A Good Pick by Obama: Samantha Power

WASHINGTON — An adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign who was forced to resign earlier this year after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton a “monster” is now working on the transition team for the agency Clinton is expected to lead.

State Department officials said Friday that Samantha Power is among a group of foreign policy experts that the president-elect’s office selected to help the incoming administration prepare for Clinton’s anticipated nomination as secretary of state. The Obama transition team’s Web site includes Power’s name as one of 14 members of the “Agency Review Team” for the State Department.

Clinton’s role at State is expected to be announced after the Thanksgiving weekend. Power’s apparent rehabilitation is another sign of that impending move.

Clinton’s office declined to comment on Power’s inclusion in the State Department transition, but an official close to the Obama transition team said Power had “made a gesture to bury the hatchet” with Clinton and that it had been well-received.

Power has been given an official State Department e-mail address and has been seen in the building, said the State officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the transition. A State Department spokesman referred questions to Obama’s transition team, which later declined to comment.

Power, a Harvard professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and noted commentator on genocide, is dealing with global humanitarian issues as part of the team, according to the officials. It is not clear if she is in line for any State Department job, they said.

Learn more & read Samantha’s blog

The Daily Show Video: Best of Palin

Follow the link below to watch the best of Sarah Palin. Great video!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=211448&title=the-daily-shows-best-sarah

Citizenship 2.0

By Danielle Allen
Tuesday, November 25, 2008; A15

 

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported an important effect of the 2008 presidential campaign: For the first time, traffic at left-leaning political Web sites overtook traffic at right-leaning competitors. The Drudge Report and Free Republic had the largest number of unique visitors in September 2007, but in September 2008, that honor went to the Huffington Post.

Political strategists have been analyzing the impact of the Internet on American political communication since at least the mid-1990s. When Hillary Clinton complained in 1998 about a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” she was drawing on a 332-page studydone by the 1995 Clinton White House alleging that a “right-wing conspiracy industry” was moving anti-Clinton material from Web sites in the United States to conservative papers in Britain and then back to mainstream U.S. print publications.

That 1995 report, and Clinton, too, were right on one point: The earliest significant impact of the Internet on political communication did come from the right.

Drudge was founded in 1994 and Free Republic in 1996. MoveOn was created in 1998 — precisely to respond to online anti-Clinton efforts — but it didn’t gain real prominence until 2003, when George Soros invested. The other major left-leaning sites appeared after George W. Bush’s election: Democratic Underground in 2001, Daily Kos in 2002 and Huffington Post not until 2005.

This pattern makes sense: The right, while in opposition, innovated with Internet tools; when the left in turn found itself out of power, it too developed new types of political communication.

But if Clinton was correct that the right dominated the Internet in the mid-90s, she wrongly attributed its success to conspiratorial methods. The word “conspiracy” fails to capture the remarkable power generated by Internet-based communication.

There are basically two kinds of influential political Web sites: sites that use a top-down hierarchy, whereby a central organization develops a message and disseminates it using social-networking technology, and sites that use a Wikipedia-type method, in which thousands of individual users contribute content and drive the message. This latter approach is exactly the opposite of conspiratorial.

The earliest and most powerful right-leaning Web site, Free Republic, used the non-hierarchical method. Free Republic developed innovative Internet architecture to build a sort of Wikipedia of citizenship, a do-it-yourself kit for spreading messages and connecting them with local, face-to-face activism. The site’s discussion lists — which have global reach — are fed by participants and connected by those participants to a plethora of state message boards organizing real-time, boots-on-the-ground political action. The influence of the site reflects the power of self-organizing social phenomena, not a conspiracy.

Notably, the right has adopted the Wikipedia method more consistently than the left. MoveOn employs the top-down structure, as does the Huffington Post. Daily Kos blends the grass-roots and hierarchical methods. Democratic Underground copied Free Republic’s grass-roots approach, but with less powerful architecture. One can’t help wondering whether the right’s more successful use of such self-organizing systems reflects the concrete impact of libertarian ideology.

