Norman Ornstein of the AEI has a piece up complaining that broadcasters do not hand over enough air time for political candidates. Apparently, Ornstein thinks that Americans are sitting around in agony, furious that they get too much Friends and not enough Al Gore on their television sets.

Kathy Sinnott is a newly elected MEP from the Cork area. John Fay of Irish Eagle summed up a lot of my worries about her last month. But I have a soft spot for her regardless. I first heard of her when a friend asked me and wife to go along to a concert by Frances and Mary Black that turned out to be a fundraiser for Sinnott. (No fraud here, just that we had not noticed.) Anyway, when I discovered this, I was upset, because the last thing I needed was another speech by some aspiring politician. But this is what happened. The first half was basically Frances Black. Then there was an intermission, after which Sinnott was to speak, to be followed by Mary Black. I braced myself, and checked my watch to see how long she was going to ramble on. She introduced herself, thanked everyone for coming, said she appreciated the support, but that since everyone was really there to hear the Blacks, she would vacate the stage for Mary Black. She off in less than a minute. Literally. How can you not love a politician like that?

Maimon Schwarzschild at The Right Coast is in a fray with Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber. First, Schwarzschild suggests here that the success of the UK Independence Party (dubbed UKIP) is a good thing. His argument is that UKIP is anti-Europe, and the heavy UKIP vote was a protest vote against a federal Europe, so UKIP's success will put a damper on the growth of a federal Europe, which is becoming increasing an anti-American and anti-Semitic project. Then Healy points out here that UKIP has more than a few anti-Semites, along with a variety of other types of racists. Finally, Schwarzschild replies here that, yes, UKIP is unsavory, but that it does not matter, because what the major parties will notice is the protest, and UKIP has no serious chance of taking power.

I link to these partly because I think it is a good exchange worth reading, but also because I have a few observations.

One common thread on Crooked Timber is that anti-Semitism in Europe is substantially less severe than the American press and American bloggers make it out to be. (I am working off dial-up, so I am not going to hunt for a bunch of links, but I think the observation is fair.) I cannot speak from personal experience about all of Europe, only of Ireland, but in that country anyway, they have a point. I have not encountered much in the way of either skinhead style anti-Semitism or the "Jews are crass" sort either. And I think it unlikely that someone who dressed so as to be identifiably Jewish would be unsafe on the streets in Ireland.

On the other hand, Israeli Jews I know who live tell me that, based on their discussions with friends in other parts of Europe, Ireland is a much better place to be a Jew than in most of the rest of Europe. And there is an obsession with Israel that simply transcends any of Israel's alleged offenses. In the fashionable bars (you know the ones, where everyone is pierced in all the right places), to be identified as an Israeli is to be abused in a way other nationalities would not be exposed to (except Americans, of course).

And the press is similarly obsessive. Typing "Israel" into the Irish Times search page generates 422 stories since the beginning of the year, compared to only 46 stories from typing in "Sudan", where there is a major genocide underway. Restricting the search to stories since the beginning of April, when the Sudan story was well established reduces the disparity, but only a little: 216 stories compared 32. That speaks volumes.

It seems Ben Affleck won $356,400 by coming in first place in the California State Poker Championship. It is good to know he has a talent for something.

Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, contra Thomas Friedman, note the dangerous delusions Europeans live under.

Critics of the Bush administration at home and abroad have long called for an early return of Iraqi sovereignty coupled with the internationalization of the assistance effort. The U.N. resolution that was passed unanimously June 8, though late in coming, does just that. What's more, the resolution reflects significant efforts by the Bush administration to meet the concerns of key nations that opposed the Iraq war in 2003. Iraq will enjoy full sovereignty after June 30, not limited sovereignty. Iraqi forces will be under Iraqi command, not the command of the multinational force. The mandate of the multinational force will expire once the political transition has been completed. And the forces will be withdrawn if the Iraqi government so desires.

One would think, therefore, that the new U.N. consensus on Iraq would offer real hope not only for putting Iraq on the right track but also for healing some of the rifts between the United States and its European allies. France and Germany demanded a significant U.N. role, and they've gotten it. They demanded a rapid turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis, and they got that, too. With the two countries having gotten their way in the negotiations on the resolution, the time has come for them to pitch in and join in the effort to build a peaceful, stable, democratic future for Iraq. After all, French, German and other European officials have insisted all along that the success or failure of Iraq is as much a vital interest for them as for the United States. They've also insisted, understandably, that if the United States wanted their help, it would have to give them a say over policy in Iraq.

