Adventure Gifts Are New Wave in Holiday Giving

This Los Angeles Times articles reports that traditional holiday gifts are on the way out, and not for just the well-heeled, as "experience" giving is becoming a more popular Christmas tradition:

They don't take much space under the tree. But look for more fantasies and long-sought "experiences" showing up this Christmas morning.

Instead of sweaters, toasters and paperweights, many adults will be receiving surfing lessons, parachute jumps, spa visits, gourmet meals and exotic vacations as gifts this year.

It's especially true for baby boomers, who seem to have all the household necessities, everyday apparel and appliances they want. Now, shoppers — young and old — are in the market for one-time adventures.

"More and more, they're looking to create memories, in particular things that are different and unique," said Lois Huff, senior vice president at consulting and research firm Retail Forward.

That's what Tristan Wimmer was after when he decided to purchase a $300 bungee jumping expedition in Azusa for his fiancee, Meredith Wardy, who was afraid of heights.

"Giving something material just didn't seem to have much weight," said the 22-year-old Marine from San Clemente. "I figured an experience we could share would be better."

More than one-quarter of all people giving gifts this year will give an experience, up from 20% last year, said Pam Danziger, president of Unity Marketing, a consumer research firm based in Stevens, Pa. On average, consumers will each spend about $950 total on Christmas gifts this year, according to her research.

"People are realizing they have more than enough material goods," Danziger said. "But gifts that people will experience last forever" as memories, she said.

Danziger, who will give her husband a wine tasting at a museum for Christmas, said that as more consumers looked to give one another experiences, businesses were accommodating the demand. Restaurants, spas and companies such as Ticketmaster are beginning to provide easy ways for customers to purchase experiences as gifts.

And then there are the companies that focus on experiential gifts for the creative, wealthy or just plain crazy.

Take, for instance, the $1.8-million Virgin Galactic Charter to space (not available until 2009) offered in Neiman Marcus' Christmas book or the $2,650 five-day shark expedition offered by Chicago-based company Signature Days.

"We're the typical males who never had any idea of what to get people — we were tired of buying watches and sweaters and shirts," Signature Days Vice President Chris Widdess said.

"We think that a memorable experience makes a fantastic gift."

Signature Days has promoted its experiences in CVS drugstores, Wal-Marts and Costcos across the country, evidence that it's not just marketing to the upscale consumer.

The company, which was founded in June 2004, sold 5,000 experiences last year. This year, it will exceed 35,000, which it provides in the 51 largest U.S. cities, Widdess said.

Some of the choices are unique to the regions where they are sold, such as a Los Angeles option to work out with Jason Kozma, Mr. America 2004 ($500 for two sessions) or stunt-driving school ($2,500). Others, such as massages or personal chefs, are nationwide.

Businesses such as Signature Days and Boulder, Colo.-based Cloud 9 Living drew their inspiration from Europe, where people have been giving one another experiences for years, said Cloud 9 co-founder and Chief Executive Adam Michaels....

Cloud 9 was founded to accommodate what Michaels saw in this country as "an overall shift in society from wanting material possessions to wanting life experiences."

I don't know if I'd go in for skydiving or bungee jumping, although a wine tasting trip might be pretty fun.

Interest Rate on Payday Loans Over 520 Percent

Check out this mindboggling New York Times article on the financial trap that is catching low-income borrowers in the payday loan industry, where interest rates at short-term "loan shops" can exceed 520 percent:

Earl Milford put up an artificial Christmas tree in the wooden house on the Navajo reservation near here that he shares with a son and daughter-in-law and their two little girls.

But money is scarce and so are presents. “It’s all right,” he said, “they know I love them.”

Mr. Milford is chronically broke because each month, in what he calls “my ritual,” he travels 30 miles to Gallup and visits 16 storefront money-lending shops. Mr. Milford, who is 59 and receives a civil service pension and veteran’s disability benefits, doles out some $1,500 monthly to the lenders just to cover the interest on what he had intended several years ago to be short-term “payday loans.”

Mr. Milford said he had stopped taking out new loans, but many other residents of the Gallup area and countless more people across the country are visiting payday lenders this month, places with names like Cash Cow, Payday Plus and Fast Buck, to get advances of a few hundred dollars to help with holiday expenses.

While such lending is effectively banned in 11 states, including New York, through usury or other laws, it is flourishing in the other 39. The practice is unusually rampant and unregulated in New Mexico, where the Center for Responsible Lending, a private consumer group, calculates that nationally payday loans totaled at least $28 billion in 2005, doubling in five years.

The loans are quick and easy. Customers are usually required to leave a predated personal check that the lender can cash on the next payday, two or four weeks later. They must show a pay stub or proof of regular income, like Social Security, but there is no credit check, which leads to some defaults but, more often, continued extension of the loan, with repeated fees.

In many states, including New Mexico, lenders also make no effort to see if customers have borrowed elsewhere, which is how Mr. Milford could take out so many loans at once. If they repay on time, borrowers pay fees ranging from $15 per $100 borrowed in some states to, in New Mexico, often $20 or more per $100, which translates into an annualized interest rate, for a two-week loan, of 520 percent or more.

In September, Congress, responding to complaints that military personnel were the targets of “predatory lenders,” imposed a limit of 36 percent annual interest on loans to military families. The law will take effect next October and is expected to choke off payday lending to this group because, lenders say, the fees they could charge for a two-week loan would be negligible, little more than 10 cents per day, said Don Gayhardt, president of the Dollar Financial Corporation, which owns a national chain of lenders called Money Marts.

The new law will have little impact on the larger practice because military families account for only a tiny share of payday lending, which lenders defend as meeting a need of low-income workers.

Mr. Gayhardt said the industry had prospered because more people worked in modestly paying service-sector jobs, and in a pinch they found payday loans cheaper and more convenient than bouncing checks, paying late fees on credit cards or having their utilities cut off.

Mr. Gayhardt, who is also a board member of the Community Financial Services Association of America, a trade group that represents about 60 percent of payday lenders, said the frequency of extended rollovers and huge payments was exaggerated by critics.

He said the association supported “fair regulations,” including a cap on two-week fees in the range of $15 to $17 per $100, a level now mandated in several states, including Florida, Illinois and Minnesota. This translates into effective fees of about a dollar a day for those who repay on time, which he said was reasonable given the risks and costs of business.

“We want to treat customers well so they’ll come back,” Mr. Gayhardt said in a telephone interview from his headquarters near Philadelphia.

Way back when I was about 19 or 20, I cashed a paycheck at one of those storefront check-cashing outlets, and they charged me about a 10 percent service fee. I never set foot in one of those stores again, but apparently for a lot of working poor short on cash, there aren't a whole lot of alternatives. While I think individual responsibility is in short supply among those who take out the loans, the industry as a whole appears pretty loathsome -- so it's good more and more states are putting up prohibitions against the practice.

Medi-Cal Pays $400 Million Annually in Illegal Alien Child-Birth Outlays in California

This front-page article at this morning's Los Angeles Times reports that Medi-Cal in California is spending $400 million a year in illegal alien pregnancy-related expenses. The piece discusses the experience of undocumented alien Sandra Andrade, who received childbirth services at the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center and whose son spent time in intensive care:

She'd been without private insurance since the premiums became too costly. But a friend assured her that, even as an illegal immigrant from Colombia, she would qualify for Medi-Cal, the state and federal health insurance program for the poor.

Andrade, a clothing exporter, is one of more than 100,000 undocumented women each year who bear children in California with expenses paid by Medi-Cal, according to state reports. They now account for about one in five births.

Regardless of their parents' status, the children are American citizens by law.

Many illegal immigrants who might otherwise shy away from government services view care associated with childbirth as something they can safely seek, a protected right.

"I wasn't afraid at all," said Andrade, who came to the United States with her daughters on a tourist visa and stayed here with her boyfriend after it expired. "I'd always heard that pregnant women are treated well here."

California long has been one of the more generous states in offering such benefits, covering everything from pregnancy tests to postpartum checkups for impoverished illegal immigrants.

Such births and associated expenses account for more than $400 million of the nearly $1 billion that the program spends each year on healthcare for illegal immigrants in California, documents and reports show. Only about a dozen other states extend similar benefits to illegal immigrants, according to health and immigrant rights groups.

Although it has not so far figured prominently in the national discussion of immigration reform, a debate is simmering about the costs — and the rights — of illegal immigrants' American-born children.

