UPDATE: Sorry, y'all. In this place was an accidental posting of a draft that I inadvertently uploaded before leaving for the airport. I should perhaps not neglect my ordinary habit of storing drafts in gmail and in standard word processor documents. Nothing particularly exciting has been removed.

RFE/FL: As expected, Kurmanbek Bakiyev has won Kyrgyzstan's presidential election. He has led the country's interim government since former President Askar Akayev fled in the face of protests and riots. It seems that at least 53% of the population voted (for the election to be legally legitimate, a 50% turnout was required), and that Mr. Bakiyev won more than 80% of the vote. Moscow Times puts his share at 86%.

The Financial Times, writing before the election, found the outlook dour no matter which candidate won. Mr. Bakiyev's only serious rival for president, the former mayor of Bishkek Felix Kulov, withdrew from the race and is expected to be appointed prime minister.

I should note, though, that I have not see anything to indicate that the OSCE will not certify the election as clean and fair. The major complaint regarding Kyrgyzstan's election is that the country's new rulers are expected to be oligarchs not particularly different from their predecessor. Kyrgyzstan has no appreciable oil or gas reserves, a beautiful stretch of the Tien Shan Mountains bisecting the country, and, to date, the strongest democracy of all the -stans. It needs a president who can stimulate economic development.

(Links from Nathan Hamm at Registan)

Sarah Vowell, the guest columnist replacing Maureen Dowd, asks why Wyoming gets $38.31 per person from the Department of Homeland Security while New York only gets $5.50.

I love Wyoming. I grew up right next to it in Montana. But from where I now sit in an apartment in the Flatiron neighborhood, staring at the Empire State Building, an apartment that, admittedly, isn't the Brookings Institution or anything, but does have high-speed Internet access and all the cable channels, it seems to me that New York has more ports and borders and financial centers and people and, yes, subways, so Wyoming could stand to throw a buck or two more our way per person.

Her argument boils down to: New York many things of great value to the US that are vulnerable to terrorist attack. Fair enough. But she never asks whether Wyoming has any similar institutions. Fort Warren AFB, near Cheyenne, is home to 50 Peacekeeper Missiles and 150 Minuteman III Missiles. Wyoming has nukes and ICBMs at the nation's largest military base of its kind.

Vowell wrote:

I was clueless enough to think that the very idea or, let's face it, ideal, of effective counterterrorism involved, at the very least, an educated guess about our national vulnerabilities - and I even thought that the money and equipment and personnel would be distributed accordingly. Which probably sounds simply adorable to those of you who have ever heard of the United States Senate.

Did Senator Clinton do an awful job of agitating for money, and did the senators from Wyoming collect in a successful pork barrel push? It's one way of putting the question. Do the crowds of people in NYC subways create overlapping needs that allow for a very efficient use of security dollars? Probably. $5.50? I don't know. It's also possibly easier for terrorists to get to than is Fort Warren AFB, making it a more realistic target. On the other hand, $38.31 to Wyoming raises the question of just how well protected those nukes were before Homeland Security dollars were around. Was military money diverted to some other purpose once DHS money was offered? Again, I don't know. But an op-ed that suggests that national inequities in Homeland Security funding can be simply reduced to the gap between $38.31 and $5.50 does no favors to anyone. Whether or not New York is proportionately underprotected depends on far more factors.