Viktor Yanukovych, still pursuing legal challenges of his defeat in the Ukrainian presidential election, has announced he will tender his resignation as prime minister.

"I have made the decision and am formally submitting my resignation," he said in a televised address.

However, Mr Yanukovych refused to admit defeat in the country's re-run presidential election, which was called for Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko. He is preparing an appeal to Ukraine's Supreme Court.

"We are still fighting but I don't have much hope," he said in his New Year's Eve address.

His threat of going into "harsh opposition", I predict, will fade to black in short order. The whereabouts of his compatriots is still unknown.

I'm off to write the last set of charitable contribution checks for 2004. Captain Ed is proposing your first check for 2005 should come January 12th for World Relief Day for the victims of the tsunamis in Asia. Join him, Mitch, the Fraters and me in contributing generously for this worthy cause.

For those in need of deductions still for 2004, you can drop your dollars at World Vision right now.

Henry Farrell has started a debate on whether the blogosphere can replace the MSM and about whether the blogosphere is full of "slavering right-wing hacks". Instapundit and PowerLine, whom I will guess Farrell considers part of that group have responded. I need to tell a story to get to my point, centered around an observation I made at lunch yesterday.

This struck a chord because of a conversation I had yesterday with a regular lunch partner, a fairly mainstream liberal Democrat (which is to say, among our faculty at SCSU, he's a saner part of the dominant paradigm.) He has been confounded by my blog and radio-hosting because to him I'm not the Republican he envisions. He comforts himself thinking I am libertarian and that therefore I must not also be Republican. (If he reads this, he will be truly disconcerted by that last sentence.) He had read Coleman's swipe at Powerline and wondered if I knew those guys. Of course, I said, we're on the same show and in the same alliance. He confessed at that point he simply doesn't get blogs.

Now, this guy is smart, very smart. He reads a great deal. He is not argumentative by nature but he's quietly passionate about his politics. And he knows no more about blogs than I've told him, even though he and I are about as close as I am to anyone in St. Cloud outside my family. No curiosity to explore further. Smart people are curious by nature, so this struck me as odd.

As we were walking back to the office, I pointed out to him a flyer. It is titled "Share the Love" and its purpose is to suggest behavior that confronts racism and homophobia. The flyers are all around campus. They are a little reminiscent of Soviet-era posters to exhort workers to forget the fact that they are cold and hungry and make more tanks. But this one contained the following bullet point.

Be informed. Don't accept stereotypical characterizations and beliefs. Read reliable sources and talk to qualified persons.

I asked my friend, what is the meaning of that last sentence? Who decides who are reliable sources and qualified persons? I am not trying to ascribe ill intent to the writer of this flyer; I am saying that this is an odd thing to write. It seems to suggest that you can't trust sources other than those already accepted, i.e., the MSM.

He gets information from MSM because those conform to his views. We all watch news through the filter of our beliefs and experiences. The blogosphere exists as a phenomenon because for many MSM reporting causes dissonance with our filters. Of course, that explanation is also there for Fox News, so to me there must be more to the explanation than that. And I think there are two other demands of the information market that bloggers meet which even a network like Fox does not.

Blogs have always had two purposes, and not necessarily to watchdog the MSM. That is a byproduct of the other two functions. The first, so wonderfully illustrated in Rathergate, was the Hayekian dissemination of specific knowledge. My own Instalanche centered on specific knowledge of Ukraine. I disagree with Reynolds that "Big Media organizations have an enormous advantage in gathering hard news" unless he means the first AP reports from places like Aceh about tsunamis. On that he'd be right. But blogs get a huge payoff for gathering a piece of information that helps shape stories other bloggers and the MSM are gathering. It does so in an efficient fashion: Spontaneous order occurs because those blogs able to gather good information draw eyes, Technorati rankings and NZ Bear love. In contrast, the marginal value to an MSM organization of getting a particular piece of data is small; ad rates and subscriptions will not be affected by coverage of one particular story nearly as much. As the mainstream media comes to understand that order in the blogosphere, it will rely on blogs more and more to help with the information gathering -- rather than compete, there will be some desire for cooperation between the blogosphere and the MSM. See, for a current example, the reliance on Sharkblog's coverage of the Washington governor's race by the Seattle Times. I think this absorption will only grow.

The other purpose, though, is more insidious to this discussion, and that is to assemble and analyze the information gathered. Powerline's advantage in the Rathergate story wasn't just that it had good readers providing information about IBM Selectric II's but also that it has three writers of high quality able to assemble and present the information in a persuasive manner. One of the great advances in macroeconomics, rational expectations, was first written about by John Muth in 1963, but it took another eight years for someone to write about it in a way that economists could grasp.

My personal problem with mainstream journalists, as a profession, is that they are badly trained in economics. Let me give you an example of a good one: James Gleick, longtime science writer for the New York Times, actually understands the science about which he writes. My field has practitioners who use chaos theory, but none of them explained it to me in the way Gleick did. He created none of the research, he only explained it in a way intelligent people outside of physics could understand. Good journalism should be able to do that. (And Gleick is certainly not conservative.) I do not see economics writers who provide that same thing on a reliable basis in the MSM. In the blogosphere there are quite a few, though. Enough that I don't feel the need to add many articles to the 'sphere in that area.

The blogosphere reduces the cost of people who are able to write such stories reaching a market. It is full of "qualified and credible" people, and full of unqualified and not-credible people as well. Just like the MSM. Caveat lector.

Written without any idea what Hugh wrote, because Amazon is pokey and some of us don't get comp copies. Ahem.

I have the bad habit of talking back to my car radio, which usually has on talk or sports talk. (Littlest thinks I'm nuts, but I'm sure this is not the only reason for her belief.) The other night I'm flipping through channels and someone is guest-hosting for Savage, and callers are talking about whether the Asian tsunamis shake one's faith in God. I, a proud Armenian and consumer of Ararat brandy, am fairly screaming at the radio "Noah's ark, you idiots!" A much more articulate answer comes David Hart. The paragraph that strikes home:

Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

I recall Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and think that the conflict even exists among Christians. One of the items I am thinking about right now for long-run development of my thoughts and faith is how to reconcile Sowell's "constrained vision", one based on Hayekian or Friedmanite principles, with such thoughts in the church as a "theology of abundance" or Martin Luther's two kingdoms and antipathy towards reason .

But I see no reason to believe that the tsunamis prove anything about God or His love. Just as after the Flood, there will be rainbows after the tsunamis. 7.5 million of them, and growing.

In yet another article on how conservative students are making liberal faculty lives harder, I find these paragraphs:

Once, it was liberal campus activists who cited the importance of "diversity" in pressing their agendas for curriculum change. Now, conservatives have adopted much of the same language in calling for a greater openness to their viewpoints.

Similarly, academic freedom guidelines have traditionally been cited to protect left-leaning students from punishment for disagreeing with teachers about such issues as American neutrality before World War II and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Now, those same guidelines are being invoked by conservative students who support the war in Iraq.

To many professors, there's a new and deeply troubling aspect to this latest chapter in the debate over academic freedom: students trying to dictate what they don't want to be taught.

