Krakauer was shocked, shocked:

The key line, of course, is “African Americans are more fundamentally rooted in the American experience.” Obama did not expand on this, and nor did Anderson Cooper ask a follow up. So did Mr. Obama mean that African Americans are more rooted in American experience than other Americans, or more rooted in American experience than the African experience?

The second one! He didn’t expand on it because he was talking about Africa. It’s hard to even imagine a more banal comment about the African diaspora. But how did Krakauer’s attempt to stir up angry right-wing comments go? Pretty well:

When the President of the United States makes such a blatantly racist comment your skin should crawl.

… what can one expect from a hopelessly elitist, hard-Leftist, white-man-done-owe-me-forty acres-and-a mule African-American mind?

He’s segregating into groups, and saying whites and Asians aren’t as rooted in America because there have been white and Asian immigrants reciently.

Obama is clearly saying that african Americans are more rooted than white people. It’s his wise Latina moment.

There’s really nothing Obama can do or say that doesn’t drive some elements of the right around the bend.

“It’s hard to separate out energy and climate change and how it connects to water and land and biodiversity and other issues,” Burke says. There are, of course, national security implications for resource use: “consumption and consequences,” even if this stuff doesn’t makes it into the President’s Daily Brief. The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 project predicts scarcity, creating “conflict on a geostrategic level,” alongside increased natural disasters as the result of climate change.

Look at the demand for materials from increased cellphone use (400 million more Indians and 670 million more Chinese people have cellphones than did in 2000): tantalum, indium, titanium dioxide, and other rare-earth elements. A ton of them are located in China, Burke says, placing the Chinese in a very commanding geostrategic position. Congo has the tantalum, also known as coltan, and it’s deeply unstable. “And we don’t know a whole lot about the global supply chain and how vulnerable it is.”

Climate change. More “cyclonic storms of intensity” like Hurricane Katrina. “It may drive conflict. It may drive migration. It will certainly drive disaster relief.” The species that die out take with them “the ecosystem we depend on. How that’s going to affect our security is an issue we have to explore.”

Burke links natural security to Afghanistan. Eighty percent of Afghanistan is agriculture-dependent. The wars, for 30 years, have degraded Afghanistan’s bio-infrastructure, “and the land is barren right now,” and such privation will render difficult any plan from the Obama administration to alleviate the stresses on the Afghan people. Restoring its natural resources is “critical to restoring security.”

“These are security issues right now,” Burke says, “and they’re bound to get worse as climate change proceeds. … We can either deal with it now and build in resilience or deal with it later and it’ll be much more difficult.”

The results of Forum for the Future’s green design competition are in, and first prize goes to the Kyoto Box, an aluminum foil-lined cardboard box that makes use of the greenhouse effect to combat, well, the greenhouse effect. Its acrylic cover lets sunlight in but prevents the heat from escaping, allowing its user to boil water without burning any wood or other fuel. The box’s inventor, Jon Bøhmer, hopes that it can catch on in Africa, where it could serve to reduce water-borne disease and cut back on emissions from combusting wood — all for the low cost of $5.

In fact, it could end up costing nothing at all. Bøhmer expects the box to be eligible for carbon credits, which polluting companies could buy to offset their emissions. If the revenue is then passed on to the users, the initial price tag would be negated.

It’s an admirable project, but since it’s not much fun to read about a cardboard box, I’ll focus my attention on a runner-up for the prize, which tackles a major global problem that’s on everyone’s mind: bovine flatulence.

Methane released by the digestive tract of cows and other grazing animals constitutes 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — more than comes from transportation. And while making more fuel-efficient cars has been tough, making more fuel-efficient cows is even tougher.

Enter Mootral. It’s a garlic-based antibiotic that can be added to an animal’s food to reduce its methane emissions (farts and burps, in layman’s terms) by up to 94 percent. It works by limiting the growth of bacteria in the animal’s digestive stomach — and it’s the bacteria that release all the offending gases. Call it Bovine Beano.

If all of the world’s farmers and herders gave Mootral to their animals, and the antibiotic worked as well on the ground as it has in the lab, a huge chunk of global emissions could potentially be wiped out.

But alas, the $75,000 prize went to the box, so Mother Earth might have to hold her breath a bit longer.

