Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Monday, January 19, 2004

Taking The Show On The Road

A novel proposal: The LongBow Papers is going on the road. We are flying to the states in a couple of hours for our first visit home after a year-and-a-half in China. While I will have my computer with me, between the hustle and bustle of visiting relatives and friends in 3 states in 17 days and the always problematical issue of readily available Internet connections while traveling, I do not know how much blogging I will be able to do. I will do what I can. I hope you will have patience with me. I treasure each and every one of my regular readers. I do not want to lose any of you.

In the spirit of thank you, and as an artistic experiment, I am going to do something I have never done before. I am going to offer for public viewing an unpublished literary property. Below is a link to the first three chapters of one of my next two books, a novel that has been years in the making but is now just about ready to go to the publisher. Ah, but I said two books: The chapters I will link to in this post, is Book One of a Two Book saga; a prequel to a sequel, or a sequel to a prequel, depending on the viewpoint. The chapters I offer for your pleasure or your critique here are from:

THE SCOTCH AND MARIJUANA PAPERS

The Confessions of an Artist

Book One

CRAZY SORROWS


I truly do want your comments, good bad or indifferent; if you have any thoughts about the work, please e-mail them to me: E-mail link

Thank you.
  

1:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, January 18, 2004

The Peking Duck & Thomas L. Friedman

Richard, the author and proprietor of The Peking Duck, has a post and link to a very important column by Thomas L. Friedman. Indeed, quick-witted and quick-fingered Richard--with one arm immobilized due to surgery no-less--beat me to the click on this one. However, I will happily refer you to his shop:
The Peking Duck: Thomas Friedman at his most explosive

And, as is often the case, he is absolutely right
The Peking Duck
  

11:22 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dowd on Dean

America has enough false prophets and ready-made myths, both are terms I believe are accurate labels for the pedestrian American short story that is Howard Dean, the doctor and fake from Vermont who would be president. This is not news to regular readers of these pages. However, I have been waiting for someone else in the media, a colleague with a much larger audience and certainly more wit than I to spell out what it is that is "smelly" about the man. My wait is over. The inimitable Maureen Dowd has worked her magic with words yet again:
DES MOINES--I went to Iowa hunting Howard Dean. His campaign said he might give me five minutes. On the phone.

At first, five minutes sounded pretty cursory. But I decided to be philosophical. Out of his 15 minutes of angry fame, Howard Dean was willing to devote a third of it to me.

How best to figure out someone who comes out of nowhere and wants to lead the world in five minutes?

I quizzed Tom Harkin, Mr. Iowa, about why he had endorsed Dr. Dean, even though it infuriated his spurned Senate buddy John Kerry and disappointed fellow Midwesterner Dick Gephardt. Senator Harkin didn't seem especially close to the Vermont governor. At the 2002 Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner here, he twice called the Democrat John Dean (as Martin Sheen did in a speech here last week).

"He's a fire hydrant," Mr. Harkin said over dinner at Bambino's in Cumming. "If you kick it, it's going to hurt you. But it's stable and secure and there when you need it."

It wasn't the most glamorous metaphor. But I knew what he meant.

Democrats yearn for somebody tough enough to stand up to the Bush family machine. They're still smarting that Al Gore lost a presidency he won. They watched even a fellow as gritty as John McCain crumple during the 2000 South Carolina primary, stunned by the sulfurous personal attacks of Bush supporters.

A fire hydrant sprays back.

Dr. Dean has certainly proved he's tough. The press critiques on him ? "hotheaded," "arrogant," "mercurial," "a jerk" ? echo the knocks on W., back before "the Roman candle" of the Bush family ran for Texas governor and transformed himself into a disciplined and genial campaigner.

After months of watching Dr. Dean's neck bulging, face churning, and sleeves rolled up tourniquet-tight, many of my colleagues were longing to ask the pugilistic pol, as one put it: "Do you ever lighten up, dude?"

I decided to use my five minutes to find out if he has the sunny side Americans love in their leaders. I'd ask him what he'd want to do for fun on a Saturday night if he could play hooky. I'd ask him the last time he did something goofy and what made him really laugh.

While I was waiting for him to call, I grew more and more afraid that he'd get angry at me for wasting his time with piffle. I cowered by the phone, jumping when it rang.

I never got the five minutes with him. Which left me five minutes to think about why his candidacy was sputtering.

He has a problem with his mythic arc. Presidential campaigns trace the patterns of mythological adventure, as contenders strive to show they are superior in the knightly virtues of temperance, loyalty and courage.

Once candidates showed that they had completed the "hero-task" by highlighting their war exploits ? J.F.K. and PT 109, George Bush senior getting shot down as a young Navy pilot over Chichi Jima.

Candidates in the Vietnam War generation who chose not to go to Vietnam had to find more personal dragons and giants to slay. Bill Clinton told the story of confronting an abusive and alcoholic stepfather; George W. Bush recounted overcoming alcoholism and career drift by embracing Christ.

In Iowa, Mr. Gephardt talks about the transforming experience of his son's battle against cancer. Mr. Kerry describes the crucible of Vietnam. John Edwards's arc is going from the son of a millworker to a Grishamesque trial lawyer standing up against corporate malefactors.

Shunning personal storytelling, Dr. Dean has chosen to make his campaign arc about his campaign arc. He brags of facing down the dragon George W. Bush.

As he said at a rally here last week about his Democratic rivals: "They weren't there when it was time to stand up to the president on the war in Iraq. . . . If you want someone to stand up to George Bush, I've done it."

Personal history shouldn't be a substitute for policy. An overreliance on stories of dramatic heroism and physical suffering can overwhelm a campaign, as it did with Bob Kerrey and Bob Dole, devolving into the politics of self. And yuppie sagas of sin and redemption can become strained with repetition.

But a race rooted mainly in attacking the president may not take Dr. Dean far enough. Voters want someone who's been through the fire. They care about character. They want to know the evolution of the man, even if it's a myth.

The New York Times
  

11:04 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Hell Continues

The dying continues, so must our resolve...
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- At least 23 people were killed -- most of them Iraqi civilians -- and more than 60 were wounded early Sunday when a suicide truck bomber detonated a half-ton of explosives near the U.S.-led coalition's headquarters, according to U.S. military sources. ...

"We have indications that some of those that were killed were American citizens -- U.S. contractors," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt during a Baghdad news conference. "We believe the current number at two. We're waiting for firmer confirmation."

Earlier, U.S. military sources said that two Department of Defense workers were among the dead, but could not specify their occupations or nationalities. ...

Shortly before 8 a.m. (12 a.m. ET) Sunday, a white Toyota pickup truck carrying almost 1,000 pounds (500 kilograms) of military-grade, plastic explosives tried to enter "Assassin's Gate" -- the northern entrance to the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses coalition headquarters, Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling of the 1st Armored Division said.

Instead, the driver -- who was also killed in the blast -- detonated the explosives about 50 feet (16 meters) from the entrance, according to military officials.

About 90 percent of the explosion was absorbed by blast barriers, protecting the headquarters from damage, according to Capt. Jason Beck of the 1st Armored Division.

At the U.S. military's 28th combat support hospital in the Green Zone, 20 people were dead and 29 wounded, including three U.S. soldiers and three U.S. civilians, Beck said.
CNN
  

10:24 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Vagaries of Predicting Bubble Boom and Bubble Bust

The Peking Duck beat me to the click on an extremely interesting analysis of China's Boom or Burst economy in The New York Times. So, I will direct you to Richard's distinguished site:
The Peking Duck: Is China the Next Bubble? That's the headline of a long and probing New York Times article that looks at China's economy from various angles, weighing the arguments of whether it's a bubble ready to pop or an essentially unstoppable engine that will experience slowdowns and bumps, but not collapse.
The Peking Duck
  

11:47 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Kristof, Buying Freedom, One Girl at a Time

There is no comment appropriate for this Kristof column. I just read it, cry a little and blog it in hopes that you will read it and maybe together we can at least get people talking about solving this evil anachronism: Slavery in the 21st Century.
POIPET, Cambodia

One thinks of slavery as an evil confined to musty sepia photographs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like Srey Neth.

I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20's.

Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it's an issue that gets little attention and that most American women's groups have done shamefully little to address.

Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.

The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House — and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.

Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.

"I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner," she said. "They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They're afraid I would run away."

Why not try to escape at night?

"They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up."

"What about the police?" I asked. "Couldn't you call out to the police for help?"

"The police wouldn't help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners," Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.

I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.

"Do you really want to leave?" I asked. "Are you sure you wouldn't come back to this?"

She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. "This is a hell," she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. "You think I want to do this?"

Another girl, Srey Mom, grabbed at me as I walked down the street. She wouldn't let go, tugging me toward the inner depths of her brothel — but she looked so young and pitiable that I couldn't help thinking that she really wanted me to tug her away.

So I did. I paid the owner $8 to spring her for the evening and then took her away for an interview.

The owner let Srey Mom go out unsupervised, it turned out, partly because she had been a prostitute for several years and was trusted to return — and partly because her dark complexion meant that she was of little value anyway. The brothel sold her to men for just $2.50, compared with the $10 commanded by the lighter-skinned Srey Neth.

I asked Srey Mom what her freedom would cost. Payment of about $70 in debts to her brothel owner, she said. Two girls in her brothel had been freed after they found boyfriends who paid their debts, she said, and she spoke of her longing to see her sisters and the rest of her family in her village on the other side of Cambodia.

"Do you really want to leave the brothel?" I asked.

"I love myself," she answered simply. "I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I'm doing now."

That's when I made a firm decision I'd been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families. I'll tell you in my column on Wednesday what happens next.
The New York Times
  

3:37 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit

500 heroes, just doing their jobs...
Roadside Bomb Kills 3 American and 2 Iraqi Soldiers

TAJI, Iraq, Jan. 17 — Three American soldiers and two Iraqi paramilitary fighters were killed early Saturday when the armored vehicle they were riding in was struck by a large roadside bomb in this town about 12 miles north of Baghdad, the United States military said.

The American soldiers were with the Fourth Infantry Division, which has oversight for much of the volatile region north of Baghdad, which had been the base of support for the regime of Saddam Hussein. The two Iraqis were with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a paramilitary organization formed by the occupying authorities to help the Americans improve security in Iraq. Two other American soldiers were wounded in the attack.

The deaths of the soldiers on Saturday and another death on Friday in Mosul of a soldier by what the military classified as a "nonhostile" gunshot brought the number of American soldiers killed in operations related to Iraq to 500. Most died after May 1, when the end of major combat operations was declared.

The Americans and Iraqis who were attacked Saturday were patrolling in one of three Bradley armored vehicles surveying Taji for roadside bombs. About 7:45 a.m., the first vehicle in the patrol was struck by a bomb made of at least two 155-millimeter artillery shells and an "unknown amount of explosives," said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the Fourth Infantry Division. The blast set the Bradley on fire.
The New York Times...
  

3:18 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Jacksonian Tradition

If you have a serious interest in American Foreign Policy, particularly its military component, you need to read the article which I begin and link to below, from the distinguished foreign policy journal of the "Realist" school, In The National Interest
The Jacksonian Tradition

by Walter Russell Mead

In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians—not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.

On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped 1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese bodies were found in the charred remains—a number greater than the 80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined.

Since the Second World War, the United States has continued to employ devastating force against both civilian and military targets. Out of a pre-war population of 9.49 million, an estimated 1 million North Korean civilians are believed to have died as a result of U.S. actions during the 1950-53 conflict. During the same war, 33,870 American soldiers died in combat, meaning that U.S. forces killed approximately thirty North Korean civilians for every American soldier who died in action. The United States dropped almost three times as much explosive tonnage in the Vietnam War as was used in the Second World War, and something on the order of 365,000 Vietnamese civilians are believed to have been killed during the period of American involvement.
While this is a very long article, a "white paper" is perhaps more appropriate, your time will be well spent.

In The National Interest
  

2:49 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, January 17, 2004

Cheney the Great & Cohorts Inc.

Cheney the Great & Cohorts Inc. This small story will grow and grow, folks. Believe me, I know the truly dead-rot subculture of the people and companies involved. When all is said and done, Cheney, Dubya & Twigs will rival the presidency of U.S. Grant for blatantly arrogant corruption and cronyism.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - Three Democratic lawmakers said Friday that the Pentagon's inspector general was investigating possible criminal violations involving fuel shipped to Iraq by Halliburton, the company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

The lawmakers said they had been told by the inspector general's staff on Thursday that an issue of overcharging by Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root unit was with the inspector general's Defense Criminal Investigative Service.

The inspector general's office declined to comment.

The information about a criminal investigation was released in a letter by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and John D. Dingell of Michigan.
The New York Times
  

10:59 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Peking Duck: The Republicans are invincible

Richard, the author and proprietor of The Peking Duck, has a must-read post:
"I see no hope. They will stop at nothing and are so well coordinated and in perfect lockstep with one another (including the Republican media) that they can get away with just about anything. They are the new Macchiavelians, and Little Boy Bush is Il Principe. I've never been so depressed about US politics before, and I'm afraid we have little choice but to resign ourselves to more of the same, and worse, for years and years to come."
This is only a snippet, please do the world a favor and visit The Peking Duck. NOW.
  

1:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Krugman Gets It

Paul Krugman gets it. I'm just not sure that the two men he primarily writes about in his column get it. I will say this: Somebody had better get it. I know some of you are probably getting tired of me republishing my piece "Give Me That Old Time Liberalism" every 4 weeks. But I am going to keep doing it until somebody steps forward and truly starts leading America again.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe with an absolutely frightening certainty that America is in more danger today than at any time since the assassination of President Kennedy or the firing on Fort Sumter. That's right, a danger from within, not from without. We are teetering on a razor-sharp moment in time. Twice before when this nation faced those crucial moments, moments when our Republic could have disintegrated, spiraling in pieces past a point of no return, we were saved by that which separates us from every other nation on earth, our Constitution, the rule of law and ideals, not ideology.

And I am not talking about the little nit-picky kind of law so loved by nit-picky little minds, minds that are more concerned with whom we are sleeping, what we are smoking, what we are reading, what we are watching, than who we are and what we stand for in this world that really is looking to us for leadership even though it will mostly not voice it. The world will not voice it because it is so hard to reconcile what the documents and the monuments and the literature and so many of our movies and plays say we are with what the world sees that we are. And what do these less fortunate nations see? They see us out of fear belie those documents, those monuments, the literature, the great dramas that they want to believe are true but learn every day that they aren't. They learn this because they see that we are hysterically afraid of some new witch-doctor with ancient ideas that empower desperate young minds to blow themselves and us into body parts only because we are afraid and they see it and are empowered all the more. We are not hated for our ideals; we are hated because we do not live up to our ideals. It is a fact, folks, and no one is talking about it. This world would be a better, safer place in a heartbeat of time if we actually were what our great founders and writers and statesmen and thinkers and artists have so wonderfully but futilely said we were. You think about it. And read Paul Krugman.
Earlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. 'I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."

In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide.

Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry's hair.

But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.

The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.

What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness -- shared, we now know, by General Clark -- to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" -- as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents -- a campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let's cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless -- but optimistic! -- Moon-base program.)

But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.