"Even the most contentious or disaffected of students in the '60s or early '70s never really pressed this kind of issue," said Robert O'Neil, former president of the University of Virginia and now director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

That seems wrong to me. Many Vietnam-era protests were directed against ROTC programs on campuses, which is "trying to dictate what they don't want to be taught." Those protests were "really pressed" on many campuses by taking over buildings and staging sit-ins.

Nor do I really understand the difference between asking for balanced treatment of the issue of American involvement in Vietnam and asking for balanced treatment of the issue in Iraq.

Articles like this one conflate an image with reality. David Horowitz and the Academic Bill of Rights carries an image that the MSM and liberal critics encourage of trying to silence anti-American speech. The article uses this case from Students for Academic Freedom and says the facts are in dispute. But there is little dispute that a faculty member in the music department is teaching "peace studies" and talking about economics and political science. That explains, for example, the cover of this pamphlet. The school is supporting this faculty member without addressing that concern. (They only say he has a doctorate in "higher education" and that he's taught "peace studies" before.)

It's not really a question of academic freedom. The questions here should not be viewed as legalistic, which to me is a continuing problem with ABOR. It is a question of whether the professional ethics of a faculty member should include an attempt to provide balance in the classroom. What conservative faculty are calling for is a re-assertion of those ethics.

It isn't the right that is calling for speech codes. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education owes its existence not to calls for suppression of free speech but to its encouragement.

(Hat tip: Scholar Jim.)

As Joe Carter notes today, the blogosphere has been almost united in its criticism of ankle-biter-in-chief Nick Coleman's attack on PowerLine. One voice in the wilderness has been Penraker, who suggests NARN has baited him.

Nick Coleman is a very small, very unusual man. But his rantings did not arise in a vacuum. There is a reason and a history behind his spewings.

The Northern Alliance took after Coleman with a particular zest. They have savaged him for weeks on the air - and it sure seemed personal to me. (I don't have transcripts, but I remember thinking "Why are they ripping this guy a new one in such a personal manner?"). If I recall correctly , they called him a coward, etc. As far as I was concerned, they went a little too far. Coleman is probably not worthy of much respect, and he probably let his ego start the whole thing - But if you are doing things right, you retain a certain minimum level of respect for even the nuttiest liberals. All human beings deserve a minimum level of respect - even Star Tribune columnists. The Northern Alliance shifted into a juvenilely mocking tone whenever discussing Coleman.

So it's not surprising to see they have pushed him over the edge into pure insanity.

A few points need addressing. Has NARN gone after Coleman? Sure we have. Part of the third hour of every show is media criticism. I call it Mediot of the Week; Coleman could retire the award in my opinion, even in a city with some real competition from his wife or any regular writer of the City Pages.

Is it unfair to characterize Coleman as a coward? He has been invited to the show several times. Up to this month he ignored these invitations. This month he says he "might consider" being on if we pay for the interview with a contribution to Maxfield School. Paying for interviews is a poor policy and we do not do so. His voicemail to Mitch Berg, which I heard, was genuinely vile in my opinion. And then he sends an email suggesting he might wish to sue us for making false statements about him.

That makes all the more interesting his editor's statement to Big Trunk at Powerline yesterday, when Scott called to ask how the StarTribune could print Coleman's fact-free piece.

Among other things, the editor advised me that Coleman's attack on us involved no reporting, and that the column's factual misrepresentations were to be read in that light. Moreover, certain of the misrepresentations were to be construed as sarcasm rather than taken at face value.

Now I've been accused of being irony-challenged, but since the beginning of all this folderol was the sarcasm practiced in the Newspaper Newlyweds, in return for which Coleman is smearing the wrong people (at least his wife sort of got it right), the StarTribune's defense of yet another ad hominem attack on Scott and John strikes me as, well, ironic.

(UPDATE BELOW MODIFIES THIS PARA.) As to "juvenile mocking", I suggest Penraker simply read Fraters. Their on-air style fits their blog style. They are who they are. We have different styles, and that comes through on the show; some of us are lawyers, some are academics, and some are younger than others. That melange works on-air for reasons I still don't fully grasp. It is not at all surprising, though, that when we go to the topic that touches FL most, we go into their style. Listen to us talk about Ukraine when I sort of control the discussion, and the tone is different. So what?

As I do not live in the Cities and do not read the StarTribune because it's irrelevant to me, not because of my disgust with its editorial policies, I've tended to stand on the side of this debate. (There are certain writers in the St. Cloud paper about whom I could bloviate mightily, but since nobody outside central MN reads that paper, who would care?) But given what I've seen of Coleman's behavior here, and the apathy with which the STrib's editorial board editors deal with personal attacks on Powerline, I'm not sure I can muster up much in the way of minimal respect for Coleman. I will try, certainly, particularly if he should drop his demands and come on our show with no preconditions. But you have to get respect to give respect, and I'm still waiting to see if Coleman can show any.

UPDATE: I've received a bunch of email about this story (for those who aren't familiar, the address is comments at scsuscholars dot com). First, some suggest I've agreed with Penraker over the comment on juvenile mocking. I wrote that paragraph poorly and have to say that I agree with the criticism. I profusely apologize to The Elder and Saint Paul for my mistake. They have a different style and use more satire -- heck, they're just funnier than I am -- and that was the point I was trying to make in that paragraph. But I completely disagree with Penraker that their pieces are juvenile. Nor would I call the on-air presentation this either.

Second, Linda Seebach, a writer at the Rocky Mountain News (and, IIRC, a former MN Daily writer) writes that because Coleman is a metro columnist and not on the editorial board, so that he's not edited by the editorial board as I suggested. I apologize for that misstatement; in his post Big Trunk says he spoke to "Coleman's editor" and it was me that read that for "editorial board". Thanks for the correction, Linda!

Reader Ron C notes in a comment that Serhiy Tihipko, Yanukovych's previous campaign manager, has come up a cropper too. Again from Maidan, a Yushchenko press outlet:

Information circulating in Kyiv is not joyful and is unpleasant for Tyhypko himself and for Ukrainian society.

An important and influential person actually has disappeared, and is not in contact with anyone. There are rumours of his death, of an attempt at suicide, and of him being in critical condition. There is an absence of clear refutation from Tyhypko himself, although logically this should occur, and obviously Tyhypko would be obligated to do this at least in regard to the reputation of his TAS-Bank.

...As of now, we have information that a few days ago Tyhypko tried to leave Ukraine with false documents. He was detained at passport control, but was released when he was recognized at the former head of the National Bank.

Who knows what this means; just because a guy doesn't return calls and doesn't respond to rumors does not mean necessarily that something bad has happened to him. But with the loss of Kirpa and Lyakh and the disappearance of others like Stasiuk and Bakai, one can't help but wonder if there's a pattern to it all.

According to Maidan, he's out.

Today, December 30, 2004, civil court judges of the Supreme Court of Ukraine dismissed the last of the four complaints filed by Yanukovych about the violations that, in his opinion, occurred during the re-voting held on December 26, 2004.

Today, civil court judges of the Supreme Court of Ukraine who were deciding on the case filed by Yanukovych reached a decision for the case to be dismissed and returned to Yanukovych. In his fourth complaint, Yanukovych disputed the election campaign rights, election funding, provision of public measures before and during the election day.