But 2008 brought one major exception to the general pattern. Over the last two years, the Obama campaign built another “Wikipedia” of citizenship. It used its Web site to disseminate tools for grass-roots organizing and made its campaign infrastructure infinitely expandable as groups replicated over and over, learning from and copying one another. The campaign infrastructure became, to a significant degree, self-organizing. This explains its remarkable people power.

What will these successes mean for the future of our politics? In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that the geographical scope of the new country — even with just 13 states — would prevent the development of nationwide factions. But the Internet has eradicated barriers of geography, enabling much more effective factional organization than the Founders could have imagined. This is what Clinton was really marking when she complained about the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Now, however, we are at a turning point. We’ve finally reached something of a left-right equilibrium in the dramatic restructuring of the public sphere that has been underway for the past decade. Against this background, on Nov. 4 the Obama campaign sent an e-mail to supporters from the president-elect signaling aspirations to convert the campaign’s success with social networking technologies into a tool not merely for winning but for good governance.

Such a conversion would require transcending the factional patterns that currently define Internet-based political communication. It would demand a category shift: to remake the tools of factional organization as instruments of broad, cross-partisan and respectful public engagement.

Can this be done? If not, the Obama team’s digital network could well become nothing more than an outsized, 21st-century version of a ward machine. If it can be done, it could restore a richer experience of citizenship.

Ignoring Africa

 

By Rana F. Sweis

World AIDS Day is about raising awareness. Yet the deadly virus continues to kill mostly Africans, where three million people died this year alone. Africa remains the most impoverished, hungry and war-ravaged continent in the world. And in the US there is modest support for increased humanitarian and military intervention as well as poverty reduction strategies. By ignoring Africa, we are ignoring a volatile and vulnerable region. We are ignoring a desperate people. The horn of Africa is increasingly becoming a fertile ground for terrorism. Terrorist cells in West Africa, “take advantage of poor, disillusioned populations to recruit for their jihad.” 

The 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi demonstrated the presence of terrorists groups. The core leadership of the Kenyan cell consisted primarily of citizens of the Gulf States, Somalia, Pakistan, and the Comoro Islands but gradually local Kenyans were recruited. In the current war in Iraq, statistics have shown that about twenty five percent of foreign fighters detained are from Africa, especially from the East Africa. 

The United States ignored a great deal of civil war, tribal conflicts, disease and poverty. All this combined, turned Somalia into a ‘failed state.’ Somalia has no central government. Reports made public by the CIA confirm that suspected terrorists operate predominantly in so-called “failed states.” Hundreds of thousands of Somalis live as refugees in neighboring countries, and many others are internally displaced. 
This is a fight for life. And it is not only African lives that are at stake. Our lives could be at stake. When we see no perfect solution, we tend to ignore the problem. We give up once when we do not understand. But recently African Union forces, soldiers from across Africa, set up a small security outpost of 50 troops in one refugee camp in Somalia. Almost immediately, refugees began returning followed by international aid groups. Whether it is one refugee camp, one village or one tribe. Little things in Africa can make big differences. 
Helping people help themselves is priceless. Empowering, rebuilding and improving the quality of life whether in Iraq or Darfur may be our best hope towards fostering democracy. Some may argue that we do not have enough troops or expertise on the ground to be effective. Peacekeeping and peace building is essential to protect our nation and others. When we decide to build the peace in Africa, we must look towards the local people who have inside knowledge of every alley, every cultural norm and every little thing that adds up to mean everything in places we seem to understand little about. 
The quick U.S. disengagement from Somalia and failure to respond to the Rwanda genocide in 1994 has left us vulnerable to attacks. An effective U.S. response to terrorist threats in the Horn of Africa must include increased and targeted foreign aid and improved intelligence capabilities. 
This year, World AIDS Day was about wearing the red ribbon, as a sign of support for people living with HIV. Let us help people help themselves as a sign of our long due support to people in Africa. We would also help ourselves by decreasing the chances of turning a vulnerable region into a volatile breeding ground for terrorists, who may end up striking us on our shores–again

Jennifer Utz: My Journey with an Iraqi Refugee

 

This is a great article by Jennifer Utz on a personal story of an Iraq refugee.

Read the whole piece in the Huffington Post.