One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration -- a much larger group than you might think ? are afraid to give money to Democrats.

Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.

Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.

So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.

That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical ? which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical ? and that Mr. Bush is.

The New York Times
  

4:17 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




This Genie Ain't Going Back Into The Bottle...

The New Cultural Revolution, Folks, welcome to it!



Zhang Ziyi: Rising movie star
Click for more, courtesy of the state-owned press

Xinhuanet.com
  

2:54 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"What's that you say, Zem...can't trust the French?"

"The French speak with forked tongue, huh, Zem? I'll pass that along to Colin. How's the modernization of the PLA comin'...? Uh, yeah...another time, of course, sorry 'bout that. So...what's my chances with that cutie right behind me?"


Jiang Zemin (R), chairman of the Chinese Central Military Commission, talks with Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US armed forces, in Beijing, Jan. 15, 2004. (Xinhua Photo)
  

2:10 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Spies...?

I hope you don't recognize any of these men, their days left on this earth are few and will surely be unpleasant. What I really hope is that they are indeed guilty of the charges. Please read that sentence carefully before having a knee-jerk reaction such as that of me wishing the worst upon fellow citizens of this Earth. Of course, with my relative lack of experience in what happens to Taiwanese spies in such a complex situation, I could be reading the potential consequences from an irrelevant viewpoint: since Taiwan is a "Province" of the People's Republic of China, then they can hardly be labeled as espionage agents of a foreign country. Can they be labeled as domestic industrial spies? How draconian should the sentences be if Beijing wants not to inflame Taiwanese voters before the March "elections"? The unpleasantries aside, from a jurisprudence perspective, the more I ponder it, this is a most interesting case.
Eight Taiwan residents detained by China's state security department are spies sent by the military intelligence authorities of Taiwan, the Taiwan Affairs Office under the State Council said.






They were Fu Hongzhang, Lin Jieshan, Song Xiaolian, Wang Changyong, Zhang Genghuan, Zhang Yuren, Tong Taiping and Li Xiangheng.

Tong Taiping was caught on Dec. 4, 2003, by security guards while collecting intelligence at the Guangzhou Huangpu Shipyard.

The others were detained on Dec. 15, 2003, for interrogation on suspicion of collecting military intelligence in Guangdong, Fujian, Anhui and Hainan provinces.

The investigation is now underway.

The Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits has informed the Foundation for Exchange Across the Taiwan Straits of the spies' situation.
China Daily
  

12:41 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, January 16, 2004

The Truth is...

Let's be honest, if Dr. King was still alive, Bush would have his attack dogs all over him, and his every move would be investigated. This stop in Atlanta for a photo-op is disgusting to me and many others who were in the civil rights movement in the south while the Bush family was no where to be found.
ATLANTA, Jan. 15 - President Bush made a swing through the South on Thursday with an appeal to black voters, but encountered emotional protests when he stopped here to lay a wreath at the grave of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mr. Bush was met by hundreds of demonstrators when he arrived at The King Center to mark the 75th anniversary of Dr. King's birth. He was shielded from their view by a row of transit-authority buses with police officers in riot gear atop them, according to the pool reporter who accompanied the president into the center.

But the chants and boos of the protesters were audible as Mr. Bush, accompanied by Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and his sister, Christine King Farris, approached the crypt, laid the wreath and paused briefly in prayer before leaving without making any public remarks.

Outside, the protesters chanted "Bush go home" and "Peace, not war."

Before Mr. Bush's arrival for the 15-minute stop, some of the protesters broke through barriers around the center. Two arrests were made, the Atlanta police said, and the incident prompted the authorities to place the buses between the demonstrators and the president.

The White House had arranged for Mr. Bush to stop at Dr. King's grave on a day when the president was scheduled to be in Atlanta for a fund-raiser. Sheriee Bowman, a spokeswoman for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said the group respected the president's right to pay tribute to Dr. King. But she suggested that the civil rights organization saw Mr. Bush's presence as politically motivated.

"We question the integrity of the timing of the move because last year at this time he took a stand against affirmative action, the Michigan case, which is part of Dr. King's legacy," Ms. Bowman said, referring to the Supreme Court case that considered the use of race in college admissions.
There is a lot more in this article, if you have the stomach for his speech, it's in The New York Times...
  

8:18 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Lady Wants To Know

Ms. Jane Harman is no wacky conspiracy theorist; she is level-headed, smart, and responsible to her position in Congress, her constituents and her country. When she starts asking these hard but obvious questions, the administration would be wise to listen and answer, not sic their usual attack teams on her. Before coming to China, I lived in Los Angeles for a decade; I have some knowledge of Ms. Harman. I really don't think Shrub & Twigs want to tangle with her. While they probably aren't seriously counting on carrying California come November, they still would like not to be embarrassed there. She can do that to Dubya any day of the week and twice on Sunday, I don't care if he goes to breakfast prayer meeting, Sunday morning Bible school and evening services to boot.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 - The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee is calling on President Bush to provide a public accounting next week of why prewar American intelligence assessments that Iraq possessed illicit weapons now appear to have been mistaken.

Mr. Bush should use his State of the Union address on Tuesday "to acknowledge the problems and outline specific steps to fix them," Representative Jane Harman of California will say in a speech in Los Angeles, according to an advance text provided by her office.

But Ms. Harman, whose position on the intelligence committee gives her access to highly classified intelligence briefings, says in the advance text of her speech that the intelligence agencies "connected the dots to the wrong conclusions."

The planned criticism by Ms. Harman, in a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, is expected to be the sharpest yet from a leader of the panel that oversees the Central Intelligence Agency. It comes a year after Mr. Bush devoted much of his State of the Union address in 2003 to portray what he called "a serious and mounting threat to our country" posed by Iraq's possession of illicit weapons.

"If our intelligence products had been better, I believe many policy makers, including me, would have had a far clearer picture of the sketchiness of our sources on Iraq's W.M.D. programs, and our lack of certainty about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities," the speech reads, using an abbreviation for the phrase "weapons of mass destruction." ...

The Harman speech does say that "there were good reasons to support regime change in Iraq" and notes that Iraq had repeatedly violated United Nations resolutions by failing to prove after the Persian Gulf war of 1991 that it had dismantled the illicit weapons and weapons programs that were discovered to be part of its arsenal at that time.
There is a great deal more in this article you should read, it's in The New York Times...
  

7:57 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Gem...

Conrad, the proprietor and author of The Gweilo Diaries, has discovered another gem and, no, it has nothing to do with feminine pulchritude--for an unusual but delightful exhibition of that you will need to scroll down just a tad. The gem I write of here is of the literary sort--blogging literature, as in good online writing, I should hasten to add in fear of chasing away any folks wishing not to be assaulted by highbrow pretensions. In short, I strongly suggest you give the following post a clickity-click:
"Welcome Functional Ambivalent to The Gweilo Diaries blogroll. Why? Because the sonofabitch can flat out write, that's why. "
I wish to add a bit of personal commentary on the subject, nay, the profession and sub-culture, that is the topic of both links, here and here. As with much personal writing, I must begin with a confession. Unlike a very large majority of people, I have great affinity for lawyers and the law, most particularly lawyers in the criminal justice business--both prosecutors and defense attorneys. While I did not follow one of my ambitions and receive the law degree I fully planned on acquiring at some point in my collection of degrees, I spent some 20 years writing extensively about murder, in the process covering most of the high-profile murder cases in America during those years. However, what most folks don't know is that I worked many, many criminal cases that were never heard of outside of the town or county which had jurisdiction over them. Many of these were cases that I was not able to publish articles or books on but worked anyway, pro bono, as it were, because there was a need for an objective journalist to work within the framework of our adversarial system. Just the fact that I was on the case, that "the press" was there, was beneficial and almost always appreciated by both sides of the Law & Order divide.

My point? During those years I worked with hundreds of lawyers, detectives and investigators on both sides of our system and I can attest to the fact that the overwhelming majority of these men and women were and are dedicated to truth and justice. You mostly only hear about the cases that were aberrations of the system, cases where the system broke down, and usually not at the fault of an attorney, although he or she will too often get the blame. They are a tiny fraction of the total. And these men and women of the big-ticket cases where there is or was hue and cry one way or the other by the public? I have worked with just about every famous lawyer and prosecutor in America, almost all of whom I call friend--and they too care greatly that our system works at it is intended to work.

I will now step down from my soap-box. I just wanted to write my mind, and in my mind lawyers are the front-line soldiers protecting your freedoms. You may not like them now--but you sure will if you are ever accused of a crime, particularly if it is a crime you did not commit. The law, folks, is a noble profession, regardless of what you might think.

Check out this post in The Gweilo Diaries
  

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Diversions...

Let's face it, some days are better than others. And some days you just have to say to hell with it and look around for some flowers to smell, or some other such diversion that strikes your fancy. Did I write "diversion"? So I did. Why? Go have a click on The Gweilo Diaries and see...
Thursday's Diversion
...what diverted me.
  

12:13 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, January 15, 2004

Friedman: War of Ideas, Part 3

I believe Thomas L. Friedman's views on the war in Iraq are an important part of the necessary collective "dialogue" we are having with ourselves if nothing else. This is installment number 3 in a 5 part series, reproduced in full below:
During the next six months, the world is going to be treated to two remarkable trials in Baghdad. It is going to be the mother of all split screens. On one side, you're going to see the trial of Saddam Hussein. On the other side, you're going to see the trial of the Iraqi people. That's right, the Iraqi people will also be on trial — for whether they can really live together without the iron fist of the man on the other side of the screen.

This may be apocryphal, but Saddam is supposed to have once remarked something like: Be careful, if you get rid of me, you will need seven presidents to rule Iraq. Which is why this split-screen trial is going to be so important. Either Saddam is going to be laughing at us and at Iraqis, saying "I told you so," as Iraqis are squabbling and murdering each other on the other side of the screen.

Or, we and the Iraqi people will be laughing at him by proving that it is possible to produce something the Arab world has rarely seen: a self-governing, multiethnic, representative Arab government that accepts minority rights and peaceful transfers of power — without a military dictator, monarch or mullah standing overhead with a stick.

You don't want to miss this show. This is pay-per-view history. If, somehow, Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, Turkmen, Christians, Assyrians and Shiites find a way to embrace pluralism, it will be a huge boost to moderates in the war of ideas all across the Muslim world. Those who scoff at the idea of a democratic domino theory in the Arab world don't know what they're talking about. But those who think this is a done deal don't know Iraq.

If Iraq is going to be made to work as a decent, pluralistic, self-governing entity, noted the Iraq expert Amatzia Baram of the United States Institute of Peace, all the key factions there will have to accept being "reasonably unhappy." All will have to settle for their second-best dream in order to avoid their first-class nightmare: chaos or a return to tyranny.

Islamists will have to accept being unhappy that the system does not mandate Sharia law as the constitution, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because Islam will be the official religion of the state and respected as an important basis for legislation and governance. Secularists will have to accept being unhappy that Iraq's new basic law gives Islam an important symbolic place in governance, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because this secular law and judges will still provide the basis for a new rule of law. Kurds will have to accept being very unhappy not to achieve their dream of an independent Kurdistan, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because the special autonomous status of the Kurdish region will be concretized in Iraqi law.

The Sunnis will have to accept being unhappy that they are no longer controlling Iraq and its oil wealth, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because they will discover that they still have a significant role in the parliament, and a share of the nation's oil wealth in their own provinces, thanks to the new Iraqi federalism. The Shiites will be unhappy that, now when their majority political status will finally be realized, power and resources are going to be diffused throughout a federal system and constraints are going to be placed on the power of the majority. But they will only have to be "reasonably" unhappy, because there will eventually be a Shiite head of government, and the very federalism that disperses power and resources will also enable Shiite provinces that wish to adopt a more Islamist form of government to do so.

"Let us put aside the literary phrase `We are brothers but others are dividing us,' " wrote the thoughtful Arab columnist Hazem Saghieh in Al Hayat. "We in Iraq and elsewhere are not brothers — there are problems we inherited from our own history and social makeup, which were not helped by oppressive modern regimes. . . . Let's be frank: the Shiites today scare the Sunnis; the Sunnis and the Shiites together scare the Kurds; and the Kurds scare the other minorities. . . . All the ethnic groups of Iraq have the responsibility of putting nation-building above their selfish and conflicting calculations."

In short, our most serious long-term enemy in Iraq may not be the Iraqi insurgents, but the Iraqi people. Can they live together reasonably unhappy at first, and then grow reasonably happy? If they can, we will be Iraq's temporary midwife, helping give birth to its democracy. If they can't, we will be Iraq's new, always unhappy, baby sitter, and the old one, Saddam Hussein, will be laughing at us all the way to the gallows.
The New York Times
  

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Too Close To Uncle Sam?

Too close to Uncle Sam? South Korea? What's with this? South Korea being too close to Uncle Sam is oxymoronic in the extreme: There would be no South Korea if the lower half of that perennially turbulent peninsula hadn't long ago placed all its kim chee in the good Uncle's basket. I think independent thought and national pride and going your own way in life and national politics are all laudable concepts--but sacking a foreign minister who counsels maintaining close ties to the dude that brought you to the dance!

It's bad enough that we have to live with the reality that a whole lot of people and countries really hope we go to hell in a suicide-bomber's hand basket, but this is too much, folks. Seriously. This is a whole lot like a public slap in the face from a spoiled brat you over-indulged. Read the piece below and see how it strikes you, particularly if you're old enough to remember Ike's golf swing, or hip enough to have watched MASH in reruns.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea's foreign minister resigned Thursday because of a rift between ministry officials and President Roh Moo-hyun over the country's close ties to the United States.

The division comes at a critical time as South Korea and the United States wrangle with North Korea over its nuclear weapons programs and discuss sending South Korean troops to help the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

Roh accepted the resignation of Yoon Young-kwan, saying the Foreign Ministry was not fully backing his administration's policy of independence from Washington. The human rights lawyer-turned-politician took office a year ago promising not to "kowtow to the Americans'' and gain equal footing with the country's top ally.

"Some Foreign Ministry officials have failed to shake off the old foreign policy that tended to depend on foreign countries, failed to fully understand the spirit and course of the (Roh) government's new foreign policy of independence, and repeatedly made remarks that went against national interests in private and public occasions,'' said Roh senior aide Jeong Chan-yong.

Local media reported that several officials in the ministry's elite North American affairs division, which handles U.S. relations, criticized Roh's policy as unrealistic.

Jeong said the foreign minister resigned to take responsibility for failing to rein in those critics.

Roh said Wednesday he would transfer those officials who criticized his foreign policy.

"Several times, they have been asked to follow the president's policy,'' Roh said. "Some of them responded with objections to the president's foreign policy and expressed their discontent with insulting comments.''

The Yonhap news agency said some members of Roh's National Security Council accused the foreign minister of leaning too much toward the United States.

Yoon defended the importance of the U.S. alliance, saying relations with Washington were "very useful'' in resolving such issues the standoff with North Korea.

Yoon noted that the divided Koreas are still technically at war since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in a cease-fire and not a treaty.

"So far we have maintained peace (on the peninsula) through alliance (with the United States) and I had said the alliance was important as we are in a situation where complete peace between the two Koreas has not yet been achieved,'' he said.