Particularly, in its statement, Supreme Court of Ukraine established that complaint filed by Yanukovych does not contain clearly stated claims about the inactivity of the Central Election Committee. Also, Yanukovych did not explain in his complaint what actions established by the legislation of Ukraine are supposed to regulate organization and implementation of the presidential elections in Ukraine. The complaint also does not contain suggestions on how to reinstate rights and legal interests of the petitioner.

NOTE: UPDATE ABOVE NOTES HE'S LOST HIS LAST APPEAL.

Captain Ed notes that Viktor Yanukovych has lost most of his appeals in the Ukrainian courts and before the Central Election Committee. He has one appeal still before the Supreme Court; he also will be able to appeal the CEC's decision.. From Radio Free Europe today

The court refused to review complaints alleging that the Central Election Committee failed to enforce voting law and failed to ensure that all disabled voters received home-voting rights.

Since it was that law that was challenged and changed over the weekend, the significance of this decision by the court is great. It too deals with procedural issues rather than evidence of actual fraud at the ballot boxes. His CEC complaint as well was a broad-brush attempt to paint the process as flawed. The CEC and its territorial subsidiaries are mostly interested in hearing of specific examples, so that particular tactic was unlikely to go far.

(UPDATE: From the last graf of the NYT this morning, quoting Yanukovych's campaign manager:

"We can predict what will happen," Mr. Chornovil said. "No solution in our favor will be made.")

I think we are witnessing the death throes of Yanukovych's political career. But there's more intrigue happening; another post coming on this today.

Spitbull says the Northern Alliance blogs have not announced the next gathering of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers.

Guess I should change that.

Where: Keegan's Irish Pub.
When: January 22, 5-9pm.
Why: To toast Nick Coleman disguised as an empty chair.

Pray for weather warm enough for outdoor cigars.

Somebody has written the book I wanted to do.

South-Western, a division of Thomson Learning, proudly presents Economics in the Movies. This collection of twenty film scenes highlights many important economcis principles, theories, and concepts. ...it will help you learn core ideas through the magic and power of film.

Here's a demo from The Family Man. How they missed the shareholders meeting in Other People's Money is beyond me.

I still want to do the book looking at economics in 18th and 19th century literature.

John Palmer wonders whether a 17 cent tax on plastic grocery bags in San Francisco is efficient.

I'm all in favour of considering user fees when an activity imposes negative externalities, but this seems extreme. First, I'm not sure how big the externalities from grocery bags are -- where I live, most people recycle the plastic grocery bags, and it is difficult to think of re-cycled bags as meriting a user fee.

Second, I suspect the price elasticity of demand for plastic garbage bags is so high that a 17-cent charge is much higher than the efficient charge. My ad hoc observations from stores that charge only two cents per bag is that LOTS of people bring their own bags when they go shopping.

We have a per bag fee for putting out garbage in St. Cloud; a green, labeled Hefty costs $2 each. This has encouraged a great deal of recycling, and more than a little searching by some for dumpsters at apartment buildings and businesses. A couple of grocery stores which have you bag your own groceries sell tote boxes; these are not very popular items as best I can tell.

The other thing I notice is that most people here do not choose plastic. Paper bags dominate when choices are offered. The bags are used by people to sort recycling ... and as bags for garbage to put in the green $2 trash sacks. I suspect that where the option is offered, paper will dominate plastic in SF too; the elasticity is probably quite high.

Maybe of my lifetime.

It is somewhere close to the year anniversity since I began reading your blog every day.

I have decided that one major reason I keep reading is your total lack of a sense of irony.

Michael, thanks. I've been giggling for two days about it. Ironically, of course.

Some scattered thoughts:

Tulip Girl has linked to Amy Ridenour's piece on Kateryna Yushchenko, which is excellent. One of TG's commenters asks why we keep referring to her as Kathy Chumachenko, and that's because that's how Ridenour knew her and how I knew her. It was common for the local workers in our office in Kyiv to call her Katya, and Kateryna would be how you translated her name to Ukrainian, just as my Armenian friends will sometimes call me "Takavor" instead of "King" (though it's rather silly, since the name is from my non-Armenian mother's side of the family.) But to suggest that somehow Kathy is not engaged in her husband's campaign is to misunderstand her. When I worked with her -- when she is described in her post as having trained a number of economists at Yushchenko's national bank, I was one of the trainers -- she opened doors for me to be successful without imposing herself in the work. (There was resistance to training -- too long a story to get into here.) The one criticism I ever heard of her was that she was too much a "true believer". I thought it was pretty neat that a western advisor actually thought of the concerns of the counterpart country Ukraine as much as she thought of those of the USA. So when TG replies that she's seen very little of Kathy, I can only think that she's working the same quiet effective way she did when we worked together. Who exactly do you think is helping to write those opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times? Maybe not her pen, but I'm sure her voice.

The squirrelly Yanukovych apparently played hide and seek with protestors, who are trying to keep him out of government offices while he still acts as prime minister. Kuchma is cooperating by suspending the acting PM, which allows Yanukovych to resume duties, "as a matter of principle" in his words. The appeals on the repeat voting from Sunday are at the Supreme Court, with one appeal already thrown out. There are reportedly three more to be considered. There are rumors that Yanukovych may quit, and another that the rest of the cabinet met in a different building (if it's the one I think it is, that's at least half a mile from where the blockade was supposed to happen). It appears the blockade is of only one person, however.

If all goes well for Yushchenko the inauguration will be January 10th or shortly thereafter. As I noted before, the calendar interferes, with Orthodox Christmas a week from tomorrow.

Scott Clark has more speculation about the Kirpa "suicide". Dan McMinn has links to some great articles in Zerkalo Nedeli with analysis. Dan's links are the best way to see them all. Go there.

Last, Terry Rogers:

The Orange Revolution proved the old saying that freedom is when the people can speak, but democracy is when the government listens.

I will be on the Ruth Koscielak Show at 1:35 CT this afternoon talking about Ukraine for around 15 minutes. Not exactly CNBC, but a guy's got to start somewhere. Attention Radioblogger...

...because Nick Coleman is still obsessed with attacking bloggers. Powerline responds twice, and Captain Ed follows suit. Two quick thoughts: First, Coleman keeps confusing Powerline with Fraters Libertas, which is good for FL. Second, if Time gives an award it never gave before in Blog of the Year, and an award it never announced it would give, wouldn't it be "unpredicted" by definition? Just wondering.

I thought it was pretty neat we got under his skin, but we now clearly have Coleman's undies in a twist. That's more cool than words can express.

Does it occur to anyone else that Nick is now riding on NARN's coattails rather than the other way around? Year of the blog, fool!

UPDATE (12/30): It occurred to Chris Muir!

An article in the Kyiv Post suggests that Heorhiy Kirpa's death reported yesterday could be connected to another death of a high-ranking official in a party aligned with losing candidate Viktor Yanukovych.

Yuriy Lyakh, chairman of the Ukrainian Credit Bank founded by Presidential Administration chief Viktor Medvedchuk, died on Dec. 3 after allegedly using an envelope opener to inflict fatal neck wounds. ...

