George Will sarcastically notes that the fuel-efficient-car-of-tomorrow boosterism is moot now that gas is cheap again:

The two best-selling vehicles in America this year are large pickup trucks (Ford F-Series and Chevy Silverado). In February, Toyota sold 13,600 Tundra and Tacoma pickups and 7,232 Priuses. It sells the Prius at a loss, which it can afford to do because it makes pots of money selling pickups. Has the Car Designer in Chief, a.k.a. the president, considered the possibility that what he calls “the cars of tomorrow” will forever be that?

The American car-buyer likes big cars, regardless of fuel-efficiency. If the president wants Americans to move away from gas profligacy—a position that seems to be politically popular—he might suggest raising the Federal gas tax to make fuel efficient cars more financially attractive. Though I think this is a wise idea eventually (raising taxes right now in a recession is unwise), I still hold that a Congress bowing to popular will (as it typically should) will handily defeat any such proposal.

The public may agree with statements that the country is too dependent on oil, but its behavior suggests the complete opposite.  The Obama energy agenda may not be as popular as he might think.

Zimbabwe’s government jailed New York Times correspondent Barry Bearak under the charge of “committing journalism.” His lawyer, Zimbabwe’s top human rights activist, got him freed after pointing out to the court that “committing journalism” is not a crime.

Robert Mugabe’s government has refused to admit defeat in the election three weeks ago and his government has not even bothered to release the total vote counts. While parking in front of the Zimbabwe Embassy in Washington today, I noticed one of the usual signs restricting a short strip of parking to embassy cars on weekdays. This sign restricted parking to the ‘Republic of Zimbabwe’, which I no long believe to be a true democratic republic. It is now dictator Robert Mugabe’s personal fiefdom, featuring a wrecked economy, 165,000% inflation (I kid you not), a refugee crisis, and one of Africa’s wealthiest populations reduced to penury. Equipped with some paper, a pen and some tape, I put together a revision to the sign so that it now reads

NO PARKING
7AM-6:30PM
DIPLOMATIC CARS
DICTATOR
ROBERT MUGABE’S
THUGS, GOONS
& APOLOGISTS
ONLY

Despite having robbed his people of both their livelihoods and the right to vote, Mr. Mugabe can still count on his defenders in the region. Shortly after it appeared that Mr. Mugabe stole the election, South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki, infamous for denying that HIV causes AIDS, met with Mr. Mugabe and, much to the world’s surprise, assured that Zimbabwe was not facing a crisis.

Fortunately, many South Africans, unlike Mr. Mbeki, do have a conscience.

The New York Times reports today that on Friday a ship carrying weapons and ammunition from a Chinese state-owned weapons foundry made a call into the port of Durban with goods destined for Zimbabwe’s military. News of the arrival quickly broke and the longshoremen’s union threatened to strike if forced to unload the ship.

The South African government, though, citing the absence of an official weapons ban on Zimbabwe, ruled that the shipment should be allowed to pass through South Africa. Not so fast, ruled South Africa’s High Court, after a South African activist and the Anglican archbishop petitioned for an embargo:

[Archbishop] Phillip, [human rights activist] Mr. Kearney and the lawyers argued that South Africa’s 2002 law on conventional arms included guidelines that directed the government to consider, in deciding whether to give permits for the transport of weapons, whether the government receiving the arms was committing human rights violations.

Late Friday afternoon, a judge in Durban granted their request. But on Friday evening, when the authorities drove out to the Chinese ship, An Yeu Jiang, to serve the court order, it pulled up anchor and moved off, according to a South African government official and Ms. Fritz.

What’s impressive is the reaction of South Africa’s civil society to represent the interests of human rights when its president fails to.

Even still, Mr. Mugabe is still holding onto his seat and the outcome of the election is still unknown. Will the State Department eventually eject Mr. Mugabe’s representatives in Washington? If he ends up stealing this election for sure, the State Department should consider it.

Our civil rights vocabulary contains a vague word called representation. When investigating the possibility of discrimination—be it in access to higher education or in hiring decisions—one piece of evidence often considered is the representation of certain groups of people. A particular group’s “underrepresentation” is considered evidence of illegal discrimination. Though this is taken as a matter of fact, I disagree.

A group’s representation, if below its proportion of the total population, is not necessarily a sign of illegal discrimination. Though states and the Federal Government prohibit denying access to education or employment on account of race and sex, the lack of women or certain minority groups at a particular workplace or university does not necessarily prove discriminatory practices.

The American has a good article about attempts to apply Title IX, a Federal statute requiring equal commitments to women’s and men’s sport programs at schools and universities, to the math, science, and engineering faculties. If women account for 60% of a university’s student body, shouldn’t they account for 60% of math majors, too? Supporters of Title IX’s expansion say yes. The American is not so enthusiastic:

If numerical inferiority were sufficient grounds for charges of discrimination or cul­tural insensitivity, Congress would be holding hearings on the crisis of underrepresentation of men in higher education. After all, women earn most of the degrees—practically across the board. What about male proportionality in the humanities, social sciences, and biol­ogy? The physical sciences are the exception, not the rule.

Does academia hold a bias against women in the physical sciences, but an overall bias against men in everything else? I doubt it. The rarity of women in the upper echelons of math, science, and engineering does not necessarily prove systematic discrimination. However, nor does it prove differences in innate scientific abilities. It could just be that in the aggregate, women and men tend to have different academic and career interests. Though the divergence in these interests may be social influence, it is not so clear that discrimination in academia or among job recruiters is the cause of all this. As a result, disparities in proportional representation may have little to do with bias on the part of the science faculty and more to do with self-selection.