Yoon dismissed criticism that he has been "worshipping the United States,'' but he said it was important for diplomats to carry out the wishes of the government.

"Diplomats are people who implement the president's philosophy on state affairs by serving as his hands and feet,'' Yoon said. "In that sense, I feel deeply sorry.''

The presidential Blue House office has not said who will replace Yoon.
The New York Times
  

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Jiang & Myers

Jiang & Myers isn't a law firm; it isn't a comedy act; it isn't a hip-hop band; it isn't a new detergent. I'll be damned if I know exactly what it is. I know what it means, if that's any help. It means Jiang Zemin is still very much in the China picture. And I'm not at all sure that's a happy picture, all things considered.
China values the commitment of the government of the United States, and hopes the US will continue its constructive role in the peaceful settlement of the Taiwan issue, said a Chinese military leader on Jan. 15.

Jiang Zemin, chairman of the Central Military Commission, met with Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US armed forces, and stressed that the Taiwan issue is the most important and sensitive issue in Sino-US relations.

Jiang said that Sino-US relations had developed although ups and downs still existed since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 25 years ago.

He said that both China and the US are major powers of the world, and with different domestic situations, the two countries have differences on some issues, but they also shared common interests.

The development of Sino-US constructive and cooperative relations conforms to the fundamental interest of the two peoples, and is conducive to world peace and stability as well, Jiang said.

He said that Sino-US relations have maintained good momentum, and the two sides should deal with the relationship from the strategic and long-term viewpoint, expand consensus, reduce differences, and solve problems, to push forward a healthy and stable bilateral relationship.

Myers said that during the visit, he has good talks with Chinese military leaders on US-China military relations and the international and regional security situation, and the two sides had reached consensus.
He said that the US is satisfied with the military relationship, and is ready to work with China to continue the existing momentum.

Myers arrived here Jan. 12 on an official visit to China. Guo Boxiong, vice-chairman of the CMC, and Cao Gangchuan, CMC vice-chairman, state councilor and minister of defense of China, met with Myers on Jan. 14.
There is much more to this article in the People's Daily.
  

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Kennedy Takes Off the Gloves

Senator Kennedy is as righteously, eloquently angry as only a handful of American political figures can pull off with any authenticity in these days of tepid, weather-vane leadership. Whether you agree with "Teddy" or not, whether you admire him or detest him as so many on the right do, you cannot deny that he can rattle the rafters when he has a mind to. I am sure it will not surprise any of you that I count myself among his admirers--I worked briefly on one of his abbreviated presidential forays so long ago that neither of us had any grey hair, at least that I knew about.

He can make this speech with even more authority since he did not vote for the war authorization in the senate. Whoa. You say. Because again it is no surprise that I have long been in favor of bringing down Saddam Hussein--that in fact I believe it was more than a decade too late in coming (how many Iraqi citizens would still be among the living if Bush the First had made the right choice instead of the cynically geopolitical one?). So why am I applauding a rousing speech Ted Kennedy made denouncing Bush on the war? Because Bush lied to everyone, perhaps even himself, because he did not trust American citizens to do the right thing when they are given the facts. The man preaches democracy, yet does not practice the most essential element for it to work as it should: an informed citizenry.
President Bush marketed the war on Iraq as a "political product" to influence the 2002 elections and is doing so again this year, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) charged yesterday in a scathing speech accusing Bush of putting politics ahead of national security.

In a speech to the liberal Center for American Progress, Kennedy said the war has increased hatred for the United States abroad, diverted attention from the broader war against terrorism and put the country more "at risk" than it was before.

Kennedy, a leading Democratic liberal who was among the small minority of lawmakers to vote against the congressional authorization for war in 2002, has been criticizing Bush on Iraq for months, but rarely in such a sweeping fashion. He accused the administration of distorting intelligence and pursuing an ideological agenda in building the case for war.

"No president of the United States should employ misguided ideology and distortion of the truth to take the nation to war," he said. "In doing so, the president broke the basic bond of trust between the government and the people. If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America would never have gone to war."

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) denounced the speech, calling it a "hateful attack against the commander in chief." He said Kennedy "insulted the president's patriotism, accused the Republican Party of treason, and resurrected the weak and indecisive foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis."

Kennedy referred approvingly to an assertion by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill in a new book that Bush began planning for war against Iraq shortly after taking office in 2001. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has denied the assertion, but Kennedy indicated he believes it, praising O'Neill's "integrity, intelligence and vision" and saying the book has "now revealed what many of us have long suspected."

Kennedy said "the steamroller of war was moving into high gear" by fall of 2002. "The administration insisted that Congress vote to authorize the war before it adjourned for the November elections. Why? Because the debate in Congress would distract attention from the troubled economy and the troubled effort to capture [al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden. The strategy was to focus on Iraq and do so in a way that would divide the Congress. And it worked."

Now, Kennedy said, "there is little doubt as well that the administration's plan to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people by this summer -- and the pressure to hold elections in Afghanistan at that time -- are intended to build momentum for the November elections in this country." The war, he said, "could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy."
Washington Post
  

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Times Really Are Changing

When one of my writing students chose homosexuality in China for her final research paper at Xiamen University last spring, just the fact she had proposed it as her thesis became a ricocheting rumor on a campus of almost 20,000. The fact that I approved the topic was worth another wave of gossip, rebounding the length and breadth of the sprawling, otherwise tranquil university. Being gay in China was still very much a closet story.

So what is in today's China Daily? Read on...
The metaphysics of film

Satisfied with his approach to making art films, Cui Zi'en is not afraid to be himself. The China's foremost homosexual author and filmmaker is enjoying success one quiet work at a time, writes Michelle Qiao.

Purple silk Chinese jacket, lake-blue scarf, a tiny silver earring, light makeup around the eyes and lips plus a gentle voice --all these make it hard to tell the gender of writer/director Cui Zi'en at first sight.

As one of the earliest people in the Chinese mainland to share his homosexuality with the public, Cui says he prefers not to classify himself. "People have an unfortunate habit of separating themselves into only two sexes -- male and female,'' Cui says, whose 12 movies were screened at DDM Warehouse last week.

"For me, there are at least three genders in the world, and probably four. From the point of view of an alien, human beings dividing themselves into genders must seem funny and very unintelligent.'' Cui did create an alien from Mars in his newest movie, "Star Appeal,'' to challenge what he views as the outdated concept of sexuality. The film revolves around an unusual love story.

A boy from Mars named ET meets a pair of lovers on Earth, Xiaobo (male) and Wenwen (female). Without knowing any of the workings of love on Earth, ET finally falls in love with Xiaobo and convinces him to reciprocate. "Traditionally sex happens when the love between two people reaches a climax,'' says Cui. "I try to avoid this outdated tradition.

The sex in this movie happens in a quiet mood, after they discuss human beings' ways of expressing love: how they caress and kiss, how sex is accomplished. Without any feeling of dramatic climax, the sex in the film is psychological, while discussion is the most profound way in expressing love.

The sex comes from ideas, not from desires.'' Frequently using obscure post-modern terminology, Cui adds that in this modern society of mass production and unoriginality, the simplest way of expressing love has been neglected by most people, who can hug, kiss and have sex at will. Therefore he used an alien ignorant of even kissing to remind the audience how to express their love. "The actors and actress speak in kiddy talk (in Star Appeal),'' says Cui.

"Their psychological age is under 10. I try to remake childhood for the audience.'' Although Cui says this movie is his easiest to understand, as it contains some dramatic elements, it still might be too much for ordinary audience.

After the screening, audience members contributed their feedback.

"I think the movie should be shortened to 15 minutes,'' one person suggested. It may not have been a bad idea, as it is a startling slow film, with long and childish dialogue and sometimes jumpy scenes, mostly accompanied with only natural noise as background. Cui defends his work. "Ordinary film is driven by drama, but mine is driven by talk and ideas,'' he explains.

"Traditional film creates gorgeous, complicated, high-tech scenes, which may be designed to push people to seek enlightened moments; they are ambitious to be the first, the most powerful and the most wealthy, and they overlook their most essential human nature.

I try to show the audience only simple scenes.'' Cui is also quick to note that although film is subject to being considered as art, many popular films are produced with the only interest being potential box office yields.

"We should not make movies simply for money,'' he says. "When audiences leave the cinema, they should have gained something from the film they just watched.''

"He lavishly uses a lot of still scenes, with moving scenes only appearing at the end,'' says Wu Hao, a TV journalist. "This is a metaphorical film. Furthermore, even though it is very esoteric, it is more understandable to me than some European art films. I agree with Cui's opinion that complicated scenes in commercial films have ruined the audience's taste. I think his film was not made to please but rather as a response, as a call for the reformation of taste.'' Born in 1958 to a Catholic family in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China, Cui was baptized when he was two months old and has remained a Catholic for his whole life. "The first memory I have is the image of Jesus on the cover of the Bible at my home,'' Cui recalls.

"My father is a surgeon, and therefore I saw him as a god. I believed, like God, he could save everyone. Whenever a friend of mine was ill, I took him to my father to save. When I finally realized that he was not capable of saving everyone, I was disappointed for a very long time.'' After receiving a master's degree in literature from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Cui began teaching literature and screenwriting at the Beijing Film Academy.

Now he is also a film critic and a screenwriter as well as an associate professor at the Theory Study Office in the film academy. In a sense, his works are a summary of homosexuality, threaded together through movies and literature that express his inner-most aspirations -- to show homosexuality as normal and to directly address homosexual love and sex.

"I think the world contains many different things, and we must maintain this variety,'' says Cui. "If the world becomes dominated by one mindset, by straight or gay people, human beings will soon go the way of the dinosaur.'' Cui published his first novel that dealt with homosexuality, "Pink Lip'' ("Taose Zuichun''), in China in 1997 and declared his sexual preference to the media. Dai Jinhua, a literature professor at Peking University, once commented that "Reading this novel is like gliding under moonlight. After getting over the initial shock, you will encounter a derailed yet beautiful world.''

In 2000 Cui and a Chinese lesbian painter took part in a program at Hunan Network TV Station, the first homosexuality-themed talk show in the Chinese mainland. Also in that year his novel "Uncle's Life'' won the Best Radio Fiction Award at the Deutschen Welle (Voice of Germany) Prize for Literature. Another one of his films, "Old Testament,'' which follows three tales of homosexuality in China, was an entry in the 53rd Berlin Film Festival last year. "He is a rare director with a childish heart,'' says Andrew Cheng, a local director, Cui's good friend and collaborator. "He is a very kind, gentle person who writes incisive works."

He is considered to be a strange man by some, a Chinese version of the pioneering British director Derek Jarman. "I appreciate his insistence in sticking with what he believes,'' Cheng adds. "No matter how difficult, he has always stayed true to his vision.

He is a unique scholar, someone who is not afraid to be himself, and, in doing so, he has also opened the door for many other Chinese filmmakers.'' Cui prefers to focus on his creativity rather than on his homosexuality.

"When I create, I often close my eyes and let the thoughts flow, let the natural light from the center of my heart illuminate me,'' says Cui, meditatively. "My films have the power to guide me to a clean and sacred realm.''
China Daily
 

1:39 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




It Happened In China Today

Sex demand rejected, man refuses to pay bill.
( 2004-01-14 10:45) (China Daily)

A man who failed to obtain sexual favours at a barber shop refused to pay the massage bill and even called the police for help, reports China West Metropolis Daily.

Zhang, a native of Southwest China's Sichuan Province, asked for sex after having a massage on Sunday. But when his request was turned down by the masseuse, Zhang got into a fight and refused to pay.

Both of them were taken to the local police station.
Sexual toys attract teens, annoy parents
( 2004-01-14 09:23) (China Daily)

Blinking her bewitching eyes, a girl exposes her upper body and caresses a breast. It is among the many pornographic dolls that have swarmed the toy market of Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province, Liaoshen Evening News reports

They have become a headache for parents, who are trying to prevent their children from being lured by pornographic materials since most of the buyers are primary- or middle-school students.

Police should decide whether the toys should be classified as pornographic materials but they are definitely not suited for children, said an official from local industrial and commercial department.
Man seizes car of mistress' lover
( 2004-01-14 10:45) (China Daily)

Enraged by his mistress "love affair" with another man, a man is demanding compensation from the intruder and seized his car as "security." Pan, 45, faces legal proceedings launched by Shijingshan District Procurate on Monday.

Pan met the teenage girl at a beauty salon in February and cohabited with her in a rented house; he gave her hundreds of yuan for living expenses every month.

When he discovered that she was dating Kang, the angry man seized the latter's car, saying he would return it only after he coughed up 30,000 yuan (US$3,600).
Plunging suicidal woman crushes husband to death
( 2004-01-14 10:45) (China Daily)

A woman in Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province, killed herself on Sunday by leaping from the 21st floor of a building; and crushed her husband 'who was attempting to catch her at the foot of the building 'to death, Shenyang Jinbao reports.

The woman's mother is reported to have witnessed the tragedy when she rushed to the building after the woman called her before she leapt, saying she "has found a good destination for herself." The 35-year-old woman allegedly suffered from depression and tried to commit suicide several times.

The couple leave behind a seven-year-old son.
China Daily
  

12:41 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Big Brass In Beijing, American Style

The Importance of China to the U.S.? While running two wars, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff makes time for a visit.

The United State's highest ranking military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, arrived in Beijing late Tuesday for the highest level military visit to China since the mid-air collision of a US scout plane EP-3 with a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea in 2001.

On Wednesday, Myers is scheduled to meet his Chinese counterpart General Liang Guanglie, Chinese Defence Minister General Cao Gangchuan and Central Military Commission Vice-Chairman General Guo Boxiong, according to US officials.

"General Myers' visit is an important step in a series of US-China military activities, including high-level visits, confidence-building measures and professional exchanges," a written statement released Tuesday by the US embassy to China said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said Tuesday Myers' visit is a very important one starting off the new year.

"We believe that through this visit we can deepen understanding between the two militaries, expand bilateral consensus and develop bilateral friendship while also promoting the healthy and stable development of Sino-US military relations," Kong said at a regular news conference.
Liang Guanglie (L), chief of General Staff of the PLA talks with U.S. Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Beijing January 14, 2004. During his two-day visit, Myers will meet with Chinese military leaders and government leaders. Mutual military exchanges, security co-operation, and Taiwan question are expected to be touched upon.
China Daily
  

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My Rose Colored Glasses

I really don't want to take off the rose-colored glasses through which I have been viewing China for going on two years now. But what am I to say to myself when I go to The Gweilo Diaries and see the truth behind this post:
"Too Busy Harassing Dissidents Perhaps.

China offers us the irony of a crime-ridden police state."
My only response is that I have experienced not even a moment when I thought about crime or the fear of crime during my time in China. Yes, I was in the beautiful, tranquil Xiamen, Fujian, for a year, where even car horns are banned and the drivers, including cabbies, obeyed the law. Not so much as a pick-pocket have I witnessed in our travels all over Hainan, and Yunnan, and now half-a-year in Beijing. But there are facts and stats such as these:
Shenzhen, the mushrooming shopping and nightlife boomtown just across the mainland Chinese border from Hong Kong, is seeing yet another growth industry flourish on its streets: serious crime.

