What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Wyclef Jean is running for president of Haiti:

Jean is expected to announce his bid for the presidency on Thursday from Haiti.

After the Associated Press first reported that an announcement was coming, the singer's brother, Samuel Jean, said the Haitian-American family was going into the process with its eyes open and breath held.

"It's not something that was taken lightly, it's not a joke, it's something very, very serious," the younger Jean said by phone from his consultancy office in Los Angeles. "It is different for us, but we are proud of him and we are going to support him in any way we can." ...

Questions surround Jean's bid as well. He must prove he has resided in Haiti for five consecutive years, own property in the country and have no other citizenship but Haitian.

His brother said that unlike much of the family, Jean has never held a U.S. passport. He added that believe that Jean's residency requirement will be waived because he has been a presidentially appointed Haitian goodwill ambassador since 2007.

Jean would have to deal with voters undecided on how to think about Haitians abroad. Many families are dependent on successful overseas relatives for remittances but often seem them as near foreigners. The singer's American accented Creole and lack of French - for many things still the language of government here - will be constant reminders he did not grow up here.

He will also have to field questions about his Yele Haiti charity, which raised more than $9 million after the quake. The organization was widely criticized for alleged financial irregularities after quake, when scrutiny revealed that it had paid Jean to perform at fundraising events and bought advertising air time from a television station he co-owns, among other suspected improprieties.

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse for Haiti...

Worth a Shot, I Guess

Kim Jong-Il never ceases to amaze:

Citing costs induced by six decades of American hostility, Jong-Il has rummaged up his calculator, revived his old grudges, and delivered a tab to the U.S. to the tune of $65 trillion -- plus tax.

KCNA, North Korea's official state-run news agency, has asserted North Korea's "justifiable right" to collect financial compensation from the U.S. for an alleged six decades worth of antagonism -- one trillion dollars for every year since the Korean peninsula was divided in 1945.

The check's in the mail, Dear Leader. While you wait for it, why don't you not send the DPRK's soccer team to the gulag? That would be dumb.

How to Out-Crazy Kim Jong Il

Drezner notes that North Korea is playing chicken, and Carpenter asks how we can out-crazy the craziest regime on earth (they diavlog about it here):

If this is actually a game of chicken as Dan argues, how might the policy dilemma be framed in such a way that North Korea, who actually wants to avoid war, might start to believe that it's not the craziest party in the equation anymore or the one with the least to lose?

Easy. Fire Gates and appoint George W. Bush as Secretary of Defense, and pass a constitutional amendment giving him power to do whatever he wants. Game. Set. Match.

Anything Hugo Can Do, Evo Can Do Better

The president of Bolivia brings the crazy again:

Evo Morales has claimed that both homosexuality and baldness can be caused by the humble chicken.

Speaking at an environmental conference on Tuesday, Morales said chicken producers injected fowl with female hormones and insisted that "when men eat those chickens they experience deviances in being men". ...

Morales's theories do not appear to have been immediately accepted by the scientific community, to put it mildly, and have been criticised by Spain's National Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals, which sent a letter of protest to the Bolivian embassy in Madrid describing the president's remarks as homophobic.

Seriously, what's with these guys? Is there some competition for best crazy talk by quasi-authoritarian that I'm not aware of? Chavez thinks the Haiti earthquake was purposefully caused by a U.S. military experiment and likens Twitter users to terrorists. Ahmadinejad thinks there are no homosexuals in Iran (what... they don't eat chicken there?), which of course inspired the classic video above.

Come on, guys. At least try to act sane.