of-interest story to emerge, but I do know that my gut told me that something wasn’t quite right. I don’t know whether I had a sense that more was going on than it seemed, or if I had a negative reaction to what I thought was an appeal based more on emotional reactions than rationality.

Either way, this is a good example of trusting your gut. It’s also a lesson that journalists don’t exist inside a vacuum. We make human connections, we network, schmooze, marry, travel and spend money. And when our human lives intersect with our journalistic lives, it doesn’t take much to put our reputations on the line.

The sovereign citizen “movement”

An AP article caught my eye today. Partly because of its content, partly because its dateline was Columbus, my old stomping grounds.

The article describes some 300,000 people living in the U.S. who call themselves “sovereign citizens,” meaning they don’t recognize the authority of U.S. law. Some of the ones featured in the article use this distinction to avoid paying taxes and bills, to stockpile weapons and to delude themselves into thinking that smuggling cocaine and other drugs into the country is OK. The story is also rife with descriptions of fraudulent banking and financial scamming.

If these people want to separate themselves from American law and its protections, all I ask is that they’re consistent. Which would necessitate the following:

1. Not using roads or highways, ever.

2. Not calling the police in the event that a crime is committed against them.

3. Not listening to or watching radio or network television.

4. Not sending their kids to school (from the look of the article, this one isn’t that hard for them to follow).

5. Not eating anything with corn in it. Ever. And that includes high-fructose corn syrup. Because corn is grown with tasty government subsidies.

6. Actually, just stop eating any produce they didn’t grow themselves, just to be sure.

7. Not eating food or taking medicine that’s been cleared by the FDA (and if it hasn’t, God only knows what’s in it).

8. Not buying imported products of any kind.

9. Not buying products whose manufacture is supported by government subsidies or other tax incentives of any kind.

10. Not using electricity, indoor plumbing or other public utilities.

11. Not driving any car that’s met government regulations of any kind.

12. Not flying on a plane. Ever.

13. Not living in a house whose construction met government-set building codes.

14. Not calling the fire department. Ever.

15. Not visiting any kind of hospital or emergency room.

16. Not using a clock or watch with a Congress-set time on it.

17. Not calling government-run consumer-protection advocates when they get taken by check fraudsters.

18. Not attending a public university of any kind (again, not a problem by the looks of it).

19. Not eating the food, wearing the clothing or using the facilities of any jail in which they might find themselves.

20. Not accepting any type of government-disbursed money or aid, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps and/or public housing.

Good luck!

Judgment Day in the UK

Today’s a very important day to me. It’s the first time since I started seriously studying the British political system that the country is having a general election.

At this point, roughly five hours before actual results start coming in, I have no idea what party is going to win. That’s what makes it so exciting and so nerve-wracking. As someone planning to move (legally, thank you) to the UK in September for school, I like to think I have some small stake in this election, even though I’m not a citizen.

The British system is also interesting to follow because of how different it is from our U.S. system. In Britain, a parliamentary democracy, you vote for the party, not the candidate. The party that wins the majority of seats gets to form a government (what we in the U.S. would refer to as an administration). Districts have MPs like we have congressmen in the U.S., but you can’t, say, vote for an MP of one party and a prime minister of another. It’s straight-ticket voting.

It’s been fascinating to read people’s complaints and comments on the BBC for the past few days. There’s talk of tactical voting — voting AGAINST one party, just to keep them out, but not necessarily voting for a party that has a legitimate chance of winning. There are complaints of the “first past the post” system, which disallows run-offs and makes it so a party could theoretically get a smaller popular vote percentage and still win. And, just like in the U.S., people are worried about immigration (don’t worry guys, I speak English), their pensions (“I don’t have enough to retire on!”), council taxes (they’re really too high) and the national debt (which they seem to equally blame Labour and the Conservatives for — Labour for being in power, the Conservatives for being pro-business).

As to who I’d vote for given the chance, I really can’t say (and not even sure that I should). I just know that this is high political drama at its best and that everyone should be paying attention, even if you don’t know who on earth Nick Clegg is (he’s the leader of the possibly king-making Liberal Democrats).

Auntie Beeb has a nifty little election section on its site. If you go to the main BBC News site, you’ll see the election coverage relegated to the upper right-hand corner, with major international news getting front-and-center play. It’s such a British thing to do — “Move on, nothing to see here! Oh, right then, suppose there’s an election today of some sort…”

A crash course in citizenship

While browsing my blogroll this morning, I saw that “birthers” are planning a protest in Washington to challenge President Barack Obama’s legitimacy as a natural-born American. As I read the article, it amazed me just how uninformed people are when it comes to American citizenship requirements. Before I continue, let me clarify that I believe Obama was born in Hawaii and that this is for argument’s sake only.

