Bono: EU definition lies eight miles away

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1601932,00.html

(Sustainable development in Africa may be one the topic choices for our final exam project. Following the lead of my favorite rock star when he read the founding document of the EU, the Treaty of Rome, 2007, we will consider the EU's role in Africa here in this re-run post.)

In saying the West’s (particularly Europe’s) greatest depends on how it deals with Africa, Bono wrote in an essay in Time Magazine:

“Fast-forward 50 years. An Irish rock star reads the treaty with the enthusiasm a child has for cold peas but does uncover what I think technocrats might call poetry. Not much of it--just a turn of phrase here and there. Like Article 177, which summons the signatories to foster "the sustainable economic and social development of the developing countries and more particularly the most disadvantaged among them" and calls for a "campaign against poverty in the developing countries." Not exactly Thomas Jefferson but a glimpse of the kind of vision that might bind us.

Over the next 50 years, we might need a little more poetry. Europe is a thought that has to become a feeling--one based on the belief that Europe stands only if injustice falls and that we find our feet only when our neighbors stand with us in freedom and equality. Our humanity is diminished when we have no mission bigger than ourselves. And one way to define who we are might be to spend more time looking across the eight miles of Mediterranean Sea that separates Europe from Africa.

There's an Irish word, meitheal. It means that the people of the village help one another out most when the work is the hardest. Most Europeans are like that. As individual nations, we may argue over the garden fence, but when a neighbor's house goes up in flames, we pull together and put out the fire. History suggests it sometimes takes an emergency for us to draw closer. Looking inward won't cut it. As a professional navel gazer, I recommend against that form of therapy for anything other than songwriting. We discover who we are in service to one another, not the self.

Today many rooms in our neighbor's house, Africa, are in flames. From the genocide in Darfur to the deathbeds in Kigali, with six AIDS patients stacked onto one cot, from the child dying of malaria to the village without clean water, conditions in Africa are an affront to every value we Europeans have ever seen fit to put on paper. We see in Somalia and Sudan what happens if more militant forces fill the void and stir dissent within what is, for the most part, a pro-Western and moderate Muslim population. (Nearly half of Africa's people are devotees of Islam.) So whether as a moral or strategic imperative, it's folly to let this fire rage.”

The entire text of Bono’s essay is linked at the top. You, of course, can refer back to http://www.data.org/ and http://www.one.org/ for more information. The ONE Campaign is an example of a grassroots (really netroots) linkage institution.

As a group, the EU countries have committed 0.7% of GDP to help the poorest of the poor. So far, as the saying goes the check is, well, in the mail. At the end of the essay, the songwriter pens, “What will define Europe in this new era…..Part of the answer lines eight miles away.”

If only it could become a hit.

The Lords' Filibuster: Undignified and inefficent?

We never got through this whole short entertaining video in class about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which is part of the UK coalition government's bill that would call for a Voting Reform Referendum to be held. Labour is against the measure, because it would reduce the number of seats in the House of Commons from 650-to-600.

From Ken Wedding's Comparative Government blog, the Lords are doing the delaying for Labour in a less than traditional way:

Undignified and inefficient?
Nearly 150 years ago, Walter Bagehot (in his book The English Constitution) drew a distinction between the dignified and efficient parts of the British regime. The dignified part represented the nation and "excited" the loyalty of the people. The efficient part of the regime did the "work of government."

The monarchy obviously was "dignified." Commons was "efficient," even if it got bogged down in political wrangling sometimes.

In the last 150 years, the House of Lords became more and more an element of the dignified part of the UK regime. However, its ability to "excite" the loyalty of the people has been questionable. Questionable to the point that there are suggestions floating about to abolish the Lords or to make it an elected body.

Recently the debate about alternative voting in the UK has dragged the House of Lords directly into the political fray. Observers like the New York Times' Sarah Lyall wonder whether Lords is dignified or efficient. How dignified can it be when peers drag out cots for naps during all-night debates like common state legislators in the US? And how efficient can they be when legislation is stalled by what amounts to a filibuster?