According to official media, the city's crime rate soared 57 percent in 2003, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reports.

Kidnappings alone rose 75 percent, the Post said, quoting the Southern Metropolitan News. In all more than 100,000 crimes were recorded during 2003 in the city of 2.5 million people.
Channelnewsasia.com
  

10:20 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Center for American Progress

It's time I remind you of one of the best and newest centers for liberal thinkers to gather daily, a blog, kind of, called The Progress Report, which is brought to you by the smart and good folks at the Center for American Progress.
O'NEILL

Bush: O'Neill 'Refreshingly Candid'

In response to O'Neill's interview on 60 Minutes, the Bush Administration is launching an investigation, claiming the former Treasury Secretary showed a classified document on screen. The problem for the White House is that, according to the WSJ, the document in question was not a Pentagon document, but a Commerce Department document that was part of Vice President Cheney's secret energy task force – not a war-planning memo. In fact, as Slate notes, the document "has long been available on the website" of Judicial Watch, the conservative group who sued to open up Cheney's task force. (See Daily Talking Points from American Progress for more analysis.)"

SUDDENLY THERE IS URGENCY: While it took the White House just 24 hours to launch an investigation into O'Neill, it took them months to launch an inquiry into the leak of a CIA agent's name. As blogger Josh Marshall notes, "Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days. Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day. Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons ... priceless."

NOT HELD TO SAME STANDARD: While the White House fulminates over its O'Neill investigation, there has never been an investigation into scores of classified leaks by the White House to Bob Woodward for his book "Bush At War." As Woodward acknowledges, he was given access to "notes taken during more than 50 National Security Council and other meetings" (which are classified) while also receiving "personal notes, memos, calendars, written internal chronologies, transcripts and other documents." The Providence Journal reported on 4/10/02 that Woodward said the President himself "often spoke candidly about classified information."

STILL AN HONEST MAN: While the right-wing attack machine targets former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, one thing has been made very clear by President Bush and Vice President Cheney: O'Neill is an honest man. In nominating O'Neill, Bush said "in a distinguished career, Paul has earned a reputation as a straight shooter." When administering the Oath of Office, Cheney said, "Secretary O'Neill is a man of consistently sound judgment. He's a man of honor and decency who will make all Americans proud." After O'Neill commented about the growing size of the deficit in 2002, President Bush again said, "I find Paul O'Neill to be refreshingly candid. I appreciate his judgment." Even as O'Neill was leaving the White House, Bush said "Paul [is] one of the most fine, honorable, decent men I've ever served with. He can be proud for all he has done for his country." Maybe this is why so few conservatives are attacking what O'Neill actually had to say, and instead have resorted to attacking O'Neill personally.

A HISTORY OF INTIMIDATION: This is not the first time the White House has sought to punish those who tell the truth. As an American Progress backgrounder shows the White House summarily fired top economic adviser Larry Lindsey "when he told a newspaper that an Iraq war could cost $200 billion." Similarly, Mideast envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni was fired after he admitted post-war Iraq could be difficult. Gen. Eric Shinseki was criticized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he admitted the army would need "several hundred thousand troops" to do the job in Iraq.

BOOK EXCERPTS: The WSJ has posted excerpts from Ron Suskind's book about O'Neill. Simon and Schuster is expected to post the entire first chapter on its website.
Center for American Progress
  

8:06 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Kristof Breaks Your Heart...again

There are precious few journalists with the talent and sensitivity to move you mightily with their words. The ones that can usually move into books and work on a larger canvas. Perhaps Nicholas Kristof will hang up his staff benefits and take that full-time freelance path someday, but we are fortunate that he still toils with the extreme restrictions imposed by the 800-words or so a modern columnist has to work with. I say that we are fortunate--if we can call having our love of humanity wrenched so painfully, fortunate--but it is really the unfortunate of this still more mean than green planet that we can hope will be the fortunate benefactors of Mr. Kristof's words. Perhaps his words will move those much greater than me, those with the ability to do something about the heartbreak and the spirit-break of which he writes. With no further comment, I reproduce one of his most powerful masterpieces of heartbreaking wordsmanship.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - I'd like to invite Richard Gephardt and the other Democratic candidates to come here to Cambodia and discuss trade policy with scavengers like Nhep Chanda, who spends her days rooting through filth in the city dump.

One of the most unfortunate trends in the Democratic presidential race has been the way nearly all of the candidates, including Howard Dean, the front-runner, have been flirting with anti-trade positions by putting the emphasis on labor, environmental and human rights standards in international agreements.

While Mr. Gephardt calls for an international minimum wage, Mr. Dean was quoted in USA Today in October as saying, "I believe that trade also requires human rights and labor standards and environmental standards that are concurrent around the world."

Perhaps the candidates are simply pandering to unions, or bashing President Bush. But my guess is that they sincerely believe that such trade policies would help poor people abroad ? and that's why they should all traipse through a Cambodian garbage dump to see how economically na?ve these schemes would be.

Nhep Chanda is a 17-year-old girl who is one of hundreds of Cambodians who toil all day, every day, picking through the dump for plastic bags, metal cans and bits of food. The stench clogs the nostrils, and parts of the dump are burning, producing acrid smoke that blinds the eyes.

The scavengers are chased by swarms of flies and biting insects, their hands are caked with filth, and those who are barefoot cut their feet on glass. Some are small children.

Nhep Chanda averages 75 cents a day for her efforts. For her, the idea of being exploited in a garment factory ? working only six days a week, inside instead of in the broiling sun, for up to $2 a day ? is a dream.

"I'd like to work in a factory, but I don't have any ID card, and you need one to show that you're old enough," she said wistfully. (Since the candidates are unlikely to find the time to travel to the third world anytime soon, I put an audio slide show of the Cambodian realities on the Web for them at www.nytimes.com/kristof.)

All the complaints about third world sweatshops are true and then some: factories sometimes dump effluent into rivers or otherwise ravage the environment. But they have raised the standard of living in Singapore, South Korea and southern China, and they offer a leg up for people in countries like Cambodia.

"I want to work in a factory, but I'm in poor health and always feel dizzy," said Lay Eng, a 23-year-old woman. And no wonder: she has been picking through the filth, seven days a week, for six years. She has never been to a doctor.

Here in Cambodia factory jobs are in such demand that workers usually have to bribe a factory insider with a month's salary just to get hired.

Along the Bassac River, construction workers told me they wanted factory jobs because the work would be so much safer than clambering up scaffolding without safety harnesses. Some also said sweatshop jobs would be preferable because they would mean a lot less sweat. (Westerners call them "sweatshops," but they offer one of the few third world jobs that doesn't involve constant sweat.)

In Asia, moreover, the factories tend to hire mostly girls and young women with few other job opportunities. The result has been to begin to give girls and women some status and power, some hint of social equality, some alternative to the sex industry.

Cambodia has a fair trade system and promotes itself as an enlightened garment producer. That's great. But if the U.S. tries to ban products from countries that don't meet international standards, jobs will be shifted from the most wretched areas to better-off nations like Malaysia or Mexico. Already there are very few factories in Africa or the poor countries of Asia, and if we raise the bar higher, there will be even fewer.

The Democratic Party has been pro-trade since Franklin Roosevelt, and President Bill Clinton in particular tugged the party to embrace the realities of trade. Now the party may be retreating toward protectionism under the guise of labor standards.

That would hurt American consumers. But it would be particularly devastating for laborers in the poorest parts of the world. For the fundamental problem in the poor countries of Africa and Asia is not that sweatshops exploit too many workers; it's that they don't exploit enough.
The New York Times
  

7:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Cheney the Great, America's First Czar

Cheney the Great really is the power behind the bully-pulpit. It is bittersweet sometimes when you go out on a Redwood log and state an informed hunch as almost a fact and it turns out you are right. Readers of these pages know that I have long believed that Mr. Cheney is the bumbling but powerful Oz pulling levers and punching buttons for the heartless, brainless, courage-less attention-deficit-disordered occupant of the oval office. Mr. Suskind's book, with Paul O'Neill's insider's view, confirms my worst fears--Cheney the Great is running America.
Mr. O'Neill, who had been a budget wiz in the Nixon and Ford administrations and a successful chief executive at Alcoa, was able to sift through economic data to his heart's content with his old pal, Mr. Greenspan. But he soon discovered that this was merely an academic undertaking. In addition to the damage that Mr. O'Neill did to himself with his erratic public statements, he was serving in an administration that was not eager to have facts get in the way of policies set by a "praetorian guard" of ideologues surrounding the president.

Mr. O'Neill can't tell you what it feels like to steer the world economy. For that, read Mr. Rubin's book. Mr. O'Neill's is a woeful tale of what it feels like to sit in the office once occupied by Alexander Hamilton and be subservient to people like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes.

"We need to be better about keeping politics out of the policy process," Mr. O'Neill told Dick Cheney, his old friend from the Ford administration who had recommended him for the job early on. In this tale, the Treasury secretary repeatedly implores the vice president to foster a more open and rigorous policy-making process in the White House, but to no avail. These scenes are reminiscent of a spy thriller in which the protagonist warns the head of counterintelligence that there is an enemy mole in their midst, only to discover that his confidant is actually the mole.

Long after the reader has figured it out, Mr. O'Neill finally realizes that Mr. Cheney is the leader of the inner circle, which keeps facts — whether about global warming, the deficit, steel tariffs or Iraq — from getting in the way of policy.

Mr. O'Neill did manage, for a time, to head off talk of a tax cut on dividends. But when the issue comes up once more right after the midterm elections, and Mr. O'Neill again notes that the country cannot afford it, Mr. Cheney cuts him off: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due."
In The New York Times...
  

6:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Rummy Called Paulie 'Cause They Were Chummy

It appears the administration had early warning that Paul O'Neill was cooperating in a "Nominate, Fire & Tell" tome, with some concern. There was at least enough concern to prompt a couple of phone calls by a Secretary of Defense running two wars.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, pulling back one veil shrouding personal discussions among cabinet-level officials, said Tuesday that he twice telephoned former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill after hearing he was writing a "sour grapes" book on the Bush administration.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that he did not urge Mr. O'Neill to refrain from writing or contributing to such a book and that he had not read "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind.

In a Pentagon news briefing, Mr. Rumsfeld said that when he heard that Mr. O'Neill was writing a book that would be sharply critical of the administration, "I said I can't believe that; I have known him for 30 years.

"So I picked up the phone and called him," Mr. Rumsfeld added, "and said, `What is this business? Someone tells me you're going to write a ? you know, one of those, what do you call them? Sour grapes or ? you know, one of those insider things.' " Mr. O'Neill assured him the book was "about policy and substance," he said.

More recently, before the publication of the Suskind book, which included the accusation that President Bush had been looking for a reason to go to war with Iraq from the start of his administration, Mr. Rumsfeld heard that Mr. O'Neill had indeed cooperated in "that kind of book."

"So I called him up and I said, `You didn't go and do that, did you, Paul? I can't believe that.' And he said, `Well, there is?? there will be people who feel that way,' or something to that effect," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

In the book, Mr. O'Neill describes Mr. Bush during cabinet meetings as a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people." Mr. Rumsfeld defended the president for "his brain, his engagement, his interest, his probing questions, his constructive and positive approach to issues."
In The New York Times...
  

5:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Roll Over Vladimir, Tell Mao Zedong the News, It's Yahoo! In China

Online Auction Service with Chinese Characteristics? CPC intransigence, human rights abuses, state-controlled press, vengeful, selective repression of speech notwithstanding, the Genie ain't going back into the bottle, folks! Amazing, absolutely amazing--and I've been in China less than two years. The "old China hands" must think they're in a time machine.
SUNNYVALE, Calif. (AP) -- Yahoo! Inc. and leading Chinese Internet portal SINA have agreed to form an auctions-based service for online buyers and sellers in China.

The deal aims to marry SINA's brand awareness in China and Yahoo's proven expertise in e-commerce, the companies said Tuesday in a joint statement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"With the rapid growth of the Chinese Internet market, we see that all indicators point to a strong surge in Chinese e-commerce,'' SINA chief executive Yan Wang said. "With SINA's brand and traffic in China coupled with Yahoo's technology, know-how and worldwide brand, we are creating an e-commerce platform that will be trusted and widely available to Internet users in China.''

The world's largest online auction purveyor, eBay Inc., does not operate in mainland China.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo and SINA will create an e-commerce platform to provide fixed-price and bid-price sales of consumer goods in an online auction setting. ...

The companies will also offer a platform to speed payment transactions. The service is expected to launch by the middle of the year.

According to China Internet Network Information Center, the government controlled regulator which manages Internet resources, there were 78 million Chinese Internet users as of last month.
The New York Times
  

4:41 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Say What...?

"In The Loop" has Dubya being a Bubba again. A return to normalcy isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as we keep sharp objects out of his reach, particularly any finer points of statesmanship.
Asked Monday about former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill's allegation that the administration was preparing to attack Iraq from its first days in office, President Bush told reporters that "we were dealing with Desert Badger or flyovers and fly-betweens and looks, and we were fashioning policy along those lines."

Desert Badger? This led to some head scratching around town. A Nexis search reveals no public mention of a recent operation called Desert Badger, although there are references to the University of Wisconsin Badgers.

So it seemed we're left with several alternatives:

1. Bush has revealed a heretofore undisclosed Pentagon name for some campaign in Iraq, maybe to enforce the "no-fly" zones or to suppress antiaircraft operations.

2. He's thinking of the famous Project Badger, a biological warfare vaccine study.

3. He was recalling those Iraqi TU-16 "Badger" bombers.

4. He's confusing his foxes and his badgers -- Operation Desert Fox was the name for a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998.
Washington Post
  

4:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Krugman Tells The Awful Truth

Here are a few points Mr. Krugman adds to the O'Neill affair:
The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist.

The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?

So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
In The New York Times...
  

2:06 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War

There is something fairly interesting, but actually more than a little "specious," going on over at Slate. It's called, somewhat "preciously":
Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War - Stopping Muslim totalitarianism. By Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria


It's hosted by Jacob Weisberg. Frankly, Mr. Friedman is the only "star" of the lot in my book. The rest aren't trifling, of course, except for Hitchens, who as far as I am concerned has become a bad joke he's played on himself--what used to be called a caricature, but that is too lofty a phrase for that fool.

Give it a look, it's at Slate
  

12:07 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, January 13, 2004

The Punishment Continues

Conrad, being a man of his word, continues to levy his punishment on his faithful for their feckless efforts on behalf of The Gweilo Diaries in the recent Asian Blog Awards. They must be contented with less...ah, so much LESS.

See what I mean? It's terrible; it's cruel and unusual; it's UNCONS-TIT-UTIONAL !

It has been said, however, that sometimes less is better; and that really is a beguiling, impish, almost Mona Lisa smile...
  

11:16 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




An Angry Man Is Funny Sometimes

Sometimes you just have to look at one more view of things to get the full perspective. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes that view is hysterically funny. This is one of those times, although the writer certainly didn't intend to write a comic strip. Or did he? You be the judge.
What Part Of "Illegal" Don’t You Understand?

Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge recently said that the United States must "come to grips with the presence of eight to 12 million illegals" now in the country and "afford them some kind of legal status some way." Secretary Ridge, I agree. We desperately need to come to grips with the presence of up to 12 million illegal aliens. But they already have "some kind of legal status." Their status is "illegal."

To Americans, that means that a law has been broken. And that also means that some form of punishment is supposed to follow. When Americans break the law, they get punished. Some Americans even get punished when they don’t break the law. Three U.S. citizens were just prosecuted, and face up to eight years in prison for importing lobsters. That’s right – they imported lobsters. But they brought them in plastic bags, not cardboard boxes. That’s a real hazard to homeland security. And a few were less than 5.5 inches long, which is the minimum length Honduran law allows. So these three were prosecuted under a federal law that forbids U.S. citizens from importing any such product in violation of foreign laws.

The problem is that Honduran officials, including their President, said that this case does not represent a violation of their laws, since so few lobsters were shorter than the minimum. That doesn’t seem to matter to our intrepid and heroic defenders. They’ve stopped a real threat to the public safety here. God forbid that I get a 5.49 inch long lobster for dinner.

Why is it that we can find a few substandard lobsters in a shipment worth over four million dollars, but we can’t find 12 million people here illegally? Maybe if the illegals had crossed the border in plastic bags like the lobsters did, we would have caught them. Maybe if we put as much emphasis on illegal immigration as we put on illegal seafood we wouldn’t even be discussing this issue.
Give the rest of this indignant fellow's lobster-rant a click, you will enjoy it. Who knows, you may very well agree with him. It is in the Chattanoogan
  

8:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Is Hong Kong "Starting A Long March Toward Democracy"?

Here's a provocative headline for a Commentary piece in BusinessWeek: Hong Kong May Be Starting A Long March Toward Democracy. For it to prove to be as prophetic as it is provocative will depend on a lot of variables that I am in no position here in Beijing to speculate upon with anything more than informed guesswork. My sources are almost exclusively within the central government, and they don't share a lot of real "insider" information with an American journalist and professor.
For Chinese President Hu Jintao, Hong Kong is a headache that just won't go away. Last summer, when half a million people took to the streets to protest Hong Kong's unpopular Beijing-appointed chief executive, Tung Chee-Hwa, and his plan to ram through tough new security laws, Hu and the Chinese leadership suffered an embarrassing reversal: Tung backed down, the first time in China's history that the government gave in to people power. To defuse tensions, Beijing introduced measures aimed at boosting the territory's economy, which was then ravaged by the SARS outbreak and the aftermath of a property bubble.

Beijing's strategy has helped Hong Kong's economy to rebound, but recovery has not translated into support for Tung. In November, pro-government pols lost big in local elections. On Jan. 1, thousands again marched for democracy. Now, democrats have their eyes on September's legislative elections, in which they could win a majority. Then, they could push Tung to meet their demand for a direct election of the chief executive in 2007. Hong Kong's constitution has vague statements about having a more democratic system by then, but it leaves out the crucial specifics. "There will be more demonstrations," says pro-democracy lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan. "Even if the Chinese government opposes [democracy], it makes no difference to us. We will fight for it."

Tung is still playing for time: In his annual policy address, on Jan. 7, he disappointed democrats when he appointed several deputies to consult with Beijing about political reform, but he said nothing about when he would consult the Hong Kong public about the 2007 question. "We definitely need to understand the full implications of these important issues, before making appropriate arrangements," Tung said. Even though Tung doesn't want to give in to the democrats again, he's in a bind: Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, whom China's leaders loathe, is running for reelection in March on an anti-Beijing platform. A nasty face-off between Hong Kong demonstrators and the government would demonstrate to Taiwan's voters that Beijing will not tolerate democracy -- and thus help Chen.

Is there a way out of this impasse? Probably not in the short term. But don't be surprised if the Chinese start to show more flexibility. Hu, a dyed-in-the-wool party operative, is no closet democrat. But he has already shown more pragmatism than his predecessors -- and may do so again. That may include giving Hong Kongers a measured dose of democracy. Indeed, some Chinese officials are now talking privately about compromises. Surprised by the depth of anti-Tung feeling, Beijing has been sending more of its own people to Hong Kong. While Beijing hard-liners oppose concessions to the democrats, some Chinese emissaries are more accommodating, says Allen Lee, former chairman of the pro-business Liberal Party and now a Hong Kong representative to the National People's Congress. "They are looking for a way out of this jam," says Lee, who says he has met with the Chinese emissaries. "Some kind of reform is coming." One idea: Allow a direct election for the chief executive in 2007, but only after a committee of pro-government Hong Kong people vets the candidates.

Some of the city's elite still believe these experiments won't happen. Democrats "think that by putting enough people on the street, they can get what they want," says Shiu Sin-por, executive director of the One Country Two Systems Research Institute, a pro-government think tank. "Beijing will be very conservative." That's certainly the instinct of many in the Chinese leadership. But with Hong Kong more politicized than ever, stiff-arming the democrats may not be a viable strategy.
BusinessWeek
  

7:41 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Poll Tolls Badly For Bush On Immigration Policy

Bush is going to have to sell his new immigration to the American public, according to ABC News:
Jan. 12— Most Americans oppose President Bush's proposal to offer legal status to illegal immigrants — and if it does happen, two-thirds favor a limited-duration program, not an open-ended one.

An ABCNEWS poll found 52 percent oppose an amnesty program for illegal immigrants from Mexico; 57 percent oppose one for illegal immigrants from other countries. Both results are roughly the same as when the administration floated the idea 2 ˝ years ago.

Moreover, in a finding that suggests it will be a difficult political sell, at least twice as many Americans "strongly" oppose the proposal as strongly support it . For Mexicans, 34 percent are strongly opposed, with 17 percent strongly in favor. For other illegal immigrants, 40 percent are strongly opposed to the idea, while 14 percent are strongly in favor.

Bush today and Tuesday is visiting Mexico, where President Vicente Fox welcomed his immigration proposal as "a very important step forward." It's been seen as an effort to boost Bush's popularity among Hispanic Americans, a growing group.

There's an insufficient sample of Hispanics in this poll for reliable analysis. But, in terms of a program for Mexicans, support rises to a majority among nonwhites, 53 percent, compared with 37 percent among whites and a low of 33 percent among white men. Support also is higher in the West (48 percent) than in other regions.

Opposition peaks in Bush's own party: Fifty-eight percent of Republicans oppose his immigration proposal for Mexicans, compared with 50 percent of Democrats. For illegal immigrants other than Mexicans, 63 percent of Republicans are opposed.

Bush reportedly will disclose more details of the plan in his State of the Union address Jan. 20. This poll phrased it broadly, asking if respondents support or oppose a program in which illegal immigrants "would be allowed to live and work legally in the United States."

A follow-up asked how long legal status should be provided if such a program is created. Sixty-seven percent prefer that it be for "a limited period of time, say six years," compared with 25 percent who favor an unlimited program. Even among those who support the idea, a majority says it should be for limited duration. Most of those who "strongly" support it, however, say it should be unlimited.
ABCNEWS.com
 

2:54 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A View Of Bush Immigration Policy From China

How does the Chinese press report Bush's new immigration policy? Here it is, short and to the point, without any spin of any kind.
MONTEREY, Mexico, Jan. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- US President George W. Bush affirmed on Monday that his immigration proposal could help illegal immigrants "leave the shadows and have an identity."

At a joint press conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox, Bush warned his government will not allow the existence in the United States an underclass of illegal immigrants, but added his proposal is not an amnesty.

The amnesty, he noted, would only promote the violation of the law and perpetuate illegal immigration.

Bush said his immigration proposal would benefit both the United States and Mexico as it recognizes the contribution of thousands of honest Mexicans who work in the United States.

On his part, President Fox said the proposal is a "very important step for millions of Mexicans living in the United States."

Half of the 8 million undocumented workers in the United States are Mexicans, and the remittances made by Mexico migrant workers constitute the second major source of foreign currency after petroleum in the Latin American country.

Fox said he was pleased that many of the issues discussed by both presidents in the past had been included in this proposal.
Xinhuanet.Com
  

2:41 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




War College Report

There is nothing like going to the source for the straight skinny. By courtesy of the Los Angeles Times we are able to do just that, along with a little basic information:
The Army War College, located in Carlisle, Pa., trains military and civilian officials in the theory and application of military strategy using land-based forces. The report contains a disclaimer stating that it does not necessarily represent the views of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.
The report is HERE.
Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., the institute's director, said the monograph was offered "as a contribution to the national security debate over the aims and course of the war on terrorism." ...

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based research organization that focuses on military affairs, said: "There's no question that Iraq has diverted U.S. attention from the war on terrorism. However, [the U.S.] invaded Iraq to resolve a potentially more serious threat that American intelligence indicated was quite urgent — that being the threat of weapons of mass destruction…. All intelligence estimates pointed to an urgent threat."

Daniel Benjamin, a member of the National Security Council staff in the late 1990s, said, "The criticism does not seem out of line with many of the conversations I have had with officers in every branch of the military."
Los Angeles Times
  

2:29 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Army War College 'Flunks' Dubya & Company's Efforts In War On Terrorism

Biting the hand that feeds it has a brand new shiny example. The "ouch" might not be too loud, but the pain from the quite negative published report from the Army War College on the administration's performance in what it has basically made its reason for existence, the "War on Terrorism," must be intense for the Bush administration. The fact that from at least the public evidence--which is by no means definitive or conclusive--it appears all too accurate only makes the White House's response more problematical. What is Bush, the intrepid AWOL non-fighter-pilot-of-publicity-stunts extraordinaire going to say to the War College: "I know a winning war when I see one"? Yeah.
A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.

The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."

It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."

Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.

His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.

But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.

Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College's commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, "He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom."

Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record study. He added: "If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in the global war on terrorism, it's not likely to be on my reading list anytime soon."

Many of Record's arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made by critics of the administration. Iraq, he concludes, "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda." But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the Army's premier academic institution.

In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism.

Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's overreach in World War II. "A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means."

He also scoffs at the administration's policy, laid out by Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. "The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future," he writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated."

He also casts doubt on whether the U.S. government will maintain its commitment to the war. "The political, fiscal, and military sustainability of the GWOT [global war on terrorism] remains to be seen," he states.

The essay concludes with several recommendations. Some are fairly noncontroversial, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress. But he also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in Iraq, and be prepared to settle for a "friendly autocracy" there rather than a genuine democracy.
Yikes! There the report is an impugnation of the fall-back position for the reason to invade now that we are being told that "Democracy in the center of the Middle East" was the real reason to go to war in Iraq, not WMDs.

Washington Post
  

1:53 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Retaliation Campaign Begins

Paul O'Neill's former employer isn't happy with him. When that employer is the Treasury Department, that is very bad news. If you are a regular citizen, other than a death in the family, or learning that your spouse is cheating on you, finding out that the U.S. Treasury is investigating you is just about as bad as it gets. Of course, Mr. O'Neill isn't your ordinary private citizen--he has personal resources, both money and contacts, that very few folks will ever have. He also has a lot of information he probably hasn't disclosed as yet. But certainly the "getting nasty" campaign has begun. How dirty it gets might be determined by the fact that O'Neill's former bosses, Bush and Cheney, are in a reelection campaign and might temper their public revenge, since most Americans don't really enjoy watching fairly decent folks being crushed by big government. But, Shrub & Twigs certainly have proven that they don't play by the rules of precedence, political, personal, national and international.
WASHINGTON (CNN) - The Treasury Department said Monday it is looking into how a government document from the very early days of the Bush administration -- marked "secret" and outlining plans for a post-Saddam Iraq -- became part of a CBS "60 Minutes" broadcast Sunday night.

"Based on the '60 Minutes' segment aired Sunday evening, there was a document that was shown that appeared to be classified," said Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols. "It was for that reason that it was referred to the U.S. inspector general's office."

Ousted Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, now an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, was a guest on the program, along with Ron Suskind, the author of a book for which O'Neill was the primary source. O'Neill said on the program that the administration was preparing plans to move against Iraq "from the very beginning."

Suskind told CNN he had no access to secret documents and O'Neill never improperly took classified papers after leaving the Administration.

"I am certain O'Neill never had it," said Suskind, author of "The Price of Loyalty", referring to a National Security Council document on post-Sadaam Iraq.

Suskind said O'Neill gained proper authorization to all 19,000 Government documents used as sources for the book. "He got the documents from lawyers at the Treasury Department when he made a request after he left," said Suskind.

Paul O'Neill was traveling Monday afternoon and did not return a phone call from CNN.

The decision to refer the matter to the inspector general was made at a Monday morning Treasury Department meeting involving senior staff and department attorneys, Nichols said, and was made without the initiation or consultation of the White House.

There is a precedent for former Cabinet members to take information -- such as schedules, letters, press releases and speeches -- with them as they leave, but it would be illegal to take classified information.

The request for the investigation came as O'Neill's comments critical of the Bush administration sparked a fury of controversy in Washington. O'Neill clashed with the president on deficit spending and tax cuts, which ultimately led to O'Neill's departure.

Asked if seeking the probe may look vindictive, Nichols said, "We don't view it in that way," according to Reuters news agency. ...

O'Neill also maintains that his advice to Vice President Dick Cheney about steel tariffs and tax cuts was ignored, largely due to political considerations, according to excerpts from the book printed in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

O'Neill, who had served in the Ford administration and also as CEO of Alcoa Inc., a big aluminum producer, had argued that tax cuts would do serious damage to the federal budget and that tariffs would do little to help domestic steelmakers in the long run.

O'Neill's account of a disengaged President Bush eyeing war with Iraq from his first days in office drew jeers from White House officials, but Democrats said O'Neill's story shows Bush misled Americans about the road to war. ...

Rep. Dick Gephardt, a Democratic presidential contender who supported the war, said at a campaign stop in Iowa: "It's a worrisome fact, and we need to look into it and find out what really went on."
CNN.com
  

12:49 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, January 12, 2004

What Went Wrong?

What went wrong? That is the question of a man who has more reason to ask why we were so wrong about Saddam Hussein's WMDs than perhaps anyone outside of government: Kenneth Pollack. He's the man that wrote the book THE THREATENING STORM, perhaps the most influential piece of journalism detailing the case for the invasion of Iraq. His book had a persuasive effect upon many intellectuals and others that might be considered somewhat dovish on the use of military might to solve all of America's foreign policy woes. Kevin Drum, the proprietor and scribe of Calpundit, as clear and judicious a critical-thinker as there is in the blogosphere, wrote in a recent post that he was "temporarily swayed into the pro-war camp partly on the authority of Pollack's book." Why are we bringing up Mr. Pollack and his book here? Simply to direct you to an article he wrote in The Atlantic Monthly. While he doesn't reach an answer to his basic question, it is a pretty good deconstruction of what led him and just about everyone else on the planet to believe that Saddam had WMDs of some variety and quantity.
Let's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.
I believe you should read this article, it won't make the confusion go away, but you will be better equipped to discuss the issue at a cocktail party, a Starbucks or perhaps a classroom.

The Atlantic Monthly
  

10:30 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Beijing Jeep launches Outlanders--With Vavooom!

