This is fantastic.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
McCain dead wrong about position of his "friend of 35 years."
I'll confine my debunking of McCain's assertions in the first debate last night to one thing:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/09/16/Kissinger_Open_direct_Iran_talks/UPI-46971221579660/
Go Obama.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/09/16/Kissinger_Open_direct_Iran_talks/UPI-46971221579660/
Go Obama.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
A Conservative for Obama
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
Leading Off
By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief, D Magazine
THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.
In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.
Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.
Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.
But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.
Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.
This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.
“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
Write to wicka@dmagazine.com.
Leading Off
By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief, D Magazine
THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.
In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.
Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.
Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.
But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.
Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.
This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.
“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
Write to wicka@dmagazine.com.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
A bank in every African pocket? Mobile phones expand access to financial services
By Mary Kimani, United Nations Africa Renewal Reprinted with permission
Kigali--Ann Wanjiku walks up to a green-and-white booth with an “M-Pesa agent” sign on it. There she shows the agent her identity card and her cell phone, which displays a PIN number provided by a client. Using the PIN number, the M-Pesa agent takes just a minute to verify that the client has transferred payment for 1,000 traditional carvings into Ms. Wanjiku’s mobile money account. Ms. Wanjiku then withdraws the amount in cash.
Like 90 per cent of Kenyans, Ms. Wanjiku does not have an account in a regular bank. Across Africa, only 20 per cent of families have formal bank accounts, according to a World Bank survey. In Tanzania the percentage is as low as 5 per cent, and in Liberia 15 per cent.
But the proliferation of mobile telephone services around the continent has opened a new way to extend financial services to people like Ms. Wanjiku. In the few countries where they have emerged, companies such as M-Pesa can use any phone or phone card to provide affordable services to customers wherever there is a mobile phone signal.
Expanding such innovations in the use of modern information and communications technologies (ICT) more widely was a central topic at a Connect Africa Summit held in Kigali, Rwanda, in October. More than 1,000 private-sector, government and donor representatives discussed how such technologies can help in finding solutions to Africa’s development problems.
Money under mattresses
Most banks in Africa have branches only in urban areas. Brian Richardson, the chief executive officer of Wizzit South Africa, a cell phone banking facility, notes that expanding access to rural areas has traditionally involved opening new branch offices. “As long as you have that mind-set,” he says, “it becomes incredibly expensive to bring banking to the mass market.”
As a result, regular bank services are often simply unavailable. Ethiopia has just one bank branch for every 100,000 people, compared with Spain, which has 96 branches for every 100,000 people. Moreover, requirements to maintain relatively high account balances make such services too costly for most Africans.
Even in South Africa, which has a more extensive banking system, it is estimated that people keep about R12 bn (US$1.8 bn) “under mattresses,” says Mr. Richardson. “If we could take just a small portion of that into the formal banking system, the impact on the economy would be enormous.”
Established in 2004, Wizzit has signed up 50,000 South African customers. It hopes to reach 16 million others, in a country where some 60 per cent of the population has no bank account. Holders of Wizzit accounts can use any cell phone, even the cheap, old models popular in low-income communities. Users can deposit cash into their cell-based accounts through any post office or any branch of Amalgamated Banks of South Africa or the South African Bank of Athens. Salaries can be paid electronically into a Wizzit account. Account holders also receive Maestro debit cards accepted at ATMs and by retailers. There is no minimum balance or annual fee, but users pay the equivalent of US$0.15–0.78 per transaction.
According to Mohsen Khalil, the World Bank’s director of global ICT, Wizzit’s operation is one of the most innovative approaches to mobile banking, since it specifically targets the poor. If this model works in South Africa, he says, the World Bank will help the company expand coverage within and beyond the country. “We may be looking here at . . . the most effective way to provide social and economic services to the poor.”
Touch of a button
Some counterparts to Wizzit have emerged elsewhere in Africa. Like Ms. Wanjiku, about 1 million Kenyans use M-Pesa, a joint product of the Vodafone/Safaricom mobile phone company, the Commercial Bank of Africa and Faulu Kenya, a microfinance organization. M-Pesa customers deposit money with a registered agent or phone vendor. The agent then credits the phone account. Users can send between 100 Kenyan shillings ($1.5) and 35,000 shillings ($530) via a text message to a desired recipient — even someone using a different mobile network. The recipient then can obtain the cash from a Safaricom agent by entering a secret code and showing personal identification.
