ponpon

Hillary Clinton
Ready to run the movie again? Oct 4th 2007 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
The betting is that the Clintons will follow the Bushes back into the White HouseTHE September 29th issue of the National Journal, an inside-the-Beltway magazine, contains a striking news item. Hillary Clinton has quietly signed a deal with the University of Illinois to house her presidential library. The university will put up $15m to help finance the construction and operation of the huge building on its Urbana-Champaign campus, close to where Hillary Rodham was born.
"Inside the Beltway" is a phrase used to characterize parts of the real or imagined American political system. It refers to the Capital Beltway (Interstate 495), a beltway that encircles Washington, D.C., and is meant to invoke matters that are important primarily within the offices of the Federal government, its contractors, lobbyists, and the media which cover them.

The phrase is often pejorative, a dismissive or insulting way to say "it's merely politics, not important," carrying the implication that the only people who care are paid by or otherwise dependent upon the federal government. Alternatively, it implies ignorance or indifference with regard to the way things work in what the user of the term regards as the real world, i.e. the world outside the beltway. This phrase is often used to mean the rough equivalent of possessing inside knowledge about American governance and the workings of American representative democracy, or having access to corridors of political power. Ironically, since many Americans might not be aware that Washington, D.C. is surrounded by an actual beltway, even the use of the term connotes Washington insider status.
This was, of course, a joke—but it contains a serious point. The political establishment is betting heavily that Hillary Clinton will become America's next president. And it has reason. Mrs Clinton is way out in front of the Democratic field. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll puts her 33 points ahead of Barack Obama and 40 points ahead of John Edwards. She raised $22m in the last quarter—more than Mr Obama at $19m and much more than Mr Edwards at $7m. The once-mighty Republican Party is a shadow of its former self, divided not only about who should lead it but also about where it should go. Intrade, a pay-to-play prediction market, shows a 36% chance of the Republicans holding the White House alongside a 12% chance of them taking the House and a 7% chance they might take the Senate.
In politics, Pay to Play is a practice in which public officials award lucrative no-bid government contracts and grant other favors to individuals, businesses, and organizations in exchange for large political contributions. Incumbent candidates and their political organizations are typically the greatest beneficiaries of pay-to-play. Many seeking to ban or restrict the practice define pay-to-play as legalized corruption.

The practice also extends, especially in the wake of the McCain-Feingold Bill, to Party Organizations, such as County and State Democratic or Republican Committees. This manner of pay-to-play utilizes "soft-money," or money which is donated to an intermediary with a higher contribution limit, which in turn donates money to individual candidates or campaign committees.

The practice has come under scrutiny in many states, and is, for the most part, left as a state issue rather than a federal one. Many agencies have been created to regulate and control campaign contributions. Furthermore, many third-party government "watchdog" groups have formed to monitor campaign donations and make them more transparent.

Politicos invariably hedge all this around with qualifications. Howard Dean was well ahead of the Democratic field at this stage of the electoral cycle in 2004. Mr Obama might make a breakthrough in Iowa (where he is nipping Mrs Clinton's heels) and gain enough momentum to win the nomination. Mrs Clinton might stumble and fall. The American electorate might balk at the idea of handing both the White House and Capitol Hill to a single party and go for a Republican president. All possible, of course; but all less likely by the day. Mrs Clinton is not only the front-runner. She is well on the way to becoming a prohibitive front-runner.

pro·hib·i·tive adj.

1. Prohibiting; forbidding:
took prohibitive measures.

2. So high or burdensome as to discourage purchase or use:
prohibitive prices.

3. So likely to win as to discourage competition: the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.

This is an extraordinary situation, for all sorts of reasons. The race ought to be wide open: it is the first time that neither party has an incumbent, in the form of a vice-president, since 1928. The rise of the netroots has transferred political power from the Washington establishment to smaller donors. And America is in an anti-establishment mood: the Democratic Congress has even lower approval ratings, at about 27%, than George Bush. Yet Mrs Clinton has all the advantages of an incumbent, from a brand name to an established political machine, without many of the disadvantages.