Some advocates for immigration control want to abolish automatic or "birthright" citizenship for babies born to undocumented women in the United States. They consider it just the first in an unacceptably long line of public benefits flowing to children who were born here only because their mothers broke the law.

"I think most Americans think that — while they certainly don't want to do anything to harm children — you cannot have a policy that says anybody in the world come here and have a baby and we have a new American," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation of American Immigration Reform, an immigration control group based in Washington, D.C.

One of the most controversial aspects of coverage has been prenatal care. Labor and delivery long have been considered emergencies, entitled to some federal reimbursement. But federal officials have balked at covering prenatal care since at least the 1980s. (Generally, the state and federal governments share the cost of Medicaid programs — called Medi-Cal in California.)

In 1989, California passed a law guaranteeing prenatal care to all impoverished women, with the state footing the bill. Last year, it began to tap federal funds dedicated to healthcare for working families, under the theory that the fetus would ultimately be an American child. Some other states have done the same.

I've blogged much about illegal immigration, as regular readers here know. It's stories like this one that continue to illustrate how out of whack U.S. immigration policies are. Immigration restrictionists -- like the FAIR organization noted above -- routinely point out the cost to U.S. taxpayers from social services to undocumented immigrants. This story is a good example of the phenomenon. While the case can be made that emergency medical services should be provided to any individual in the country regardless of citizenship status, the receipt of such programs is largely viewed in the immigrant community as an entitlement. The comments from another illegal alien interviewed for the story are representative of the undocumented entitlement mindset:

"My husband pays taxes. They take a bunch out of his paycheck," Ludys Ortiz, 36, said as she nursed her newborn son Christian at Women and Children's Hospital, down the hall from Andrade.

Her husband works for $12 an hour washing cars at a body shop.

Ortiz, who entered the U.S. illegally in 2004 from Honduras, worked as a caretaker for children and the elderly, then as a house cleaner.The pregnancy was unexpected."

I am embarrassed because I'm not from here, I didn't pay anything and they delivered my baby without my having to pay anything," she said."

But I'm more grateful than ashamed, because there's no sin in asking for help, only in stealing."

We all have some rights in life. No matter what, we're human beings," she added. "The only thing that divides us is a few pieces of paper."

Actually, there are national borders that divide us, although they seem to becoming less and less important in this age of cultural globalization.

Racism Lives on as Faith for the Multicultural Left

Shelby Steele's commentary in today's Los Angeles Times argues that racism in America is largely a thing of the past, although claims of racism continue to give the multicultural left a source of power:

FROM A POLICE shooting in Queens, N.Y., to a racially charged legal battle involving the Los Angeles Fire Department, from the self-immolation of comedian Michael Richards to the failed Senate campaign of Tennessee's Harold Ford, race is back in the news, bringing with it a batch of new and disturbing questions.

Is racism now a powerful, subterranean force in our society? Is it so subtly infused into the white American subconscious as to be both involuntary and invisible to the racist himself? A recent CNN poll tells us that 84% of blacks and 66% of whites think racism is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem in American life. Is this true?

In attempting to answer these questions, we must acknowledge one of the most profound achievements in recent human history: the death of white supremacy. Here was an event far more world-altering than the collapse of communism, and yet, out of a truly extraordinary historical blindness, it has gone utterly unnoticed. Possibly it was an event too conspicuous to see.

Many believe that it is racist for whites to say white supremacy is dead, and that it is Uncle Tomism for blacks to say it. But it is dead nevertheless. Once a legitimate authority with dominion over all the resources and peoples of the world, it is today universally seen as one of history's greatest evils. It is dead today because it has no authority anywhere in the world and no legitimacy out of which to impose itself. It was defeated by revolutions in the last half of the 20th century that spanned the globe from India to Algeria to the United States. It was defeated by the people who had suffered it. And even if it survives in some quarters as an idea, as a speculation, it now stigmatizes anyone associated with it to the point of ruin....

This does not mean that racist behavior today is somehow benign. It means that today racism swims upstream in an atmosphere of ferocious intolerance. Moreover, today's racism is no longer in concert with an overt and systematic subjugation of blacks. While racism continues to exist, it no longer stunts the lives of blacks.

Yet a belief in the ongoing power of racism is, today, an article of faith for "good" whites and "truth-telling" blacks. It is heresy for any white or black to say openly that, today, underdevelopment and broken families are vastly greater problems for blacks than racism, even though this is obviously true. The problem is that this truth blames the victim. It suggests that black progress will come more from black effort than from white goodwill — even though white oppression caused the underdevelopment in the first place.

In other words, this truth is unfair. And when whites or blacks utter it, they are instantly identified with the unfairness rather than with the truth.So it propriety causes us to say that racism still explains black difficulty.

This explanation is also a source of power because it portrays blacks as victims. And wherever there are victims, there is justification for seeking power in their name. Thus the specter of black difficulty has been an enormous source of power for the left since the 1960s. To say racism is not the first cause of black problems is to put yourself at odds with the post-'60s left's most enduring fount of power....

So when race gets in the news, it is hard to know whether we are dealing with fact or faith. Was the political ad that some say defeated Harold Ford in Tennessee really racist, as the NAACP suspects, or was this old civil rights group ambulance-chasing for power? Did racism motivate the police shooting in Queens? Was the recent defeat of affirmative action at the polls in Michigan an example of racism or of an insistence on fairness? As we look at such events, are we judging facts or practicing a faith?

The great mistake Americans made after the civil rights victories of the '60s was to allow race to become a government-approved means to power. Here was the incentive to make racism into a faith. And its subsequent life as a faith has destroyed our ability to know the reality of racism in America. Today we live in a terrible ignorance that will no doubt last until we take race out of every aspect of public life — until we learn, as we did with religion, to separate it from the state.

Steele forgets to mention the racial outcry after Hurricane Katrina. Jonathan Alter's Newsweek cover story following the catastrophe in New Orleans focused on the racial angle of poverty, looking at structural characteristics like de facto segregation and changes in welfare policy as the most important aspects explaining the persistence of a large black underclass. Did Katrina expose a fundamentally racist United States unwilling to deal effectively with the poverty of black America? Alter argues that racism was one factor making things worse. The articles does not discuss the cultural aspects of race and poverty, of course. Race becomes an easy explanatory variable for the liberal media, and as Steele notes in the L.A. Times commentary, it gives the activist left some leverage of guilt in perpetuating race-conscious social policies.

Be sure to check out my earlier post on the New York Police shooting in Queens. I had to delete one of the comments on that post from a radical leftist blogger, who said that the I was stupid and that racist cops should be shot and killed.

Election of Muslim to Congress Stirring Controversy

Keith Ellison's an African-American Muslim who was elected in November to the U.S. House of Representatives. Ellison is the first Muslim elected to Congress, and there's been some recent controversy as to whether a Muslim in Congress poses a threat to America's traditional heritage. The tension came to a head this week when Representative Virgil Goode of Virgina expressed these views, as this New York Times article notes:

In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

Mr. Goode declined Wednesday to comment on his letter, which quickly stirred a furor among some Congressional Democrats and Muslim Americans, who accused him of bigotry and intolerance.

They noted that the Constitution specifically bars any religious screening of members of Congress and that the actual swearing in of those lawmakers occurs without any religious texts. The use of the Bible or Koran occurs only in private ceremonial events that take place after lawmakers have officially sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

Since the November election, Mr. Ellison said, he has received hostile phone calls and e-mail messages along with some death threats. But in an interview on Wednesday, he emphasized that members of Congress and ordinary citizens had been overwhelmingly supportive and said he was focusing on setting up his Congressional office, getting phone lines hooked up and staff members hired, not on negative comments.

“I’m not a religious scholar, I’m a politician, and I do what politicians do, which is hopefully pass legislation to help the nation,” said Mr. Ellison, who said he planned to focus on secular issues like increasing the federal minimum wage and getting health insurance for the uninsured.

Check out this news report, which suggests that religious diversity in Congress is at an all-time high. So far Representative Goode has not backed away from his remarks, as this Boston Herald story indicates:

A congressman said Thursday that he will not retract a letter warning that unless immigration is tightened, "many more Muslims will be elected" and use the Quran to take the oath of office.

Republican Rep. Virgil Goode triggered angry responses from a civil rights group and some colleagues with a letter this month to constituents concerned about a decision by Rep.-elect Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim elected to Congress, to use the Quran when he is sworn in.

