This morning, I’m in Zurich on the way home from a few days in Nairobi (Kenya).

This was a rather interesting and serious visit, and I got to spend quite a bit of time talking with both business and government leaders about their longer-term development plans and aspirations. If there is interest (vote in comments ), I can try to put together a more serious post later in the week (once I get home and get everything settled back down).

But for your Sunday morning relaxation, I’ll just present a few photos from Nairobi for some cultural upliftenment.

More below the fold….

Read More →

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a cheap hit-job against the International Republican Institute (a mostly-government-funded NGO that engages in democracy promotion in civil society staffed primarily by Republicans). The allegation is in the second paragraph:

As tensions mounted, Kenneth Flottman sat in Nairobi and grew increasingly frustrated. He had in his hands the results of an exit poll, paid for by the United States government, that supported the initial returns favoring the challenger, Raila Odinga.

People who followed the election will recall that the results were contested. There were riots. Over 1,000 people died in street protests and the crackdown.  Eventually Odinga was declared the winner as part of a power-sharing deal. The gist of the story is that if IRI had released their exit poll showing that the IRI-supported challenger had won, then perhaps the deaths could have been prevented. The only “on the record” source in the NYT piece, as the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb notes, is Mr. Flottman. And the NYT piece suggests that his voice was uniformly in support of releasing the poll. Turns out it wasn’t so.

IRI sent a letter to the NYT, which was editted and published. But check out the removed paragraph, courtesy of IRI:

The article quotes liberally from emails by former IRI employee Ken Flottman to buttress the charge. Not mentioned are other Flottman emails in which he agrees with our decision not to release the poll because we believed the data was flawed.

Now why would the NYT not print that paragraph or cite those emails? Well, Goldfarb has the text of some of those emails after the jump.

Read More →