Election Bill Erodes Decorum in House of Lords

It was nearly midnight on Day 12 of the most grueling debate in recent House of Lords memory, and not all the Lords present were, strictly speaking, awake. But the Right Honorable Lord Davies of Oldham was warming to the question of the hour: a proposal to change “may” to “should” on Page 10, Line 7, of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill…

Give him points for enthusiasm, at least. With the coalition government and the Labour opposition both refusing to compromise on a measure that has severely divided them, the debate had already ground on for 98 hours across several weeks. The peers are not the youngest group of people ever to populate a legislature, and on Monday, after several all-nighters, some Lords were reaching the outer limits of coherence, patience and stamina…

The bill would trigger a referendum May 5 on whether to change the way election votes are calculated, and it would redraw Britain’s parliamentary boundaries, reducing the number of seats in the House of Commons to 600, from 650. The coalition government wants it, because it would fulfill the Liberal Democrats’ pledge to enact voting reform, and because the Conservatives would benefit from the boundary changes.

Labour is resisting because, while it supports voting reform, it vehemently opposes the redistricting proposal. The measure must become law by Feb. 16 in order for the May 5 referendum to proceed, and Labour is determined to delay the bill so that it misses the deadline.

Normally, opposition parties adopt a spirit of compromise and bonhomie in the House of Lords. Not this time. The government seems unwilling to budge, and Labour has resorted to virtually unprecedented delaying tactics.

These include proposing picayune amendments — more than 270 so far — discussing them for hours, and then, because they have no chance of passage, withdrawing them…

At one point during last Monday’s all-night session, Baron Trefgarne, a Conservative, drew gasps from other Lords when, saying he was fed up with the “abuse of the procedures of this house,” set in motion a procedural tool to bring an end to debate on the amendment in question — the first time such a tool has been used in 40 years, and only the sixth or seventh time since 1900...

//www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/world/europe/26lords.html

Scandal Between the Sheets in Parliament?

Is it the latest Parliamentary sex scandal? Speaker Bercow's wife posed in a bed sheet (only a bed sheet) in front of a window overlooking the Houses of Parliament. Is this a Parliamentary Scandal (there have been a few of those) or just Valentine's Day fun, as Sally Bercow said in the interview below:


//www.mizozo.com/weird/02/2011/04/sally-bercow-wife-of-the-speaker-of-britain-s-hous....html

Would this be different if it was, say, the U.S. Speaker of the House's wife?

BTW, here is a brief Bio on the British Speaker and his role in the House of Commons (from Wikipedia):

The Speaker of the House of Commons is the presiding officer of the House of Commons, the United Kingdom's lower chamber of Parliament. The current Speaker is John Bercow, who was elected on 22 June 2009, following the resignation of Michael Martin. He was returned as a MP in the 2010 general election and was re-elected as Speaker when the House sat at the start of the new Parliament on 18 May 2010.

The Speaker presides over the House's debates, determining which members may speak. The Speaker is also responsible for maintaining order during debate, and may punish members who break the rules of the House. Unlike presiding officers of legislatures in many other countries, the Speaker remains strictly non-partisan, and renounces all affiliation with his former political party when taking office. The Speaker does not take part in debate nor vote (except to break ties, and even then, subject to conventions that maintain his or her non-partisan status), although the Speaker is still able to speak. Aside from duties relating to presiding over the House, the Speaker also performs administrative and procedural functions, and remains a constituency Member of Parliament (MP). The Speaker has the right and obligation to reside in the Parliamentary estate, near to Big Ben.^[1]

Can't Search for "Egypt" in China

(from the apgov.org blog)

Check out this post about the Chinese Government regulating what Chinese citizens can see about the Crisis in Egypt.

Separate and Equal Branch?

Last weekend when talking on CNN about raising the debt ceiling to avoid a shutdown of the government, NY Senator Chuck Schumer mis-spoke about the three branches of government..."the House, the Senate and the President." Embarrassing when hopefully any one of my students could have taken him to task on the sound-byte blooper.

But if he followed the latest news of the Judicial Branch, Schumer may have wanted to forget the political actions that should concern those who want a "Separate, But Equal," Federal Judicial Branch that protects our Rule of Law.