We’re all taught early on that a person must be a “natural-born” U.S. citizen in order to become president. This can obviously mean being born on U.S. soil. What many people (including “birthers”) don’t know is that there are two paths to American citizenship at birth — jus soli and jus sanguinis.

Jus soli (of the soil) refers to the physical location of a person’s birth. Jus sanguinis (by blood) refers to a person’s ancestry. A person born of non-citizen parents in the U.S. would be a natural-born American citizen by virtue of jus soli. A person born in the U.S. of American-citizen parents would be a natural-born American citizen by virtue of both jus soli and jus sanguinis. And a person born abroad of two American-citizen parents or an American-citizen mother would also be a natural-born American citizen by virtue of jus sanguinis, even if they don’t meet the jus soli requirement. The U.S. uses both, and both can be met exclusively.

Yes, kids. This means that even if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, he would still be a natural-born U.S. citizen because his mother was a U.S. citizen, by virtue of jus sanguinis.

(Lest I be accused of playing favorites, this principle also applies to John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone to two American parents, while the Zone was a U.S. territory but before Congress had formally hashed out the citizenship of those born in the Zone.)

Now can the “birther” movement die already?


What senators say about health care

As a copy editor, I’ve learned that a lot of writing comes down to simple word choice. Same holds true in politics. One word in place of another, or one word repeated over and over, holds immense power. In the ongoing debate over health-care reform and its implementation, senators’ manifestos hold keys to their stances, priorities and plans.

Below are two Wordle creations, using the text of 10 U.S. senators’ health-care manifestos on their Web sites. Each Wordle represents the top 50 words found in the manifestos, compiled together. One Wordle is from the text of five Democratic senators, and the other is from the text of five Republican senators. The words “health” and “care” were removed beforehand from both composites. Without scrolling below (read: cheating), can you guess which Wordle belongs with which party?

The top Wordle belongs to the Republican senators, and the bottom Wordle belongs to the Democratic senators. (Republicans: Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback, Jon Kyl, Richard Shelby and Olympia Snowe. Democrats: Claire McCaskill, Harry Reid, Debbie Stabenow, John Kerry and Mark Udall.)

Were you right? If not, why do you think you missed it? And if you were right, what words clued you in?

Wordle only tells part of the story. It measures frequency, not context. And you’ll notice a substantial amount of overlap in the words — insurance is the most-used word of both parties, and Americans is a word both also use liberally.

I have to say that the word that jumped out at me most was Medicare. It’s one of the “medium” words in the Republican word cloud, but is the second- or third-most used word in the Democratic cloud, more used even than Americans. Further combing suggests that Republicans are likelier to discuss the process and risks of the legislation — bill, senate, congress, increase, legislation — while Democrats are likelier to tout their legislative success and specific actions — Medicare, coverage, seniors, businesses, ensure. I thought it was interesting that words like coverage, seniors and affordable had about the same amount of usage by both parties.

What do you think each Wordle says about the parties and their health-care stances?

Righteous Indignation on the BBC

No later than June 2010, the UK will have a general election. In Britain, there are three major parties. Labour, led by current Prime Minister Gordon Brown; David Cameron’s Conservatives; and the third-wheel Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg.

While these three parties dominate Parliament, some fringe parties have taken hold, mostly because of voter apathy and general discontent with Labour and Conservative policies in particular. One of these is the British National Party, or the BNP. The BNP doesn’t hold any seats in Parliament, but has a seat in the London Assembly, seats in smaller councils and two seats in the European Union Parliament. One of these seats went to BNP leader Nick Griffin.

To say the BNP is controversial is putting it mildly. For one thing, its membership is limited to “indigenous Caucasians.” Party members, including Griffin, have a history of Holocaust denial. Its early anti-Semitic views have been replaced with anti-Muslim sentiment. The party is strongly anti-immigration. Its economic policies are protectionist, and reject free-market capitalism. It is, however, gaining ground with white Britons who are gravitating toward the BNP out of either desperation or protest against mainstream parties.

Given the recent electoral success of the BNP, the BBC invited Griffin to be a panelist on Question Time on Thursday. For my American audience, it’s a mix of Meet the Press and a Q&A-style town hall meeting. Some highlights are in the video below.

While I find the BNP’s platform repugnant, equally repugnant — nay, more repugnant — was the protest that stuffed up West London. People carried signs calling Griffin a “fascist” and said the BBC shouldn’t have had him on. I find it ironic that people try to fight “fascism” by engaging in the very fascist-like practice of trying to silence speech they don’t like. If the guy’s ideas are that godawful, that’s bound to come out during the program (er, programme). No one needs them to protect society from big, bad Nick Griffin. The British electorate can watch him and decide for themselves what to think.

If you’re opposed to Griffin and the BNP’s policies, you should want those ideas to come to light and for people to see in the harsh light of day how offensive they are. Keeping people like Griffin from stating their platforms only makes them free-speech martyrs and gives them a mystique they don’t deserve.