It reminds me of all the fuss over Miss Universe visiting Guantanamo Bay recently, which garnered more media attention to the U.S. prison in Cuba than any story about hapless Muslims sold for bounty to the U.S. military and imprisoned for years without charge ever did.

So despite the controversy and ridicule it inspires, I agree with Mr. Mohammed: bring on the celebrities!  Fly the beauty queens out to the Bagram prison next, and maybe those 600 men imprisoned by U.S. authorities without charge or even the right to see the evidence against them will finally get some much-needed attention.

Anti-poverty advocates like the economist Jeffrey Sachs learned this years ago, working with stars like Bono and Angelina Jolie to call attention to the plight of the world’s poorest.

As distasteful as the celebrity buzz may be — and as bizarre as it must seem in a muddy village in Malawi or on the shores of Guantanamo Bay — little else moves Americans so much as a beauty, celebrity and wealth.  And if those can every-so-often be put to good use, well, I say, “go for it.”

Susan Rice (flickr)

In April 2007, as the United States was enmeshed in two wars, a Brookings Institution scholar and Clinton-era State Dept. official testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of taking military action as a last resort to stop the genocide in Darfur.

“A collective shame” was what Susan Rice, now one of President-elect Barack Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers, called the international community’s failure to act. Rice was hardly sanguine about what it would take to stem the genocide, nor did she exhibit a preference for taking military action.

In passionate but clear language, she instead proposed a multistep policy of robust financial sanctions against Sudan and the imposition of a no-fly zone around the afflicted western Sudanese province. But if that failed, Rice continued, a starker measure should follow.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“The U.S. should press for a Chapter 7 U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum,” Rice told the committee, chaired by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), now the vice president-elect. “Accept the unconditional deployment of the U.N. force or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states collectively or individually.”

As for the potential consequences and risks, Rice added, “We have to acknowledge that they can’t be eliminated. Yet we also have to acknowledge the daily cost of the status quo of a feckless policy characterized by bluster and retreat. … I would submit, Mr. Chairman, Sen. Lugar, that that cost is too high.”

Rice’s testimony could offer a window into the next four years of U.S. foreign policy. According to interviews with longtime associates, the woman who was just named to head the foreign-policy transition team for an Obama administration — and herself a likely candidate for deputy national security adviser or other top position — is a rigorous thinker and thorough pragmatist, impatient with ideology and incompetence.

Over the past year and a half, Rice has become increasingly close to Obama, owing in large part to their mutual frustration with conventional foreign-policy thinking. Unlike many seasoned foreign-policy hands, Rice’s focuses less on traditional state-to-state relationships and more on transnational threats, challenges and opportunities — befitting the emphasis of a new generation of global strategists. With Rice at the helm, former colleagues said, an Obama foreign policy would likely be bold but not dogmatic.

Rice, who turns 44 Monday, is the youngest person ever to become an assistant secretary of state, a position she attained at age 33. A protege of Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, Rice joined the Clinton administration in 1993 as an staffer on the National Security Council, after a stint at the McKinsey & Company business-consulting firm.

On the NSC, Rice earned a reputation for pragmatism, which she carried over to the State Dept. as assistant secretary for African affairs, a post she held from 1997 to 2001. But her record was not without its blemishes.

According to human-rights expert Samantha Power’s study of the U.S. reaction to genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” Rice didn’t distinguish herself in the Clinton administration’s lax response to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. As an Africa expert on the NSC, she shocked an interagency conference call by interjecting domestic politics into the discussion of the administration’s policy options.

“If we use the word ‘genocide,’” Rice allegedly asked her colleagues, “and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?” Rice later told Power — who herself became a trusted foreign-policy adviser to Obama before leaving the campaign during the Democratic primaries — that while she didn’t remember saying that, “If I said it, it was completely inappropriate.”

Her colleagues said that Rice’s willingness to subject herself to the scrutiny she expects of others is a characteristic trait. “She’s always examining not just what she thinks but why she thinks the way she does,” said Jane Holl Lute, the assistant secretary general of the United Nations for peace-building and a friend of Rice’s. “She’s one of the most honest thinkers I know.”

About Rwanda, Rice later told Power, “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required,” which might explain Rice’s passion about Darfur.