"I will not be putting my hand on the Quran," Goode said at a news conference Thursday at the Franklin County Courthouse.

Goode, who represents Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, said he is receiving more positive comments from constituents than negative.

"One lady told me she thinks I’m doing the right thing on this," he told Fox News. "I wish more people would take a stand and stand up for the principles on which this country was founded."

Goode also told Fox News he wants to limit legal immigration and do away with "diversity visas," which he said let in people "not from European countries" and "some terrorist states."

In his letter, Goode wrote that strict immigration polices are necessary "to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America."

Goode's attack on Ellison's faith is ill-considered and intolerant, although the larger question of growing religious diversity in the United States is an important one. Ellison's a Muslim convert and doesn't appear extremist. Moreover, the large majority of immigrant Muslim-Americans are well-integrated into the American mainstream, reflecting America's long-standing cultural pattern of assimilation.

The focus for Representative Goode, the Congress, and rest of the federal government, should be on rooting out Islamic extremists in our midst, who may indeed represent a threat to American national security. This report from the Council on Foreign Relations has more information on the nature of the homegrown threat from Islamic terrorism.

Arizona is First in the Nation in Population Growth

Today's Christian Science Monitor reports on new Census data showing that Arizona leads the nation in popluation growth:

Two desert states continue to grow more rapidly than all others. But Arizona can now lay claim to the title of the country's fastest growing state, outpacing Nevada for the first time in nearly two decades.

According to figures released Friday by the Census Bureau, Arizona's population grew by 3.6 percent between July 2005 and July 2006. Nevada's grew 3.5 percent in the same period.

But it's not always easy being big - and getting bigger at a rapid clip - in the middle of a desert. The growth that Arizona - and greater Phoenix, in particular - are experiencing has placed a great strain on the use of public land, roadways, and precious natural resources - especially water.

"Historically, water has been the resource that's driven population growth in the state," says Patricia Gober, a geography professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. But whether the supply of "water can keep abreast of the population growth is the issue that will challenge us in the future."

To be sure, Arizona has been booming for decades. Just prior to World War II, the state hosted 499,000 people. Today, 12 times that many people - nearly 6.2 million - call the Grand Canyon state home. In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is the state's most densely populated area, the population grew in the same period from about 400,000 to nearly 4 million.

Planners project that by 2010, the greater Phoenix and Tucson areas will merge. And forecasters predict that the population in that swath of land, dubbed the Arizona Sun Corridor, will top 10 million by 2040.

USA Today reported on the new Census figures as well, noting that the South leads the nation in regional growth:

The South is rising again, this time as a population magnet for immigrants who come for the same reasons that pull Americans there from other states: the warm climate, jobs and cheaper housing, according to an analysis of Census estimates out Friday.

More than half of the population growth in the USA in the past year occurred in southern states. The July 1 estimates also are the first to reflect Hurricane Katrina's devastation: Louisiana suffered a staggering net loss of 219,563 people, the largest annual decline in any state's population since troops were deployed during World War II.

If people don't return, Louisiana will lose a seat in the House of Representatives, according to an analysis by Election Data Services, a consulting firm. Seats will be reapportioned after the 2010 Census.

The South now attracts as many people from other countries as the West, partly because California's appeal is waning.

California needs to assimilate those already here, so a break in the state's surging population numbers should be welcomed. Of course, the dramatic demographic changes seen here are now becoming more common around the nation.

See also this USA Today article, indicating that Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas -- the fastest growing states, all leaning Republican -- are likely to pick up seats in Congress after the 2010 reapportionment.

Younger Generation Indifferent to Sacrifices of War

Over at USA Today, Jack Valenti's got a moving lament on the younger generation's indifference to the sacrifices of earlier Americans in times of war. Valenti's a former Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. He flew a B-25 attack bomber in 51 combat missions in World War II:

There is a piece of sadness that the election failed to debate. It is the lamentable detachment by the young among us to freedom's history.

The press has reported that Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, his masterly recreation of courage and fidelity to duty and country exhibited by young Marines in the bloodiest battle of World War II, has gone largely unattended by the youngsters of this day.

Watching this movie, watching ordinary young men performing extraordinary feats of heroism, broke my heart. They put to hazard their own lives not to win medals, but because their country was in danger. Why, then, a casual indifference to this story by so many young people? Maybe it's because we have been so benumbed by war, particularly this Iraq war, and because so few youngsters have worn a uniform. A movie about a battle a half a century ago carries no umbilical connection to them. That's understandable. But it ought not to be.

Perhaps some parents might want to do what I did years ago. When my son was about 14, I took him to Omaha Beach and the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France. We stood on the bluff above the beach in the same spot where Nazi troops had dug in. They had poured rifle, mortar and machine gunfire onto the U.S. troops clambering out of their landing crafts. They cut them down on the sand and in the water that seemed to still run red with the blood flowing so wantonly on that invasion day, June 6, 1944.

My son was struck with how close it was from the bluff to the beach. I said, "John it was very close, but remember those young boys never turned back, not one of them. They never turned back. They kept coming."

Then we walked a short distance to the American Cemetery. It is on land a grateful France granted to the United States for use in perpetuity. The Stars and Stripes flies over this cathedral of the dead. We turned our gaze to the grave markers, row upon row upon row, as far as the eye could see. There, I told my son, were buried 9,387 young men, many of whom were in between the ages of 18 and their early 20s, "just a few years older than you are right now," I said.

We walked among the markers laid out in serried ranks. I asked my son to read the inscriptions on those grave markers, the bland finalities of a young warrior's life — name, rank, outfit and the day he died — lives ended before they could be lived.

Finally, I stopped and looked full face at my son. "John, I want you to know why I brought you here." He looked puzzled. I said, "I wanted you to understand that these boys, who never knew you, nonetheless gave you the greatest gift one human can give another. They gave you the gift of freedom. They bought and paid for that gift in blood and bravery. They made it possible for you and millions like you to never have to test your own courage to see how you would react when the dagger is at the nation's belly and death stares you right in the face. You owe them a debt you will never be able to repay."

My son seemed genuinely moved. We never spoke about this again until one day years later, he phoned me. "Dad, last night I saw Saving Private Ryan. You were right. They never turned back, not a one. They kept coming." His voice trembled as he spoke.

Somehow, my own voice cracked a bit with gratitude. My son remembered. May God grant that every boy and girl in this free and loving land never forget the gift of young boys so long ago, a gift given to generations of Americans who were yet to be born.

I think Valenti's pining for a long-lost era of shared sacrifice during times of crisis. Perhaps the danger from Islamic fundamentalism isn't as acute as the totalitarian threats of the 1930s -- engagement in war today is not as pervasive an experience for the whole of the nation. World War II was "the good war," of course, and America's Cold War military experiences, especially Vietnam, met a very different set of social expectations with the emergence of postmodern culture.

Whatever the case, there seems less a sense of shared military commitment in the current era. Newsweek had an interesting piece a couple of years back on military families and war, suggesting that today's military experience is isolated from the bulk of society:

Increasingly, it seems, America is divided between the vast majority who do not serve and the tiny minority who do. The shared sacrifice of World War II is but a distant memory. During World War II, 6 percent of Americans were in uniform; today, the Pentagon says, the figure is four tenths of 1 percent. On military bases, wives warily watch for a pair of somber-faced officers emerging from a car, a sign that bad news is about to arrive at the front door. At military hospitals, young men and women missing limbs are an increasingly familiar sight. But for the rest of us, going about our daily lives, it can be hard to tell there's a war on.

Check out my earlier post on the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, which recalls the heroics of "the greatest generation." See also this post covering Victor Davis Hanson's analysis of the changing nature of warfare.

Afghanistan at the Tipping Point

There's some consensus among journalists and analysts that Afghanistan has reached a critical turning point in the country's war against the Taliban and other forces of a growing, ragtag insurgency. The consolidation of the Afghan democracy is at stake. Barnett Rubin, in the January/February Foreign Affairs, has a comprehensive article examining the difficuties in Afghanistan, suggesting steps to renew the U.S. and NATO deployment there:

For decades -- not only since 2001 -- U.S. policymakers have underestimated the stakes in Afghanistan. They continue to do so today. A mere course correction will not be enough to prevent the country from sliding into chaos. Washington and its international partners must rethink their strategy and significantly increase both the resources they devote to Afghanistan and the effectiveness of those resources' use. Only dramatic action can reverse the perception, common among both Afghans and their neighbors, that Afghanistan is not a high priority for the United States -- and that the Taliban are winning as a result. Washington's appeasement of Pakistan, diversion of resources to Iraq, and perpetual underinvestment in Afghanistan -- which gets less aid per capita than any other state with a recent postconflict rebuilding effort -- have fueled that suspicion.