Marketing Has Also Changed In China--To Say The Least:

Beijing Jeep launches Outlanders




Beijing Jeep launches the Outlanders CUV (car-based utility vehicle) of Japan's Mitsubishi Motor Group in Beijing January 10, 2003. The four-wheel-drive Outlanders will be equipped with a 2.4-litre engine and will retail at 215,800 yuan (US$26,100). Beiing Jeep, a joint venture between Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp and German-US DaimlerChrysler AG, will produce 25,000 Outlanders this year.




China Daily
  

6:49 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Gone -- with grace or disgrace

Here is more evidence of change in the state-owned press. In these pages, you have read me expound upon the changes taking place in the government controlled press in China, some of these changes are apparent in only small ways, others are almost radical departures from the colorless, party-line information-only style of publishing that turned readers of the official state-organs off in droves. Just 18 months ago, shortly after we had arrived in China, when my Chinese students--some of them party members--saw me reading China Daily or the People's Daily, they would scoff and gesture derisively, saying something along the order of: "Why do you read that? It's only a bunch of lies and boring propaganda." And, in truth, the boring part was painfully true; the lying part I was too new of a resident to judge.

Now, after the passage of time, and a fair amount of traveling around, I can write more knowledgeably about both aspects of the two principal, official state-organs of news. The change that I have witnessed, day by day, month by month has been remarkable, and very obvious. The change certainly wasn't like watching grass grow, or paint drying, both very real processes that are so visibly action-less we remark upon them only in metaphor and experience them only in the fullness of time.

I am going to produce the following article from the People's Daily as an example of just how colorful and narratively creative the journalism is today; it is a fine piece, as an editor--which I have been--I would have published it with satisfaction.
Like birth, death is a natural event. But the emotional impact and personal significance of some events are vastly different. Birth may be anticipated with excitement and optimism, while the reality of death is avoided and even denied. While we cannot be immortal, we can choose to pass away with dignity.

Death takes no holidays. It worked terribly hard last year. Among China's star artists who checked out at relatively ripe old ages were film director and actor Xie Tian (89), and Ying Ruocheng, (74), actor and former vice-minister of culture.

Xie was one of the longest-serving artists in the country's movie industry.

Ying was cast in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 film "The Last Emperor,'' appeared at stage in many dramas and translated several of Shakespeare's plays into Chinese.

Their names may sound less than familiar to today's young fans of Hollywood blockbusters. But the history of modern Chinese cinema and theatre would be incomplete without the two.

The Hong Kong entertainment industry suffered a double blow, with the loss of the beautiful and versatile Hong Kong actress Leslie Cheung (46), who committed suicide, and singer/movie star Anita Mui, who lost her battle against cancer at age 40.

Cheung starred in the Oscar-nominated "Farewell My Concubine."

Mui is said to have never failed to send shivers down her fans' spines when she sang, and it is not difficult to feel the emotion that flows from her as she performs. She won the hearts of her fans with her generosity with her friends and the needy.

Both are enormously popular icons in the Chinese-speaking world whose appeal crosses generation lines.

The passing of all of them is cause for grief and sorrow.

It does not, however, a tragedy in the cases of those who lived long, productive lives. Stars come and go. Their legacies shall now forever be etched in the Hall of Fame. Their works will continue to entertain and inspire us, as they did in the past.

I tip my hat to them. May they rest in peace.

The saddest departure was the 243 people who died in a blast at a natural gas field in Chongqing on December 23, 2003. Investigations indicate it was an accident caused by negligence -- technical faults and failure to promptly evacuate the village people in the mountainous area where the accident happened. Actually, they were placed at the gateway to death when the big project was launched.

The collective deaths of such a large number of people should make investors who are single-mindedly pursuing maximum profit to double check their conscience.

The 243 Chongqing people were only the tiny tip of the iceberg.

Official statistics found that there were 883,000 accidents in the workplace for 2003 up to the end of November, which claimed 120,890 lives. The figure remains large, regardless of government officials announcing it was 3 per cent less than the figure for the same period of the previous year.

Accidents claiming 10 or more lives were on the rise. The bloody list of lethal accidents, from coal mine explosions to traffic accidents, has finally prompted resolute actions to shut tight the doors to death in the workplace.

In 2003, the passing of an ordinary worker has brought the country's internal migration laws under scrutiny.

In March 2003, Sun Zhigang, a 27-year-old graphic designer from Hubei Province, was detained for not having a residence permit for the southern city of Guangzhou, where he was living. Within days he had died while in police custody. In June two people were sentenced to death and 10 others received sentences up to life imprisonment for their roles in the beating death of Sun.

Sun's tragic departure, which lead the country's media to call for changes to the internal migration laws, has made a difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese who live and work outside their home villages.

The government finally rescinded the "Regulation on the detention and deportation of vagrants and beggars in the cities," which was introduced in 1982.

Still, Sun's case showed the role media can play. Similar instances of abuse of power by the police were considered so routine his maltreatment might not even have made it into the local press. It inspired a storm of online calls for "weiquan'' (defence of civil rights), and provoked debates over the "custody and repatriation system," which was used primarily in dealing with migrant workers and was the basis for Sun's detention. The online protest that ensued undoubtedly played a role in the government's decision to abolish the system and arrest the policemen and officials involved in the case.

Last year, death of several big shots merited much more attention. They earned themselves a berth in the Hall of Shame.

Liu Yong, a mafia leader in Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province, almost had his life saved. He failed.

China's Supreme Court, in a rare move, stepped in and sentenced Liu to death.

Liu was convicted of a series of organized crimes such as racketeering, extortion and illegal possession of firearms.

Liu was originally sentenced to death in April 2002. He was given a two-year reprieve in August 2003 by the Liaoning provincial high court, based on the claim that his confession might have been extracted from him as a result of torture. The reversal of a death sentence often results in life imprisonment, and then a considerably lighter sentence.

The Supreme Court, in a rare review, overturned the second-trial verdict and denied the reprieve. The retrial came after massive public criticism of the high court's reversal of Liu's death penalty. It might be unfair to attribute Liu's death to the judiciary's response to public opinion. But there is no denying that the uproar has helped move the judiciary to honour its promise to promote transparency.

Li Yaoqi, former chairman of the Hainan International Investment Group, was executed for corruption in Haikou, in South China's Hainan Province, on December 29, 2003, after being convicted of illegally amassing about US$6 million and illegally channeling millions of dollars of stocks into his personal firm while his State-owned investment company went bankrupt.

His execution came a day after the disgraced former vice-governor of Anhui Province, Wang Huaizhong, was sentenced to death for corruption. A dead man walking, Wang has lodged an appeal. The result is pending.

Both Li and Wang had success, wealth and power. It was their abuse of power and ill-got gains that won them their debut with death.

Like birth, death is a natural event. But the emotional impact and personal significance of the two events are vastly different. Birth may be anticipated with excitement and optimism, while the reality of death is avoided and even denied.

While we cannot be immortal, we can choose to pass away with dignity.
People's Daily
  

6:21 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Talk About A Perspective On Time...

Whenever I start talking to other westerners about the importance of understanding the age of Chinese civilization, I can see their eyes almost immediately start to glaze over in the expression of: "Oh, jeeze, here we go again!" Well, folks, start glazing those eyes, because here comes a whopper: not a hamburger, not a fish story, but a whopper of a "Now, this is old!" true story. How long is 4500 years? A long, long time. In America the only thing that old is the commentary on how young Dick Clark still looks! But try and wrap your mind around a city that old. Not some scraggly camp site where a few charred animal bones and flint axes are found lying around, but a CITY four thousand, five hundred years old! This is incredible...
Archaeologists in northwest China's Shaanxi Province have unearthed the ruins of an ancient city dating back 4,500 years on a mountain in Jiaxian County.

The ancient city consists of a 3,000-square-meter inner city, built on the top of a hill, a 60,000-square-meter outer city, which encircles the middle and lower part of the same hill, and a moat, 10 meters wide and 6.4 meters deep.

The walls of the inner and outer cities were built with stones and loess, said Zhang Tian'en, a research fellow with the Shaanxi Provincial Archaeological Research Institute.

Archaeologists have been excavating in a site of the late Neolithic period, known as the Shiluoluo Mountain Ruins in Jiaxian County, which covers 100,000 square meters and was found in 1978.

Relics such as pottery jars and pots, ruins of residences and stone walls and hills of stones piled up by human beings have been unearthed from the Shiluoluo Mountain Ruins. The newly-discovered ancient city is located on a lone hill in the northeastern part of the Shiluoluo Mountain Ruins.

Archaeologists unearthed foundations of 18 houses and more than 80 vaults and pottery kilns in the ruins of the ancient city.

Discovery of the newly-unearthed city, the most intact among the ancient cities of the same late Neolithic period that are unearthed in China, is of important value in the study of city construction and civilization in ancient times, Zhang said.
People's Daily
  

5:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




SARS Is Present In Southeast China, But So Is The Correct Response

The Central Government and the WHO appear to be on top of the limited reappearance of SARS in China's Guangdong Province. The lessons of last year were hard to swallow for a bureaucracy that is so steeped in the mendacious paranoia and heavy-handedness of the old ways, but swallow them they did, and learned from the experience. In truth, there is little more you can ask from an individual, an organization, or a nation than that: To stand up and accept their errors publicly and, most importantly, learn from them. The People's Republic of China has done this. My Panama hat is off to them--I know, I know: one is not supposed to wear a Panama hat in the winter, especially in a Beijing winter, but it is my lucky hat, it is me, I am lost without it.
A 35-year-old man has been isolated in hospital in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province for SARS observation, officials said Sunday, Jan. 11.

"The Ministry of Health has received the report from Guangdong health authorities on Saturday that a man with some SARS symptoms has been isolated in hospital for medical observation,"said Mao Qun'an.

Mao was echoed by Roy Wadia, a World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman in Guangzhou with a team of WHO experts. Mao also said local physicians are attempting to diagnose the case.

"There's always been a problem with case definition with SARS "actually identifying a case. So we want to understand clearly the basics that Guangdong is using,'' WHO Beijing office spokesman Bob Dietz said in Beijing.

Medical experts have yet to confirm the man as a suspected case. So the local health authorities did not report the case as a suspected one to the Ministry of Health.

Apparently, the hospitalized man has had no contacts with any SARS patients or infected wild animals. Both the 32-year-old confirmed SARS patient, surnamed Luo, and the 20-year-old suspected woman SARS patient, who were revealed last week are in Guangzhou. Just how they were infected is unknown.

The team visited Lijiang Garden, a community in Panyu District where Luo had lived, are trying to find if the virus source is there.

They have swept through the man's apartment interviewing people and looking for possible modes of infection in water systems, garbage facilities and living quarters.

"Our environmental experts scoured the building,'' Wadia said. "Based on the observations they made, the complex seemed to be managed pretty well. The upkeep was good. The management was extremely cooperative.''
People's Daily
  

3:27 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Arrogance of the Insecure

This Taiwan story is rather revealing of a very human trait. However, building taller and taller skyscrapers I would think should be losing its appeal since some lunatics have discovered the attention one gets by aiming jet planes at them. There is much comfort that these folks have stayed away from east Asia since there is nothing but a lose-lose scenario for them here where tolerance, strangely enough, coupled with swift and total retribution, are the prevailing sentiments.
When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland at the end of the civil war in 1949, they did not intend to stay long. The architecture showed it.

Rows of short, dreary concrete buildings line the older streets. Typhoons are a frequent threat and earthquakes a menace - 2455 Taiwanese died in a quake just over four years ago that destroyed 51,000 homes and damaged 53,000 more.

Not surprisingly, only a handful of buildings have more than 30 storeys and the tallest has 52.

But that has not stopped a coalition of local tycoons, politicians, builders and architects constructing what is about to become the world's tallest building, a 101-storey tower in the shape of an abstract pagoda that soars past previous holders of the title, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Plans for the site of the former World Trade Centre in New York call for an even taller building, although some argue it may not qualify as tallest because part of it will be more structural framework than habitable building.

Hydraulic jacks on the roof moved the Taipei building's spire into place in October, and the final windows to finish enclosing the 506-metre-high building were installed in early November. Although it trails the Sears Tower in the height of antennas on top of its roof, it exceeds the Sears building in the height of its uppermost occupied floor and has a higher spire than the Petronas Towers.

As with other very tall buildings in Asia, the construction of this one is as much about politics and pride as about commerce.

"As the world's highest building, Taipei 101 will attract attention to Taiwan's excellence, and carve 'Taiwan first' in the minds of people around the globe," President Chen Shui-bian said about the project.

Mr Chen was mayor of Taipei in 1997 when he began pressing to have a skyscraper built in the new neighbourhood he was creating close to City Hall, on the city's eastern outskirts.

The total cost of the building is $US1.7billion ($2.1 billion).
Australian Financial Review
  

2:30 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Gweilo Diaries Punishes the Eyes of His Faithful

Conrad, the proprietor and scribe of The Gweilo Diaries continues to "punish" the eyes of his faithful readership for minor transgressions of voting attentiveness in a recent blogging awards event.

In all due candor, I must assert that I don't see it the same way he does, i.e., as "punishment" to my eyes. But then, to each his own. I like a well-aged Single Malt Scotch, some folks like an aged well-blended one such as Royal Salute. As in almost all matters of import, you should judge for yourself. Please do so Here.

While you are there, you should read his viewpoint on a Thomas L. Friedman column that I recently featured in these pages; we differ only somewhat, but that is the name of the game in opinion politics.
  

2:08 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




You Don't Want To Be A Criminal In China

Because we do not have the necessary numbers to crunch, we cannot say statistically if capital punishment is a deterrent in China. However, in a heartbeat I offer that I would think long and hard before I committed a crime here in the Middle Kingdom where they do NOT coddle murderers and other serious miscreants.

Three members of a mafia gang and four murderers have been executed in two Chinese provinces. Chinese officials say among those executed were three men accused of having created a mafia empire in the north east province of Jilin, under which they gained power by bribing officials, killing and carrying out robberies.

In the south east province of Fujian, three convicted killers were also executed after being paraded on a stage.

China is the world's leading country employing capital punishment, but the number of death sentences and executions are closely guarded state secrets.
ABC RADIO AUSTRALIA
 

1:22 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




What Goes Around, Comes Around

Whether Mr. O'Neill has an axe to grind isn't the issue, obviously he does. Is he speaking the truth, is the only issue. It would seem ludicrous beyond measure to assume that he is fabricating out of whole cloth; almost surely there is some, or even much, truth in what he is alleging. How it eventually plays out will be interesting. My guess is that it won't change anything substantially. The polarization regarding Dubya's presidency is pretty well set in granite for most: those who support the administration will continue to do so, probably with even more vehemence since they see this as a sour-grapes betrayal by a man with a very personal agenda, revenge; those who denounce the Bush administration--perhaps 'hate' would not be an inappropriate description of many people's personal reaction to all things Bush--will continue to do so with added ammunition.

There is a moral to this story, however, in political, as well as personal dynamics, we reap what we sow. Bush treated a member of his cabinet with scorn; it came back to bite him in the ass. Is there anything new about this in our knowledge of human nature? Surely not.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two Cabinet members Sunday defended President Bush from harsh criticism by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in an upcoming book and accompanying television and magazine interviews.

