Today's Washington Post has an excellent story that I strongly recommend on recent rise in food prices worldwide and resulting international upheaval.Its the exact story I would assign to my World Politics class-- an example of how this thing we call Globalization...
Yet another page in the continuing saga of the Secret Raid on they Syrian Reactor that maybe never was....As many loyal Duck readers know, I've been following this story with fascination since it...
Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I've been sick all week and finally feel like myself again this afternoon, so I'm going to try to catch up on a few things that I had meant to mention...
Earlier this year, Hillary was leading Barack by 25 points in Pennsylvania; by April 22, Obama closed the gap to 9.2. Interestingly, this result has been largely interpreted as a loss for Obama,...
Pundits have frequently compared the 2008 election to 1980. In both elections, the opposition party fielded strong candidates in the face of an unpopular president brought down by economic insecurity and foreign policy disaster. For his part, Senator Barack Obama has openly compared himself to Ronald Reagan -- not in substance, of course, but in transformational style.Reagan won the 1980 Republican nomination for President, but his main opponent became his Vice President and was later elected for the top job. I was a freshman in college during spring 1980 and was taking a course on campaigns...
Peter recently urged me to report from the Pittsburgh grassroots on the Pennsylvania primary. Well, word from Frick International Studies Academy in Pittsburgh is that middle-schoolers are split on who they hope will win tomorrow, and the divisions cut across grade-level. According to my twelve-year old daughter, lunchroom polls at Frick last week reported a majority of 6th-graders support Obama; a majority of 7th-graders support Clinton. The big issue in the lunchroom: neither race nor gender but which candidate will do most to reverse President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which is...
Last week, in the much-maligned Democratic debate in Pennsylvania, Senator Hillary Clinton said that she would greatly expand the US nuclear umbrella in the Middle East: Well, in fact, George [Stephanopoulos], I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region.You know, we are at a very dangerous point with Iran. The Bush policy has failed. Iran...
This weekend I discovered Facebook’s “Which Dictator Are You?” application. This is a seven-question quiz that spits out a result with some basic historical information on a dictator and some cheeky comments about how the application inferred a match from your answers.I have some unanswered questions about how the quiz works and some preliminary thoughts on how history is being communicated through such a device.1) First item of note is the questions themselves. They arguably tell you very little directly about a person’s leadership style. They include things like musical taste, whether you...
A while ago there was some discussion on this blog about the definition of "celebrity" activism for the purposes of empirically studying the entertainment industry's role in advocacy campaigns. A question was raised about what constitutes celebrity status, what constitutes activism, how much the two co-constitute one another in these cases.Jeff Skoll weighed in on this last week in his comments at the Global Philanthropy Forum 2008 Annual Conference in San Jose. Skoll, who founded the Skoll Foundation to create independent films on social topics, believes the definition of "celebrity" can...
Charles Tilly has won the 2008 Albert O. Hirschman Prize.From the announcement:“Charles Tilly is one of the most distinguished of all contemporary social scientists,” said Craig Calhoun, president of the SSRC. “He is the most influential analyst of social movements and contentious politics, a pathbreaker in the historical sociology of the state, a pivotal theorist of social inequality. Among the most eminent of sociologists, he is also a leading voice in history and political science and has played a hugely important role in integrating these fields. His 1975 book, The Formation of National...
An unusually empirical op-ed in the New York Times today tests Obama's hypothesis that "wedge issues take prominence" when voters are frustrated by "difficult times." Larry Bartels uses polling data to demonstrate that in fact, more small-town working class voters believe the government can be trusted than urban voters making more that $60,000 a year, and the small town working class is also least likely to vote on social issues. David Park articulates a similar finding over at The Monkey Cage.To be fair, Obama's remarks were aimed at describing variation over time within a demographic, not...
Some commenters on my recent post about emotions in IR are a little flustered over the difference between Klingons and Vulcans in Star Trek. Representative David Wu of Oregon offers a clarification from the floor of Congress: