Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

From Chatham House comes Alex Evans's report on what rising food prices mean not today, but in the future. You can download the entire report here (11-page pdf). What follows are summary points:

^{Rising Food Prices: Drivers and Implications for Development}

Global food prices have risen 83 per cent over the last three years. The increases have been driven by high income growth in emerging economies (probably the single most significant factor), use of crops for biofuels, the relative inelasticity of supply, historically low stock levels and some speculative investment.

More recently, national concerns over inflation and prices have led some countries to reduce exports and others to try to build up stocks - creating a feedback loop that feeds on itself to drive prices up still further. In the medium to longer term, 'scarcity trends' - climate change, the cost of energy inputs, scarcity of land and water - could limit the supply-side response.

In the immediate term, the priority is to increase both the volume and the quality of humanitarian assistance available to poor people, including by moving away from in-kind food aid and towards cash transfers or voucher systems - although it is important to be clear that there are outstanding questions about how these social protection systems will work, and they should not be seen as a panacea. The issue of compensatory financing may also arise for some countries facing balance-of-payments difficulties.

In the longer term, the key challenge is to increase the supply of food: the World Bank estimates that demand for food will rise by 50 per cent by 2030, as a result of rising affluence and growing world population. Achieving this challenge will require something close to a revolution, and a massive investment in agriculture in developing countries.

If supply fails to keep pace with rising demand, then the question of 'fair shares' is likely to emerge as a significant global issue. Already, the effect of a burgeoning global middle class switching to diets with more meat and dairy products - both relatively inefficient in terms of grain use - has been to reduce the affordability of staple foods for poorer consumers.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

American military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4052

Coalition military fatalities in Iraq: 4361

Iraqi civilian and military fatalities: 200,000 to 1.4 million

In the latest Gallup Poll, 63% of Americans, up 6 points since December, say the United States made a mistake invading Iraq.

Open Thread and Diary Rescue

Tonight's rescuers are Yashua, YatPundit, ezdidit, dadanation, TruthOfAngels, and srkp23, with pico helming the editor's chair, and a big assist from vcmvo2.

April 27th is the birthday of Sergei Prokofiev, one of the twentieth century's greatest composers. Here's a classic production to enjoy while you scan tonight's selections.

• In two diaries about veteran issues, testvet6778 discloses The War Within: Part of the PTSD story, and jimstaro asks, "Where is the public's outrage about Help for Veterans?" (ezdidit)
• Stephen Johnson, The Environment's Alberto Gonzales is The Cuncator's efficient (and well-sourced) takedown of our current EPA administrator. (dadanation)
• With a diary for the reality- and science-based communities here, patrickz suggests You Should Listen to Steven Chu. (ezdidit)
• yaddab brings us a concise and well-researched article on our burgeoning national debt in Did you know you owed $3935 to the Chinese Government?! (Yashua)
• gjohnsit writes an excellent, well-linked piece explaining that Taxpayers Already Bailing Out Housing Market. (pico & srkp23)
• cloudwatcher pens a thorough and well written op-ed piece on religion and politics, in Calling all candidates: Get off the religious bus. (Yashua)
• dogemperor continues to expose the shocking missions and methods of the Dominionists, in Teen Challenge: Coercive groups disguised as rehab. (srkp23)
• betson08 reports on the important accomplishments and continuing needs of this extraordinary netroots-supported women's shelter: Pretty Bird Woman House Update. (pico & srkp23)
• Yosef 52 offers a poetic break from the campaign madness in Some Poems for the Saturday Night Club. (YatPundit)
• For the perfect tonic (with or without the gin), we have Eddie C's beautiful photo-diary spotlighting some of the activists he has encountered while in Southern California, in Outstanding in the Field: Laguna Beach Activist. (dadanation)

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread.

House Roundup

CT-04, CT-05: President Bush held a $10,000 per person fundraiser for Representative Chris Shays and State Senator David Cappiello, the chosen challenger to Democratic Representative Chris Murphy and a fellow with his own ties to Big Oil. The Republicans really can't abide the prospect of being kicked out of New England.