In a live televised interview on Dec. 27 with television station Era, Our Ukraine deputy Mykola Tomenko said the deaths could impede investigations into illegal activities related to the 5-month presidential election campaign. Tomenko added that Kirpa and Lyakh could have served as key witnesses in investigations into financial wrongdoing by President Leonid Kuchma’s regime.

On Dec. 28, Tomenko called upon President Leonid Kuchma to provide protection for three figures that have been influential in recent years: Medvedchuk, former head of the Presidential Administration's department of affairs Ihor Bakai, and Volodymyr Satsiuk, former deputy head of the State Security Service (SBU).

Tonight we learnd that Bakai has been relieved of his duties and is reported to have fled the country. Satsiuk was sacked ten days ago. I'm guessing he left no forwarding address either, given what's happened to his compatriots. Satsiuk, you may recall, was the person reported to have hosted the dinner where Viktor Yushchenko was allegedly poisoned.

A report on Maidan details some of the possible abuse of Kirpa's position with the state railway.

UPDATE: I'm glad I didn't read this with coffee:

I've heard reports that Kirpa died from multiple gunshot wounds. In which case, these suicide reports will be like something from the files of Police Squad -- "He was stabbed in the back 28 times. The worst case of suicide I've ever seen. . ."

Now that he's lost the election for president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych has returned to be prime minister. He was voted out by parliament, but under the old rules the order had to be signed by Kuchma, who has let him take this "holiday" instead. Yushchenko has called for a reinstitution of the blockade of government offices.

The over/under number for Yanukovych's duration in office is seven days. I might move that out a bit because Orthodox Christmas may intervene.

Freedom of speech that does not embrace the right to offend is a farce. The stipulation that you may say whatever you like so long as you don't hurt anyone's feelings canonizes the milquetoast homily, "If you can't say anything nice. . . ." Since rare is the sentiment that does not incense someone, rest assured that in that instance you don't say anything at all.

The concept of religious "tolerance" seems to be warping apace these days, and we appear to forget that commonly one tolerates through gritted teeth. It is rapidly becoming accepted social cant that to "tolerate" other people's religions is to accord them respect. In fact, respect for one's beliefs is gradually achieving the status of a hallowed "human right."

I am under no obligation to respect your beliefs. Respect is earned; it is not an entitlement. I may regard creationists as plain wrong, which would make holding their beliefs in high regard nonsensical. In kind, if I proclaim on a street corner that a certain Japanese beetle in my back garden is the new Messiah, you are also within your rights to ridicule me as a fruitcake.

From Lionel Shriver, in today's Wall Street Journal.

Another excellent Jay Matthews column, this time covering carefully a study on whether advanced placement (AP) high school courses help students succeed in college. The answer is not terribly surprising. From the study,

AP is increasingly emphasized as a factor in admissions, particularly at selective colleges and universities. But while student performance on AP examinations is strongly related to college performance, merely taking AP or other honors-level courses in high school is not a valid indicator of the likelihood that students will perform well in college.

That is, if you don't verify that a course has truly prepared someone for college, it's not likely that the course has transmitted something that is in fact preparatory.

Most AP courses include the best students, and students will be counseled into those classes, so there is the real possibility of there being a third factor that moves both success on AP exams and success in college. Matthews makes an excellent point about whether we could in fact generalize anything about the usefulness of AP (or International Baccalaureate or IB) courses for students of more modest talent levels.

...we cannot learn much from this study about the effect of AP and IB on the chances of average or below-average high school students graduating from college because there are almost no such students in the Geiser-Santelices sample. UC campuses accept only the top 12 percent of California high school graduates, the A and high-B students who are not the least bit average. Those students have already gotten, in many cases, good doses of the college trauma necessary for them to graduate when they get to the university of their choice, and many are skilled and motivated enough to get through college even without that extra high school preparation.

But as Geiser and Santelices make clear, there are an enormous number of average students who are not in their study, but who want to go to college, need that high school preparation and are, nonetheless, denied even a taste of those challenging courses. The study looked at the 117,650 college-bound seniors who took the SAT I test in California in 2002 and found that 54.9 percent of them, a total of 64,577 kids eager to get to college and graduate, had been given no AP, IB or honors courses -- that's right, zero, nada, none -- either because such courses were not offered by their
poverty-stricken high schools or because they were tracked out of such courses by their clueless high schools. Mike Riley, superintendent of the Bellevue, Wash., schools, called this fact "perhaps the most significant in the study. Kids heading to college without a college-prep high school program are headed for failure."

If I had a dollar for every time I had a student in my principles of economics course who said "I cannot understand why I am getting a C- with you, because I got nothing but A's and B's in high school," I could retire today. What predicts success at any school isn't grades but verified performance in classes that are preparatory for college work. My son got great grades in high school math but he was not tracked into AP courses and thus was not prepared for college algebra. It was a shock to him to find out he wasn't prepared.

In California, where the study was done, grades in AP carry an extra point in determining GPA, so that on a nominally 4-point scale the average score of an admitted freshman to Berkeley was 4.31. That may need to be re-adjusted in light of this study.

For those interested locally, SCSU has the policy of accepting AP for college credit if one takes a 3 or better on the AP standardized test. So we do verify for use in college credits, but we do not adjust GPAs. Admission is on the basis of either class rank (top 50% are eligible) or scoring 25 on the ACT or 1140 on the SAT.

Powerline reports on an article in Commentary this month on the Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference at Duke University. PSM has been known to be, um, less than agnostic about terrorist attacks in Israel, with one of its organizers confessing a desire to "strap a bomb to his chest and kill those Zionist racists," and another to openly support the intifada.

None of this was of concern to Duke president Richard Brodhead. He found the decision to host the pro-terror organization to be "an easy one" given "the importance of the principle free expression." It is true that after the PSM's statements and deeds were spelled out in detail for Brodhead, he modified his position. Now the "deepest" reason for hosting the conference was no longer free speech, but "the principle of education through dialogue."

The dialogue, as Adler and Langer show, was a one-sided and darkly anti-Semitic affair. Keynote speaker Mazin Qumsiyeh (a Yale professor of genetics) presented a short history of the virulent Zionist "disease." Israel was pronounced "racist" and a greater abuser of human rights than South Africa in the days of apartheid. One speaker defended the terrorist acivities of Hamas. At a workshop, Huweida Arraf of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) urged students to join her group, which she acknowledged cooperates with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and offered them tips on how to enter Israel surreptitiously. Thus, in the name of dialogue, did Duke University assist in the recruitment of accomplices to terrorism.

Duke's own coverage lauds the fact that the conference went off peacefully. As if that were the only issue. One wonders how much additional "dialogue" has occured since then.

Nothing is ever straightforward in CIS countries like Ukraine, and the reported death of transportation minister Heorhiy Kirpa is a beauty. Kirpa is suspected of helping shuffle around the voters that helped stuff ballot boxes back on November 21. Captain Ed calls it the suspicious "suicide" of a Yanukovuch supporter, but Orange Ukraine says Kyrpa wasn't a supporter any more. Yanukovych reported responded with a swift kick in the family jewels. He was also upset that Kirpa had allowed so many protestors to reach Kyiv and the Maidan. Foreign Notes says the kick was a little higher, up in the mouth.