In the book, "The Price of Loyalty," by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, scheduled for publication Tuesday, O'Neill says administration officials discussed plans to go to war with Iraq as early as their first weeks in office.

He also compares Bush's presence at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a longtime Bush friend who was chairman of his 2000 campaign, disputed that account Sunday.

"He drives the meeting, asks tough questions. He likes dissent," Evans told CNN's "Late Edition."

"He likes to see debate. He thinks it's very healthy, very constructive for the process. Oftentimes, he has to make the deciding decision when he has his advisers on both sides of the same subject."

An interview with O'Neill aired Sunday night on the CBS program "60 Minutes."

In it, O'Neill said the Bush administration was eyeing an invasion of Iraq "from the very beginning" -- months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that administration officials said changed their strategic perspective.

Bush administration officials say regime change in Iraq had been U.S. policy since 1998, when President Clinton was in office, and insist removing Saddam by force was a last resort.

They also say the Bush administration has contingency plans about many global hotspots.

"For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," O'Neill said in the interview.

"We didn't listen to [O'Neill's] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now," said a senior official. The official said he informed Bush of O'Neill's comments but declined to describe the president's reaction.

Suskind said he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including several Cabinet members who gave him their accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.

But the main source of the book was O'Neill, who said he was going public because he felt the administration "has been too secretive about how decisions have been made," CBS said.

The network added that O'Neill gave Suskind 19,000 internal documents and took no money for his role in the book.

O'Neill, the former CEO of aluminum giant Alcoa, was fired in December 2002 over differences with the administration's tax cuts.

Suskind writes that O'Neill warned Vice President Dick Cheney of the consequences of a growing budget deficit, only to be told that Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency showed "deficits don't matter."

"I enjoyed my times spent with Paul O'Neill and I appreciate his service," Evans said. "But we continue to stay focused on jobs for the American people, growing this economy, and the results are proving that the president's policies that he's been leading on are working."

John Snow, who replaced O'Neill's at the Treasury Department, said the administration believes cutting budget deficits -- projected to hit $500 billion -- is important, but the shortfalls are "understandable" given the impacts of recession and war.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan brushed off O'Neill's criticism Saturday.

"We appreciate his service, but we are not in the business of doing book reviews," he told reporters.

"It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people."

O'Neill also told Time magazine he never saw evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq --Bush's primary justification for the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March.

None have been found, although searches have turned up evidence of continuing research on banned weapons.

O'Neill predicted that his former colleagues -- one of whom has already tried to paint him as a disgruntled former employee with a "tin ear" for politics -- would hit back.

"These people are nasty and they have a long memory," O'Neill told Time.

Democrats vying for the chance to challenge Bush in November jumped on O'Neill's comments.

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, whose opposition to the invasion of Iraq has boosted him to the front ranks of Democratic candidates, said the Suskind book shows Bush "planned to go to war all along."

Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who backed the decision to go to war in Iraq, said O'Neill's concerns about Bush's economic programs were right.

"This administration has taken us into the largest fiscal deficit in our history," Lieberman told "Fox News Sunday."

"The dollar is at an all-time low, and 3 million people lost their jobs. Last month, when the administration said we'd expect to see 150,000 new jobs created, we ended up seeing 1,000 -- a very lame performance."

Former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri told CBS that O'Neill's observations about Bush "are things that I've found when I met with the president."

"I told the president on 9/12, the day after 9/11, that we had to trust one another, that we had to try to put politics aside, to try to prevent further acts of terrorism," Gephardt said.

"I said, 'This is a matter of life and death, and we've got to do our best to work together to keep our people safe.' And I've really tried to do that. I found him to be hard to help."

Former Sen. Bob Dole, the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 1996, said he wouldn't suggest O'Neill was "bitter," but he was "certainly very critical."

"I mean, there's always somebody in somebody's administration who jumps out early, sells a book, and goes after the guy who hired him," Dole told CNN. "I don't know if that's good. It may be good business; it's not good politics."
CNN.com
  

12:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Mississippi Sorrows (A republish of one of my favorites; this is for all of the perhaps fleeting new visitors)

I wish I could just simply be angry at Trent Lott, even after all these months. It should be easy enough. I have been angry at Trent for most of my life, the first couple of decades of which were spent growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast way too close to that dangerous neat-freak and everything he believes in. While my house and his house fronted onto the same warm, rich waters of the Gulf of Mexico, we weren’t next door neighbors. That dubious distinction belonged to my uncle; and still does, whenever Mr. Lott returns to Pascagoula, Mississippi from his benighted labors in Washington.

No, I have an overwhelming sense of sadness rather than my usual anger at Trent Lott because of all the Mississippians everywhere who despise racism and who had, until Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday—and now his death—almost quit being ashamed when asked that most basic conversational question: Where are you from?

Believe it or not, there were more than a few native white civil rights activists in Mississippi during those old days Mr. Lott is so nostalgic for. Nowhere near a majority, surely; sadly not even a significant vocal minority. The fear of lethal retaliation was too real. It must never be forgotten that people died in the name of those “Dixiecrats” for which Strom Thurmond was the standard bearer and over which Trent Lott waxed so yearningly. For hundreds of blacks—and a number of whites—the “Mississippi way of life” was maiming, mutilation and murder, and it wasn’t just “54 years” ago either. Trent knows this as well as I do, because we most certainly weren’t children when it was still routinely happening! But, still, there were plenty of us who were more ashamed than afraid and we tried to fight Trent and his cowardly majority.

Yet even when our side finally won—at least within the institutions of the Republic, if not in the majority of its hearts and souls—we saw in Northerner’s eyes that the stigma of being “from Mississippi” was still too palpable to attempt an explanation about “good Mississippians.” Some of us actually hid from it. I worked hard to lose my Mississippi accent when I lived in New York City during the 70’s. For those who knew the truth I used the excuse first of being a theatre major, and then a working stage actor, for the affected, stilted dialect I foisted off on the world. I also started saying I was from New Orleans instead of Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Of course, young Trent didn’t hide anything and he was going places fast by toadying to and parroting some of the most notorious segregationists of that blighted era. So well did he booster the grand old cause that in short order one of the champion racists of all times, Congressman William Colmer, mentored the right-thinking young Trent right into the seat he’d been holding onto until just the right young bigot came along.

Soon my anger towards this “friend of the family” became more personal and focused. With great embarrassment for my district and State, I watched our Congressman cry out the actual innocence of Richard Nixon on national TV only moments before he resigned, waved wanly, and then boarded that waiting helicopter for his final ride into infamy, leaving a sputtering, stuttering Trent Lott speaking his empty trash to an empty house. And once again the world saw Mississippians as not only morally degenerate, but every bit as ignorant as the stereotypical slurs said we were.

So, when Congressman Lott was running for re-election in 1974 virtually unopposed, and certain principled people asked if I would manage the campaign of the first woman to ever run for national office from Mississippi—against Trent—I couldn’t say yes fast enough. I didn’t do so because I thought there was any chance of winning. That we, or anyone else, had no chance of defeating a racist incumbent holding that particular seat was so obvious that the Mississippi Democratic Party chose not to waste its time or resources. This did not deter a brave young school teacher, Claudia Mertz, and a few good citizens who believed that at least Lott should be forced to defend his voting record. Perhaps we could even make him spend some Republican campaign money.

While we received a tacit nod from the Mississippi Democratic Party, that was all; basically an acknowledgment that Ms. Mertz was running as a Democrat. No money. No volunteers. No politicos making appearances. So with what funds we could raise amongst a small but dedicated group, I was able to load up my car with Ms. Mertz, the printed campaign material we could afford, and gasoline and start touring Southeast Mississippi. We went to every radio station that would let us in the door. Which wasn’t many, since very few wished to displease their constituency—white folks who knew only that Lott was against colored folks, and all women folk in politics. But we did get into some, and we got into all stations that had predominately black audiences. And we kept doing it, stopping to talk to every gathering of people we could find who would listen to us without pointing shotguns.

Then came a godsend. A generous white man with vision gave us enough money to buy TV time! We shot a couple of clever spots and things got interesting. Too interesting for Trent; he had counted on not having to spend a dime to stay on the public dole uttering his old-time meanness. His strategy? Very Republican—he cornered my father at a cocktail party at my uncle’s house, jabbed his index finger towards his chest and barked: “Frank! You’d best tell that boy of yours to cut this nonsense out—I’m startin’ to get mad, and he’s gonna get himself into a bunch of trouble!”

My wonderful father, long deceased now, a very principled man of grace and conscience stared at that jabbing finger until it withered back to its cowardly place and answered: “Trent, Joe’s a grown man and doesn’t ask for my advice much anymore. But, if he did, I would tell him to keep up the good work.” Trent stammered and my uncle glared at his older, wiser brother.

Claudia Mertz lost the election, but it wasn’t the complete landslide Trent had counted on and he did have to spend Republican dollars. My father wasn’t asked back to his brother’s house as often as before. But he was proud of me; and I was proud of him. Perhaps as important, I started the long process of overcoming my shame at being a Mississippian.

I was also a good deal more angry with Trent Lott. And I have stayed angry with him—futilely so, to be sure—as he climbed higher and higher up the political and public ladder. And every minute, hour, and day of that climb he has never changed the racism and xenophobia that is at the heart of him and his brethren. His constituents know that—both the racists and the good people of Mississippi. That is why he will always be re-elected no matter how much he periodically embarrasses Mississippi; because, to our great shame, there are still more white Mississippians who believe what he believes and he knows that.

Which is why he could eat Jim Crow while also being defiant, even brazen as he did his patented verbal wink-wink shorthand to his arch supporters at his Friday the 13th press conference at the LaFont Inn in Pascagoula, Mississippi. This is the same LaFont Inn where too many years ago I attended my junior and senior proms—all white affairs, of course. Neither Trent nor I ever went to school with black kids; the difference is he thought that was a good idea. He still does, no matter what he says publicly.

This overwhelming sense of sadness, this darkness that hangs on me like a shroud, even here in China, is because no matter the down-home political consequences of Trent Lott's loss of his Majority Leadership position, many Mississippians are again faced with the choice of being ashamed or lying when asked: Where are you from?

You see, even my Chinese students and colleagues give me “that look” when I tell them where I am from in America. They know what Mississippi is most famous for—and to our great shame it is not William Faulkner, Leontyne Price, Tennessee Williams, or Mississippi John Hurt.
 

1:07 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




More Than You Need To Know About Sweaters And Politicians

Miss Dowd had a slow news day, or else she's still warming up from her holiday hiatus: Sweaters?
On Thursday, eight reporters and three minicams trailed the general as he sweater-shopped at L. L. Bean in Concord, N.H. Chris Suellentrop filed a fashion dispatch in Slate that the Democratic candidate tried on "a plain, green, wool crew neck sweater."

On Thursday, eight reporters and three minicams trailed the general as he sweater-shopped at L. L. Bean in Concord, N.H. Chris Suellentrop filed a fashion dispatch in Slate that the Democratic candidate tried on "a plain, green, wool crew neck sweater."

Maybe the former supreme allied commander should stop fretting over his style and do more with Colin Powell's belated admission that despite his assertions to the U.N. last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. General Clark has long been skeptical of that link.
In The New York Times...
  

12:52 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




War of Ideas, Part 2

Here is Thomas Friedman's 2nd installment in a part series explaining and analyzing the "War on Terrorism" from the perspective that it is indeed a "clash of civilizations," a World War II. As I did with the first, I am going to present it here in full. It is that important, and I want a record of it in these pages.
While visiting Istanbul the other day, I took a long walk along the Bosporus near Topkapi Palace. There is nothing like standing at this stunning intersection of Europe and Asia to think about the clash of civilizations — and how we might avoid it. Make no mistake: we are living at a remarkable hinge of history and it's not clear how it's going to swing.

What is clear is that Osama bin Laden achieved his aim: 9/11 sparked real tensions between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East. Preachers on both sides now openly denounce each other's faith. Whether these tensions explode into a real clash of civilizations will depend a great deal on whether we build bridges or dig ditches between the West and Islam in three key places — Turkey, Iraq and Israel-Palestine.

Let's start with Turkey — the only Muslim, free-market democracy in Europe. I happened to be in Istanbul when the street outside one of the two synagogues that were suicide-bombed on Nov. 15 was reopened. Three things struck me: First, the chief rabbi of Turkey appeared at the ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of Istanbul and the local mayor, while crowds in the street threw red carnations on them. Second, the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamist party, paid a visit to the chief rabbi — the first time a Turkish prime minister had ever called on the chief rabbi. Third, and most revealing, was the statement made by the father of one of the Turkish suicide bombers who hit the synagogues.

"We are a respectful family who love our nation, flag and the Koran," the grieving father, Sefik Elaltuntas, told the Zaman newspaper. "But we cannot understand why this child had done the thing he had done . . . First, let us meet with the chief rabbi of our Jewish brothers. Let me hug him. Let me kiss his hands and flowing robe. Let me apologize in the name of my son and offer my condolences for the deaths. . . . We will be damned if we do not reconcile with them."

The same newspaper also carried a quote from Cemil Cicek, the Turkish government spokesman, who said: "The Islamic world should take stringent measures against terrorism without any `buts' or `howevers.' "

There is a message here: Context matters. Turkish politicians are not intimidated by religious fundamentalists, because — unlike too many Arab politicians — they have their own legitimacy that comes from being democratically elected. At the same time, the Turkish parents of suicide bombers don't all celebrate their children's suicide. They are not afraid to denounce this barbarism, because they live in a free society where such things are considered shameful and alien to the moderate Turkish brand of Islam — which has always embraced religious pluralism and which most Turks feel is the "real" Islam.

For all these reasons, if we want to help moderates win the war of ideas within the Muslim world, we must help strengthen Turkey as a model of democracy, modernism, moderation and Islam all working together. Nothing would do that more than having Turkey be made a member of the European Union — which the E.U. will basically decide this year. Turkey has undertaken a huge number of reforms to get itself ready for E.U. membership. If, after all it has done, the E.U. shuts the door on Turkey, extremists all over the Muslim world will say to the moderates: "See, we told you so — it's a Christian club and we're never going to be let in. So why bother adapting to their rules?"

I think Turkey's membership in the E.U. is so important that the U.S. should consider subsidizing the E.U. to make it easier for Turkey to be admitted. If that fails, we should offer to bring Turkey into Nafta, even though it would be very complicated.

"If the E.U. creates some pretext and says `no' to Turkey, after we have done all this, I am sure the E.U. will lose and the world will lose," Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, told me in Ankara. "If Turkey is admitted, the E.U. is going to win and world peace is going to win. This would be a gift to the Muslim world. . . . When I travel to other Muslim countries — Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia — they are proud of what we are doing. They are proud of our process [of political and economic reform to join the E.U.]. They mention this to me. They ask, `How is this going?' "

Yes, everyone is watching, which is why the E.U. would be making a huge mistake — a hinge of history mistake — if it digs a ditch around Turkey instead of building a bridge.
The New York Times

 

12:23 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, January 11, 2004

O'Neill Tells All?