In the 3rd District, businesswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, director of the Lake Erie Arboretum, won the Democratic nomination handily in a four-person race. Dahlkemper finished almost twenty points ahead of the second-place finisher, Kyle Foust. Dahlkemper paced the Democratic field in fundraising, but she'll have to kick it up a few notches to beat incumbent Phil English, although the district itself is winnable.

The 5th District race was a doozy on the GOP side, with GOPer Glen Thompson emerging from a field of nine candidates, winning with just 19% of the vote. It's a shame he won, as the second-place GOPer, Derek Walker, has a fascinating background involving charges of burglary and criminal trespass. On the bright side, Club for Growther Matt Shaner also lost. Ha ha!

For the Dems in the 5th, Clearfield County Commissioner Mark McCracken won the nod over Bill Cahir and Rick Vilello.

In the 10th, Club for Growther Chris Hackett narrowly fended off fellow wingnut Dan Meuser to earn the right to face Chris Carney in the fall.

And in the 18th District, self-funder Steve O'Donnell won the Democratic nomination to face Rep. Tim Murphy over fellow Democrat Bethany Hafer, daughter of former State Treasurer Barbara Hafer.

They previously filed a complaint against Freedom's Watch for illegally coordinating with the NRCC by literally using an NRCC script in their ad.

The well-funded, if unfocused, Freedom's Watch has put over $500,000 into their ad campaign, coming through where the NRCC and Jenkins himself have failed (Cazayoux has drowned him in the fundraising game, so far). Here's the DCCC's own ad on Freedom's Watch:

The VRWC at Dartmouth and beyond

This is a story that is on the one hand very local, and on the other has far-reaching national implications. It is no big stretch to say that the VRWC, the vast rightwing conspiracy, is attempting a takeover of Dartmouth College.

What does it matter if the far right takes over Dartmouth? It means just over a thousand students a year being taught by professors to whom a conservative litmus test has been applied. It means a new training ground for rightwing pundits like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza (both of whom came out of Dartmouth in the 1980s heyday of the Dartmouth Review). It means a prestigious academic home from which conservative faculty could themselves act as pundits, or draw support for their research. And it provides a blueprint for future assaults on other colleges and universities; it is, in the words of one of its leaders, part of a "multigenerational battle."

Here's the deal: Dartmouth has an unusually small board of trustees, with half the trustees historically elected by the alumni. In recent years, a group of alums has organized to elect hard right trustees, with the intent of rolling back two decades of Dartmouth's movement away from its infamously conservative past. Because the board of trustees is so small, it is vulnerable to the election of just a few people. (By way of comparison, Colgate University, with 2,750 students, has 34 trustees, while Dartmouth, with 4,100 students, has 18.)

When the college acted to make a full takeover of the board more difficult by expanding its size, the conservative-controlled Association of Alumni sued the college, supported by outside conservative groups. Now, the AoA is about to begin its elections, and the VRWC is continuing its mission to take over Dartmouth's alumni governance, continue the lawsuit, and influence the course of the college for generations.

Are these the people you want leading one of the nation's top colleges?

• Current trustee Stephen Smith has questioned evolution and defended fraternities sanctioned by Dartmouth for "publishing date-rape techniques in their house newsletter" and "secretly videotaping women hooking up with brothers."
• Current trustee Todd Zywicki, a professor at the incredibly conservative George Mason School of Law, used his blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy as a platform to aid his candidacy for Dartmouth trustee; he went on to say, in remarks at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, that former Dartmouth president James Freedman was a "truly evil man" trying to promote "Political correctness in all forms."
• Candidate for Association of Alumni (the group currently suing the college) First Vice President Martin "Bert" Boles spoke in February at an Opus Dei conference and has contributed money to the Club for Growth and Alan Keyes.
• Candidate for Association of Alumni Second Vice President Paul Mirengoff blogs at Power Line. Enough said.

In his Pope Center remarks, Zywicki laid out some of the plan:

It's going to be a multigenerational battle; it's going to take a lot of resources, and a lot of struggle. And I think what you have to understand is that those who control the university today they don't believe in God and they don't believe in country.