Similar services are now available in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia. In Zambia, Celpay, a product of First National Bank of South Africa, allows businesses to pay for services and receive payments via mobile phone accounts. Celpay currently processes up to $10 mn in payments per month.
In South Africa, First National Bank also partners with cell phone provider Mobile Telephone Networks (MTN), which provides services for South Africans who already have a bank account but also want to send and receive money over cell phones.
Between them, MTN and Wizzit enable 500,000 South Africans who do not have accounts to send and receive money to relatives, pay for goods and services, check balances and settle utility bills. Until the advent of the two services, South Africans often paid couriers the equivalent of $30–50 to deliver cash to relatives. Now such transactions cost only $0.50 through mobile bank networks.
The greatest impact is in rural areas, says Beyers Coetzee, a rural community officer for Wizzit. “Eighty per cent of all farmers do not have bank accounts.” Moreover, he adds, a Wizzit account, unlike a regular bank account, is not closed if the customer does not use it regularly. That is “very useful for seasonal workers” in particular.
Rob Conway, head of the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, an international group of mobile phone service providers, says that such innovations have “changed the lives of millions of Africans, catalyzing economic development and strengthening social ties.”
Lauri Kivinen, head of corporate affairs for the Nokia Siemens network, agrees that this development is significant. “It means unprecedented, substantial change for ordinary people,” he told Africa Renewal. Through mobile phone banking, people can “extend their social and business networks, boost their productivity and so much more, all at the touch of a few buttons on a cell phone.”
Kigali--Ann Wanjiku walks up to a green-and-white booth with an “M-Pesa agent” sign on it. There she shows the agent her identity card and her cell phone, which displays a PIN number provided by a client. Using the PIN number, the M-Pesa agent takes just a minute to verify that the client has transferred payment for 1,000 traditional carvings into Ms. Wanjiku’s mobile money account. Ms. Wanjiku then withdraws the amount in cash.
Like 90 per cent of Kenyans, Ms. Wanjiku does not have an account in a regular bank. Across Africa, only 20 per cent of families have formal bank accounts, according to a World Bank survey. In Tanzania the percentage is as low as 5 per cent, and in Liberia 15 per cent.
But the proliferation of mobile telephone services around the continent has opened a new way to extend financial services to people like Ms. Wanjiku. In the few countries where they have emerged, companies such as M-Pesa can use any phone or phone card to provide affordable services to customers wherever there is a mobile phone signal.
Expanding such innovations in the use of modern information and communications technologies (ICT) more widely was a central topic at a Connect Africa Summit held in Kigali, Rwanda, in October. More than 1,000 private-sector, government and donor representatives discussed how such technologies can help in finding solutions to Africa’s development problems.
Money under mattresses
Most banks in Africa have branches only in urban areas. Brian Richardson, the chief executive officer of Wizzit South Africa, a cell phone banking facility, notes that expanding access to rural areas has traditionally involved opening new branch offices. “As long as you have that mind-set,” he says, “it becomes incredibly expensive to bring banking to the mass market.”
As a result, regular bank services are often simply unavailable. Ethiopia has just one bank branch for every 100,000 people, compared with Spain, which has 96 branches for every 100,000 people. Moreover, requirements to maintain relatively high account balances make such services too costly for most Africans.
Even in South Africa, which has a more extensive banking system, it is estimated that people keep about R12 bn (US$1.8 bn) “under mattresses,” says Mr. Richardson. “If we could take just a small portion of that into the formal banking system, the impact on the economy would be enormous.”
Established in 2004, Wizzit has signed up 50,000 South African customers. It hopes to reach 16 million others, in a country where some 60 per cent of the population has no bank account. Holders of Wizzit accounts can use any cell phone, even the cheap, old models popular in low-income communities. Users can deposit cash into their cell-based accounts through any post office or any branch of Amalgamated Banks of South Africa or the South African Bank of Athens. Salaries can be paid electronically into a Wizzit account. Account holders also receive Maestro debit cards accepted at ATMs and by retailers. There is no minimum balance or annual fee, but users pay the equivalent of US$0.15–0.78 per transaction.
According to Mohsen Khalil, the World Bank’s director of global ICT, Wizzit’s operation is one of the most innovative approaches to mobile banking, since it specifically targets the poor. If this model works in South Africa, he says, the World Bank will help the company expand coverage within and beyond the country. “We may be looking here at . . . the most effective way to provide social and economic services to the poor.”