:73:/ Netroots is a recent term coined to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. The word is a portmanteau of Internet and grassroots, reflecting the technological innovations that supposedly set netroots techiques apart from other forms of political participation. In the United States, the term is used mainly in left-wing circles.[1]

The term necessarily overlaps with the related ideas of e-democracy, open politics and participatory democracy, all of which are somewhat more specific, better defined, and more widely accepted. Netroots outreach is a campaign-oriented activity that uses the web for complementing more traditional campaign activities, such as collaborating with grassroots activism that involves get-out-the-vote and organizing through interconnecting local and regional efforts, such as Meetup, and the netroots-grassroots coalition that propeled the election of Howard Dean to the DNC Chair in January, 2005.

Advocates claim that the essential quality of the netroots is its flatness and inter-linked web connectiveness: that it constitutes communication points that reach out to influence traditional media, but is not directed outward from any one point. Through events like a blogswarm, the netroots displays non-hierarchical and decentralized features.

And this too is odd, since she is one of the most hated figures in American politics. During the 1990s she embodied everything that conservatives hate about female professionals: a bossy harridan who disparaged stay-at-home mothers, tried to reorganise the health-care system that makes up one-seventh of the American economy, and stayed with her tom-catting husband to further her political ambitions. Conservative conferences regularly feature loo-paper with Hillary's face on it and Hillary trolls to throw balls at. CafePress, a web retailer, is selling more than 100,000 anti-Hillary items, including a “Hillary is the Devil” beer stein.

But Hillary-hatred is by no means confined to the right. David Geffen, a Hollywood mogul, gave voice to a widespread feeling on the left when he complained about the Clintons' relationship with truth. “Everybody in politics lies,” he told the New York Times. “But they do it with such ease, it's troubling.” Mrs Clinton has some of the highest negatives of any politician in the business.

And yet here she is, with her husband, looking likely to break all sorts of records. If she wins, Mrs Clinton will be the first female president of the United States—a banner headline in itself—and Mr Clinton will be the first male first spouse. She will be the first president married to a former president. She will also be the first president who is married to a former president who was impeached for having oral sex with an intern in the Oval Office.

This raises all sorts of intriguing questions. How will the first couple be addressed? Mrs and Mr President? Mrs President and Mr Clinton? What will people call Mr Clinton? (He says that his Scottish friends have suggested “first laddie”.) And, more important, what will Mrs Clinton do with her husband? Back in 1992, the Clintons campaigned on the slogan “Buy one, get one free”. But Mrs Clinton's presidency will be doomed if she allows herself to be overshadowed by her more experienced and more charismatic spouse. Not for the first time, Mr Clinton is likely to be both her biggest asset and her biggest liability.

古典情节

说实话,这个ECONOMIST真的很难，我怎么看也看不懂,
它的WEB上生词很多~

王子的微笑

貌似在哪里看到过这个东西
希拉里讲的啊？

Lydia

不过这个杂志真的很好哦!
前两天还在网站上看到最新一期的封面故事就是中国的十七大,不过貌似批评,

古典情节

是噻~我刚才看的时候就发现在批评17大

ponpon

我还没有发完，我自己做的东西啊！等我编辑好了再重新发一次，大家有什么一起交流啊！能学到很多东西的！

ponpon

对了，想问下，音频和视频怎么发？

米兰

看到这个主题，突然想起张鹏老师了，挺想念他当时给我们带的报刊选读的，了解了很多传媒的知识的，现在在新加坡应该过得很好吧！

新dē希望

China's Communist Party congress

Still in Mao's shadow
Oct 11th 2007 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

And 1.3 billion people are still in the dark about what their leaders want
AFP
IN THE absence of serious elections, the big event in Chinese politics is the five-yearly congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. From October 15th Hu Jintao, who has led the party since the last congress, will preside over a gathering that offers him the chance to demonstrate his authority and explain his vision for China in the next five years. On neither count is he expected to inspire.

