If you're part of a group or political movement, word to the wise: try very hard to not get yourself list of terrorist organizations.

'Cause if you do, even showing the world you're really just trying to do some good by - like - ending apartheid in South Africa is no guarantee you'll get off any time soon.

Last week the president signed a bill, HR 5690, taking the African National Congress - the party that, yes, ended apartheid - off the US's official list of terrorist groups. You could say it's about time; the ANC has been the ruling party in South Africa since 1994 and, in spite of some of its funky ideas about AIDS, has been a role model of humanity and sound leadership for nations making the transition to democratic governance.

I have a theory: we, as humans, are biologically engineered to react not proact.

That's at least the best way I can explain the uproar after the PATRIOT Act became law - and the almost silent somnabulence over the wiretapping bill that is now making its way through Congress.

PATRIOT wasn't a sweetheart of a bill, but - in spite of the legitimate concerns of civil libertarians - it made relatively incremental changes in surveillance law. While it may have made it easier for the feds to get a warrant to search your home or listen in to your phone calls, it at least required the feds to go to court to get a warrant.

The new surveillance gives up the idea of warrants entirely. True, if an American is the target of an investigation, federal spies would still need to go to court to get the okay to tap your phone. But if someone abroad - or someone that is "reasonably" believed to be abroad - whom the feds thinks is connected to terrorists calls you, your conversation might be being listened in on - without a judge ever knowing.

David Leonhardt, the New York Times' competent and clear-speaking economics reporter, offered a nifty little example of how small "special interests" hold such big sway on Capitol Hill.

Here's the story: Congress was thinking of passing a bill to inch down the prices Medicare pays out for medical equipment - by using competitive bidding, instead of the old way of indexing inflated prices. You know, kind of like what happens in the free market, when buyers and sellers negotiate the best price. The bill probably would have saved Medicare about $1 billion a year, which is barely a fiscal bandaid; still - as Medicare slides towards bankruptcy - every bit helps.

But while $1 billion in savings would hardly be noticed in the federal budget, a $1 billion loss would certainly not be missed by the medical equipment industry. That's why what you'd expect would happpen, happened; lobbyists and a surge in campaign support from the medical equipment industry miraculously made Congress' competitive bidding plans disappear.

While global warming may be walking us in slow motion toward widespread destruction and misery, European scientists are devising ways to zippily end life as we know it - if not gobble up the earth wholesale.

Okay, not really.

But that's what a couple of Americans are contending a particle accelerator project at the European Center for Nuclear Research will do - blasting bits together that could create a black hole on earth (which all of us would collapse into, I'm guessing, in a matter of milliseconds) or other strange things called magnetic monopoles and, um, "strangelets."

Scary stuff. So scary, in fact, that I'm going to blindly put my faith in those European scientists that they know exactly what they're doing.

And if I and they are wrong - I look forward to having my mass smashed in with y'all in infinitely dense space. 

A bunch of economists (including nobel laureates) are asked "if you had $85 billion bucks over four years, how would you spend it to get the best benefit for the world?"

The answers - published by the Copenhagen Concensus Center - are surprising. (If you don't want to download the pdf, see a synopsis here.)

Top of the list: for a cost of $60 million a year you can add Vitamin A and Zinc to the diets of children in the developing world - and get back $1 billion in health and cognitive improvement.

Many other solutions are similarly simple and unsexy - and a good reminder that while  we fret over flashy fears like terrorism, the developing world suffers daily from lack of basic health and nutrition needs.

One solution to global problems - lowering carbon emissions to stave off global warming - gets dissed again this year, as it has since the Copenhagen Consensus has gone into business.

I have to admit I was asleep on this one too.

While the rich world was scrambling to get a grip on its credit markets, the poor world was sinking into a serious food crisis - of the kind that brings on riots (in a dozen nations already) and possible social and political upheaval (knock on wood).

The good news is that DC is waking up - in great part because it realizes that global social unrest is bad for national security.

The even better news is that a global crisis gives the US the chance to spread a lot of American good will - for a discount price.

Right now, we give about $2 billion a year in food assistance to the rest of the world (USAID). That's not a piddling sum - but when you think about the fed's $30 billion bail-out of Bear Stearns, the $100 billion+ in support after Katrina or the fact that we spend about $2 billion in one week in Iraq - we have a lot of room to be a heck of lot more generous.

A New York Times article this week reported on what's become a common story over the past few years: federal or state crime fighters are collecting/storing/sorting yet more information on us. In this week's update, the info they're collecting is DNA from anyone who happens to be arrested or detained by the feds (including detained immigrants).

I was giving it a ho-hum read until I came across the justification for the practice: “The regulations will save lives, prevent
crimes, and bring justice for victims and their families.” Again, nothing surprising there - and who, after all, can complain about preventing crime, particularly heinous crimes against young people?

But then the question got begged: what are our expectations of the government to prevent crime? The assumption seems to be that the more crime we prevent the better. But is that always true? Is there a point when will we be "safe enough?"  

Last year a friend told me about a theory that lame duck presidents, knowing the have squat power to forge policy at home, have a habit of turning their attention abroad in their final year, where they can still make things happen.

Oh crud, I thought - that means for sure Bush is going to do drop the bomb on Iran. Knowing him, he'd think he was saving the world from an Islamo-fascist threat - but he'd really just be leaving another Mideast mess on our hands.

Well, ten months from the end of his presidency, it's looking like an Iran disaster could be averted.

What's saving Iran? Africa.

A friend of mine who used to work on "the Hill" was arguing with me the other day that the whole debate over earmarks is overblown - and that DC doesn't work like a back-room shady-deal fat-cats-paying-pols kind of place.

For the most part, I agree with him - earmarks are a small drain on our budget and most lawmakers, I think, are primarily concerned with making decent policy.

The problem with earmarks is not that they're hurting our country in a massive way - but that they're just icky - or, put in a less scientific way, they make for unfairness and leave a bad smell (oh, and they're also a time suck).

Take, for example, the multi-billion dollar hand-out the banks got this week. It wasn't the classic kind of earmark - instead of writing in money for banks, a senator who happened to get a lot of campaign money from banks, wrote in immunity from pending patent lawsuits that would cost them billions.

You can always count on Congress to pull it together when disaster occurs. National monument hit by terrorists? Hurricane washes away port city? Credit crunch tips off recession? Congress drops its partisan theatrics and grabs a moment to whip out the checkbook and actually make itself useful.

The skeptic in me - which never doubts the Senate's ability to bollix a popular bipartisan plan - was partially shamed this week when Congress sent the president a stimulus package that most politicians and economists could at least nod approval at, if not jump for joy over.

But my inner cynic still sighs and wonders why it's so easy for Congress to act nobly when they don't have to pay the price for doing so.