So we cannot be sure if perhaps this was revenge, covering tracks for electoral fraud, suicide, or even distress over financial difficulties around its supposed revitalization of the nation's railways.

Our students are required at SCSU to take nine hours (out of 120 required for graduation) from a set of courses labeled "diversity" credits. We have several nice study abroad programs, including a popular one at Alnwick in England. Faculty teaching in the program think that studying abroad should count as part of one's cultural diversity and that they should get diversity credits. The diversity warriors, however, don't believe this is the proper understanding of diversity.

During the debate we had on the discussion list last week about Christmas decorations, the current director of the program -- a position which rotates each year and this year even between the semesters -- reacted to the post supporting the no-decorations position with a simple "Bah, Humbug!" Miss Median, who can't help putting her foot in it even from Arizona, responded with a threat.

What does this mean? The SCSU British Studies Program has recently claimed that students doing studies abroad under their auspices ... should receive "diversity" credits for at least one course (the original request was to eliminate all three (9 credits) MGM requirements).

Does the director of this program understand or not understand the meaning of valuing diversity? --and if not, I'm wondering how much cross-cultural education that merits such credits students participating in study abroad in Britain do acquire.

Power really goes to some people's heads, doesn't it! If you do not agree with her view of Christmas decorations, you must not ever teach diversity in the way she approves, so your students must be required to undergo remediation in a manner of her choosing.

Here's how she chooses.

Dave Huber:

Got "Crossfire" on while surfing ... guest "on the left" host Al Sharpton asked an earthquake expert about the tsunami that hit southern Asia: "Is global warming somehow involved?"

At another regional state university, transfer student JMPP is looking over her list of student groups to see how to make friends.

The Vagina Club. Hey, I have one of those! But, is it for vagina owners, or vagina enthusiasts? Or perhaps vagina owners who are also vagina enthusiasts? Let's see what the club description says:

"To provide an empowering, positive environment for women. To have a place for women to talk about current issues, and have them understand that they are not the only person to share certain views."

Hmm. Pretty vague. Also, I wonder what these "certain views" are that I'm supposed to share with my fellow vagina owners?

You know, though, I think the focus of The Vagina Club is a little too broad. I'd really prefer to specialize more. Fortunately for me, there's Tampaction!

"The Tampaction Campaign aims to eradicate the use of unhealthy, unsustainable tampons and pads, institutionalize sustainable alternatives into our schools and communities, and infuse healthy attitudes surrounding menstruation into our culture's consciousness. We're letting the world know that bleedin' can be everyone's issue. In doing so, we work to destroy patriarchal taboos, end environmental degradation caused by disposable tampons and pads, and promote vaginal and menstrual health."

I really hope they schedule their club information tables for AFTER the lunch hour.

I wish she had transferred here instead. I would be happy to get this woman ready for graduate school.

(Hat tip: Michael Munger.)

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy wonders whether students know faculty read their blogs.

If you are a student and you blog about a professor, you should always assume that the professor will read the post and will know who you are. Even if you blog under a pseudonym and don't refer to the professor by name, you're probably leaving enough information behind to identify the professor and yourself. Even if you keep your own identity secret, there aren't that many professors out there: particularly critical or juicy posts are likely to lead to someone recognizing the professor and tipping off him or her to the blog. The professor may then take some effort to figure out who you are. You may never know about it, either: I know professors who regularly read their students' discussions of class on their blogs, and don't want the students to know it.

I have a similar problem, as students now tell me they listen to NARN. One came up to me on Monday last week and said how much he enjoyed listening to the David Liss interview with Trunk, Mitch and myself, and that he was a fan of Liss. This student and I exchange reading ideas often. Well, I never heard of Liss before Trunk set up the interview, but afterwards I mentioned it to my family, and Littlest went and got me A Conspiracy of Paper as my Christmas gift. I opened it up last night, and it's great. (I guess I'll have to buy Blog for myself. I hear it's pretty good.)

I have some alumni blogging (like Liz at A Blonde Moment -- it appears Kevin Ecker has stopped blogging) but I do not know of any of my own current students' efforts. Will Baude seems not too concerned about students blogging about professors and classes, because much of what is said in a private conversation with a student eventually gets around to the rest of the class. He's right, and sometimes we use that to send a signal to a class without making a public statement. I assume what I say as a department chair gets around to the rest of the faculty when I say it to some of my department members; others are known to be tightlipped. Good chairs and good faculty know the difference between them. Likewise on our campus, people know that what gets said on a faculty discussion list could show up on, say, this blog. Can we say some discussion is off the record? I suppose if it's in my office, but if you put it up on a discussion list you're stuck. (And yes, I have a new one today coming up.)

So if you are a student at SCSU, and if you have a blog, we're looking out for you. And it's not like you can say anything about me I haven't heard before. Or even printed myself.

A friend from my National Bank days sends me a photo from the past. This was my sending off from Ukraine in November 1996. The woman second from the right is the then-Kathy Chumachenko, now Mrs. Katya Yushchenko. At that time she was the country manager for KPMG, for whom I worked that year. (John Fund has a nice article about her in OpinionJournal today.) The only fellow I do not recognize is the guy to the right of Yushchenko, who I thik was translating for him that day. The rest of them are all people I worked with or for.



MY RAZOM, NAS BAGATO, I NAS NE PODOLATY.

We have about 99% of the vote in now, and as I had guessed we're at 52-44 Yushchenko -- the tightening with from the late counts in eastern Ukraine have now come in. Here are the official results, while Hotline is suggesting a few extra precincts counted. There will be a period now in which Yanukovych's people will challenge the results. Ukrainian Supreme Court Justice Stepan Havrysh has suggested that the Central Election Committee not certify the results until these appeals are heard. The law is pretty strict in Ukraine on how long Yanukovych has to file, but we can be pretty certain the appeals were ready even before the voting started, given the flap over absentee ballots. Scott Clark has a story from Donetsk of voter poisoning -- an obvious slam of Yushchenko's own case.

On the Ukraine List, Dominique Arel points out that most of the gains for Yushchenko come from increases in votes and vote share in his strong areas; Yanukovych felt declines in his regions that were never more than 3%. Dominique worries that this is a sign of increasing polarization. I don't think any comparison of vote totals in the regions is valid, since falsifications of the ballots were so widespread. Yushchenko's people think fraud still occurred against him. Or it may very well be that this latest result mimics the previous results sans fraud. But we'll never know. Yushchenko's best course is to not bring out fraud allegations, defend where possible the results as they are, and get his election certified.

I'd expect little movement here for some days yet.

Le Sabot Post-Moderne is live blogging between Yushchenko and Yanukovych headquarters. He reports here on a press conference by Yushchenko's campaign manager that indicates 80% of those approached by exit pollsters are answering this time compared to 25% in the first runoff. This may explain why the three exit polls reported give Yushchenko between a 15% and 20% lead.