First,

(From Jonathan Cohn, in the New Republic on the Federal Court ruling that the Affordable Health Care Act was unconstitutional)

Did Roger Vinson, the federal judge who on Monday ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, have a particularly conservative take on politics as well as the law? His ruling certainly suggests as much. There’s what looks like a shout-out to the Tea Party — specifically, a reference to the American Colonists’ outrage over the tax on tea. (Page 42.) There’s the gratuitous reference to General Motors as “partially government-owned.” (Page 45.) And there’s the use of President Obama’s campaign rhetoric against the law Obama now supports. (Page 68).

Nor is the first time a judge invalidating the Affordable Care Act may have tipped his political hand. Henry Hudson, the federal judge who issued a narrower ruling against the law late last year, noted in his decision that the bill was rushed through the legislative process — which is a strange way to describe a law nearly fourteen months in gestation, unless you are trying to argue there was something fundamentally illegitimate about the process that produced it.

But perhaps the clearest indicator of bias in the decisions against the Affordable Care Act is the gist of the decisions themselves. For generations, conservatives have championed “judicial restraint.” If judicial restraint means anything, it means deferring to the Congress on matters of policy preference — like, for example, whether it’s better to run a national health insurance system with a system of regulated private insurance (which is what people will get with the Affordable Care Act) rather than via a single-payer, government-run plan (which is what the elderly already get with Medicare). But if these these decisions by Judges Vinson and Hudson carry the day — and, please remember, two federal judges have already ruled the other way — they would effectively take that discretion away from the Congress.

//blog.cagle.com/2011/02/shocker-a-court-decision-tinged-with-politics/

Next,

The NY Times reports on Virgina Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, setting up a "Conservative Lobbying Shop" in Washington, D.C. to have "hands-on operational duties on Capitol Hill:

WASHINGTON — The wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has raised her political profile in the last year through her outspoken conservative activism, is rebranding herself as a lobbyist and self-appointed “ambassador to the Tea Party movement.”

Virginia Thomas, the justice’s wife, said on libertyinc.co, a Web site for her new political consulting business, that she saw herself as an advocate for “liberty-loving citizens” who favored limited government, free enterprise and other core conservative issues. She promised to use her “experience and connections” to help clients raise money and increase their political impact.

Ms. Thomas’s effort to take a more operational role on conservative issues could intensify questions about her husband’s ability to remain independent on issues like campaign finance and health care, legal ethicists said.

Justice Thomas “should not be sitting on a case or reviewing a statute that his wife has lobbied for,” said Monroe H. Freedman, a Hofstra Law School professor specializing in legal ethics. “If the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that creates a perception problem.”

Ms. Thomas’s founding of her own political consulting shop, Liberty Consulting, was first reported Thursday by Politico, which said she had begun reaching out to freshmen Republicans in Congress.

The move comes a few months after she gave up the top spot at Liberty Central, a conservative Web site that she founded in 2009 and that has strong links to the Tea Party movement.

An anonymous $500,000 donation to start up Liberty Central came from Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate investor and Republican financier, Politico reported.

Mr. Crow, reached by phone Friday, would not say whether he was the source of the money. “I disclose what I’m required by law to disclose,” he said, “and I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose.”

Ms. Thomas did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for an interview on Friday. The Daily Caller reported in December that she had said in an interview that she was looking forward to a new role involving “lobbying on Capitol Hill” and a variety of other hands-on operational duties.

//www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/us/politics/05thomas.html?_r=1

Democracy? Sharia law in Egypt if a majority 'allows it'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9384094.stm

In the current turmoil in Egypt, one of the oldest and biggest opposition parties, the Muslim Brotherhood, has kept a low profile.

Banned in the past, it is now keen to play a greater political role in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

BBC HARDtalk's Zeinab Badawi speaks to Kamal El-Helbawy, a member and former spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood, about whether the party will attempt to implement Islamic law in Egypt.

In 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, sparked a stormy debate when he appeared to suggest that some aspects of Sharia law should be adopted in the UK.

//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7232661.stm

A parallel system does already exist in several countries, including Nigeria, which we will study later in the semester. The BBC reports:

//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7235357.stm

A Flurry of Snow Day Thoughts

City Defends Decision to Leave Lake Shore Drive Open: MyFoxCHICAGO.com

Snow Day Thoughts:

Politics is Easy Governing is Hard

Notice how nobody has heard from Rahm, Gery Chico, Carol Mosely Braun or Miguel De Valle the past two days. Wonder how their snow removal plans would have worked?

