Can Obama’s network help Gustav’s victims?

Posted on August 31, 2008 | Daniel Korski | More on Cooperation and coherence, Networks, US politics | Comments Off

As the Gulf Coast gets ready to evacuate and plans for the Republican Convention have been throw into disarray, an interesting question has emerged. To what extent can the Obama campaign use its well-established, grass-roots network to assist the official recovery effort?

Yesterday in Ohio, Senator Obama said he would mobilize its e-mail list of supporters to encourage them to volunteer or send contributions:

We can activate an e-mail list of a couple million people who want to give back. I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary.

Helping victims of crises can be politically-expedient, as well as the humanitarian thing to do.  When Russian-Israeli tycoon Arcadi Gaydamak used his money to build “refugee” camps for victims of Hezbollah’s rockets he wrote himself into Israeli politics.

Barack Obama does not have money, but it is common knowledge that his campaign’s e-mail/grass-roots network is the largest in political history, and campaign team expects to raise $1 billion online during the 2008 campaign, 12 times as much as John Kerry raised through online fundraising in 2004. Many analysts believe that Obama, despite what the national polls say, will eventually pull ahead of McCain because of the national, internet-aided network.

But the idea of using this network for national, non-partisan purposes is novel, though logical. If it is eventually used to help victims of the hurricane and if Obama is elected to the White House could this network be “federalised” or serve as a nucleus of a new Kennedy-style Peace Corps or a way to take the newly-established Civilian Reserve Corps a step further?

Hurricane Gustav

Posted on August 30, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on News, Resilience | Comments Off

Hurricane Gustav has already swept through Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. After Cuba, its projected path will take it over the Gulf of Mexico, before arriving on US shores. New Orleans has already begun a mandatory evacuation for coastal districts and parishes.

You can follow preparations for Gustav on the the Red Cross’ Twitter feed.

A wikipedia page for Gustav (2008) was created today and is being regularly updated.

The Eye on the storm blog is also offering a running commentay.

Update 1: The Gustav Information Center has been created for coordinating volunteer knowledge-sharing related to Hurricane Gustav.

Update 2: Predicted route of Gustav has been updated.

Update 3: New predicted route.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi

Posted on August 30, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Africa | Comments Off

H/t Chris Blattman.

Sarah Palin: climate change not man-made

Posted on August 30, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Climate Change, US politics | 12 Comments

From a Newsmax interview done before her nomination as McCain’s running mate:

What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?

A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.

Wow.  That is so not where John McCain is on climate.  It’ll be fun to watch this pan out…

Shaking up Australian national security

Posted on August 29, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on Asia Pacific, Cooperation and coherence, News | Comments Off

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister he hit the ground reviewing. From education to health, welfare to security no policy area was too large or small. One such area was national security where he promised both a review and a strategy, and he delivered both, if not exactly on time.

9000 miles away in Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will soon publish his long awaited review of national security. According to some analysts, one of the first things he will do is appoint Duncan Lewis as his national security adviser. Major General Lewis will co-ordinate Australia’s long-term security planning. Interestingly, one of Brown’s first decisions on becoming PM was to do away with a similar post in the Cabinet Office (Permanent Secretary on Security, Intelligence and Resilience) preferring instead to have three individuals at the same level: Robert Hannigan (security adviser to Gordon Brown) plus Jon Cunliffe and Simon MacDonald).

According to various internal and media reports Kevin Rudd is due to publish a ground-breaking national security statement this coming week. By the sound of it, the strategy will be pretty similar in nature and scope to the UK Government’s work. There is also a likelihood that that Kevin Rudd will outline some of the changes to the national security apparatus which many believe has focused too much on counter terrorism.

Australian public servants will also want to thank Ric Smith, who was put in charge of the review into Homeland Security. This could have been a major opportunity to rearrange bureaucratic deck chairs - and cause all sorts of problems - which the DHS is currently facing. Instead he has recommended against the creation of a department of homeland security, saving precious time and resources and a major headache for public servants and Ministers.

McCain’s VP on climate

Posted on August 29, 2008 | David Steven | More on Climate Change, Communication, Middle East, US politics | Comments Off

All the buzz today is that Sarah Palin, Alaska’s governor, will be McCain’s vice president pick. Interesting to see how close she is to him on climate change…

Interesting, also, that the first rumours appeared to have popped up on a pro-Hilary and now pro-McCain website… and [update 1] are now being reported as untrue. With Romney now also said to be out, McCain is doing a masterful job of building up suspense… but [update 2] it’s now confirmed…

Update 3: She doesn’t like polar bears… but she is into creationism.