Latest results from the CEC, reported by UNIAN: 25.4% of votes counted, Yushchenko up 58-39. (The remainder will be either spoiled ballots or votes for none of the above.) These are consistent with the exit polls. I'll check back periodically through the evening on results and kick this to the top as needed; I'll post other news from Ukraine between times.

UPDATE 1: Neeka says you can check the official results here, in English. She's got good pictures too. a nice picture of Yushchenko voting with his children.

UPDATE 2: 5:34pm CT: At 1:34am Kyiv time: 39.6% of the vote counted, Yushchenko still up 57-39.

UPDATE 3: 6:43pm -- Only narrowing a little: 57-40 with 54% of ballots counted. While you wait, TulipGirl has some greatest hits of the Orange Revolution going on. Go read.

UPDATE 4: 8:50pm 75.6% votes tallied, Yushchenko is still up 15% (55.6-40.6), according to UNIAN (in Russian.)

UPDATE LAST: 11:50pm, 92.25% of votes counted: Yushchenko 53.53% (14,150, 096); Yanukovych 42.69% (11,286,006).

And that's just the part we'll be able to see on his face:

Viktor Yushchenko has recovered enough from poisoning with a highly toxic chemical that, if elected, he should be able to serve as Ukraine's president, but he will need treatment for months if not years, his doctors and foreign experts said.

.

Still, they caution, his illness is virtually one of a kind, caused by ingesting a highly potent form of dioxin called TCDD. Under such circumstances it is difficult to predict with great certainty the course of his recovery, and most of the treatment he will need is at least somewhat experimental.

...The popular opposition candidate, who is still suffering from disfiguring cysts that cover his face, will need long-term treatment for his skin, Zimpfer said, since this condition, called chloracne, tends to persist for years.

.

He will need to take drugs to help his body get rid of the dioxin, which is normally deposited in the body's fat cells, and he will need close monitoring for cancers and abnormalities of fats in his blood - all aftereffects of the poisoning, Zimpfer added.

I've been wondering how his body can process and dispose of all that dioxin. Apparently, none of us can know the answer to that. And Yushchenko got a dose of TCDD that was pure, not put into some compound like normally you'd find this in environmental settings.

"There is no way you could get this kind of pure TCDD level from an accident - it's incredibly high," said Dr. Bharat Chandramouli, a dioxin expert at Eno River Labs in Durham, North Carolina, which tests samples of soil and water in the United States for the chemical.

.

Chandramouli added that TCDD is such a concentrated toxin that an amount smaller than a grain of salt could produce the levels found in Yushchenko's blood. This tiny amount would presumably be tasteless and odorless. Since TCDD dissolves readily in oils, the poison could be slipped into food, Chandramouli said.

The head of Yanukovych's campaign is now saying that Yushchenko will win, but that the victory margin will be small.

The final results of the Ukrainian presidential elections of December 26 will end with Viktor Yushchenko's victory, but the margin between the candidates' ratings will be small, said head of Viktor Yanukovych's headquarters Taras Chornovyl.

Chornovyl told a press conference on Monday morning that the work of many regional elections commissions in eastern Ukraine was halted due to the absence of the Our Ukraine bloc's representatives.

This, Chornovyl said, allows the Central elections commission to publish preliminary results of the voting that indicate there is a big margin between the candidates.

It's hard to see what difference it will make, though, as with 87% of the vote counted Yushchenko is up 54-42. Closing, like I thought before, but not by as much as I thought. The lead is more than 3 million votes with about 24 million counted so far. Four Yanukovych regions are still with plenty of precincts still to report (including Luhansk, Crimea, Mykolaiv and Odessa) but I will guess the spread comes in around 51-45 or 52-44 when it's all done by morning our time.

I'll hit the CEC site one more time before turning in later tonight.

UPDATE: A member of the CEC already agrees with Chornovyl.

LSPM and Orange Ukraine are heading to what looks right now to be a victory celebration in Maidan Nezhelemosti: Yushchenko has told them to assemble there in about ninety minutes.

"The first news is - it is done," Yushchenko said in his HQ on Monday morning. "It is a victory of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian nation," he added.

Yushchenko noted that a new political year is beginning in Ukraine. "The era of Kuchma, Medvedchuk and Yanukovych is going away, a new era of great democracy is beginning. Dozens of millions of Ukrainians dreamed about it. Today it is fashionable, stylish and beautiful to be a Ukrainian," Yushchenko said.

Yushchenko thanked "free journalists for letting the whole world talk about Ukraine."

You're welcome Viktor, but don't count your victories before they're official. Cautious horilka in the meanwhile. The lead is below 16% (55.9-40.2) with 63% counted. And I don't trust the buggers not to try a little surprise at the end.

UPDATE: Abdymok has photos of fashionable, beautiful voting.

UPDATE 2: I guess Yushchenko gave his speech early; LSPM and Orange Ukraine report the crowd thinning at Maidan and a little silliness. I suppose at this stage denouement is a good thing.

That's pretty much what this article (in Ukrainian) on Yanukovych's press conference says. From a translation:

"I am expect to win, but if I lose, I believe that by now I have been sufficiently convinced that it is impossible to negotiate with people who have no morals and do not follow the law. That is why - no negotiations, if I lose - "harsh opposition" - he stated at a press conference at his Kiev headquarters.

Yanukovych stated that his opponents will "learn what opposition really means"

He emphasized that due to the changes to the law on the elections and as a result of the Supreme Court decision which came in too late, many people have not been able to use their right to choose/vote.

In his opinion, "the elderly, who are literally classified as not people by this law, who built this country, and thanks to whom we have the country as it is today" have been deprived of the right to vote.

"Let such a humiliating situation as well as alleged cases of "dead" people voting stay on their consciousness" - he said.

Yanukovych could not say how many people could not vote. "I am unable to count how many people were not given a chance to vote today, but this number is high" - he said.

According to him, his team does not yet have "hard evidence, [but] only hearsay".

Given the data I show below, the suppression level, if it exists, isn't high enough to change the results at present showing.

Al Gore could not be reached for comment.

One thing to note in the electoral results by regions: the first precincts reporting are likely to be more pro-Yushchenko than the country as a whole. With 30% of the vote counted (and with Yushchenko holding still an 18-point lead) only 7% of Luhansk has reported, an area that went heavily for Yanukovych last time.

So expect that lead to close some as the evening progresses, though the question will remain how big a turnout in Donetsk and Luhansk will be, and the extent to which Yanukovych's people are going to claim vote suppression there.

UPDATE: Turnout overall this time (station readings from 8pm local time): 80.9% on November 21st, 76.9% this time. There will be claims of suppression, but 77% voting looks pretty darn good to me, and the difference could be accounted for by the allegations of ballot-stuffing last time. I'm kicking around the CEC website and drawing some comparisons in the regions. Compare these numbers to the maps I posted last month.