Unfortunately, now that the Bush administration has finally acquiesced to their requests, it appears that France and Germany are refusing to fulfill their end of the bargain. Leaders of both countries have declared they will not send troops to assist in Iraq under any circumstances. Still more troubling was French President Jacques Chirac's declaration at the Group of Eight summit last week that he opposed any NATO role in Iraq, even though the resolution France supported explicitly calls on "Member States and international and regional organizations to contribute assistance to the multinational force, including military forces."

The positions staked out by the French and German governments are an abdication of international responsibility.

Many Europeans believe their problem is only with the Bush administration. That's a dangerous miscalculation. If John Kerry wins in November, one of his first acts will be to request Europe's help in Iraq. If France and Germany are intent on saying no, then future American administrations, including Kerry's, will have to reconsider the value of the alliance. Do Europeans really want to sever their strategic ties to the United States? If not, they need to understand that the ball is now in their court.

Thomas Friedman notes that anti-Americanism is less common in the growing countries of Asia, such as India and China, than in the failing economies of the Middle East.

To begin with, there a few "technical" reasons why anti-Americanism generally does not have the same edge in Asia as in Europe and the Middle East. Asia's leaders, as a group, have much more legitimacy than leaders in the Arab world, either because they have come to power through free elections or because they have delivered on their core promise to their people of economic growth. Because of that, they don't need to demonize America regularly to deflect their people's anger from them. Also, Asia generally is focused like a laser on economic development — and countries like China see investment and technology transfer from America as critical to their growth. "People in Asia do not hate the United States," Singapore's elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, said to me. "Big countries like China and India are focused right now on their economic development and they see in America an enormous well to draw technology and economic growth from."

But here's the problem: Young people want American education and technology more than ever, but fewer and fewer want to wear our T-shirts anymore — want to be identified as "pro-American." As one former U.S. diplomat in Beijing put it to me: "They want to cherry-pick us, not line up with us. We've lost prestige."

The idea of America as the embodiment of the promise of freedom and democracy — not just of technology and high living standards — is integral to how we think of ourselves, but it is no longer how a lot of others think of us. They are now compartmentalizing. The unilateral war in Iraq, the postwar mess there, the walk-away from Kyoto and other treaties, the Abu Ghraib scandal have taken a toll. The idea of America as embodying the charisma of democracy has been damaged. As the political theorist Yaron Ezrahi put it, "America as the do-gooder has been hurt, but America as the goods-doer is still there."

Fortunately, this situation is not irreparable. The longing for an America that exports hope, not fear, and that is an example of the best global practices and values, runs really deep in the world. In fact, it is one reason that some people abroad are so angry with President Bush — because they blame him for taking that America away from them. I'm convinced a different approach or different administration would elicit a big response from the world. But for now, we will pay a price, because when people want to line up for our visas but not for our policies, it means Americans alone will have to bear the burden and the price of those policies.

But Friedman is simply kidding himself if he thinks the Bush administration is the cause of all this. Granted, the Bush administration has made less of a pretense than the Clinton crowd about caring deeply what Europeans think. Clinton sat on Kyoto for four years, never submitting it to the Senate, but unlike Bush, he never publicly repudiated it. And it is true that Europeans seem to enjoy being delusional, pretending how much they liked America in the good old Clinton days. Granted, as an academic, I face a biased sample, but I have heard incessant snide carping about Americans and American policy, both foreign and domestic, since I came here during the first Bush administration. I usually ignore the cracks about "Is American culture an oxymoron?" from people who don't actually read, but know that the Irish are naturally literary, and still go to all the Hollywood movies. I did, however, lose my temper with a crack about fat American tourists coming from a fellow so fat that he needed to keep his pants up with suspenders ("braces" over here). But it is more than academic bias. I know several American businessmen here, mostly Dublin based, who said they simply stopped going to parties in the 90s because they got tired of the abuse.

The Washington Post reports that Ray Bradbury is upset with Michael Moore for stealing his title for Moore's latest.

Ray Bradbury is demanding an apology from filmmaker Michael Moore for lifting the title from his classic science-fiction novel "Fahrenheit 451" without permission and wants the new documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" to be renamed.