Touch of a button
Some counterparts to Wizzit have emerged elsewhere in Africa. Like Ms. Wanjiku, about 1 million Kenyans use M-Pesa, a joint product of the Vodafone/Safaricom mobile phone company, the Commercial Bank of Africa and Faulu Kenya, a microfinance organization. M-Pesa customers deposit money with a registered agent or phone vendor. The agent then credits the phone account. Users can send between 100 Kenyan shillings ($1.5) and 35,000 shillings ($530) via a text message to a desired recipient — even someone using a different mobile network. The recipient then can obtain the cash from a Safaricom agent by entering a secret code and showing personal identification.
Similar services are now available in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia. In Zambia, Celpay, a product of First National Bank of South Africa, allows businesses to pay for services and receive payments via mobile phone accounts. Celpay currently processes up to $10 mn in payments per month.
In South Africa, First National Bank also partners with cell phone provider Mobile Telephone Networks (MTN), which provides services for South Africans who already have a bank account but also want to send and receive money over cell phones.
Between them, MTN and Wizzit enable 500,000 South Africans who do not have accounts to send and receive money to relatives, pay for goods and services, check balances and settle utility bills. Until the advent of the two services, South Africans often paid couriers the equivalent of $30–50 to deliver cash to relatives. Now such transactions cost only $0.50 through mobile bank networks.
The greatest impact is in rural areas, says Beyers Coetzee, a rural community officer for Wizzit. “Eighty per cent of all farmers do not have bank accounts.” Moreover, he adds, a Wizzit account, unlike a regular bank account, is not closed if the customer does not use it regularly. That is “very useful for seasonal workers” in particular.
Rob Conway, head of the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, an international group of mobile phone service providers, says that such innovations have “changed the lives of millions of Africans, catalyzing economic development and strengthening social ties.”
Lauri Kivinen, head of corporate affairs for the Nokia Siemens network, agrees that this development is significant. “It means unprecedented, substantial change for ordinary people,” he told Africa Renewal. Through mobile phone banking, people can “extend their social and business networks, boost their productivity and so much more, all at the touch of a few buttons on a cell phone.”
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator
Sarah Palin has picked out an All-American set of names for her children. There's Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, and Piper.
Ever wonder, What would your name be if Sarah Palin was your mother? Well now you can find out!
(link)
Me? I'm Claw Washout Palin.
Ever wonder, What would your name be if Sarah Palin was your mother? Well now you can find out!
(link)
Me? I'm Claw Washout Palin.
Falling Down by Joseph Stiglitz
More than 75 years ago, confidence in the market economy got a rude shock as the world sank into the Great Depression. Adam Smith had said that the market led the economy, as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency and societal wellbeing. It was hard to believe that Smith was right when one in four Americans was out of a job. Some economists held true to their faith in self-regulating markets; they said, just be patient, in the long run the market's restorative forces will take hold, and we will recover. But Keynes's retort ruled the day: In the long run, we are all dead. We could not wait. Today, even conservatives believe that government should intervene to maintain the economy at or near full employment. (more)
My Gal by George Saunders
Explaining how she felt when John McCain offered her the Vice-Presidential spot, my Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin, said something very profound: “I answered him ‘Yes’ because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”
Isn’t that so true? I know that many times, in my life, while living it, someone would come up and...more
Isn’t that so true? I know that many times, in my life, while living it, someone would come up and...more
Monday, September 8, 2008
The Sarah Palin Church Video Part Two
Check out this video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k84m2orSOaM
Peter L. Baldwin
www.peterbaldwin.info
615-430-7445
The Sarah Palin Church Video Part One
Check out this video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG1vPYbRB7k
Peter L. Baldwin
www.peterbaldwin.info
615-430-7445
Friday, September 5, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Help send me to Mali!
Djeneba and I have been married for 5 months, and we haven't been able to be together the entire time. Her visa is being processed, but I am told that if we were to go together into the US embassy in Bamako, we could greatly expedite things. I have had several trips fall through since April, not to mention repeated setbacks on the job front. I have started to sell possessions in order to finance this trip, but I really don't have anything else to sell.
So now, I am basically begging for cash. Any little bit helps. If you click on the link below, you will be taken to a secure Paypal page where you can contribute whatever you want, and you can also include a note to me if you wish. Thanks in advance- we really appreciate it.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
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