Pro-Yanokovych regions
"Oblast" Turnout Nov.21 Turnout Dec.26
Donetsk 96.7% 85.7%
Luhansk 89.5% 83.1%
Kharkiv 78.1% 73.9%

Pro-Yushchenko areas
"Oblast" Turnout Nov.21 Turnout Dec.26
Lviv 83.5% 83.3%
IvanoFrankivsk 82.4% 85.3%

The Constitutional Court has invalidated some of the restrictions against absentee voting in Ukraine. As Brendan Koerner pointed out, absentee ballots were at the bottom of many voting irregularities in the second round on November 26th. They believe 1.5 million extra absentee ballots were introduced illegally. The new law said that absentee voting certificates would be severely restricted, and homevoting would be limited to those with serious and permanent disabilities, and fixed the ratio of absentee ballots to those cast in polling stations. It appears from this report on Maidan News that this is the part that was ruled unconstitutional. Many other restrictions are still in place. I'll update with whatever more I find on this.

This is clearly a pro-Yanukovych move by the court. The result of this decision, coming the day before the election, is likely that there will be court appeals of the results regardless of who wins.

UPDATE: I am reading a translation of the law, and I believe this is the section that was invalidated.

Article 6.1. Voting outside the premises for voting shall be allowed only for
the disabled individuals of the 1st group, who can not move by their own. A
handwritten application for providing a voter with a possibility to vote outside
the premise for voting shall be filed with a polling station commission together
with a copy of a disabled individual's certificate certified in accordance with
the established procedure or a certificate of an expert medical commission no
later than on 12 AM of the day before the polling day.

2. Two members of the polling station commission representing different candidates shall organize voting outside the premise for voting. It is prohibited to use more than one mobile polling box at the same time.

I do not believe the limits on the ratio of absentee to paper ballots were lifted by the law, but I haven't seen anything more than news reports to this point.

Littlest Scholar reports that she got the best gifts this year overall. Given the letter she sent to Santa, we better hope so.

We've been laughing about this for weeks. She's already into graphs -- must be an economist's daughter.

Hope your Christmas is everything you wanted, too.

Littlest Scholar -- who at 10 still believes in Santa -- is holding out on Mrs. S's computer tracking Santa. She swears this year she'll stay up all night and track him to St. Cloud.

Penraker has the story of tearing down Christmas trees at the University of Illinois. The assistant housing director there is quoted,

...one student complained about one of the trees. The issue was also raised by an employee in a housing staff meeting and an employee on the housing division's multicultural committee, both of whom noted that "the trees maybe weren't quite as inclusive as we wanted them to be," she said.
"We do want create a festive atmosphere in the dining halls this time of year," she said. "Some things that one person might consider secular, another might find meaning in. I don't want to be the decorations police, but we want everyone to feel comfortable in our spaces and that's the most important thing."

The Christmas tree debate raged again this week at SCSU, where a faculty member wrote to the campus list about his attempt to get greenery back into the student union building.

Pine boughs are not religious. Fir trees preceded Christianity. The display of such greenery is a regionally appropriate response to the bleakness of winter. If we eliminate our culture’s aesthetic displays, we will be left with nothing to decorate Atwood’s walls but commercial displays, and those are, I assure you, ready and waiting to fill such a vacuum.

But to no avail, and when one faculty member posted this story from Australia there was an outpouring of frustrated Merry Christmasers and one killjoy.

Has it escaped the discussants that each of the writers have suggested including everyone, but have highlighted or concluded with "Merry Christmas?"

Has it occurred to the writer that there are no restrictions on wishing someone Happy Hannukah or Happy Kwanzaa? Do you really want me to believe that a housing director somewhere would ask a Jewish student to take down a menorah because it make some Christian student "uncomfortable"?

I've not spent much time thinking about Ukraine this week but this morning I got a translation of this article in Ukrainska Pravda, which is an intriguing interview with Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski from the Polish paper Polityka. Some selections with comments follow.

Q: Why were they looking to negotiate?

AK: They were confused. Both sides were in a risky situation for themselves. Uushchenko, backed by thousands of people on the Square, had no legal support. The only thing was that he was the opposition leader. The official results stated that he had lost the election.

Kuchma's situation was exactly the reverse. The fact that he was the acting president did not matter - Kuchma could not even get into his own office, he could not go anywhere, he was locked in some recreation facility in Kyiv's suburbs. Of course, the snowy park he was is beautiful, but I told him: "If you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, it means you have no power."

The effectiveness of the blockade against Kuchma has not been cited enough. The place in which he was isolated was about thirty minutes from the presidential headquarters, but he was effectively frozen. The virtual collapse of the economy surrounding Kuchma could not be stopped until the blockade stopped. Kwasniewski notes that since it was a spontaneouls blockade, there would have to a political solution. This political solution was complicated by the actions of the Russians and, interestingly, the Germans.

AK: I had several phone conversations: With Netherlands' Premier Balkenende, with Chancellor Schroeder, whom I constantly keep in touch with, with Czech President Klaus, with Austria's Chancellor Schussel, Chirac heard me out with interest and said important words: "Good luck, Aleksandr."

Q: What was Schroeder's reaction? The German sources are saying that after your conversation he called Putin, and Putin's response was firm - Yanukovych won the election, period.

AK: The first conversation was quite cold. I asked him, using his good connections, to explain to Russia that it is unacceptable to take such a firm and uncompromising position - it will lead to nothing good. We needed Russia to resolve this conflict.

Q: How about the US reaction?

AK: Washington has long been assisting us, it's been interested in Ukraine, probably it's been more interested in the democratic part/aspects of Ukraine since it didn't work out between Washington and Kuchma. I told Bush I needed his public support, which would give the mission more weight. Naturally, Bush, on his way to Canada, made a public statement saying that he was supporting my actions.

Q: Aren't Americans playing a double game? When Bush meets with Putin, he is using a different language, to say the least. After all, Russia is America's strategic partner.

AK: I understand the US President, but I am also trying to have good relations with Putin. Yet, I also know that for every great power Russia without Ukraine is better than Russia with Ukraine.

Q: That's the Polish thesis.

AK: No, it's the American thesis. Why would it be geostrategically interested in Russia having Ukraine within its sphere of influence? Russia is restoring its position in the world, and it's normal. Yet, why let it have control over 50mln. Ukrainians?

Why indeed? This remark appears to have infuriated Putin, and the slanging match that results should be fun to watch. It appears at last that Putin has decided to accept reality and work with whomever wins Sunday. Perhaps statements like this from President Bush has helped focus Putin's mind on the pressing issues. And Putin has fired back:

I repeat, we are not going to annex anyone. That is the first point. Second, if this is read as a wish to curtail Russia's scope for developing its relations with its neighbours, it means a desire to isolate the Russian Federation. I do not think this is the purpose of American policy, although we will have a meeting with President Bush, it is scheduled for the near future, in the New Year, and I will certainly ask him if this is really the case. If it is, then the position on Chechnya becomes more understandable. This means that there too they are following a policy to create elements rocking the Russian Federation.

Back to the Kwasniewski interview:

Q: Were Yanukovych's people refusing to admit that they had falsified the election?

AK: The first meeting with Kuchma was dramatic. Can you imagine - meeting the President of a large country, in the middle of nowhere? He was blaming the whole world, everybody, for everything that was going on. The election was not rigged, and if it was, then it was the USŠ well, the US was the focus of the meeting. There are falsifications in the US, their elections are not perfect either, what do you want from Ukraine?