In recent months, much has been said in the media about Iraqi refugees going back to Iraq as a result of the success of “the surge.” The truth is that most of those who return are doing so because either they’ve run out of money or their visas have expired. Many of those who return find that another family has taken up residence in their home.

After receiving criticism for not having done enough to respond to the crisis, the Bush administration recently began taking in more Iraqi refugees — in 2008, more than 14,000 Iraqis were accepted into the United States. But for the country that started this war, that’s a drop in the bucket – just a third of 1 percent of the total number of those displaced. After the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians were authorized and ensured admission to the United States each year.

Today, Mohamed says that without having had me as an advocate, he could have never done this on his own. As an American and a journalist, I was able to make him stand out as more than a face in the crowd, and helped him navigate the perplexing bureaucracy of being a refugee.

Book: ‘Outliers’ Puts Self-Made Success To The Test

Outliers by Malcom Gladwall

 Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the “self-made man,” he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”

Why do Asian kids outperform American kids in math? How did Bill Gates become a billionaire computer entrepreneur? Was there something simplydifferent about Mozart?

New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell takes on these questions and more in his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. From corporate lawyers to talented hockey players to high-achieving students, Gladwell identifies “outliers” as those who have “been given opportunities, and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

Listen to this story

A Renewed Global Commitment to Afghan Refugees

Khaled Hosseini

This week, donor nations will convene in Kabul for the Return and Reintegration conference. The objective is to enhance efforts to reintegrate Afghan refugees in their homeland. The conference is a good reminder that the Afghan refugee situation, among the longest running and most complex in the world, is far from over.

The mass exodus of Afghans began during the war against the Soviet Union. Since then, for more than two decades and largely without sufficient international assistance, Iran and Pakistan have generously hosted millions of Afghan refugees who fled the violence back home.

Recently, however, both countries have shown signs of fatigue over the long presence of Afghan refugees on their territory and have increased pressure for Afghans to return. Since 2002, over five million Afghans have voluntarily returned home, the majority with assistance from UNHCR (the U.N. Refugee Agency). This year alone, UNHCR has helped some 270,000 refugees return home from Pakistan.

But repatriation patterns are changing. Increasingly, decisions to return are driven not by expectation of a better life in Afghanistan but by rising prices and insecurity of life in exile. Many of the repatriating refugees have encountered harsh realities as the earlier hopes of durable peace, reconstruction and development in Afghanistan have faltered. Upon returning, they end up in makeshift shelters in barren deserts where the elements are unforgiving and the resources few.

Read more

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

 

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

SAN DIEGO — Over the last two years, some of this city’s darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a h

andful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.

Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.

The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.

“Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat,” said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, ‘This is the future of journalism.’ ”

That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.

Read more…

Amman’s November Gas Crisis

Words & Multimedia By: Naseem Tarawnah

Some of the most remarkable scenes have emerged on the streets of Amman these past 48 hours. Word that gas stations were refusing to sell their fuel supplies began to spread on Saturday and gained momentum as the work week began Sunday morning. By 5pm drive-home traffic time, some of Amman’s street were packed with what felt like thousands of cars, all lining up for a chance to fill up. Stations have been at odds with the government after the latter decided to reduce fuel prices for the sixth time since August. Having bought their fuel at a higher price and forced to sell at a new and reduced price, many stations have shut down in protest, while at least 17 others have gone bankrupt. Police forces have descended upon every gas station open for business to help allay any possible violent outbursts, while managing the long queues, some of which stretch for well over 1km. Asking a few motorists who were waiting as patiently as the circumstance allowed, some told me they had been in line for over an hour, hardly moving a few meters in the direction of the gas station’s entrance. Meanwhile, sirens could readily be heard, blazing across the city, as I sighted at least one oil tanker swooping past the airport road highway with what seemed to be a police escort.

Read More

Arab Bloggers Size Up Obama

November 7, 2008

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

New York Times

For the moment, Arabs are mainly excited about Mr. Obama’s victory, and have much good will toward him and the country that chose him. But Middle Easterners are more skeptical than anyone else about American politicians and their intentions, and already it seems Mr. Obama is no exception.

His speech during the primaries to Aipac, the powerful pro-Israel lobby group, did little to assuage fears that America will continue to support Israel unconditionally. And there remains a more general anxiety that, like previous American presidents, Mr. Obama will somehow let the people of the Middle East down.