Update 4:This is what she said before she got offered the job:

[A]s for that V.P. talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the V.P. does every day? I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that V.P .slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here for the rest of the U.S., before I can even start addressing that question.

Oh - and she has a baby with Down’s Syndrome, who she took to work as governor so she could keep breastfeeding:

When we first heard, it was kind of confusing. It was very, very challenging. [But now,] it just feels like he fits perfectly. He is supposed to be here with us.

Global Vulnerability

Posted on August 29, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on Africa, Asia, Asia Pacific, Climate Change, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Development, Food prices, Global economy, Middle East, Resilience, Russia | Comments Off

The new report on Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots, which was carried out by CARE International, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Maplecroft is definitely worth a read.

The map below shows overall human vulnerability based on a combination of natural, human, social, financial and physical factors. Areas shown in darkest blue are likely to be most at risk if exposed to extreme weather, such as floods, cyclones and droughts, or other impacts of climate change.

From the report:

The study used GIS mapping to understand how the projected impacts of climate change will intersect with existing patterns of human vulnerability or so called disaster risk hotspots.

This allows the identification of current and future hotspots of climate change risk. The results illustrate the implications of climate change for humanitarian assistance so that policymakers can grasp the nature and scale of the challenge we face and humanitarian actors can begin adapting their response strategies to the realities of climate change.

Straight Intta Compton: Wu-Tang Clan expand their thinking on the Democratic agenda

Posted on August 28, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Cities, Communication, Leadership, US politics | Comments Off

Readers have welcomed my decision to eschew the NYT op-ed page in favor of RZA’s commentary on the election, but it turns out that the Wu-Tang Clan is a cabinet of all the wits.  MTV reports that Raekwon has also been in Denver, although technically for a show rather than punditry… but wait:

He wants Barack to win, but said he’s worried that “if he do win, they’re going to put him in a situation where the country’s going to be haywire,” meaning that Obama could be set up for failure since he would be entering the presidency at a difficult economic time for the country.

He also commented on John McCain, saying, “McCain is cool but nobody knows about McCain. Barack is connected to the community, and people in the community want to see a change.”

The point about McCain is a bit weak, but the fact that 2009 may be a bad year to be a new president is a good one - and less glib than, say, Thomas Friedman’s column yesterday. Still, this is all somewhat short on policy ideas. For those, turn to Wu-Tang’s Method Man, who set out this strategy while in the UK in June:

The rapper is a big fan of the Democrat but he insists no new president should be allowed to lead the country without visiting the toughest areas of America.

He says, “My people never feel the effects of who changes the world or who’s in office because it never trickles down that low on the scale. We don’t feel the President’s power down there (in Compton, LA, as in “Straight Outta…”), we just feel the poverty. Blessings to Obama and the whole Obama click. Hopefully he’ll bring his ass to Compton and walk through the war zone to see what it is. Somebody told me, ‘Why would he go there; that’s dangerous.’ That’s why he should go!”

With half the press hard at work linking LBJ, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama (OK, Robert Caro had a rather fine piece in the NYT about all that) it’s a fair point.

John McCain has a very large barbecue

Posted on August 28, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Off topic | Comments Off

At the start of the month, Richard pointed out the interesting fact that Nicolas Sarkozy has a very large television.  The picture he supplied proved that this was indeed the case; but it is as nothing compared to John McCain’s barbecue, which looks like something out of Mission Control:

Richard ripostes: or does he?  Mr. McCain is, of course, Senator for Arizona and an inspection of Arizona’s #1 BBQ Club suggests that his electorate have much larger contraptions.  Like this one:

Paul Collier’s dubious vision for developing country agriculture

Posted on August 28, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Africa, Development, Food prices | Comments Off

Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, is amusing himself by taking shotguns to sacred cows on agriculture and development again.  This time, as Owen Barder points out, he’s on Comment is Free, where he regales us with his views on GM technology.  As you may have guessed, he’s not in quite the same place as Prince Charles:

[Europe's] GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out of the market for GM technology, the pace of research has slowed. GM research takes a long time to come to fruition, and its core benefit - the permanent reduction of global food prices - cannot fully be captured through patents. European governments should be funding this research, but it is entirely reliant on the private sector. Private money for research depends on the prospect of sales, so the ban has not only blocked public research - it has reduced private research …

It is conventional to say that Africa needs a green revolution. The reality is that the green revolution was based on chemical fertilisers, and even when fertiliser was cheap, Africa did not adopt it. With the rise in fertiliser costs as a byproduct of high energy prices, any green revolution will perforce not be chemical. What African agriculture needs is a biological revolution. This is what GM offers, if only sufficient money is put into research. There has as yet been no work on the crops specific to the region, such as cassava and yams.

What to make of his claims?  Well, first, I’m curious about his source for the assertion that Europe would have 15% higher grain yields if it permitted GM, as in fact, GM tech hasn’t actually made any major advances in yields for the three main cereal crops (wheat, rice and maize).

What’s certainly true that GM technologies can contribute to making crops more resilient to biotic stresses (pests, weeds etc.).  The second generation of GM research is now focusing on abiotic stresses like reduced water availability, soil salinisation etc.  But if life sciences represent one R&D approach towards more resilient agriculture, an alternative is ecologically integrated approaches like integrated pest management, integrated soil fertility management and so on.

What both approches have in common is moving away from the Green Revolution’s high-input approach and towards a high-knowledge approach instead.  But whereas in life sciences, the knowledge-intensiveness is concentrated at the top end of the supply chain - in R&D labs in biotech and seed companies - with whole systems approaches, the type of knowledge involved is both more participative, and more open to local adaptation.  Given adequate investment in extension services to train farmers, then, the latter approach can improve economic resilience as well as crop resilience - by reducing farmers’ dependence on expensive off-farm inputs.

Although there’s much to admire about Collier, when it comes to agriculture, his approach does sometimes come across as a bit, well, ideological.  Here he is in The Times a few months back, for instance, where he says:

 ”The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply. The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies that supply the world market. There are still many areas of the world - including large swaths of Africa - that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To contain the rise in food prices we need more, globalisation not less.

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is deeply, perhaps irredeemably, unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them.

In Africa, which cannot afford such policies, the World Bank and the Department for International Development have orientated their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant-style production. Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had 60 years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is not well suited to innovation and investment. The result has been that African agriculture has fallen farther and farther behind.” [emphasis added]

The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply?  Not necessarily.  Remember Amartya Sen’s sage observation on this point: food security is less about the overall quantum of food available than about who has the resources to access it: as he once put it pithily, “starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat.  It is not the characteristic of there not being enough to eat”. 

So although we do indeed need to increase global food supply - by 50% by 2030, the World Bank reckon - that on its own ain’t enough.  The process also has to work for the three quarters of the world’s poor who live in rural areas, most of whom rely at least partly on agriculture.  Although these people should have benefited from high food prices, they haven’t - because they’re largely net food buyers, not net food sellers; because fertiliser costs have risen even faster than food prices; because they’ve got poor infrastructure; and so on.

Now, if you’re Collier, you probably think that the best thing for poor people in rural areas would be if they just packed themselves up and decamped to the nearest city.  But actually, the evidence set out in the latest World Development Report supports the opposite case.  Between 1993 and 2002, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day declined from 28% to 22% of people in developing countries.  The principal driver for this improvement, the report continues, has been falling poverty in rural areas (where poverty fell from 37% to 29% over the same period) - and 80% of the decline in rural poverty was due not to migration to cities, but simply to better conditions in rural areas. 

Countries like Vietnam show that ag-based growth, export success and smallholder farming can all come together in a virtuous circle: unlike most developing countries, Vietnam has done reasonably well out of high food prices.  But to achieve this, various factors need to be in place: infrastructure, access to credit, access to technology, functioning markets, risk management mechanisms, acess to assets backed up by effective rule of law and dispute resolution, etc. etc. 

But most small farmers in Africa have never had the benefit of these enabling conditions.  In this regard, they’ve been let down by their governments (who despite an African Union target of spending 10% of government budgets on agriculture, mostly spend less than half that level), and by donors (who largely forgot about agriculture until the food price spike, having allowed the proportion of development assistance spent on agriculture to fall from nearly 20% at its peak to around 3% today).

Perhaps it would be worth trying out what real commitment to making smallholder farming work could achieve in Africa, before jumping to the conclusion that the only way forward is to empty Africa’s countryside of people?