"He didn't ask my permission," Bradbury, 83, told The Associated Press on Friday. "That's not his novel, that's not his title, so he shouldn't have done it."

The 1953 novel, widely considered Bradbury's masterpiece, portrays an ugly futuristic society in which firemen burn homes and libraries in order to destroy the books inside and keep people from thinking independently.

"Fahrenheit 451" takes its title from the temperature at which books burn. Moore has called "Fahrenheit 9/11" the "temperature at which freedom burns."

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Bradbury, who hadn't seen the movie, said he called Moore's company six months ago to protest and was promised Moore would call back.

He finally got that call last Saturday, Bradbury said, adding Moore told him he was "embarrassed."

Cal Thomas discovers just how loathsome the creepy part of the Irish left can be.

Doesn't the Irish left care about human bondage? When the list of the groups co-sponsoring the demonstrations is considered, none is noted for promoting freedom. They include The Socialist Party, The Socialist Workers Party, The Green Party, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Committee (that means the terrorist Palestinian leadership, not the Jews in Israel who are their murderous targets), the CPSU (which used to stand for the Communist Party Soviet Union but is not spelled out on the Web page of the Irish Anti War Movement) and other rabble.

I have said before that Michelle Malkin is one of the best columnists out there, so I was delighted to see that she is now blogging (of course the blogroll is updated), wasting no time in capturing the appalling sleaze of some cable TV operations and nailing former economist and current DNC hack Paul Krugman but good.

I was also pleased to discover she reads AtlanticBlog. So maybe pleased is the wrong word. Maybe elated would be better.

How do you make more money? You cut price to customers who would otherwise walk away, and you raise price to customers who have no where else to go. That is a rough description of price discrimination. So imagine my surprise when I went to the DHL office at Cork airport to send adoption papers and discovered they get a discount of over 50%.

The discount makes sense only if adoptive parents are more likely to walk away than businesses, the usual DHL customers. It isn't that the extra cost will drive people away from adoption. Depending on where you go, adoption can easily run between $10,000 and $30,000, so an extra €30 is not likely to matter. Nor can it be that adoptive parents have better alternatives. Gathering all the documents together costs an Irish couple about €600 plus a lot of time, and originals must be sent. If they are lost, replacement is another €600 and a lot more time. You do not entrust that to the tender mercies of some government run postal service. What about searching around for the best deal? Business customers make extensive use of couriers. Searching around for the best deal offers big gains. Adoptive parents use a courier maybe once or twice per adoption, so they are less likely to check around for good deals. Maybe DHL wants an image as a caring company. But then you would think they would advertise the discount, and they do not. I found out only by chance while chatting with the clerk, and no one I know had heard of the discount. (And it wasn't a generous clerk either; he showed me the price list.)

I can think of no reason why adoptive parents are more sensitive to price than business customers, and good reasons to think they are less sensitive to price. But still they give adoptive parents the discount. I am not complaining, mind you. I appreciate the extra cash, and now I have a good puzzle to work on while I sit in traffic.

I have been pretty quiet lately, because of heavy exam demands, visiting relatives, and a variety of personal demands, including building a house. But exams are largely over and the relatives are safely home (even if missed), so it is time to get active again. The blogroll has been updated, because Eric Rasmusen has moved off his university server and I discovered that I had stupidly never added A Small Victory.

I think Eric is being sensible in getting away from the university server. American professors should keep their blogs private, not necessarily as some grand ethical matter, but simply to avoid hassle. In Europe, which has little in the way of free speech rights, it makes little difference.

The Berkeley Daily Planet carries a piece by Kenneth Theisen of Bay Area Legal Aid, denouncing Operation Gatekeeper. Gatekeeper was a plan to beef up border patrols in urban areas where crossing over is easy, combined with little enforcement where crossing over is difficult. Not surprisingly, more immigrants are risking the grounds that are more dangerous, and some have died. Complaints about the policy constituting a violation of human rights have come from the ACLU, the US branch of Amnesty International, and of course Mary Robinson. Some of the complaints, if true, are disturbing:

And the dangers at the border are not limited to the environmental elements. There is also a problem with the human element, particularly the Border Patrol agents.