Contrary to the claims of the Bush administration, whose attention after the September 11 attacks quickly wandered off to Iraq and grand visions of transforming the Middle East, the main center of terrorism "of global reach" is in Pakistan. Al Qaeda has succeeded in reestablishing its base by skillfully exploiting the weakness of the state in the Pashtun tribal belt, along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. In the words of one Western military commander in Afghanistan, "Until we transform the tribal belt, the U.S. is at risk."

Far from achieving that objective in the 2001 Afghan war, the U.S.-led coalition merely pushed the core leadership of al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan, with no strategy for consolidating this apparent tactical advance. The Bush administration failed to provide those Taliban fighters who did not want to defend al Qaeda with a way to return to Afghanistan peacefully, and its policy of illegal detention at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan, made refuge in Pakistan, often with al Qaeda, a more attractive option.

The Taliban, meanwhile, have drawn on fugitives from Afghanistan, newly minted recruits from undisrupted training camps and militant madrasahs, and tribesmen alienated by civilian casualties and government and coalition abuse to reconstitute their command structure, recruitment and funding networks, and logistical bases in Pakistan. On September 19, 2001, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told his nation that he had to cooperate with Washington in order to "save Afghanistan and Taliban from being harmed"; accordingly, he has been all too happy to follow the Bush administration's instructions to focus on al Qaeda's top leadership while ignoring the Taliban. Intelligence collected during Western military offensives in mid-2006 confirmed that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was continuing to actively support the Taliban leadership, which is now working out of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, in western Pakistan. As a result, a cross-border insurgency has effectively exploited Afghanistan's impoverished society and feeble government.

Here's some additional discussion on the Pakistani stumbling-block:

Pakistan's military establishment has always approached the various wars in and around Afghanistan as a function of its main institutional and national security interests: first and foremost, balancing India, a country with vastly more people and resources, whose elites, at least in Pakistani eyes, do not fully accept the legitimacy of Pakistan's existence. To defend Pakistan from ethnic fragmentation, Pakistan's governments have tried to neutralize Pashtun and Baluch nationalism, in part by supporting Islamist militias among the Pashtun. Such militias wage asymmetrical warfare on Afghanistan and Kashmir and counter the electoral majorities of opponents of military rule with their street power and violence.

The rushed negotiations between the United States and Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 changed Pakistan's behavior but not its interests. Supporting the Taliban was so important to Pakistan that Musharraf even considered going to war with the United States rather than abandon his allies in Afghanistan. Instead, he tried to persuade Washington to allow him to install a "moderate Taliban" government or, failing that, at least to prevent the Northern Alliance, which Pakistanis see as allied with India, from entering Kabul and forming a government. The agreement by Washington to dilute Northern Alliance control with remnants of Afghanistan's royal regime did little to mollify the generals in Islamabad, to say nothing of the majors and colonels who had spent years supporting the Taliban in the border areas. Nonetheless, in order to prevent the United States from allying with India, Islamabad acquiesced in reining in its use of asymmetrical warfare, in return for the safe evacuation of hundreds of Pakistani officers and intelligence agents from Afghanistan, where they had overseen the Taliban's military operations.

The United States tolerated the quiet reconstitution of the Taliban in Pakistan as long as Islamabad granted basing rights to U.S. troops, pursued the hunt for al Qaeda leaders, and shut down A. Q. Khan's nuclear-technology proliferation network. But five years later, the safe haven Pakistan has provided, along with continued support from donors in the Persian Gulf, has allowed the Taliban to broaden and deepen their presence both in the Pakistani border regions and in Afghanistan. Even as Afghan and international forces have defeated insurgents in engagement after engagement, the weakness of the government and the reconstruction effort -- and the continued sanctuary provided to Taliban leaders in Pakistan -- has prevented real victory.

The Pakistan sanctuary caps off a long list of issues facilitating the Taliban comeback. State consolidation has been halting under Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The country's drug trade has surged amid a booming opium crop, and drug money helps finance the insurgency. The Afghan population is among the world's poorest, and many in the population have become frustrated by the government inability to provide security and basic services.

According to Michael O'Hanlon, "Operation Enduring Freedom" -- the 2001 U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan -- has been considered one the most successful military operations since World War II. Rubin, though, suggests that the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan was done on the cheap -- just unseat the Taliban and move on, with a sprinkling of humanitarian support.

For more information, check out the Los Angeles Times series on Afghanistan, "Democracy in the Balance."

"Fahrenheit 911" a Staple on Insurgent TV in Iraq

Today's Los Angeles Times reports that an Iraqi insurgent group has launced a renegade satellite television channel in Iraq, broadcasting anti-American propaganda, including clips from Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911":

The men with laptops sat around an unadorned conference table, chatting amicably about their plans and operations.

The scene on the newly launched Al Zawraa satellite television channel could have been footage from the boardroom of any company, if it weren't for the ski masks the men wore and the subject of the meeting: future mortar attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq.

The renegade, pro-insurgent Al Zawraa channel, with a 24-hour diet of propaganda against U.S. forces and the Iraqi government, has become something of a sensation throughout the country. It has drawn condemnation from U.S. officials, Iraqi politicians and Friday prayer leaders.

Most hours of the day it plays footage of U.S. soldiers in Iraq being shot and blown up in insurgent attacks, often with religious chants or Saddam Hussein-era nationalist anthems in the background. There are segments warning Iraq's Sunni Arabs to be wary of Shiite Muslims, and occasional English-language commentary and subtitles clearly meant to demoralize U.S. troops.

"Your new enlisting qualifications are kind of comical," an announcer says in slightly accented American English, over an image of a U.S. soldier in a field hospital, a bandage on his newly amputated arm. "I mean, what are you doing? Thirty-nine years old? That's the new age of recruiting? Are you recruiting nannies? I guess if we are patient, we might witness crippled people enlisting for the Marines."

The station attempts to present an alternative to images of the war appearing in U.S. and other Iraqi media. It shows footage of Americans abusing Iraqis and Baghdad government officials collaborating with the "occupier." Even Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911," the 2004 documentary critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy, gets drawn into the commentary.

"After all, there are honest guys in America," the announcer says in comments directed at President Bush. "If Mr. Moore can talk to you like that, so can I."

It's not clear how big an Iraqi audience Al Zawraa captures. But its very presence demonstrates the insurgency's abilities. Despite 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and intense diplomatic pressure on Iraq's neighbors, the station is able to circumvent U.S. and Iraqi forces and stage round-the-clock broadcasts, complete with news bulletins, graphics and commentary.

Read the whole thing. The station apparently shows video clips of American soldiers slumping to the ground after being hit by insurgent snipers.

I've always respected Michael's Moore's right to an opinion, but it's very disturbing that his film is aiding America's enemies -- the same nihilists who behead U.S. citizens, shoot inocent Iraqis, and work to topple Iraq's emerging democracy. Moore claims to be a true patriot, although he's looking more like a fifth columnist all the time. For Christopher Hitchens' review describing "Fahrenheit 911" as deceitful and dishonest, click here.

What Next for American Grand Strategy?

What's the future direction of U.S. grand strategy? Daniel Drezner, in Sunday's Washington Post, laid out a brief survey of some of the key foreign policy options among academic experts. The query comes amid the backdrop of the Iraq Study Group's recommendation for a major diplomatic and strategic reorientation of American policy in the Middle East, as well as a public preferences for bringing the Iraq conflict to an end and repatriating American troops:

In this climate, policy heavyweights from Washington to New York to Boston are grasping for the Next Big Idea, the grand strategy that will guide U.S. foreign policy in a post-Iraq world and earn its creator fame and, if not fortune, perhaps a spot on the next administration's foreign-policy team. So who will be the next George Kennan? The current strategies on offer in various books and articles include new buzzwords, promising ideas -- and miles to go before a consensus emerges.

Mere dissatisfaction with today's foreign policy doesn't guarantee that a new vision will take its place. As Jeffrey Legro, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, recently pointed out in his book "Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order," a lot is required for a real shift in worldviews. A new strategy must be more than visionary; it must provide attractive and practical solutions to current challenges. During the Cold War, containment's appeal was that it offered a coherent vision for how to deal with the Soviet Union, as well as concrete policy steps that flowed from that vision.