One of the most disappointing moments in the recent Democratic debates came when Sens. Clinton and Obama nearly tripped over each other in a contest to denounce the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Threatening a unilateral withdrawal from NAFTA upon her increasingly unlikely election, Sen. Clinton admitted that some regions of the country do benefit from NAFTA, while others, primarily in the rust belt, suffer. Sadly, Sen. Clinton fails to explain why the economic interests of those who benefit, including American consumers, should take a back seat to the economic interests of a few rust belt manufacturers.

A recent article in the Post explains that many economists estimate that NAFTA has benefited the United States, particularly Texas:

Overall, the Texas economy has profited from NAFTA, studies have found, with manufacturers taking advantage of cuts in Mexican tariffs to send more electronics, industrial machinery, chemicals and instruments south, according to a 2006 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas study. The same report found that the export of Texas lumber and furniture declined after NAFTA.

Though Clinton and Obama both promise to “renegotiate” NAFTA, it is unlikely that any renegotiation could reasonably be called a free-trade agreement. Both Canada and Mexico have their share of upset constituencies that would demand more protection in any deal, as would American textile mills and manufacturing unions.

American consumers benefit from cheaper goods and American farmers, particularly corn farmers, benefit from export opportunities to Mexico. One group with a particularly strong interest in protectionism is organized labor. As U.S. manufacturing output has increased steadily over the decades, the number of American employed in manufacturing has dropped. Though output is up, labor unions benefit not one bit from output increases, since their economic lifelines come from the dues of employees. Clearly the anti-trade rhetoric of Sens. Clinton and Obama will woo the hearts of union leaders.

Though Sen. McCain steadfastly supports NAFTA even in front of skeptical audiences in the rust belt, it is unlikely that a possible Democratic win in November would number the days of NAFTA. Shortly after the February debate in the video above, Canadian news outlet CTV reported that a senior Obama staff member quietly reassured Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. that Obama’s words were just to please the crowd:

The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

The Obama campaign stood by the NAFTA-bashing, of course, but did not deny that his campaign had contacted the ambassador.

I am impressed with Sen. McCain’s defense of NAFTA, since it takes a good deal of courage to support something unpopular. His courage on this matter, though, is only admirable because he is right in his assessment on the long-term benefits of trade. Free trade is always a politically fragile issue since the benefits are subtle (decreases in costs of consumer goods), whereas the resulting job losses, even if only for a few, are obvious and painful.

Despite Ross Perot’s famous prediction that NAFTA would result in a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs fleeing to Mexico, the unemployment rate in the U.S. actually declined after the agreement’s ratification. Furthermore, the biggest competitor for U.S. manufacturing jobs is not Mexico, but China, which lies outside the scope of NAFTA.

Nonetheless, NAFTA-bashing, though popular with the more xenophobic section of the electorate, is widely considered by economists to be a net benefit to America. This is probably why the Obama campaign official quietly reassured the Canadian ambassador that the senator had no plans for withdrawal.

The Clinton campaign, as I have noted, also double-talks on trade issues. It was recently revealed that Mark Penn, one of Sen. Clinton’s senior advisors, also consulted the Colombian ambassador about how to secure a U.S.-Colombia free-trade pact. Upon public revelation of this seeming double-dealing, Penn resigned. All for election-year politics. George Will explains:

Mark Penn’s sin was to be caught doing something sensible, surreptitiously. That is the only way Democrats can do sensible things regarding trade when their party is pandering to organized labor. Penn’s downfall makes him a member of a species that many Democrats insist is large and about which Democrats theatrically grieve: Penn is a casualty of free trade.

Penn’s consultations with the Colombian ambassador were to no avail. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised today to change House rules to kill the bilateral deal—a deal that she helped negotiate! The New York Times explains:

What Democrats do not want, many of them say, is a vote that would force lawmakers to choose between the labor and working-class opponents of the measure, who say that trade has cost American jobs and led to wage stagnation, and the Wall Street and manufacturing interests that favor the deal.

Interestingly the article notes that both Sens. Clinton and Obama oppose the deal (publicly, at least), “in part because labor groups say that President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia has not done a sufficient job of cracking down on anti-labor violence committed by right-wing groups.”

George Will fires back:

Colombia’s unions, however, document that the number of murders of their members has sharply declined. Edward Schumacher-Matos, visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, notes that “it was far safer to be in a union than to be an ordinary citizen in Colombia last year”: The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.

Sen. Clinton’s opposition to free trade is in markèd contrast to her husband’s position on trade. Though one should not expect her to adopt unswervingly the views of her husband, it is doubtful that her NAFTA threats are sincere. She is pandering to her a core constituency of union members, whom she needs to turn out in significant numbers in Pennsylvania’s upcoming primary. Be it with Mexico, Canada, or Colombia, the Democratic Party has turned against the nation’s overall best interest in trade. The Washington Post’s editorial board, certainly no bastion of conservatism, put it well:

Are [Clinton and Obama] unaware of the real statistics on NAFTA’s effects? Voters are left to wonder, and to ponder which would be worse: that the candidates are sincere and misguided or are insincere and lacking the courage to speak honestly.

Good question.