Then again, we also haven't heard much from Mayor Daley. To me he seemed checked out and sent his Chief of Staff to face an avalanche of questions about the Lake Shore Drive fiasco.

Depending on who you listened to, that was either good, or bad political strategy:

Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times said that Daley learned from the 1979 "Bilandic Blizzard" that cost Michael Bilandic the mayor's race, to Jane Byrne, and his image:

"A few inches of snow and 32 years separate the Blizzards of `79 and 2011. But from a public relations standpoint, they were worlds apart.

The late Mayor Michael Bilandic was publicly vilified — and ultimately booted out of office — for mismanaging post-storm communications even more than he botched the city’s emergency response to the storm.

Under retiring Mayor Daley — who has nothing but his legacy to preserve — image management has been flawless, even if storm management wasn’t.

As many as 900 vehicles, including CTA buses, were stuck on Lake Shore Drive for hours after three accidents in 28 minutes, followed by ramp closures caused by high winds, drifting snow and white-out conditions.

Ray Orozco, the mayor’s chief of staff, responded to the interminable wait by apologizing to motorists for the inconvenience — even as he defended the city’s decision to keep the Drive open.

“While city personnel worked as quickly as possible to get motorists, buses and cars off the Drive, we certainly understand everyone’s frustration ... We know that hundreds of people were very inconvenienced, and we apologize for that,” Orozco said.

“Nevertheless, it was clear that thousands and thousands of motorists leaving the Loop were relying on [Lake Shore Drive] as a major artery to get home. ... We did not want to eliminate that option for those motorists, further pushing that large quantity of vehicles to arterial streets that could clog up those roads, maybe cause more accidents or hamper emergency response.”

Orozco urged motorists to call 311 to identify one of five locations where their abandoned vehicles had been towed. He even offered them free gas.

He also didn’t make the mistake of over-promising. He vowed to “eventually re-open Lake Shore Drive when we believe it is safe to do so.” But, he initially refused to say when that would be."

//www.suntimes.com/news/politics/3623320-418/bilandic-mayor-storm-drive-motorists.html

NBC Chicago's Ward Room had a different take:

"When severe weather strikes, city officials always issue a reminder that the more fortunate among us should check on our poor, our infirm and our seniors.

Has anyone checked on Richard and Maggie Daley?

The mayor, who has in the past called himself "the most accessible public official you've ever met," has been strangely absent since Mother Nature unleashed her winter fury over Chicagoland.

There was word that Daley was going to address the public during a press conference at the Office of Emergency Management and Communications on Wednesday afternoon, but he apparently backed out, leaving his chief of staff, Ray Orozco, to face the cameras...

But the main department head in this city is Daley, and while he's been known to dodge questions in the past, his absence in the wake of what became the third-biggest winter storm in Chicago's history is uncharacteristic.

While the men who want to be mayor are pushing cars and digging out neighbors, the man who is mayor isn't taking questions.

In the end, maybe he doesn't have to. The lame-duck mayor will be out of office in a little more than three months.

But it's interesting that a massive snow storm -- like the one that many say was the downfall of the late Mayor Michael Bilandic -- would leave some wondering what's going on at City Hall."

Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/chicago-blizzard-2011-daley-115158539.html?dr#ixzz1CuTwVdoV

Robo Calls

I received two calls from the City of Aurora to tell me not to go outside and and three calls and six e-mails from District 204 to tell me that school was canceled for the past two days. While canceling in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday for Thursday, may have seemed earlier than usual, local governments are trying to stay ahead of the curve in providing information to their citizens.

Some I know criticized the calling off today. That's what we do in our democracy. But I just appreciated the efficient use of technology to help get the message out early.

Snow Day Tea Party?

If less-government, Tea Party Patriots were running things all over, whose job would it be to move the snow in places like Chicago, Naperville and Aurora. Government bad, but snow removal good.....once again, Politics is Easy, Governing in a 20-inch snow fall with drifts is Hard.