A 1993 Los Angeles Times investigation of the Border Patrol found that it had hired agents with “dubious pasts, including criminal records and checkered careers with police agencies and the military....During the 1990s agents were prosecuted or disciplined for numerous offenses including unjustified shootings, sexual misconduct, beatings, stealing money from prisoners, drug trafficking, embezzlement, perjury and indecent exposure.”

Between 1992 and 1997, Human Rights Watch published five highly critical reports about human rights abuses along the border. These reports included “dozens of instances of people shot and killed or injured by the Border patrol; violations of INS firearms policies on use of lethal force, sexual assaults, beatings and other ill-treatment of detainees; a code of silence by which officers refused to testify against colleagues accused of wrongdoing; and virtual impunity [sic] for agents, regardless of their actions.”

I have been away for several days in Kerry and West Cork, away from the news, and learned only on return of Ronald Reagan's death. I first voted for him in the 1976 Illinois primary (a strange experience after working for McGovern in 1972), and voted for him every time after that. I admit that I went into the 1980 Washington Republican caucuses planning to back Bush, because I feared Carter would be beat Reagan, but after discovering the meeting was filled with whiny Kennedy supporters backing John Anderson, I said to hell with it and flayed left and, well, left. His achievements have been covered well by others. His undeniable position as the greatest president of my lifetime is summed up here, by Natan Sharansky.

In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth - a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

The Irish Examiner (registration required) reports a new book is coming out on UN peacekeeping missions, and that the UN tried to block publication.

THREE United Nations fieldworkers are publishing details of sex, drugs and corruption inside UN missions, despite a UN attempt to block their book.

'Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth' chronicles the experiences of a doctor, a human rights official and a secretary in UN operations in Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Liberia and Bosnia.

The controversial volume, due out next week, charges that some UN officials demanded that 15pc of their local staff's salaries go directly to them instead; that Bulgaria sent freed criminals to serve as peacekeepers and that incompetent UN security has cost lives.

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Particularly galling to them is the murder in Mogadishu in Somalia of a young American colleague, shot dead as he rode in a UN convoy.

Kenneth Cain, an American human rights official, complains bitterly that the board of inquiry ignored failings in UN security.

"The board is stacked with UN officials who oversee security," he writes. "I don't trust these f***s for a second to truly investigate and hold one of their own accountable."

After he is evacuated from Haiti because of worsening violence, Dr Thomson advises readers: "If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run."

Zoe Williams, in a Guardian piece on the Tories, starts out this way:

The Tories have already unleashed their centrepiece election conceit upon a waiting public. You will probably have seen the poster - "Let Down By Labour?" it quizzes. "Vote Conservative". It's like putting up a sign saying "Hungry? Eat these eyeballs!"

Everyone knows the little poem from Longfellow

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

But when they aren't being horrid, they go ahead and call a Scrabble tournament with a bunch of literary types. The outcome is pretty funny.

"What the hell is that word?" Robin Cook exclaims in horror. He's talking about "PXCLAIM" - a result of board slippage - and once this is remedied, the former minister sinks quickly into silent, brow-furrowed thought. Here, it's clear, is a man who thinks deeply about the decisions he must take in his life. Eventually, after an internal struggle lasting some minutes, he reaches a conclusion, and plays FEINT. "I've only got the one vowel," he says, apologetically. "Good political word," someone says.
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And so to the historian Andrew Roberts. Roberts, who arrives with his partner Leonie Frieda, also a historian, seems convinced that there is an obscure rule in Scrabble whereby, if somebody has played a blank, you can replace the blank with a tile showing the letter it was intended to represent, and then claim the score for yourself. He scours the rules on the box for proof. There is no such rule, we assert. "If you're Andrew," Frieda says under her breath, "the rule is that you can do whatever you like because you're Andrew." Eventually Roberts capitulates. "Maybe, just because I've done it before, that doesn't actually mean that it's allowed." He stares at the board. "Not for the first time," he says drily, "Robin Cook leaves an impossible situation behind him."

Eventually he puts an S down to spell CODES and IS, because the other options, he declares, "aren't clever enough." At 252, the authors are a mere seven points behind the Guardian, which has started flailing around with low-scoring embarrassments such as AGE. With things so close, the tension persists through to the next morning, when the comedian and actor Dylan Moran arrives to play the final move for the opposition.

"My word doesn't have to connect with the other words, does it?" He pauses. "Or is that one of the fundamental principles of the game?"