To provide a sense of what Middle Easterners are thinking about the American election, here are excerpts, translated by me where necessary, of blog postings from the day after Mr. Obama’s victory.

— JOSIE DELAP, an editor for Economist.com

•

Tamem, Egypt (tamem.wordpress.com)

The victory of Barack Hussein Obama that we, along with the rest of the world, are witnessing today is another historic moment, not just for America but for the whole world by virtue of America’s huge influence, whether we like it or not. Personally I, like others, doubted Americans’ ability to overcome racism, but in electing “Abu Hussein,” they created a historic moment by accepting the first black president to govern not just America but the white West as a whole. With this, they removed all such doubts and the impossible dream of Martin Luther King became possible.

(translated from the Arabic)

• 

Syrian Dream, Syria (syriandream.com)

The world arose today to welcome Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States, and Africa danced with joy.

The whole world is optimistic about what he offers but doubts remain about him, a great question mark.

What will Syria’s fate be under him? Will he give the green light to bombing us?

(translated from the Arabic)

• 

The Damascene Blog, Syria (damasceneblog.com)

Dare we hope that the eight-year nightmare is over?

• 

Egyptian Chronicles, Egypt (egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com)

The Egyptian people are glad that Obama won despite their previous knowledge of his bias to Israel, and his V.P. is a Zionist. But still they are happy because they can’t stand the Republicans anymore.

Good for the Americans.

• 

Esra’a, Bahrain (mideastyouth.com)

I can honestly say that we can finally wave goodbye to the overwhelming anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry that we have suffered with for the past eight years under the Bush administration. We can expect less wars, less corruption, less political abuse. It won’t be perfect, but it will get better. I am so happy and proud of all the Americans who worked extremely hard for Obama, understanding fully well the importance of change in every sense of the word. This moment is not just historical but crucial to us here in the Middle East.

This is a win for all of us, not just America.

This is a win for civil rights and justice.

For all the pessimists out there, allow us to enjoy this moment. If you learned anything from this campaign, you would learn that it starts with hope — not cynicism. And hope is what I have right now, for America and the Middle East.

We can do it, and this time, we can be sure that we can do it together.

I haven’t said this in a really long time, but I am loving America right now.

• 

The Black Iris, Jordan (black-iris.com) 

Congratulations are in order to the American people and the Obama fan base.

So begins a new chapter in American history, to say nothing of world history.

Fingers crossed that it’ll be a positive one, especially for this region.

• 

The Skeptic, Egypt (elijahzarwan.net/blog)

A new day dawned in Cairo today. As it does every day.

And it started as it always does: with birds, schoolchildren and car horns. No national holiday here.

I’m looking forward to going out in the streets to hear the reaction. The best reaction I’ve heard so far: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Bah humbug. I confess I’m moved.

• 

Mashrabeya, Egypt (mashrabeya.blogspot.com)

Only time would tell if Obama is real, or just too good to be true!

Sometimes, it is not enough to have a Big Dream. What matters is to have enough strength to resist the pressures to give up a Big Dream!

• 

Land and People, Lebanon (landandpeople.blogspot.com)

My take on this is that he is the president of the United States, and not Barack Obama. That said, I would really like to hope for change. After all, Obama showed that change was possible: he himself changed from a supporter of Palestinian rights into a man who believes that Jerusalem is the historic capital of Israel. He also changed during his campaign from “No Iraq war for me please, I’m trying to quit” into “All right I’ll have some, but a tiny piece please.”

People in the Middle East are expecting to see Obama act differently from previous U.S. presidents because he is darker-skinned. Time will show again that the color of the skin has little to do with politics, democracy and equity. Just look at the Arab world with its homegrown dictatorships.

But the question that really interests me is about the relationship between Obama and the true center of world power, Kapital. There was an awful lot of money in Obama’s campaign … A great chunk must have come from carefully planned investments by C.E.O.’s and multinationals. Will Obama be able to confront the mega-corporations? Does he want to? The poor and the colored population of the world, including that of the U.S., is the one that suffers most from malnutrition and hunger and food insecurity. We know now that mega-corporations, pushing for more profit at any cost, are responsible for most of the damage. Will Obama do something about that? Does he want to? Can he?