Let that be a reminder to those who want to muck around in elections in Ohio and Washington that their examples are being watched and used for all manner of electoral fraud overseas. Though it now appears Yanukovych's people were hoisted on their own petards.

AK: Then, Gryzlov (the Russian representative of Putin) took the floor, he had before been the Interior Minister in Russia: according to him, the protests had been pre-planned, they were a provocation, the protesters are being paid. Secondly, Russia believes that the election was fair. The Central Electoral Committee announced who the winner was, period. Thirdly, in the US there were falsifications both four years ago and now. He was very involved discussing this last point. ...

Q: In other words, did Yanukovych agree with [waiting on the Supreme Court's decision to revote]? So easily?

AK: In that discussion his only support was from Gryzlov. Yet, he had earlier fallen into two traps, which was pointed out to him at the roundtable.

First was his own statement that in Western Ukraine elections were also falsified. Yushchenko submitted 700 appeals regarding violations in Eastern Ukraine, and, in response, Yanukovych submitted 7700 appeals from Western electoral districts. As a result, we had 7700 complaints, which meant that the election had been unfair.

The second trap was the following: if he believes that he had won, and that the election was fair and he gained a million votes more than his opponent, then what is he afraid of? Of the re-run? Yanukovych responded that he understood everything, but legally speaking the decision regarding the election results could not be changed.

Dino Rossi won't be so lucky in Washington, I fear.

Two other clips that are quite telling.

Q: Why did you need the second roundtable discussion?

AK: The main question was whether to have the re-run of the whole election or only of the second round. The government believed hat it should have changed Yanukovych for another candidate who could be able to take votes away from Yushchenko and who would not talk about separatism - the issue everybody was afraid of.

...

Q: Since everything was clear after the second roundtable discussion, why did Kuchma [subsequently] pay a visit to Putin? Was it a smoke screen?

AK: It was despair.

With Yushchenko holding somewhere between a 9 to 14 point lead in the polls currently -- a little more than what he had in the previous runoff -- Kuchma's despair may come to an end soon.

UPDATE: Le Sabot Post-Moderne makes the good point that Yanukovych could win by losing, because if the parliament stands as it is today he could end up the leader of a relatively united opposition force. Kuchma would have no supporters left in the parliament. Discoshaman notes that Koochie's people aren't standing still.

Let me give a view from a different kind of institution than those of the two principals of this debate, David Adesnik and Matthew Yglesias. First a little economics: We know that if we add more of one input like higher education to an economy it will be subject to diminishing returns. That's more likely true in an industrialized country like the U.S. Increasing the share of GDP we spend on economics by 1%, by best guesses, would increase output by less than 0.3%. Adding more education is likely to reduce that return, just as was found by Alwyn Young for the Asian tiger economies ten years ago. I wrote last year that the returns to education in the U.S. are also probably falling to those who take the courses.

More thoughts at Cold Spring Shops and Shot in the Dark. In the latter, Mitch talks up vo-techs, which work for many people at first. I had this discussion with someone writing an article for MnSCU on how the system could help with jobs in manufacturing. The problem is that training for a particular job allows you to get ... a particular job. My son is learning to be a chef, and I suppose that's a job that will always be there, but the nature of jobs will change regardless because economies evolve. You would think my job is the same as when I became a professor in the mid-1980s, but I'm doing most of my work now on a laptop with a wireless connection sitting in a coffee shop or in my basement. In general vocational education will help with training for jobs that exist now; they are much less helpful with jobs that will occur. I tried to impress in that interview that there's a need for people to be trained for a flexible set of potential tasks.

If we're to "college-educate everybody" it is going to be at places like mine, and a school that pays lip-service to critical thinking while engaging in indoctrination isn't going to be much more help than technical training. Students still think reactively, waiting to be told how to fix a term paper to get an 'A' (of course they should all have 'A's, it's good for their self-esteem!) rather than exploring the boundary between knowing and ignorance. Mitch argues that we should "Encourage more of our society to seek further development of everything that makes them a person - their minds, their skills, and whatever it is that drives them." But I don't know that we are doing that here or at technical colleges.

John Palmer has some great thoughts on re-gifting. There is a fairly well-known article by Joel Waldfogel in the American Economic Review that showed that giving Christmas gifts destroys 13-18% the cost of purchasing the gift (that is, the value to the recipient is about 13-18% lower than the price the giver paid.) John explains this here, and there's an older Economist article with the same thought. An article in rediff.com from India has a very different take, citing other pieces that consider show an increase in welfare from giving. Waldfogel continues to argue his case using newer surveys.

Waldfogel also found that the gap between price and value to recipient is much greater between family members than between friends. In John's piece one of his correspondents refer to this as peer-relationship gifting, which is done with a "grim resolve". I had this happen the other day as I was trying to buy gifts for my nieces and nephew. All live back in my hometown in New Hampshire, and I see them no more than once a year. How to not destroy value? I confess that this is the year I broke down and bought a couple of gift certificates when I did not have the info enough to select something specifically. On the other hand, a friend and I who love Susan Tedeschi led to a gift of the new Austin City Limits show recording -- I was the giver, and it was more fun to watch him find a CD he didn't know about than anything else.

As my son's godfather always says, cash offends no one. And the proliferation of those gift cards that beckoned to me at Best Buy earlier today indicates that many people use them. But I think John has the last and best point:

I can remain civil and pleasant to someone who gives me a fruitcake (especially if I'm able to "regift" it), but if I receive something that adds to my utility, I'm pleased, especially if it is something for which (unlike Justin) I wouldn't have wanted to spend the money but which I am delighted to receive (e.g. an expensive bottle of bourbon). Furthermore, even though I know and teach the indifference curve analysis about how giving cash is better than giving subsidies in-kind, I still want some people to know how much I care for them, and I can signal that by, as Nicholas indicates, showing that I care enough to select something that will add a lot to their utility.

Bourbon is always welcomed here, btw.

Finally got the grades in for my senior thesis students, but now have to deal with all the kids' Christmas shopping. I'll blog tonight and tomorrow morning -- see you then.

Craig Westover responds again to the Maxfield School debate (as discussed here Monday.) The important part today is his distinction between public education and school choice:

In short, "public education" is education in the public interest. It is a "public good" in the sense of "benefit to all." It is worthy of tax dollars. But "public education" is NOT the private fiefdom of the tenurial few. "Public education" is NOT equivalent to a government monopoly. It is NOT a specific institution.

"School choice" is committed to the concept of "public education" in the public interest, not to any specific method of delivering knowledge and skills. A vital "public education" system consists of a diversity of educational options — government-run schools, charter schools, private schools, religious schools and a plethora of other options.

Furthermore, "school choice" means that when any educational institution is not meeting the needs of any individual student, that student has an actionable alternative — a choice. A public education system has a moral obligation to both provide that alternative and make it actionable — for all students.

Craig and I both have libertarian leanings, so when he says public education "is worthy of tax dollars" you know he ain't just whistlin' Dixie. I agree with him in this assessment, but there's a strong difference here. Let me explain.

Like many economists of middle-age, I took my graduate public finance course using Buchanan and Flowers' The Public Finances. Early in the book t