--snip--

Secondly we need to think about investing in alternative institutions or simultaneously or alternatively. Which is, that is we need to start thinking about creating and supporting alternative institutions. Elite institutions matter, absolutely, that's where the leaders of society are disproportionately going to be found. But we need to find the shining lights elsewhere and start nurturing these. I will just tell you about George Mason Law School....Our faculty are willing to engage on leading issues of the day, the second amendment, affirmative action, those sorts of things. We were the ones who sponsored the brief supporting the military, we wrote the brief supporting the military in the Fair  v. Rumsfeld case, which we were then vindicated in eight to nothing in the Supreme Court. All the other law schools were on the other side of that issue....Because if reform is going to come I think it's going to come from these new institutions, not from those that are already within the elite institutions. People like Michael Monger and Robbie George, these people are sui generis right, you can't replicate them. If they come along, grab the opportunity and ride it. You have to invest in people and not just programs.

Having said that, the third point is that institutions do matter. Institutions matter a lot, which is what we've done is build institutions around the periphery like these centers, which again I think are very, very important and very, very useful. But fundamentally institutions matter. Jesus was great but Peter was just as important. Right? It's great to have people out doing these things but institutions are where the actions are, institutions is where you draw kids in and educate them with a fundamental curriculum and that sort of thing. People don't want to invest in overhead, for instance. But you've got to start thinking about getting institutions like George Mason Law School or wherever and building those programs and investing in them if it is going to be a multigenerational project of bringing them up to prominence so that they can compete.

This is a radical program to bring the worst intersection of neo-con and fundamentalist thought to higher education -- to engage in a multigenerational battle to take over your children's education, and the airwaves, and the courts. It's not just about what happens in the colleges themselves, but about the influence they can have, about the conservative infrastructure they can have waiting for the next time a George W. Bush is elected president and wants to staff an administration with lawyers who will find the justification for torture, for steamrolling Congress, for the unitary executive.

They have set up institutions to lend themselves credibility -- rightwing candidates at Dartmouth often cite FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. This group is ostensibly committed to free speech, but somehow it always seems to be the speech of frat brothers who've "jokingly" published date-rape manuals that FIRE is most concerned about. It's funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation and others. According to SourceWatch:

FIRE is a major proponent of the intellectual diversity movement which aims to dismantle the so-called liberal bias in higher academia.

--snip--

FIRE also has a legal network which connects students who feel their rights have been violated by faculty or administrators with attorneys specializing in FIRE's major talking points.

Then there's ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. ACTA was founded in 1995 by Lynne Cheney and Joe Lieberman, among others. Its current president, Anne Neal, worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities under Lynne Cheney in the first Bush administration. ACTA can often be found inveighing against the Dartmouth administration and supporting the actions -- including the lawsuit -- of its rightwing movement alums.

When you read articles about these conflicts, then, there are always outside, neutral-sounding groups weighing in against the college. If you don't know that they are conservative front groups, it might sound convincing. And that's the point. You build institutions so that whenever you need it, there's an "expert" to give the media a quote supporting you, to fund your lawsuits, to be a constant source of money and manpower and support for the generations-long project of moving American higher education drastically to the right.

This isn't just Dartmouth. It's just the first step.

If you are a Dartmouth alum, or know any, the Association of Alumni elections begin tomorrow, April 28, and run until June 5. VOTE

For more information before you vote, go to Dartmouth Undying, the group organized to retake the AoA and drop the lawsuit against the college.

I would encourage you to vote for their slate (not, as you will see, a set of wild-eyed radicals) -- but equally I would encourage you to do your research. Look seriously at their candidates; don't vote for someone you know nothing about. In this case, getting the lawsuit dropped so that the college can defend itself against the Todd Zywickis and Stephen Smiths is of paramount importance.

If you aren't a Dartmouth alum, but are an alum of a school that allows you to vote on trustees or alumni groups, take this as a reminder of the importance of that. Research your candidates and vote, or those elections may become vulnerable to organized groups trying to impose radical agendas.

When you see groups like FIRE and ACTA being quoted, know what's going on. Know what their agenda is and look for ways to unveil it in individual conflicts.

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