• 

An Arab Woman Blues, Iraq (arabwomanblues.blogspot.com)

So Obama, the booma, won the elections. I had already predicted that in my post “A long American-Iranian Film.”

I said the following, “My hunch is — and my hunches are rarely wrong — if Obama the booma wins, and he will, by a small margin, Iraq will be handed over to Iran …”

I also said that Obama will strike a deal with Ahmadinejad on Iraq and in particular southern Iraq.

And lo and behold, the vice president for the booma Obama is none other than J. Biden. J. Biden. … is an ardent supporter of the partition of Iraq into three statelets. No wonder Maliki & Co. were also backing the booma along with Iran. I also know that Iran had generously contributed to the Obama campaign.

… I shall not congratulate you on your 44th president. He will simply finish off what the other Zionists had started — the final partition of my country.

To hell with all of you and all of your presidents.

• 

Neurotic Iraqi Wife, Iraq (neurotic-iraqi-wife.blogspot.com)

For me, this is not just about history, this is about someone who was able to bring down the very people that broke my country. It’s a great punch to the very people that destroyed the individual Iraqi. And that to me is an enough victory.

I will only have to say to Mr. Obama, don’t let us down.

• 

Ali, Jordan (alidahmash.blogspot.com)

This is what America is all about. The land of the free, dreams and opportunities. Despite all the catastrophic mistakes that America committed the past years, the American Constitution and system prevailed. The people of America have chosen for change, they voted for Barack Obama. They have learned from their past mistakes with the Republicans. They chose Barack Obama not because of his skin color, but for what he stands for, because they believe he will change America …

Barack Obama is not a wizard either, he won’t be in the office until Jan. 20, and by then he must choose his cabinet wisely. It will take many months until the economy improves, which was the main concern for Americans in this election. Unlike the elections in 2004, terrorism (the Bush game) was the least concern. It will require a lot of time and sacrifices to get out of Iraq, though I doubt that American lobbyists are ready to give up the oil in Iraq and the Gulf region. As for the Middle East peace process, I will not only hope that Obama doesn’t side with the Israelis only and the Israeli lobby in America, but to put real effort on achieving a fair and just peace for the Palestinians and the Israelis. And hoping is not enough, as Arab leaders and organizations should move quickly towards building an alliance with Obama.

The Displaced: Homeless at Home

By John Holmes

Today, the United Nations estimates that 77 million people – more than 1 per cent of the world’s population – are displaced within their own countries, having been forced to flee their homes by armed conflicts, violence, urbanisation, development, and natural disasters. This is more than the population of France, the United Kingdom, or Turkey.

These people are not “refugees,” because they have not crossed an international border, but their experiences are often equally devastating. Today, the number of people who have been internally displaced by conflicts alone is twice that of refugees. With the increasing pattern of internal, rather than international, armed conflicts, and the rising regularity of extreme weather events affecting millions of people, internal displacement poses an even greater challenge to future generations.

Uprooted from their homes and livelihoods, and traumatised by the violence or sudden disaster that forced them to flee, the displaced are often thrust into an extremely precarious future with few resources. Think of the 15 million Chinese displaced following the Sichuan earthquake, the more than two million Iraqis uprooted within their country’s borders by sectarian and other violence, the 2.4 million displaced in Darfur, or the hundreds of thousands who have fled Mogadishu in the last year.

In the last decade, those displaced by conflicts alone rose from 19 million to 26 million, with millions more displaced by disasters. The plight of these victims long went unrecognised, as governments and the international community alike failed to acknowledge their rights to protection and assistance. In 1998, the UN issued Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which sets out these legal rights.

Ten years on, what impact have the principles had on displaced people’s lives? The achievements are notable, if insufficient. We have raised awareness of the plight of the displaced, brought about changes in government policies, and raised billions of dollars to respond to their basic needs. This has helped save countless lives. Humanitarian efforts continue to be strengthened, including through a new rapid funding mechanism, the UN Central Emergency Response Fund.

Read more

Photos from Grant Park, Chicago.

 Jordanians Weigh in on Obama’s Candidacy (Read)