Team Miliband

Posted on August 28, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on UK politics | Comments Off

The gossip-laden public affairs magazine Pr Week, which caught our attention some months ago, is back with a focus on Miliband. One article leads with news that D-J Collins of Google would be Miliband’s director of communications should he become PM, which may not be terribly exciting to readers of GD. Turn the page, however and you can feast your eyes on Miliband’s circle of power… (click to enlarge).

Update: According to the The Independent Stephen Carter, Brown’s PR guru, is to be sidelined. Jeremy Heywood, Permanent Secretary at No.10 is seen to have won over Brown.

The Caucasus crisis: Conspiracy theory #21

Posted on August 28, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on News, Russia | Comments Off

Numerous conspiracy theories on the Caucasus crisis are zipping round cyberspace. The latest from from Scott Lucas at Birmingham University:

it turns out that Dick Cheney’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, Joseph Wood, was hanging out in Tbilisi just before Georgia’s assault upon South Ossetia on 7 August.  The official explanation is that Wood was helping set up Cheney’s visit to Georgia, along with stops in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan, in the first week of September. Hmmm…

The Olympics via Venezuelan state TV

Posted on August 28, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on Off topic | Comments Off

The games are over, but courtesy of Daniel Duquenal, a video gem from the swimming pool. Michael Phelps is on his way to win his 8th gold medal, Venezuelan state TV is primed and ready.

That’s right, in the excitement of the men’s final the anchorman confuses Michael Phelps with Mark Spitz, and suggests Hitler refused to give Phelps a medal at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Climate, McCain and the Republican Convention

Posted on August 27, 2008 | David Steven | More on Climate Change, US politics | Comments Off

Uniting the Republican Party and John McCain on climate change is a fiendishly difficult task, as a fascinating article by Stephen Spruiell shows.

By the time you’re done, you’ve scratched through so many lines and penciled in so many revisions that the document is barely legible. I wish I could show you my copy of the energy section of the 2008 Republican Platform’s working draft. You wouldn’t be able to read it, but you’d see what I mean.

The original draft accepted the reality of climate change and argued for ‘measured and reasonable’ action, while cautioning against “the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by the aficionados of centralized command-and-control government.”

But it has proved contentious in committee. So what were the rows about?

Firstly, and most strangely, the word ‘global warming’ has proved controversial. Of course, experts tend not to use the term and prefer climate change (which helps “to convey that there are changes in addition to rising temperatures.”)

But Republicans are nervous about the warming word for another reason. They are unconvinced the world is getting hotter. The phrase “increased atmospheric carbon has a warming effect on the earth” has therefore been excised from the draft platform. And climate change has been used in preference to global warming throughout.

Compromise was also necessary to keep the door ajar for McCain’s preferred policy of cap and trade:

The working draft purposefully left McCain enough room to continue his support for an artificial ceiling on carbon emissions. The subcommittee improved the working draft by specifying that any proposals “should not harm the economy,” but it did not add anything that explicitly precludes McCain from supporting cap-and-trade. McCain is still free to argue that a cap-and-trade regime wouldn’t inhibit economic growth, and conservatives are still free to disagree.

Any cap and trade scheme must have no economic downside, in other words. (Or could any downside be balanced against the economic impact of unchecked warming?) Policy responses must be ‘global in nature’ as well, which would probably translate into a tough policy on China.

But this may not be enough for base. To sample its thinking, head over to the Republican Party site that solicits grassroots opinion on the platform. Here are extracts from the five most recent contributions that mention global warming:

Do NOT add “global warming” to the GOP platform. Do not fall for this nonsense. Its a fraud.

Under no circumstance should the platform even mention global warming, unless its a statement to acknowledge the evidence that we aren’t causing it.

I just saw on Drudge that there is to be a plank for global warming. If the Republicans fall for this false science, I have no one left to vote for and our economy will be ruined. Read what Senator James Imhof has to say about it all. He knows.

I cannot believe that the GOP is adding global warming to its platform. How can I respect my party if it can’t even come up with its own scams to increase the size and power of government, but has to adopt scams from the like of Al Gore.

Global Warming is a hoax! Why would we get on Al Gore’s bandwagon?

I would say there’s 80% agreement with the statement: “Man Made global warming is the biggest lie ever sold to the U.S. and the world.” For McCain as President - or for any President who bought a treaty home for ratification - there’s a long struggle ahead.