The main force behind the containment strategy was George Kennan, also known as "X," the author of the classic 1947 Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Kennan proposed countering any Soviet encroachment into the non-communist world with a mix of military deterrence and soft power, while trying to exploit divisions within the communist bloc. He cautioned against "threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward 'toughness.' " Kennan achieved something all too rare in the world of politics: At a crucial moment, he came up with a big idea that was both influential and correct. His doctrine seems measured, prudent and -- most important -- successful. In other words, containment was everything that neoconservatism isn't.

One candidate for a new grand strategy is found in "The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century" by political scientist Michael Mandelbaum. He argues that the United States is the foundation for any peaceful global order, because only Washington can provide the security assurances, protection of vital sea lanes and large, open consumer markets that the world needs. To remain strong, he writes, the country must ease its dependence on foreign oil and control its entitlement spending.

Points in favor: Mandelbaum offers both a vision of the world and specific policies flowing from that worldview. Strikes against: This approach too closely resembles the Bush administration's current strategy, and people are looking for change. Sorry, Mandelbaum -- the nays have it.

Beltway wonks Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman offer a different perspective in "Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World." They want U.S. foreign policy to return to the realist tenets of past luminaries such as Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and (of course) George Kennan. Ethical realists do not disdain democracy or human rights, but think that Americans should promote these goals by building a stronger democracy at home and thus leading by example, not by hectoring others to be more like us.

Ethical realism is not isolationist; Lieven and Hulsman think Washington must deepen global markets together with nations such as China, India and Russia. This would require a conscious retrenchment of U.S. power in places where it could irritate other major players, such as Ukraine or the Korean peninsula. In return, Lieven and Hulsman argue, economic interdependence will help spread peace.

Points in favor: Ethical realism proposes a set of specific and prudent policies, and retrenchment is consistent with the current U.S. mood. Strikes against: Lieven and Hulsman may place too much faith in the power of markets. They think that growing middle classes will drain the swamp of terrorists when, in fact, terrorists do some of their best recruiting within these groups.

Francis Fukuyama, already immortalized for his "End of History" thesis, serves up a new buzz term in his book "America at the Crossroads : Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy ," proposing a policy of "realistic Wilsonianism." The Wilsonian in Fukuyama argues that to build a stable world order, what happens within nations matters as much as what happens between them. The United States should therefore continue to support democracy, human rights and free markets worldwide. The realist in Fukuyama, however, recognizes that outsiders have little ability to affect societies' internal affairs. The best channel for U.S. power, Fukuyama advises, "is not through the exercise of military power but through the ability of the United States to shape international institutions" such as the United Nations and NATO, thus offering Washington the velvet glove of multilateral legitimacy.

Points in favor: By proposing a "multi-multilateralism" of overlapping institutions, Fukuyama bridges realist and Wilsonian principles. Strikes against: Fukuyama seems to focus more on process than outcome, and lacks the scope and detail necessary for a grand strategy. "Realistic Wilsonianism" will be a useful adjunct to the next grand strategy, but cannot claim the mantle alone.

In "Forging a World of Liberty Under Law," G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University go further in stressing the rule of law as a way to advance U.S. national interest. The document was the final report of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year effort involving hundreds of foreign-policy analysts (myself included), led by Ikenberry and Slaughter to write, as they put it, a "collective X article."

To their credit, the two make explicit a point that others have not: Kennan had it easy. In his time, the United States faced only one obvious threat, the Soviet Union. In contrast, Ikenberry and Slaughter argue that "ours is a world lacking a single organizing principle for foreign policy," with "many present dangers, several long-term challenges and countless opportunities." Multiple threats call for multiple responses. This includes using international law and institutions to channel and augment U.S. power and influence; creating a "concert of democracies"; and advocating the peaceful promotion of popular, accountable and "rights-regarding" governments.

Points in favor: They recognize that it's a complex world out there. Plus, Democrats listen to Ikenberry and Slaughter, so don't be surprised if the Princeton Project gains traction in 2008. Strikes against: The point of having a grand strategy is to prioritize, and this strategy doesn't. This problem may have been inevitable; Kennan alone will always trump Kennan by committee.

On at least one key dimension, all the contenders for Kennan's throne agree. They all stress the importance of fostering open markets to advance economic development and U.S. power. Just one problem: As Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton point out in "The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want From Our Leaders but Don't Get ," the greatest gap between U.S. policy elites and the American public revolves precisely around international economic policy. As the recent midterm elections demonstrated, economic populism plays far better with Americans today than does free trade.

The grand strategy that wins out in the end may be the one that -- regardless of specific positions on Iraq or terrorism -- convinces Americans that it is possible to have free and fair trade at the same time. By a hair, then, the front-runner is Lieven and Hulsman's ethical realism. By economizing on other forms of power projection, ethical realism potentially frees up resources to cushion the domestic costs of globalization.

At present, however, there is little consensus on a Kennan-like grand strategy. But remember, Kennan's strategy looks a lot better now than it did during the Cold War. The precise definition of containment "was at best ambiguous and lent itself to misinterpretation," Kennan acknowledged in his memoirs. Certainly, Jimmy Carter interpreted containment differently than did Ronald Reagan, who interpreted it differently than did Henry Kissinger.

The foreign-policy establishment may be stumbling around right now, searching for the one strategy to rule them all. It is possible, however, that what looks like disarray today may appear smarter, better -- grander? -- in the future.

To some extent, academic preference for a reorienation reflect a deep dislike of the Bush administration's ambitious, muscular approach to world politics. I don't really care for the law and order based approaches cited, because they seek to rein in American power and interests through deeper integration with multilateral institutions like the U.N. I prefer Mandelbaum's grand strategy of continued promotion of American world power and leadership in an international system of U.S. primacy.

One strike against Drezner's survey: He forgot to mention Christopher Layne's advocacy of a realist, off-shore balancing strategy, a sophisticated and theoretically principled preference for a limited American foreign policy posture. Drezner blogged about his commentary piece over the weekend, and I put up some additional, more detailed comments over there. Drezner doesn't respond much to his commenters, as some elite bloggers are wont to do. One of the reasons I enjoy Ann Althouse's page so much is that she jumps in to debate her visitors on a regular basis, not to mention her shameless self-promotion.

The Republican Party's Identity Crisis

Michael Gerson, who was a principal speechwriter in the Bush White House, coining phrases like "the axis of evil," has an excellent commentary on the future of the GOP at this week's Newsweek:

My low point with the Republican Party came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In attempting to deliver benefits to victims, the administration found men and women who had never had a bank account; families entirely disconnected from the mainstream economy. A problem rooted in generations of governmentally enforced oppression—slavery and segregation—demanded an active response from government to encourage economic empowerment and social mobility.

Yet the response of many Republicans was to use the disaster as an excuse for cutting government spending, particularly the Medicare prescription-drug benefit for seniors. At a post-Katrina meeting with White House officials, one conservative think-tank sage urged: "The president needs to give up something he wants. Why not the AIDS program for Africa?"

This reaction previews a broader, high-stakes Republican debate as we head toward the 2008 election. One Republican Party—the Republican Party of movement conservatives on Capitol Hill and in the think-tank world—will argue that the "big government Republicanism" of the Bush era has been a reason for recent defeats. Like all fundamentalists, the antigovernment conservatives preach that greater influence requires a return to purity—the purity of Reaganism.

But the golden age of austerity under Reagan is a myth. During the Reagan years, big government got bigger, with federal spending reaching 23.5 percent of GDP (compared with just over 20 percent under the current president). But the Reagan reality is more admirable than the myth. He wisely chose what was historically necessary—large defense increases and tax reductions—over what was politically unachievable: a massive rollback of government.

And the critics believe in a caricature of recent budgets. Well over half of President Bush's spending increases have gone to a range of unexpected security necessities, including military imminent-danger pay, unmanned aerial vehicles and biological-weapons vaccines. Other types of discretionary spending have increased at 3.9 percent a year on average—far below President Clinton's double-digit growth in his final year. Why don't anti-government conservatives mention spending increases on defense and homeland security when they make their critique? Because a minimalist state cannot fight a global war—so it is easier for critics to ignore the global war.