From the Peoples World Blog:

"Our nation is experiencing what is being described as the largest snowstorm in the country's history. This massive storm is spread over 30 states and weather experts are saying it is going to leave a foot of snow stretching some 2,100 miles....

Meanwhile, governors and mayors are cutting back services and laying off tens of thousands of skilled public workers, replacing them with non-union private contractors with some working overtime, but they don't have the capacity to solve crises such as this one....

There's a real problem here, people! It is the role of government to do something about it. This is a national emergency and people are in danger. The government must act.

There are 15 million unemployed in our nation. Many are able-bodied, ready and willing to work. It's time to hire the unemployed at union wages and help save lives and clean up this mess.

Laid off public workers should be the first to be hired back. The money should come out of federal disaster funds and from taxing the rich individuals and corporations who are hoarding billions and refusing to invest in the American people.

The right-wing corporate-financed Republican and tea party fanatics only want to talk about high taxes and big government. The truth is that public workers and government are key to our everyday ability to function as a nation."

//peoplesworld.org/hire-the-unemployed-to-meet-the-snow-emergency/

Two Year Anniversary: 4 inches of Snow had London Crawling

Not sure if getting all the unemployed to remove snow works, but unitary national government's like the UK have had snow troubles, too. As reported two years ago yesterday, London was shut down after just 4 inches of the white stuff:

LONDON (AP) — It was hardly a blizzard, but it still shut down the city that beat the Blitz.

The biggest snowfall to hit London in 18 years idled the city's trademark red buses and Underground trains Monday, stranded thousands of airline passengers, and raised the vexing question of why a predicted winter storm caught authorities so unprepared.

Transit officials had nearly a week to get ready, but they failed to keep things running normally in the capital, which was buried under more than four inches of snow overnight and another four inches in the afternoon.

Londoners who needed to get somewhere often found they couldn't — unless they were willing to walk for miles.

"There's no point in going to work today," said office worker Caroline Samuel after waiting for an Underground train that never arrived. "I'm going home."

All five of the capital's airports briefly shut down — with nearly 800 flights canceled throughout the day and thousands of passengers stranded. An international flight skidded off a taxiway at Heathrow, causing no injuries.

Buses kept off streets
The city's extensive bus network was completely closed for most of the day and many trains simply didn't run.

Colossal traffic jams clogged roads because of fender benders and more serious accidents.

London Mayor Boris Johnson conceded that the city lacked the plows and other equipment — mostly because buying it is a gamble with big snowfalls so rare here.

The usually upbeat mayor said "the volume of snow was so huge" that the city's efforts to keep up were doomed and that skidding buses could become "a lethal weapon."

The mayor's official spokesman denied that concerns about insurance coverage led to the decision to keep the buses off the streets.

"It never got that far," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with department policy. "It was a basic safety issue. It might have caused some inconvenience, but it's nothing compared to the damage that could be done by a 12-ton vehicle cruising over crushed ice. The roads weren't fit."

Richard Tracey, a Conservative Party member of London's city council, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the bus company's willingness to deal with snow is different than in past years because of growing levels of health and safety legislation.

"I think the public are prepared to go out, but the bus drivers and the companies won't drive if there's even the tiniest risk of the bus skidding and people being injured," Tracey said. "Government legislation, European legislation and all that, that's what stops these things."

Former Mayor Ken Livingstone blasted London's storm preparations. He said it had been more than a century since the city buses were idled.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the government was doing "everything possible" to keep transit systems operating.

The harsh conditions led to hundreds of school closures, and many courts shut as well, including London's landmark Old Bailey. Hospitals remained open, but staffing levels were reduced.

A Transport for London spokesman said the agency must largely rely on London's local councils to treat roads — and that not all of the councils have the same level of ability to deal with a heavy snowfall.

"We're not in Russia here," said Guy Pitt, a press officer for the agency. "We don't have an infrastructure built for constant snow."

Mayor comes out defends City response: This is not the 'Daley Show'

On Thursday afternoon, the day after the groundhog day, Mayor Daley came out for Q & A with the press. He has a bit more than 6 weeks left (the new mayor takes office May 16), but this may be one of the last times to witness classic city mayor spar with those on the beat. Great stuff.