The FCO’s failure over Russia

Posted on August 27, 2008 | Jules Evans | More on Europe, Russia | Comments Off

The typical criticism of the Foreign Office is the one eloquently expressed in John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener - that they are pitiless practitioners of real-politik who care more about stability than idealism, and who only really work to protect the interests of British corporations, rather than British values.

But on Russia, the FCO seems to have erred on the other side. They seem committed to sacrificing our strategic relationship with Russia on the altar of pointless liberal grand-standing.

The rot set in, it seems to me, when the previous ambassador to Moscow, Sir Roderic Lyne, was replaced by the present ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton. Lyne was well-liked, tactful, amusing (always a great asset in Russia) and - in a word- diplomatic. Brenton was more of an analyst, highly intelligent, but lacking in the social skills and sureness of touch that Lyne possessed.

Brenton made the error of attending the ‘Other Russia’ political rally in 2006. The Other Russia movement was an opposition movement led by Garry Kasparov, which also included Eduard Limonov, a proto-fascist punk. Other countries, such as the US, sent government figures to the opposition conference, but the only ambassador present was the UK’s.

It was a mistake. An ambassador of course keeps touch with the various political factions in a country, but they should never publicly throw in their lot with an opposition, particularly an opposition which had so little popular support in Russia. Garry Kasparov gets an enormous amount of press in the West, but he’s barely even a marginal figure in Russian politics. And the Kremlin was furious with this public support for the opposition. Brenton is being replaced in October, but his time in Moscow has been disastrous for UK-Russian relations.

Then, when Alexander Litvinenko was brutally murdered in London, I was surprised to hear the British government come out and, basically, accuse the Kremlin of the murder, and condemn the Kremlin for failing to extradite Andrei Lugovoi. Miliband, new to the job and all-fired-up, gave the Kremlin an ultimatum - extradite Lugovoi or else.

But the Kremlin was never going to extradite Lugovoi - firstly, because the UK almost always refuses Russia’s requests for extradition (including requests to extradite Litvinenko himself) on the grounds that Russia’s judicial system can’t be trusted. So why should Russia cooperate with us? And secondly, why would the FSB, which is incredibly paranoid about MI6 and thinks it rules the world, hand over one of its agents, albeit a somewhat rogue agent, to MI6?

So Miliband was left looking outspoken, weak, and naive.

In the Georgian crisis, there were no good-guys. The Georgian government’s response to fighting with South Ossetians was extremely heavy-handed, with a huge bombardment of Tskhinvali by artillery. A balanced response would have condemned Russia’s involvement in the crisis, while also asserting the need to protect the lives of Ossetian civilians, which the Georgian government does not seem willing to protect.

But Miliband again weighed in with a surprisingly outspoken and one-sided response, which blamed Russia entirely for the conflict. His piece in the Times was such a one-sided polemic that it came as something of a shock to read at the end of it ‘David Miliband is the Foreign Secretary’.

He is now travelling to Ukraine to drum up ‘the widest possible support for a coalition against Russian aggression’. What is the gameplan here? Is this just a coalition ‘against Russia’? What are the coalition’s concrete goals?

It just seems really badly thought out, just more liberal grandstanding, more unnecessary alienation of Russia, and even potentially alienation of Ukrainians, half of whom speak Russian, and who feel more sympathy with Russia than any British youth stepping off a plane to deliver a speech. Ukraine has deep ties with Russia, and depends on Russian gas, so will never sign up to some vague ‘coalition against Russia’.

President Yushchenko might meet with Miliband and voice support, but Yushchenko is deeply unpopular and on the way out, while prime minister Timoshenko, the rising power and likely next president, has already said Ukraine wants to keep out of any military conflicts and has conspicuously failed to condemn Russia’s actions in Georgia. I wonder if she will even bother meeting Miliband.

So our foreign minister will again look weak, toothless and naive.

Yes, Ukraine’s government wants to join NATO. But its population doesn’t, so that is unlikely to happen as well. Ukraine is a country which has, at times, looked like it could be split into two, a Russian-speaking and a Ukrainian-speaking part. They are trying to forge a unity out of their young country. The last thing they need is some vain young Brit trying to draw a battle-line through the middle of their country.

Whatever happened to an intelligent, and diplomatic FCO? When did it become so shrill, so driven by the desire to look good domestically rather than achieve anything real globally?