As antigovernment conservatives seek to purify the Republican Party, it is reasonable to ask if the purest among them are conservatives at all. The combination of disdain for government, a reflexive preference for markets and an unbalanced emphasis on individual choice is usually called libertarianism. The old conservatives had some concerns about that creed, which Russell Kirk called "an ideology of universal selfishness." Conservatives have generally taught that the health of society is determined by the health of institutions: families, neighborhoods, schools, congregations. Unfettered individualism can loosen those bonds, while government can act to strengthen them. By this standard, good public policies—from incentives to charitable giving, to imposing minimal standards on inner-city schools—are not apostasy; they are a thoroughly orthodox, conservative commitment to the common good.

Campaigning on the size of government in 2008, while opponents talk about health care, education and poverty, will seem, and be, procedural, small-minded, cold and uninspired. The moral stakes are even higher. What does antigovernment conservatism offer to inner-city neighborhoods where violence is common and families are rare? Nothing. What achievement would it contribute to racial healing and the unity of our country? No achievement at all. Anti-government conservatism turns out to be a strange kind of idealism—an idealism that strangles mercy.

But there is another Republican Party—what might be called the party of the governors. It is the party of Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who has improved the educational performance of minority students and responded effectively to natural disasters. It is the party of Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who mandated basic health insurance while giving subsidies to low-income people. Neither of these men embrace big government; both show convincing outrage at wasteful spending. But they have also succeeded in making government work in essential government roles—not a small thing in a post-Katrina world.

The future of the Republican Party depends on which party it wants to be—the party of purity, or the party of the governors. In that decision, Republicans should consider: any political movement that elevates abstract antigovernment ideology above human needs is hardly conservative, and unlikely to win.

Gerson's views are pretty much in sync with my own. Foreign policy is key for me -- so I want the GOP to resolve the Iraq dilemma and work to restore American credibility in the world (whereas the Democrats are more likely to restore Carter-esque impotence). I'm also troubled by continuing chronic cycles of dependency in welfare programs, especially among the African-American community, as well as the racial achievement gap in learning. The Democrats, though, are just now accepting the underlying theories of market-based approaches to welfare reform and individual self-sufficiency. And liberals cling to quota-based approaches to educational advancement for minorities. Gerson's right that Republicans need to abandon purely libertarian philosophies on government, but we should not foster continued expansion of government programs that debilitate the poor either.

In an earlier post, I cited Christine Todd Whitman's claim that GOP moderation will be the ticket to the party's future electoral success.

L.A. County Jail Beset by Explosive Ethnic Violence

Today's Los Angeles Times has a disturbing story on the violence at the Los Angeles County jail, with the depths of depravity there making the lockup tantamount to an ethnic heart of darkness. Here's an excerpt:

On a Tuesday in October 2003, Ki Hong entered Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles to serve a five-day sentence for soliciting a prostitute.

He didn't survive two hours.

Three members of a Korean gang instantly spotted Hong, 34, who authorities allege was a member of a rival gang. The trio had broad freedom to roam the jail because sheriff's deputies had given them jobs as inmate workers — jobs for which they, awaiting trial on murder charges, should have been ineligible.

They let themselves into Hong's dormitory using a guard's control button. Then they stabbed Hong repeatedly, strangled him with bed linen and hid his body in a trash bin.

Since 2000, 14 inmates have been slain in jails run by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, including four this year. Hundreds more have been injured in jail violence.

Taxpayers, who pay more than $500 million a year to operate the jails, paid an additional $6 million since 2004 to compensate inmates and their survivors for errors, negligence and brutality. In addition, a tentative $2.8-million settlement is awaiting county approval.

A Times review found that:

• The Sheriff's Department has failed to protect vulnerable inmates from predators, despite repeated calls for action by jail experts. Last year, deputies placed Chadwick Cochran, a low-level offender with a long history of mental illness, in an unsupervised holding cell with violent gang members. They punched and stomped him to death.

• The department has had increasing difficulty maintaining order at its eight jail facilities. More than 30 major disturbances involving large numbers of inmates erupted this year. Riots left two dead and at least 100 injured. After widespread rioting in 2000, the violence subsided briefly. But the number of disturbances has risen from 47 in 2001 to 112 this year, records show.

• Disciplinary action against sheriff's employees whose lapses contributed to inmate deaths or injuries is often softened or rescinded on appeal. In one case in 2003, a deputy was suspended five days for failing to notice that two inmates, drunk on jail-brewed alcohol, had beaten their mentally ill cellmate to death. A supervisor overturned the suspension over the objections of the department's internal affairs monitor.

The Hong case cost the county $800,000 in legal claims and prompted sanctions against a dozen jail employees. Yet similar failures played a role in at least seven inmate deaths over the next two years.

In the most notorious case, an inmate wandered unescorted through Men's Central Jail for several hours, finally finding a witness who had testified against him in a murder case and strangling him in his cell.

Sheriff Lee Baca says his department has done its best to contain an ever-more-explosive inmate population."

It's remarkable there's not more violence in the context of the county jail demographics," he said in an interview. "It could be 10 to 100 times worse if it wasn't for the managers and deputies in the Los Angeles County Jail. We'll never be singled out for the murders we have prevented."

Read the whole thing. The article suggests that the majority of inmates are Latino, and that African-Americans are an at-risk demographic inside the jailhouse blocks. One in five inmates is a gang member -- pertuating gangland violence inside the lockup -- and most of those landing in jail are there on felony charges. While it looks like there's some incompetence in running the jail, there's clearly a need for more resources, especially in facilities and personnel.

It's sometimes hard to fathom what goes on inside lockups -- whatever takes place there is truly scary, and completely of another world from that familiar to the average, law-abiding middle class American.

Foreign Service Examination a Tough Nut to Crack

Today's Week in Review section over at the New York Times has an interesting article on the Foreign Service examination. The exam's tough, and most who attempt it fail. The State Department has proposed some revisions to make the exam less quantifiable. Check it out:

THE path to the Foreign Service has always been straight and narrow: the first step is the written test, perhaps the nation’s leading smarty-pants exam. Since 1932, hundreds of thousands of applicants have grappled with a half-day of questions on geography, English usage, history, math, economics, culture and more.

“It’s like being on a golf course,” said Justin Norton, a 26-year-old who flunked the test this year and last, but wants to take it again. “You’ve got all the sand traps, the water hazards. I remember I didn’t understand the question about economies of scale. I remember something about Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. And sometimes even when I knew it, like a question about George Kennan and containment policy, I got it wrong anyway.”

It is not an easy exam to study for. The State Department suggests reading a good daily newspaper for a year. There are prep books, and at places with lots of applicants, like the Fletcher School at Tufts University, maybe even a study group. But mostly, people prepare on their own, looking through a world atlas, the Constitution or the word problems they did on the SAT.

Still, the exam gets rid of most applicants. More than three-quarters of the 17,000 to 20,000 who take the exam each year flunk. Even those who pass often remember for years the lacunae in their general knowledge exposed by the test. Where, exactly, are the pampas? What countries neighbor Tunisia?

The test is more about breadth than depth. So for a question about Etruscan vases, the applicant might need to know that the Etruscans preceded the Romans in Italy, but nothing more.

Those who pass the exam go on to an oral interview, where they are hammered with questions and situations by several Foreign Service officers, and the best performer gets the job.

But now, the State Department wants to try a new approach, a bit less quantifiable. At the suggestion of McKinsey & Company, the management consultants, it plans to revamp the process to evaluate what it calls “the Total Candidate,” The Washington Post disclosed last week. The written exam will stay largely the same, although streamlined and given by computer, instead of bubble-sheet and bluebook. Online, the exam will be given more often, to speed the recruitment process, one of the State Department’s main goals.

As applicants register for the exam, they will submit an online “structured résumé” describing their work experience, foreign residence, leadership experience and language abilities, among other things. Then, on the basis of the test results and résumé, combined in some undisclosed metric, a screening committee will decide who goes on to the oral assessment.

Some Foreign Service officers, past and present, applaud the new approach:

“Testing people on their general knowledge, their ability to parse questions, is a poor standard for bringing people into the Foreign Service,” said Mark Van Fleet, who was posted in Thailand for five years. “You get people who are well educated, and understand the relationship of inflation and interest rates. But the test doesn’t measure more important things, like good judgment.”

Be sure to take the article's sample quiz reflecting typical questions from the real Foreign Service exam (I scored five out of six, missing question #1).

Critics of the reforms note that the nonpartisan rationale in State Department hiring will be weakened, opening the doors to more political appointments, or to those simply less qualified.

