BLACKFIVE suggests Pat Tillman for Sportsman of the Year, and tells you how to cast your vote.

A READER ASKS why I’m not blogging about the “disastrous economic news.” Trouble is, he’s not very clear on what he means. I don’t blog much about the economy (except on the micro, things-I’ve-noticed Andy Rooney level) because I don’t think I know enough. But I don’t see much disastrous news. The dollar has fallen against the Euro, which strikes me as potentially bad news, but probably worse news at the moment for the Eurozone than for the U.S. I believe this is bound up in an effort to force the value of the Yuan up (that’s the gist of this story, and an item (subscriber only) in the WSJ earlier this week suggested the same thing). Could it go bad? I guess so, but it’s not obviously disastrous, and I have nothing to say about it.

Is it “ballooning spending?” Spending’s a lot higher than I’d like, but it always is. Josh Bolten writes that the 2005 budget is under control: “Congress stayed within budget limits and met key priorities. While the appropriations bills are not perfect, they honor the goals President Bush set last February: Overall discretionary spending in Fiscal 2005 will rise only 4%, the same as the average increase in American family income.” Not exactly parsimonious, but not disastrous.

Then there’s global growth, which as David Brooks notes is quite rapid: “Some rich countries, like the U.S. and Japan, are doing well, but the developing world is leading this economic surge. . . . As even the cautious folks at the World Bank note, all developing regions are growing faster this decade than they did in the 1980’s and 90’s. . . . we’re in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history.”

Some of the commenters over at Pejman’s seem to think that the problem is that Americans are consuming too much and saving too little That’s probably right — just listen to Dave Ramsey’s show for half an hour — but on the other hand it’s probably behind a lot of that third-world growth, too. I’d certainly like to see us shift to a tax system that encourages savings and investment over consumption — but although such plans are out there, I doubt they’ll get much support from those commenters. But I won’t argue that, at the very least, the tax system should be neutral and that it probably ought to encourage saving and investment.

Is disaster looming somewhere? Maybe. But it’s not obvious enough that I can see it.

UPDATE: Social Security, of course, is a long-term problem, and Tyler Cowen notes that fixing it won’t be cost-free.

UKRAINE UPDATE: “Ukraine’s parliament on Saturday expressed no confidence in the Central Election Commission overseeing a disputed presidential election run-off. ”

SO FAR, I’VE done all my Christmas shopping right here.

Looks like I’m not the only one to take this approach.

UKRAINE STATE TV in revolt. Meanwhile, look at these diverse allies supporting the opposition:

The Democratic party’s National Democratic Institute, the Republican party’s International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros’s open society institute.

I hope Soros has more luck with this election than with the last . . . .

HOWARD DEAN: Bringing people together. He’s a uniter, not a divider!

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE notices what’s really going on. I think the Saudis have, too. . . .

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH is wondering why the organizers of “buy nothing day” want poor people to starve.

WELL, AT LEAST THIS TIME it wasn’t at Concordia University:

MONTREAL — Montreal’s exclusive Lower Canada College is again in an embarrassing spot after two graduating students placed coded messages calling for death to all Jews in the school’s yearbook as a joke.

Sigh.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up.

SOME INTERESTING UKRAINE ELECTION MAPS, and much more informed commentary, at the SCSU Scholars site. (Via Ukraine blogger TulipGirl).

FOREIGN POLICY LESSONS FROM THE FRENCH: Read this, especially if you’re Condi Rice.

I HAVEN’T HAD TIME to do a lot of Tennessee fall photography, but this guy has. I like the turtle.

ERIC OLSEN looks at double standards on racism.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “If a legend is used as leverage to change the law, we need to be willing to think about whether the legend is true, and if it is not, we need to be willing to rethink our analysis. . . . Justice demands that we think clearly about criminal responsibility and not let our minds be clouded by evocative stories that mesh with our assumptions about the world and our social policy aspirations.”