I’m not for a moment claiming that the Russian government is anything other than a KGB kleptocracy which picks fights with small neighbouring countries in order to increase its popularity at home. But there’s no point grand-standing against it. Identify your goals, then identify the best way to achieve them. Simply mouthing off against Russia might feel noble but it’s counter-productive - the regime is very popular, and is likely to be in power for many years to come.

The best way to limit iRussian expansionism is to take away the excuse for its expansionism by making sure that former colonies - Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltic countries - respect the rights of Russian citizens living within their borders. If the EU takes a pro-active stance on that, it takes the wind out of Russia’s victimist rhetoric.

Celebrity galas in the McCain White House are going to be awful

Posted on August 26, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Communication, Influence, Public diplomacy, US politics | Comments Off

Do you know who these people are?

You do?  OK, get off this blog and play outside.  You don’t? Then you’re over 16.  They are the Jonas Brothers, a Disney-produced band with an enormous following among early teens in States.  Last week, we found out that Dick Cheney’s a fan too, as the lads visited the White House to make a public service film about national parks and the Veep brought his granddaughters by to say hello.

About time.  The Brothers have “visited the Bush White House three times, and are noted Evangelical Christians”.  This leads us to the all-important question of which celebrities we can expect to see in the White House as of January next year.  I’ve highlighted Barack Obama’s success in bringing RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan into public politics, but musicians up to and including Kanye West are descending on the Democratic Convention in hordes like never before.  That has not, of course, stopped the Democrats from reportedly booking Springsteen and Bon Jovi to headline before Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday - they may have a fifty-state electoral strategy, but musically they’re all New Jersey.

The real question is, however, what the celebrity coterie hanging around a McCain White House might look like.  The candidate launched a small war with Paris Hilton, and is trying to spark something similar with Madonna.  Earlier this year, Doonesbury ran a great series of comic strips about a Hollywood fixer trying to recruit stars for the Republicans, settling for a lesser Baldwin brother.  Now,  the NYT blog reveals, politics is imitating satire, but at a sub-Baldwin level.  Here’s its account of a recent fundraiser in Hollywood, oddly entitled “McCain’s celebrities”:

The (press) pool reported that the actors in the crowd included Gary Sinise, Dean Cain, Jon Voight, Jon Cryer, Angie Harmon, Craig T. Nelson and Lorenzo Lamas, among others.

Shouldn’t that be “McCain’s celebrity“?  Jon Voight is, of course, a big name.  The rest?  Gary Sinise was good as the guy left on the ground in Apollo 13.  Erm, Dean Cain was solid in the Superman TV series in the mid 1990s, but let’s face it: co-star Teri Hatcher has gone further.  So what are we to make of this?

Mr. McCain was cheered when he told the crowd that he “would like to thank so many brave and courageous people who are here that happen to be in the business of Hollywood who are risking their entire futures and careers.”

He must be thinking of Dean’s rumored involvement in Maneater, in pre-production:

A former FBI profiler, now a sheriff of a small town and a single parent of a high school aged daughter, begins to profile a series of unexplained murders only to learn that the monster he’s profiling may be himself.

Ooh, I’m looking forward to that.  If nothing else, Mr. Cain hamming it up sounds more fun than a celebrity gala at the McCain White House.

Wu-Tang Clan nail political analysis: “Rambo was crazy!”

Posted on August 25, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Communication, Off topic, Public diplomacy, US politics | Comments Off

Enough with the NYT op-ed page!  My main point of reference in the U.S. election will be the Wu-Tang Clan.  In an interview with New York magazine’s Denver bloggers, RZA goes places that Dowd, Herbert et al have never been…

What do you think of Biden?

I don’t know Mr. Biden. I just saw him on TV yesterday.

He got in trouble last year for saying Obama was the first “clean and articulate” African-American candidate we’d ever had run for president.

He got in trouble for that?!

I guess it was seen as stereotyping.

A lot of us ain’t clean and articulate, because we grew up in harsh conditions. So Mr. Obama is clean and articulate. I’m actually proud to watch him on TV, myself, as a black man, because I think we hold our dicks when we walk — know what I mean? — and he got something about him that’s really classy. It’s like in every nation and every race, you have some people that are born as a prince because of the natural way they are.

Do you support him because he’s the first black candidate or for other reasons?

I’m not really a political guy. Some of my friends were supporting Hillary in the beginning, and I do what my friends do. I was trying to help Hillary in the beginning.

Really? Why?