My Dad was always encouraging me to take the Foreign Service exam. Dad worked for the Army Civilian Service Corps in the 1960s, and a few of his friends were Foreign Service Officers. When I attended Fresno State I got copies of the State Department's practice exam, plus information on exam dates and locations (back then the exam was offered only twice a year, and one had to travel to San Francisco to take it).

I studied international relations with a State Department career in mind. Utimately, I became more interesting in pursuing a Ph.D. in political science, and a career as a professor. Today, in my American government classes I discuss the federal government's hiring process with students, and I relate to them this story on my interest in taking the Foreign Service exam. In my World Politics course in 2001, I had a State Department recruitment officer -- a career diplomat -- visit the class and explain the nature of the job. At least one of my students went on to take exam.

Christmas Wreaths Honor Fallen Military Heroes

Check out this heartwarming story from USA Today on Worcester Wreath Company, which after a production overrun a few years back started laying red-ribboned wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery. Word got around -- spread by a chain e-mail on the Internet -- and Worcester Wreaths are now seasonal phenomenon of holiday giving:

The rows of gravestones stretched out before him like time itself. But when John Lechler saw the date on one particular tombstone, he knew where to lay his wreath. And for a moment, Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. Gordon H. Sterling Jr., who died on Dec. 7, 1941, lived again.

The balsam fir wreath was from Maine — made by hand, decorated by hand, wrapped, boxed and loaded on a truck by hand, then driven 750 miles to Arlington National Cemetery.

This is the miracle of Arlington. "When you first look at that sea of stones, you don't get the impression of individuality," says Tom Sherlock, the cemetery historian. "But if you stop for just a moment and look at the name on the stone, in that moment they're thought of again, and they live again."

Lechler was one of about 600 volunteers at the cemetery Thursday for what has become a new holiday tradition: placing Christmas wreaths — supplied by a Maine businessman who never got over his first sight of the cemetery — on more than 5,000 veterans' graves.

"It's great that we came together to show our gratitude, considering how tough it is for everybody with this war going on," says Lechler, 42, an Ashburn, Va., resident who runs a sports training business and who never served in the military.

Every December for the past 15 years, Morrill Worcester, owner of one of the world's largest holiday wreath companies, has taken time in the midst of his busiest season to haul a truckload of wreaths to Arlington from his small Downeast Maine town of Harrington.

For years, he and a small band of volunteers laid the wreaths in virtual obscurity. In the past 12 months that has changed, thanks to a dusting of snow last year at the cemetery, an evocative photograph, a sentimental poem and a chain e-mail. And this year, Worcester went national. A new program, "Wreaths Across America," shipped a total of about 1,300 wreaths to more than 200 national cemeteries and vets' memorials in all 50 states.

Worcester, 56, says he wants to help Americans remember and honor deceased military veterans, particularly at Christmas, when they're missed most. On the Wreaths Across America website, he makes this comment: "When people hear about what we're doing, they want to know if I'm a veteran. I'm not. But I make it my business never to forget."

Read the whole thing. Worcester first visited Washhington when he was 12, and of all the sights he saw, Arlington affected him most:

"That stuck with me all these years, the enormity of the cemetery," Worcester says. "And the fact that everyone buried there had a personal story, and aspirations and plans for the future, like we all do."

This story fills one with pride and wonderment about the essential goodness of the people of this land.

French Culture Resists Role for Women in Politics

The French Socialist Party has nominated Segolene Royal as the party nominee for the 2007 presidential election. Royal's nomination has stirred debate across the country on the proper role for women in French politics and society. This Christian Science Monitor report has the details:

When Catherine Bailhache was running for a regional council seat in the Atlantic coast area of Brittany earlier this month, she asked for help from the party bosses. But the men - and the kingpins of her center-right party were men - suddenly had other things to do.

She blames the macho streak in French politics.

"There's a certain political culture that believes women should not get involved in politics because they have to take care of their homes and families," says Ms. Bailhache.

The national symbol of France is the bare-breasted warrior-mother, Marianne, who is said to represent liberty, reason, and homeland.

But, despite Ségolène Royal's recent nomination as the country's first female major-party presidential candidate, most real-life French women still find themselves on the sidelines of the political battlefield and less than equal in the corporate world.

A new study by the World Economic Forum, released last month, ranked France in 70th place in terms of parity between men and women in public and economic life, out of a field of 115 countries representing 90 percent of the world's population.

France was beaten by, among others, China, Peru, Russia, Poland, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. The ranking of the United States was 22, Canada was 14th, and the United Kingdom was ninth best in overall success in closing the gender gap.

The Forum, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland, is best known for its annual gatherings of world political and business leaders. Its rankings were based on comparisons of men's and women's salaries, their presence in high-level jobs, access to higher education, representation in political decisionmaking, and life expectancy.

The report's authors said it is "a snapshot of where men and women stand" on fundamental rights, and measures how close countries have come to closing the gender gap.

On average, most of the surveyed countries have nearly closed the gap in education and health and have made progress in the leveling the economic playing field, said Saadia Zahidi , an economist and director of the Forum's women leadership program. The biggest disparities, she said, were in political life empowerment.

The study's conclusions about France tallied with French research.

Women represent 46 percent of the working population but only one-quarter of the managerial jobs in the private sector, according to the national antidiscrimination agency.

Their salaries, on average, are 21 percent lower than the salaries of men in comparable jobs. Also, only 12 percent of the deputies in the National Assembly - and only 17 percent in the Senate - are women.

Many reasons have been offered for the dearth of women in elective office. Some commentators have said it has to do with the fact that the French were ruled by a queen only a handful of times in their history. The newspaper, Le Monde, said it is because women were excluded so long from "citizenship" and only got the right to vote in 1944.

Others point to the French feminist movement that flourished in the 1970s and focused more on social legislation, such as the right to free contraception and legal abortions, than on breaking into male-dominated political party cliques.

Even now, some French feminists bridle at the notion that French women need to fight for their place in a male-dominated political world.

Clara Dupont-Monod, a writer and activist, for example, has criticized Ms. Royal's description of her candidacy as a revolution.

"You make your gender an electoral argument," she wrote last week in the magazine Marianne. "I distrust that because it raises the argument of a battle of the sexes ... and the idea was to make a revolution with men, not against them."

Other French women, however, credit Royal with taking a new tack by making an end-run around the hidebound party establishment and appealing directly to party members to win the Socialist primary last month.

There is some precedent for women in power for the French Socialists. In 1991, Socialist President Francois Mitterand appointed Edith Cresson as French Prime Minister, the first and only time a woman has served in that position. Cresson was remarkable for her consistent hard-line on Japan in trade politics, and I remember her making quite a stir in the early 1990s when governments the world over were worried about Japan emerging as number one.

I'm interested to see how well Royal does with French voters next year. The French political culture prides itself of equality, though traditional gender roles appear pretty sticky in the French system. In the U.S., while Hillary Clinton's presidential bid is generating a lot of public attention, a recent Los Angeles Times Poll found only 4 percent saying they would not vote for a woman.

Iowa Will Be Key in 2008 Presidential Nominations

In presidential nomination politics, Iowa has long had the reputation as a kingmaker due to its role as the first-in-the-nation caucus. The Democrats have tried to weaken Iowa's grip on selecting the party nominee in 2008 by scheduling additional states -- Nevada and South Carolina -- early in the season. As this Los Angeles Times story relates, however, Iowa remains the key destination for presidential aspirants testing the waters for their 2008 White House bids:

There are two main reasons for the unprecedented flurry of activity. The 2008 contest is the most wide-open presidential race since at least 1952, with no president or vice president running. And once they finish tinkering, both parties will probably telescope a nominating process that was already front-loaded.

That makes it all the more critical to do well in Iowa, to build momentum heading into the rapid-fire series of contests that follow. Iowa's caucuses are set for Jan. 14, 2008, followed five days later by caucuses in Nevada. The New Hampshire primary is tentatively set for three days later. South Carolina is scheduled to vote a week after New Hampshire....

Iowa has been a crucial stop on the presidential campaign trail since 1972, when then-Sen. George S. McGovern of South Dakota used a strong showing to push past better-known rivals and capture the Democratic nomination. Four years later, another dark horse, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, won Iowa and, ultimately, the White House. Since then, presidential candidates have ignored the state at their peril."

All sorts of contests are set up to establish a candidate's viability: How much money has the candidate raised? Which organizers have they hired? What kind of website do they have?" said strategist David Axelrod, a veteran of several Iowa campaigns. "This is the first real contest."