Something that also might explain it is Rice’s facility with nontraditional foreign-policy issues. Former Sen. Tim Wirth, the Clinton administration’s undersecretary of state for global affairs from 1993 to 1997, said Rice saw connectivity in the world’s problems, instead of viewing them through the traditional prism of individual state power.

“She was one of the few people to live in the foreign-policy world who understood global issues, transnational issues like human rights, climate change and terrorism,” said Wirth, who worked with Rice when she was at the NSC and who now heads the United Nations Foundation. “The foreign-policy community is largely about political relationships. That’s what drives the [typical] foreign-policy world. But the new one is transnational problems, problems that don’t have passports.”

What position Rice could receive in an Obama administration is a guessing game. She has been mentioned for everything from deputy national-security adviser to U.N. ambassador to even secretary of state — all a function of her bond with the president-elect.

The only knock against Rice is a reputation for abrasiveness. A rumor circulating in foreign-policy circles this month is that she and a top Obama defense adviser, Richard Danzig, have developed a frosty relationship, though it is hard to get Obama aides to explain the source of any turbulence.

Wirth said Rice’s sense of dedication is occasionally misunderstood as harshness. “She’s very calm, very careful, but once she determines where to go, she’s very firm about that,” said Wirth, “and that’s where that comes from — people saying she’s abrasive. She’s very firm when a decision gets made.”

Rice herself declined to comment for this article. But in February, she indicated to me that an Obama administration would need to be bold in differentiating itself from the Bush administration to restore American global standing.

“After eight years of George Bush,” Rice told me for an American Prospect cover story, “when the next president puts his or her hand on the Bible to be sworn in, the U.S. is going to get one brief second look [from the world] about whether the U.S. truly learned to change from its past mistakes, recent and historic, and whether we’re again the kind of America people look to lead in a constructive fashion, or whether we’re hopeless.”

What that means exactly is hard to say. But Rice challenged the idea that Obama’s more controversial foreign-policy proposals — setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, negotiating with foreign adversaries, bolstering the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan and renewing the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan — were, as his critics maintained, imprudent. “I don’t see it as radical at all,” she told me in February. “I see it as rational, wise and long overdue.”

Obama-watchers have seen Rice quickly build a rapport with the president-elect, something that will aid Rice in staffing the foreign-policy team. “It indicates they’ll be very pragmatic,” Wirth said, “and focused on strengthening the international machinery, to regain America’s reputation around the world. And she’ll just be reflecting what Obama has said.”

Another colleague, John Prendergast, an Africa aide on the NSC after Rice moved to the State Dept., was similarly impressed. “She was a brilliant strategist with a big vision, who was relentless in pursuing the president’s objectives,” remembered Prendergast, who now runs the Enough Project, an anti-genocide activist group. “She had a firm command of all of the relevant issues, and a keen insight into how to move decisions through the system so that the U.S. could act in a relevant and decisive manner.”

Rice was one of the few Democratic foreign-policy luminaries to oppose the 2002 invasion of Iraq. Prendergast said he was not surprised by her position. “Susan has an uncanny ability to weigh all sides to a situation and see through rhetoric and diversion,” he said.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Center, came to know Rice when they worked on the Phoenix Initiative over the last four years, an attempt by progressive foreign-policy thinkers to craft a post-Bush grand strategy.

Slaughter’s assessment of Rice echoed Wirth’s. “She has a very holistic vision of national security,” Slaughter said, “one that includes the problems of weak and failing states and the overall imperative of standing for increased prosperity and justice for all people around the world.

“That doesn’t make her a starry-eyed one-worlder,” Slaughter continued, “although Obama may soon be giving that term a different and far stronger connotation, but it means that her experience with Africa has sensitized her to the many ways people can die violently — not just in conventional war.”

Wirth and others said Rice would be “very loyal to Obama,” to use Wirth’s words. Another former colleague, who requested anonymity, added that Rice doesn’t have an agenda separate from Obama’s.

Slaughter added that Rice’s potential ascendancy represented a milestone in gender equity for the foreign-policy community. “It is very important to women in foreign policy that Susan is not married to her job,” Slaughter said. “She has a great husband and two young kids, and she managed to balance it. After Madeleine Albright, whose kids were grown, and Condi Rice, who does not have a family, that’s a very important message to send. After all, most men in foreign policy manage to have families, too.”