Because I thought, When the Clinton family was in office, my family had better food in their house. I could call my aunt up and she could say, “Yeah, things is good.” Now everybody calls me for money. So I thought that Clinton could help out families better. But when she moved out of the race and I started watching Mr. Obama, I actually became a fan of his. You know, this man has something elegant about him!

And I watched Mr. McCain, too, and I know he went through a struggle with the war and all that. But in all reality, if you’re a P.O.W., it means you’ve been locked up and in jail. And in our country, you can’t vote as a felon. A lot of people can’t vote because once you’ve been locked up and incarcerated, it changes your mentality. He did that for his country. That’s a great thing and a great sacrifice. But people I know have been making comments, saying, “You know, a man who’s been through that … Rambo was crazy!”

Texting rebels

Posted on August 25, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Africa, Communication, Conflict and security, Development, Influence, Networks | Comments Off

From BBC Focus on Africa, via the excellent Chris Blattman:

Each morning the 36-year-old powers up a small United Nations radio transmitter and starts broadcasting from his mountain shack. His antenna points directly at the rebels in the bush. They know him by his call name “Mike India”.

…every so often, he reads out his phone number. Between the hours of 1am and 4am — when mobile minutes are free — his phone is deluged. Some rebels want to know where to demobilise, others rant about Paul Kagame, the current Rwandan president and former Tutsi rebel leader. Some just want Mike India to play different music.

These conversations are particularly extraordinary because neither the United States nor the United Kingdom- key Rwandan allies - have any official dialogue with the Hutu rebel groups (something diplomats from both countries complain about in private). Mike India not only talks to the rebels, he exchanges texts with them.

Brits abroad

Posted on August 24, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Public diplomacy | Comments Off

This is the third most emailed story on the NY Times site today.  Great.

The Future of War Reporting

Posted on August 24, 2008 | Daniel Korski | More on Communication | Comments Off

Since the Russian invasion of Georgia there has been a lot of discussion about the media war and who won it. The Guardian’s Peter Wilby, like many others, think “the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully.”

But another aspect seems to have received a little less attention – namely the nature of the media’s coverage and how it differed from other wars. Or, as a future PhD thesis might be titled: “The Media Coverage of the Georgian War: A Comparative Perspective.”

Let’s start with the Iraq War, which, like the Bosnian War before it, was a milestone in journalistic history. The tactics of the early Iraqi insurgency - indiscriminate killings, road-side bombs, kidnappings etc. – as well as the occasional Coalition aerial attack made the war the deadliest for the media. The war and its deadly aftermath have cost more reporters’ lives than any other conflict.

But reporting, too, seemed to undergo a transformation from its earlier Balkan incarnation. The Iraq War initially took the embed concept to the extreme. Viewers were up, close and personal - yet at the same time removed, as reporters were placed under different forms of censorship. We, the viewers, knew what the soldiers felt, could hear the whizzing bullets and could see their ghostly green silhouettes during night-time raids, but were left in the dark about the larger picture.

As post-combat stability gave way to violence, insurgency and chaos, it became too difficult to report outside Baghdad’s Green Zone. Suddenly we were looking down the other end of the media telescope: it became easier to understand the big picture – the missing WMD, the faltering reconstruction, the developing insurgency - but much of the detail was became, or at least fragmented. Relationships and personal stories – a stable of Balkan reporting – seemed rarer. Footage was usually after the event; a bomb would go off, but by the time the crew would to shoot the scene the bodies had been removed.

But in Georgia, the business of war-reporting seemed to take a step back to its Balkan version. Reporting was on the spot and live again. Really live. Pictures were not only after the event, but during the happening. We saw the footage as it happened, to the people, to the journalists. Even to the soldiers. “Embedded journalism” was live, but controlled. This was live and uncontrolled. David Chkhikvishvili’s video images of Georgian rockets being launched towards South Ossetia were live – and the first most people heard of the conflict.

But the war also seemed a little grittier, a post-Iraq kind of Balkans War - more indiscriminate, and more dangerous for reporters. Before the Russian suspension of hostilities, a Reuters reporter’s vehicle narrowly escaped bomb blasts near Gori. Jon Williams, an editor for BBC News, went so far as to call the safety situation during the conflict “catastrophic”.

As the prospect of state-to-state conflict seemed outdated before the Georgian War, so journalism seemed to be in a permanent post-Iraq state. Things have changed and it will be interesting to hear the progression reflect on these changes in the weeks to come.

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