The 2,217 delegates, most of them officials chosen in rigged elections to attend the meeting in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, will voice no criticism of Mr Hu's record. He has done next to nothing to fulfil repeated promises of greater democracy within the party. The congress, expected to last about a week, will be as tightly scripted as the 16 others in the party's 86-year history. Delegates will name a new Central Committee of around 200 members. This will meet at the end of the congress to name a new Politburo to rule the country until 2012. Mr Hu and his colleagues will ordain the outcome.

But rumours abound that Mr Hu has been having trouble appointing the exact Politburo he would like. Observers had long assumed that the Politburo's Standing Committee—the apex of power in China—would include a new member to be groomed as Mr Hu's heir-apparent. This would be Li Keqiang, the 52-year-old party chief of Liaoning Province in the north-east. Now rumours suggest that Mr Hu has been forced by colleagues to promote two heirs-apparent. The second is said to be Xi Jinping, 54, party chief of Shanghai.

The two men will presumably have to contend for the top slot in 2012. Chinese politics is too opaque to know how the succession of either man would change the way the country works. This was not always so. In the build-up to the party's 13th congress in 1987 the emergence of Zhao Ziyang as Deng Xiaoping's chosen successor appeared to herald an era of liberalisation, Mr Zhao being a noted reformist. But he was deposed by hardliners two years later during the Tiananmen Square unrest and kept under house arrest until he died in 2005. Since the early 1990s Chinese leaders have succeeded in presenting a far more unified front. Mr Hu, Mr Xi and Mr Li have no apparent policy differences.

They could represent different factions, however. Mr Xi, a popular theory has it, is closer to Mr Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who remains a behind-the-scenes force in Chinese politics at the age of 81. One of Mr Jiang's pet projects, a glass and titanium egg-shaped opera house costing $360m opposite the Great Hall of the People, opened last month after years of controversy about plonking such an extravagant oddity in the nation's political heart. On a tour of the building this week for the foreign press, a construction official told The Economist that Mr Jiang had sung to staff there during a recent inspection.

Both Mr Xi and Mr Li (who both have degrees in law) have received considerable attention from China's state-controlled media. Mr Li's leadership has been praised for a massive programme of building affordable housing and clearing slums. Mr Xi's leadership has been implicitly linked with Shanghai's recent accomplishments, even though he only took over as the city's chief in March following the dismissal of his predecessor, Chen Liangyu, for alleged corruption. Among notable events since then have been the topping out in September of the Shanghai World Financial Centre, which will be the country's tallest building and, says the official press, the third-tallest in the world. Mr Xi enjoys the additional distinction, which China's official press prefers not to mention, of being the son of a late revolutionary leader, Xi Zhongxun. Such “princelings” appear to be on the rise.

If both men are elevated to the Standing Committee, the country's obscure politics will be shrouded by another veil of uncertainty. After Mr Hu was promoted to the Standing Committee at the party's 14th congress in 1992, it was taken almost as read that he would eventually succeed Mr Jiang (even though he was Deng's choice, not Mr Jiang's). Liberals in the party have long argued that there should be more open competition for top posts. But Mr Hu is not in favour of elections for his job. The outcome is more likely to be determined by factional squabbling.

In the build-up to the congress there has been a ritual upsurge of complaints by liberals that the party is stalling on the issue of making China more democratic. In the latest edition of Yanhuang Chunqiu, a Beijing monthly, Mao Zedong's former secretary, Li Rui, gave warning of looming chaos in China unless it embraces democracy. Mr Hu, however, though keen to impress the rest of the world with China's openness as it prepares to host the Olympic Games, fears the opposite is true: that political reform could trigger a tidal wave of discontent from democrats and the underprivileged.

Indeed, he shows no interest even in more cautious suggestions. Early this year a party journal, Study and Pursuit, published proposals for reforming the party- congress system. These included convening congresses annually, imposing a 50% limit on the proportion of delegates who hold official rank and electing fewer delegates, in order to cut costs and encourage genuine debate (of which there is currently none). This year the number of delegates has actually been increased by more than 100 compared with 2002. So the applause for Mr Hu will be even louder.

新dē希望

关于十七大咯，不负责任的把自己读不懂的发个