UKRAINE UPDATE: Timothy Garton Ash writes: “If we, comfortably ensconced in the institutionalised Europe to which these peaceful demonstrators look with hope and yearning, do not immediately support them with every appropriate means at our disposal, we will betray the very ideals we claim to represent.”

Well, New Europe has done pretty well on this front, with active and vigorous support from Poland, Lithuania, and the Czechs. Old Europe, not so much.

UPDATE: On the other hand, here’s some premium Old Europe thinking on the subject. If this guy’s not on Putin’s payroll, he ought to be. (Via Clive Davis).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. Jonathan Steele, author of the second piece, may not be on Putin’s payroll — though to borrow a trope from his article, we haven’t seen conclusive evidence that he’s not — but he appears to be on Putin’s travel budget. This pre-election article by Steele contains the following disclaimer:

Jonathan Steele was a guest of the Russian Club in Ukraine at an expenses-paid conference in Kiev last weekend.

And this article from the Washington Post notes that:

The Russian Club was opened in August by Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s favored candidate for the presidency, and Dmitry Medvedev, chief of staff to Russian President Vladimir Putin. At first, officials said the club’s opening had nothing to do with the election, but lately it has been involved in little else.

Interesting. Thanks to reader Paul Horbal for the pointers.

MORE: I’m not the only one to notice the curious lack of attention from Old Europe — note this observation from Timothy Garton Ash’s piece in The Guardian:

Who says Europe is boring? Yet until Tuesday, many west Europeans probably did not even know that there was a presidential election going on in Ukraine. We were all focused on that other crucial presidential election, in the US. And, shamingly, Americans probably have done more to support the democratic opposition in Ukraine, and to shine a spotlight on electoral malpractices, than west Europeans have. Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have been more actively engaged, understanding how much is at stake.

That’s how it looks to me, too, though not everyone agrees.

NOW THERE ARE HAVEL-FOR-SECRETARY-GENERAL BUMPER STICKERS: The juggernaut is rolling!

UPDATE: Related post here.

A BLOG REVOLUTION sweeps across China?

Ever since the Communist party took power in 1949, the Chinese media has been tightly controlled by the government. Online publishing is a real threat to that control, and the government is clearly worried. A crackdown in 2003 closed websites and internet cafes and saw the arrest of dozens of online commentators.

Yet this is not proving enough to stifle the pluck and ingenuity of China’s bloggers. The rise of the blog phenomenon was made possible by blog-hosting services. Just as companies like Yahoo host email accounts, sites like blogger.com, based in the United States, host blogs. . . .

Blog services are now sprouting all over China. By the end of October 2004, China had more than 45 large blog-hosting services. A Google search for bo ke will return more than two million results, from blogs for football fans to blogs for Christians.

And while the larger hosting companies have become subject to censorship regulations, smaller companies and individuals do not face the same pressures. Any tech-savvy user can download and install blogging software themselves, bypassing the controls.

Blogs play an important role in republishing and spreading information as quickly as it is banned from official websites.

Read the whole thing.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

One of the next big chapters in the United Nations oil-for-food scandal will involve the family of the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whose son turns out to have been receiving payments as recently as early this year from a key contractor in the oil-for-food program.

The secretary-general’s son, Kojo Annan, was previously reported to have worked for a Swiss-based company called Cotecna Inspection Services SA, which from 1998-2003 held a lucrative contract with the U.N. to monitor goods arriving in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq under the oil-for-food program. But investigators are now looking into new information suggesting that the younger Annan received far more money over a much longer period, even after his compensation from Cotecna had reportedly ended.

The importance of this story involves not only undisclosed conflicts of interest, but the question of the role of the secretary-general himself, at a time when talk is starting to be heard around the U.N. that it is time for him to resign, and the staff labor union is in open rebellion against “senior management.”

What time is it? It’s Havel time!

ROGER SIMON has found the political party for him. Unfortunately, he’s not an Iraqi.