Republicans have their own reasons for showing up early and often. The party's calendar may leave little time to recover from an Iowa stumble. Unlike 2000, when the gap was more than two weeks, the South Carolina primary will probably come just seven days after New Hampshire.

A straw poll set for next August may also be a significant, if unscientific, gauge of strength; in the 2000 campaign, the Iowa results effectively knocked several GOP candidates out of the race, months before any real ballots were cast.

By their nature, the Iowa caucuses require a substantial commitment of time and personal effort, on the part of candidates and the people who judge them. Voting for a presidential nominee here is not as simple as dropping by a polling place or mailing in a ballot.

The caucuses are small gatherings that can last for hours. They require participants to publicly state their candidate preference and, often, defend their choice to argumentative friends and neighbors."

This is not an impulse buy," said Doug Gross, a Des Moines attorney who leads Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's Iowa effort. "You want to get comfortable with a candidate, as a person as well as on key issues. That takes time. And the more time you spend in Iowa, usually the better the result."

I find the nomination process fascinating. There are, though, several criticisms of the contemporary primary and caucus system. One critique is that the system is too frontloaded, and disproportionate attention goes to the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. These states have small populations -- generally unrepresentative of the nation as a whole -- but they end up playing a disproportionate role in building momentum for candidates.

The early contests also force candidates to build massive campaign warchests -- as the article here points out -- because there's no time to recover a fundraising edge if one falters in one of the early states. Thus, fundraising prowess becames a key characteristic in which candidates gain traction, which might turn off otherwise top-tier candidates from seeking the nomination. A case in point might be Evan Bayh, who has now decided not to seek the Democratic nomination, according to this Fox News report.

Augusto Pinochet Set Chile on Road to Democracy

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal ran an enlightening editorial on Augusto Pinochet's legacy:

Augusto Pinochet died on Sunday at the age of 91, more than 18 years after he agreed to a 1988 plebiscite that turned him out of power. The standard Pinochet narrative is to emphasize the loss of liberty during the 17 years he ruled the country as a military dictator. The real story is more complicated.

Though General Pinochet became a devil symbol of the international left, he was a far more complex figure and cannot be understood apart from the global Cold War conflict of which he and his country were a part. Pinochet's legacy is a paradox--a long string of them.

He took power in a coup in 1973, but ultimately he created an environment where democratic institutions would prevail. He is responsible for the death and torture that occurred on his watch, but had Salvador Allende succeeded in turning Chile into another Cuba, many more might have died.

Late in life it emerged that he had probably stashed millions in personal bank accounts. But he also supported the free-market reforms that have made Chile prosperous and the envy of its neighbors. Finally, his legacy includes a Chile that is democratic, that truly belongs to the Chilean people; it exists in stark contrast to the nearly five decades of personal (and soon to be fraternal) dictatorship that Fidel Castro is leaving in Cuba.

Pinochet proved the truth of Jeane Kirkpatrick's Cold War distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, with the former far more likely to evolve into freer places. That the international left still gives Castro higher marks is something for democrats everywhere to ponder. The popular notion that the U.S. sanctioned the coup or condoned Pinochet's torture also hasn't held up under historical scrutiny. In particular, his behavior can't be understood without considering the behavior of the Allende government he deposed.

Contrary to mythology, Allende was never a popular figure in Chile. He garnered only 36% of the vote in the 1970 election. His path to the presidency had to run through Chile's congress. Reluctantly, the Christian Democrats agreed to let him go forward only after he promised to accept a "Statute of Guarantees" supporting the rule of law. In office, he moved fast and hard to the left.

Government threats to jail journalists in 1972 brought condemnation from the Inter-American Press Association and the International Press Institute. That same year, shortages and spiraling inflation sent Chilean housewives to the streets banging pots and pans. In the first days of 1973, Allende proclaimed government rationing.

In March, he tried to further accelerate the state's unlawful assault on private property through expropriation. In May the 14 members of the Supreme Court denounced "an open and willful contempt of judicial decisions [by the executive]" that threatened an "imminent breakdown of legality." Throughout 1973 street violence escalated. The coup came in September.

The official death toll of the Pinochet dictatorship is some 3,197. An estimated 2,796 of those died in the first two weeks of fighting between the army and the Allende-armed militias. The balance died in the next 17 years. The Pinochet dictatorship was fraught with illegality. Civil liberties were lost and opponents tortured. But over time, with the return of private property, the rule of law and a freer economy, democratic institutions also returned. An economic crisis in 1982 led to even more economic liberalization.

Let no one doubt that, for the peoples of many nations, the Cold War years were dark times. Like Spain's Franco, Pinochet was an authoritarian who resisted the Communists and created the foundation of what would become a democratic transition. What remains is a Chile that has the healthiest economy in Latin America, a free press and a competitive political system that has allowed Socialists to come to power.

One rarely gets the full story about Chile's flirtation with Marxism in the early-1970s, especially from radical leftists obsessed with the CIA's role in toppling the Allende regime. Unfortunately, level-headed retrospectives such as this won't persuade the numerous America-bashers who are convinced of an evil American imperialist crusade to dominate the world.

Tax Cuts Are Best Anti-Poverty Policy

Social welfare policy is my last lecture topic of the semester. We cover the evolution of U.S. anti-poverty efforts from the early-20th century to the present, focusing on both social insurance and means-tested programs. I conclude with a discussion of (and occasional debate on) and the 1996 welfare reform legislation.

It turns out that today's Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting article from Matthew Ladner at the Goldwater Institute on the role of fiscal policy in fighting poverty:

When the US government ended "welfare as we know it" in 1996, it handed responsibility for reform to the states. In so doing, it also created a real-world test of two competing economic strategies used to fight poverty. The results are in and the lessons are clear: Low tax rates lift up the lives of America's poor.

Many people argue that government can reduce poverty by "redistributing" wealth through progressive taxation - imposing higher tax rates on higher income brackets - and through more government spending.

Most economists, however, say the best way to reduce poverty is through stronger economic growth. Growth means more jobs, a surefire antipoverty plan. Building a strong economy means keeping taxes and government spending low.

A study published last month by the Goldwater Institute, "How to Win the War on Poverty: An Analysis of State Poverty Trends," tests these different theories by examining state poverty rates from 1990 to 2000.

Nationwide, states took great strides in reducing both general and childhood poverty. Poverty fell by 5.3 percent and childhood poverty by 9.4 percent. Some states, however, reduced poverty much more than others, while some states suffered large increases.

Take Colorado. It reduced its childhood poverty rate by almost 27 percent. Meanwhile, Rhode Island's childhood poverty rate increased by almost the same amount. What accounts for those differences?

Using data from the Census Bureau, the report found that states with the lowest tax rates enjoyed sizable decreases in poverty. For example, the 10 states with the lowest total state and local tax burdens saw an average poverty reduction of 13 percent - two times better than the national average. The 10 highest-tax states, meanwhile, suffered an average increase in poverty of 3 percent.

Some high-tax states, such as California, Hawaii, and New York, suffered catastrophic increases in poverty. As California began to reject the low-tax legacy of the Reagan governorship, the state's poverty rate jumped 13 percent in the 1990s.

Some will be quick to dismiss this as a consequence of illegal immigration. But lower-tax border states such as Arizona and Texas had substantial declines in poverty while also experiencing large increases in immigration.

In fact, California's high taxation has been so damaging to the economy that another increase like the one in the 1990s would result in poverty exceeding Mississippi's by 2010.

When a state has a low tax burden, economic growth is stronger. Economic growth delivers more job creation and higher per capita and median family incomes. Economic growth is a powerful means to pull people out of poverty.

Although some policymakers justify high taxes for the sake of the poor, the data show that higher taxes and related spending do little to reduce poverty rates. Rather, states with healthy economic climates have much more success in lifting people out of poverty.

The causes of, and solutions to, poverty are complex, but one policy is clear: Low tax rates are a significant factor in achieving the universal goal of poverty reduction.

This is an intriguing analysis, but one would need a more detailed multivariate study to really sort out the causal factors explaining poverty reduction across states. A good first cut explanation, though, might very well be the impact of low tax rates on state economies, and the residual reduction in poverty rates.

I stress in my classes that robust economic growth is the best poverty-fighter around, as Ladner suggests. In fact, the 1996 welfare reform legislation -- the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) -- was passed just when the economy kicked into its late-decade high gear. Analysts will say that if there was ever a good time to pass a get-tough, work-based welfare reform bill, the late-1990s was it.