Sorry for not blogging in a long time - I’ve been digging my way out from beneath a pile of books and articles on democracy and transitions theory - Dahl, Rawls, Lipset, Schumpeter, etc. I’ll throw some text on the grill later this week (hopefully).

And now for the news:

In PARADE Magazine’s annual 10 Worst Dictators listed Islam Karimov as the world’s fifth-worst dictator. What propelled him from fifteenth was Andijan, although expelling the American military from the Karshi-Khanabad air base probably didn’t help. Niyazov scored eighth, the same as 2005 and 2004. However, as the article notes, the list is getting steadily worse, and maintaining the same position actually indicates a downward trend.