JONATHAN CHAIT: “Heartfelt thanks are what grandmothers are for. I’m going with bile.” His targets are Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE: Howard Dean as the “D-1000?” I say go for it! Anything I can do to help, Oliver. . . .

THE DEATH OF CAPITALISM? This passage goes well with the Economist article mentioned below:

The first indication came when the falling price of computers crossed the point where the average programmer could afford to own a computer capable of producing the code from which he typically earned his living. This meant that, for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the ownership of the most critical tool of production in the most critical industry of the world’s leading economy was readily affordable by the individual worker. Throughout the first three decades of the Information Age, the individual worker was still dependent on his employer for his means of production, just as any textile worker in Manchester or Lawrence was in 1840.

Suddenly, this changed. Now it is as if a steelworker could afford his own blast furnace or rolling mill, an automobile worker his own assembly line. By strict Marxist definitions, capitalism ended sometime in the early 1990s. This is a development that has not received adequate attention.

There’s also this, which meshes with some things I’ve written on Web video:

The cost of a facility for Webcasting is far less than the cost of a facility for television broadcasting. At some point in the relatively near future the quality of the webcast will be as good as, if not better than, that of broadcast television, and the cost of a webcasting facility for high-quality production will be within the range of many individuals. Just as the personal computer capable of producing first-rate software is revolutionizing the work relations of software, the personal webcasting facility will change the nature of the broadcasting media. It also changes the dynamics of production.

I think that’s right, and the blogosphere is an early manifestation of this phenomenon.

UKRAINE UPDATE: Arthur Chrenkoff looks at a Kremlin conspiracy theory and observes: “All I can say is, I’m scared that this sort of thinking goes for a serious political analysis in Russia.”

THIS ECONOMIST ARTICLE ON THE BLOGOSPHERE and Dan Rather gets it right:

Mr Rather’s retirement epitomises two broader shifts of power. First, the old media are losing power to the new. And, second, the liberal media establishment is losing power to a more diverse cacophony of new voices.

For most of the post-war era the American media were dominated by a comfortable liberal consensus. The New York Times was the undisputed king of the print news, while the network anchors lorded it over TV news. That consensus is now under siege. The attacks are partly coming from the cable networks—particularly from conservative Fox News. (Charles Krauthammer once quipped that Rupert Murdoch had spotted a niche market—half the country. Sure enough, Fox is now America’s top-rated cable news network.) But old media also face a newer and more unpredictable source of competition—the blogosphere. Bloggers have discovered that all you need to set yourself up as a pundit is a website and an attitude. . . .

The erosion of the old media establishment probably does entail some shift to the right, if only because so many of the newer voices are more reliably pro-Republican than Mr Rather. But the new media are simply too anarchic and subversive for any single political faction to take control of them. There are plenty of leftish bloggers too: such people helped Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. And the most successful conservative bloggers are far from being party loyalists: look at the way in 2002 that they kept the heat on the Republicans’ then Senate leader, Trent Lott, for racist remarks that the New York Times originally buried. It is a safe bet that, if the current Bush administration goes the way of previous second-term administrations and becomes consumed by scandals, conservative bloggers will be in the forefront of the scandal-mongering.

No doubt.

VIRGINIA POSTREL PRAISES SHOPPING MAGAZINES:

For all their blatant materialism, however, Lucky and its kin actually represent cultural progress. Their unabashed presentation of goods as material pleasures keeps materialism in its place. They don’t encourage readers to equate fashion with virtue or style with superiority. They’re sharing fun, not rationing status. . . . Reading Vogue or, worse, Harper’s Bazaar often feels, by contrast, like returning to the vicious status competition of middle school. Would-be authorities arbitrarily proclaim what–and, by implication, who–is in or out. “You are only as good as your last jacket,” explains an author in the August edition of Bazaar, telling readers how to dress for other women.

Interesting take.