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Blueprint's new idea
Tweet Share on Facebook July 31, 2006 CommentOne of the best political magazines around is the Democratic Leadership Council's bimonthly Blueprint, edited by my former U.S. News colleague Peter Ross Range. This month's issue has several thoughtful and interesting articles. I'd like to focus on one, Austan Goolsbee's "Democratic Capitalism." Goolsbee is an economics professor at the University of Chicago but not a discipleine of the "Chicago school" of Milton Friedman and others. He's bothered, as many Democrats and the editorial writers of the Washington Post are, by the apparent rise in economic inequality in the United States. In this article, he focuses not on incomes but on wealth:
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Demographics; Life in Lebanon
Tweet Share on Facebook July 28, 2006 CommentDemographics
The Washington Post had a nice story yesterday on Page A2 on demographer William Frey. Frey teaches at the University of Michigan and also works at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He also has his own website and has helped set up other demographic websites. I have found his work to be first-rate. I found only one irritating passage in the story:
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Trade talks in ruins — powerful farmers win; most others lose
Tweet Share on Facebook July 26, 2006 CommentThis has been a big news week. Israel's campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon continues into its third week, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues to resist calls to negotiate a cease-fire. Rep. Mike Pence and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison brought forward an immigration bill, with border enforcement and guest worker provisions, which may form the basis of a bill that is passable in both the House and the Senate. I've commented on Pence's approach before.
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Sock-puppetry
Tweet Share on Facebook July 26, 2006 Comment (26) -
The Middle East; The teachers unions; A delicious read
Tweet Share on Facebook July 24, 2006 CommentThe Middle East
Here is my Creators Syndicate column for this week, via realclearpolitics.com. The Hezbollah attack on Israel was launched when I was on vacation, so I probably have some catching up to do. But it strikes me that this is a Middle East crisis very different from those of the past. We see the governments of Arab states blaming not Israel but Hezbollah and inferentially Iran for the attacks. For years we have been told that in order to please the Arabs, we need to settle the Israel/Palestine issue, by forcing Israel to make concession after concession.
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A North American update on elections elsewhere
Tweet Share on Facebook July 24, 2006 CommentMexico: What accounts for the durability of the PRI system, which lasted from 1929 to 2000? Under that system, each president served just one six-year term and in his sixth year chose his successor, who became the PRI candidate. The nominee was said to have been chosen by dedazo, by his predecessor's finger. Why did this system last so long? Because, I think, it was in sync with the Aztec side of Mexico's part-European, part-Mesoamerican culture. In three ways:
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Journalism school deans defend the Times
Tweet Share on Facebook July 14, 2006 Comment (24)While I'm away, my assistant, Brian Sopp, has put together a few issues worth considering.
There is a good post on "Phi Beta Cons" about the deans of several journalism schools coming to the defense of the New York Times's publication of information about SWIFT. The deans wrote in the Washington Post that the government's objections to the Times story were unfounded.
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More on regional political divisions, in Mexico and elsewhere
Tweet Share on Facebook July 11, 2006 CommentLexington Green, one of the frequent posters at chicagoboyz.net, has responded to my latest post on Mexico with these thoughts. In my post, I noted the apparently persistent regional divisions in Mexican politics and voiced what I called a suspicion that they represent something in the nature of ethnic differences. I also noted the existence of such regional differences in the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Brazil. Lexington Green, who reads wisely and widely in history, notes that there are similar differences in France, Germany, and Canada as well. Point taken. He also makes the following observation:
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More on Mexico's election
Tweet Share on Facebook July 10, 2006 Comment (1)Here's a link to my U.S. News column on the Mexican election, in which I try to put it in a Latin American and in a North American perspective. Bottom line: Not all of Latin America is turning left, and all three countries covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement now have and will have for at least the next couple of years center-right governments. That last conclusion assumes that Stephen Harper's Conservative government in Canada, which currently does better in polls than it did when it won a plurality of parliamentary seats in the January election, will stay in office for some good period of time.
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British politics back to normal
Tweet Share on Facebook July 5, 2006 CommentI have been observing British politics since the early 1960s, and I have noticed a common pattern: Until the 1990s, the party in power has most of the time been behind in the polls.
Michael Barone
Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.
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