Is any one surprised by this? If so, why? I am not asking the question in the spirit one might think: That Bush is a congenital liar and he took us to war on fabricated and exaggerated claims of Iraq's danger to the United States. That might very well be true; it is not, however, why I wonder if anyone who is knowlegeable about contemporary history and world events is really surprised at the allegations made by Paul O'Neill. Of course, there was a desire to bring down Saddam Hussein and that various military plans were made towards that end. If there weren't, some folks at the Pentagon and within the Joint Chiefs and the War College, etc, should be looking for other employment. We, and the U.N., were still technically in a "suspended" state of war with Iraq; and there are probably contingency plans to invade Greece or Norway tucked away somewhere. That's what military strategists do when there isn't actually a shooting war somewhere and are therefore otherwise occupied with "live" planning.

What is surprising, what is in fact sadly amazing to me is why Bush & Twigs didn't tell the public and the world the truth, namely: Saddam Hussein should have been unconditionally defeated the first time around, Shrub the First made a sinister, wrong-headed blunder, and let's go back and finish the job but with a proper--non bullying--diplomatic strategy which would have brought more allies into the fight. In other words, why did Dubya & Company not trust the people of America to do the right thing? Why did they believe they had to fabricate--or at least, greatly exaggerate--an "imminent" danger type of rhetoric? The only answer is relatively simple: People like Bush and those he keeps around him do not actually trust the American public's ability to think. Shame on them.
CRAWFORD, Texas -- The Bush administration was determined to oust Saddam Hussein long before the Sept. 11 attacks, former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill told CBS News in an interview to be aired tonight.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said in the interview with "60 Minutes."

The interview is being broadcast amid publicity for a new book by journalist Ron Suskind called "The Price of Loyalty," for which O'Neill was a primary source. The book is published by Simon & Schuster, which is owned by Viacom, the parent company of CBS News.

The book quotes O'Neill as saying he was surprised that at one meeting of President Bush's top advisors, no one questioned why Iraq should be invaded.

"It was all about finding a way to do it," the book quotes O'Neill as saying. "That was the tone of it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.' "

In the CBS interview, O'Neill also faults the Bush administration's declared policy of preemptively attacking other nations before they can attack the United States. "For me, the notion of preemption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," he said.

O'Neill headed the Treasury Department from January 2001 to December 2002, when he was forced out as a result of policy disputes. An administration official dismissed his allegations Saturday, saying, "No one listened to his wacky ideas when he was in office. Why should we start now?"

Critics have accused the administration of using the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse for invading Iraq and of implying that there was a link between Hussein and the attacks, which has never been proved.

In his book about the Bush administration, "Bush At War," author Bob Woodward said top officials raised the issue of targeting Hussein as soon as four days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

O'Neill's assertion dates to the early days of the administration, long before Sept. 11. But it is unclear from the remarks attributed to O'Neill in Suskind's book whether the administration was actively preparing to oust Hussein or was just making contingency plans.

On Saturday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began planning for a war with Iraq early in Bush's term.

"The fact of the matter is that the international community viewed Saddam Hussein as a threat before Sept. 11 and that threat became even more of a threat after Sept. 11," McClellan said from Texas, where Bush is spending the weekend.

"It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," McClellan said.

Like the Clinton administration before it, the Bush White House was on record with warnings aimed at the Iraqi leader well before Sept. 11. Earlier in 2001, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice warned after an Iraqi missile attack that "Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration."

After the attacks, senior administration officials, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that it had become imperative to prevent "rogue nations" such as Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction and transferring them to terrorists.

O'Neill, a former chief executive of aluminum giant Alcoa whose comments on various economic issues had caused problems for the administration, was asked to resign in a shake-up of Bush's economic team after he opposed a plan to reduce taxes on corporate dividends.
Los Angeles Times
  

11:30 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Stand Up Guy

Conrad, of The Gweilo Diaries, is a stand-up guy with the kind of character that is in short supply these days; he also has a sense of humor. Frankly, we will probably never agree much on American domestic policies or politics--in the matters of foreign policy we will find more on which to agree. The primary problem I have with the War in Iraq is that we should have finished the job in Gulf War One

I don't want to get maudlin, or overly sentimental here, but I do want to thank Conrad for taking my somewhat barbed practical joke with such magnanimity. I also need to thank him for a rather incredible leap in readership over the past 36 hours. Needless to say, The Gweilo Diaries is one of the really big-time blogs, and mine is very new, and quite small in regular visitors. While my name is perhaps well known in some publishing and journalism circles--particularly in the criminal justice field--I am a complete newbie in the world of blogging. I am grateful that so many people have dropped in for a look because of the link back from Conrad's good natured "Ouch" post. I am not so delusional as to believe that most or perhaps even many of you will return. But I do want to thank you for visiting.

Since I did not expect this jump in visitors, as luck would have it, a fellow blogger from Living in China was in Beijing today and we had a visit to the Summer Palace already scheduled. Phil, of Disorientated distinction, my wife and a couple of others friends had a really nice outing, made even more interesting by a snow fall that added a distinct other-worldy effect to one of China's best landmark sites. However, it meant that I was gone for almost all of the day and was not here to greet you with new posts. I will attempt to catch up with the time left in this night.

Again, thank you for dropping in. If you found anything you liked, please return. If you didn't, I am sorry and thank you for visiting this time.
  

8:28 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Sucking Up Panda Bears

Dean sucking up a Panda Bear? What a great image. It speaks plenty, and Mr. Colbert I. King, in his column in today's Washington Post, writes plenty about it. It sums up what I, and I am sure, others like me, think these days of the man we used to call Doctor Dean, or Governor Dean, but now the moniker "Reverend Dean" best suits this man who wants to be president so much he'll sell his soul--not to the devil as have politicians and miscreant other notables throughout history, but to god, and that's whatever god is worshipped in whatever town or county or state he's stumping in at the moment. A pox on you and all of your new-found gods, you New England hypocrite. Or, in the words of Mr. Colbert...
Howard Dean took a pass on yesterday's Democratic presidential candidates debate, hosted by WTOP radio and George Washington University. Too bad. He missed a chance to show Democrats in the nation's capital that he cared enough to come to their first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Most of all, though, Dean lost out on a chance to be publicly declared the victor in a contest that he won even before the first Democratic votes are cast Tuesday in the District or later in the month in Iowa and New Hampshire.

It would have been my pleasure, had he chosen to be there, to personally give the former Vermont governor this year's prize for "Panda Bear of the Year."

A panda bear is my own humble way of recognizing the politician who is most shameless when it comes to pandering or ingratiating himself or herself with the voters. Dean is this year's winner, hands down. The second-place finisher wasn't even close.

Dean captured the suck-up prize with his revelation that -- praise the Lord -- he has finally found a way to talk about his deeply held religious faith. Most remarkable, and the reason he won going away, was his explanation for how he reached this exquisite moment of sudden understanding. Was it a particular scene, some road-to-Damascus experience, that occasioned such a flash of insight in Dean? What, pray tell, set off Dean's new compulsion to openly discuss Jesus and his mastery of the Bible?

Dean disclosed that his willingness -- no, make that eagerness -- to start sharing his faith with any reporter, microphone or voter within the sound of his voice comes as a result of his travels on the campaign trail. Yes, credit Dean's journey -- not to Damascus but on the road to the White House, which happens to take him down to the Bible Belt in South Carolina -- for bringing about the Democratic front-runner's epiphany. Dean discovered, to use his words, that way down south in Dixie, "The people there are pretty openly religious."
Washington Post
  

1:07 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Kristof Speaks on Korea

The elephant in the living room is the subject today of my favorite columnist, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. He doesn't use that phrase in his writing, but I do, often. I have used it here in these pages, as many of you may remember. I use it often in my lectures on "Media & Foreign Policy" here at the China Foreign Affairs University. And I have used it on CCTV International's program DIALOGUE, broadcast worldwide here from Beijing. What does it mean, this "Elephant in the living room" phrase? It is simple, when an elephant enters a living room, where does he sit? Any damn place he wants to. Which is exactly what happens when a nation, any nation, large or small, rich or poor, acquires nuclear weapons. It becomes war-proof, or in the words of that old Cold War concept, mutually assured destruction; you don't go to war with a fellow member of the nuclear "club" unless you have a desire to destroy civilization, yours and theirs. You can only negotiate with a nation that has a nuclear arsenal and hope that there are "no madmen on their side or on your side."

Well, through the blunders of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, North Korea is almost certainly a member of the club--and that is flat-out scary. Which is what Mr. Kristof writes about in his column today. If you care at all about the future of this spinning rock we all live on, you should read it. toward that end, I will present it here in full.
The place we should really lose sleep over is North Korea, not Iraq. That's because President Bush is in effect acquiescing as North Korea builds up its nuclear arsenal.

An administration that was panicked about Iraq's virtually nonexistent nuclear programs is blasé as North Korea reprocesses plutonium, enriches uranium and gets set to produce up to 200 atomic weapons by 2010. North Korea balances its budget by counterfeiting American $100 bills, so counting on its scruples not to sell a nuclear warhead to terrorists seems a dangerous bet.

Granted, all the North Korea options are awful. President Bill Clinton's approach was to bargain with North Korea, and that achieved a freeze on plutonium programs — but the North Koreans cheated by starting a separate, much smaller uranium program. President Bush has refused to negotiate directly with the North Koreans, and the result is that Kim Jong Il is now pursuing both the plutonium and uranium approaches and could eventually produce several dozen warheads a year.

The upshot is that we've slipped from a troublesome situation to an appalling one. Now the administration is stalling for time, hoping that North Korea will collapse before its arms can proliferate. This looks like Iraq-style wishful thinking.

In the summer of 2002, insiders say, the U.S. had a defector report that Mr. Kim might soon be ousted. Experts on Korea were deeply skeptical about that unconfirmed report, but it matched what hard-liners wanted to believe, so they passed it all the way up to President Bush himself. That defector's report, later discredited, helped harden the administration's give-no-inch approach — leading Mr. Kim to begin reprocessing plutonium last year.

On a visit to China last month, I interviewed North Korean refugees hiding in Manchuria. These are ordinary workers and farmers, not top officials, but they offer a window into the mood in the most isolated country in the world — and those interviews left me feeling that the administration is wrong to believe that Mr. Kim will be ousted soon. A coup may be possible any day, but in such a tightly controlled society there's no hint of a popular uprising brewing from the ground up.

"People still believe in [the late `Great Leader'] Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il; they still worship them," said Ms. Jung, a 26-year-old woman who dislikes her country's government. "I think Kim Jong Il will still be in power 10 years from now."

Another woman, Ms. Kim, said simply, "There's no thought of an uprising or a riot in North Korea."

A 62-year-old man, Mr. Ho, put it this way: "Most Koreans are against America, and [Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il] are against the Americans. So even though they are hungry, the people say the Kims will fight against America, and we are with them."

The refugees mostly said that they had respected Kim Jong Il until they reached China, realized that the world is not as they had been taught, and turned against him. And Mr. Kim's survival prospects may be enhanced by a slow rebound in the North Korean economy. Rick Corsino, an American who just ended a three-year term as director of the U.N. World Food Program in North Korea, traveled the country and saw it as no other American has. He says living conditions have improved a bit in the countryside and greatly in the capital, Pyongyang.

"Pyongyang has certainly shown signs of burgeoning prosperity," Mr. Corsino said. "There are more vehicles on the road, and people are dressing more colorfully than in the past. There's more electricity, more shops and restaurants opening."

Conditions are still wretched, he said, noting that last month his staff was at work at a local office where the inside temperature was 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, he said he had never seen any evidence that Mr. Kim's government was wobbling:

"The general conclusion of all of us who've been there and worked there and traveled all over the country is that I don't think any of us have seen any evidence of what you're talking about, a collapse coming."

If only it were different. But hope is a dangerous substitute for policy, and it's time to negotiate with North Korea directly instead of trying to wish its nuclear programs away. Mr. Bush's reluctance to reward bad behavior by the North Koreans is legitimate, but are we really better off sitting paralyzed by the sidelines as North Korea turns out nuclear warheads like hotcakes?
The New York Times
  

12:27 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, January 10, 2004

A Fitting Tribute To A Great American

For Conrad, truly a man for his times, in reward for his faithful service in representing the
Red, White and Blue American Way in distant lands, for ensuring that the one great American Civic Organization which best exemplifies the values we hold so dear will forever be a beacon of light so far from home:
The Hong Kong John Birch Society

The LongBow Papers Presents An Original Multi-Media Composition By The Inestimable Mark Spittle, Of Spittle & Ink And The Award Winning Web Site Liberal Oasis
Click here Big Guy, This Is For You.
  

4:51 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




P.O.W. Sounds Humiliating Enough

He is a mega-mass murderer and sadistic despot, but this is the right call for history and international law. To do anything else would set a bad precedent.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pentagon lawyers have determined that Saddam Hussein has been a prisoner of war since American forces captured him on Dec. 13, a Defense Department spokesman said Friday.

A senior British official said Friday Saddam had not given useful information to his interrogators. The senior official, who briefed journalists on condition of anonymity, said U.S. authorities were taking their time questioning Saddam in the hope that he might eventually open up.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Saddam and all Iraqi captives are being treated in compliance with the Geneva Conventions. He said Saddam's legal status was being reviewed by several U.S. agencies and no determination had been made.

The general counsel office in the Pentagon -- the Defense Department's top civilian lawyers -- has determined that Saddam is a prisoner of war because of his status as former commander in chief of Iraq's military, spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers said Friday. The lawyers determined that no formal declaration of Saddam's status was needed, he said.

U.S. officials have said they plan to turn Saddam over to an Iraqi court for trial. The United States says Saddam's government killed at least 300,000 Iraqis, including thousands of Iraqi Kurds in a poison gas attack in 1988.
In The New York Times...
  

4:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Nooooooooooooooo! Anything But This!

Someone somewhere must know how to reach this egotistical maniac! Hasn't he done enough for his "legacy"? There must be something this man wants more than to "throw" another election? He will completely destroy his name for posterity if he persists and causes this nation to get four more years of Dubya by default!
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 — He is sounding like a presidential candidate again, charging the Bush administration with "messianic militarism and subservient corporatism," and the Democrats with soft-pedaling liberal policies that were once mainstays of their party.

Three years after the election in which Democrats say he cost Al Gore the White House, Ralph Nader is considering another campaign, and says he will decide shortly.

At this point, Mr. Nader said in an interview this week, a run depends only on his ability to collect enough money and volunteers to mount a credible effort. Otherwise, he said, he has a zillion reasons to go ahead — including, he insists, that doing so would be good for the Democrats.

"But you've got to have money, and you've got to have volunteers," he said, though declining to specify the levels he would need of each. "The verdict is still out, but I'll decide by the end of the month."

Four years ago, he said he was running for president because he believed that the major-party nominees, Mr. Gore and George W. Bush, were virtually indistinguishable and that the parties were too cozy with corporate America. Now Mr. Nader, 69, says he has seen enough of Mr. Bush's administration to make defeating him and ending Republican control of Congress the chief goals. And those goals are more achievable, he says, if he joins the race.

That may be a hard sell to many Democrats, given the effect he had on the 2000 election as the Green Party's nominee. He finished with nearly 3 percent of the national electorate and won enough votes in Florida — more than 97,000 — to deny Mr. Gore the state, even in Mr. Nader's calculation that he won half as many votes from Republicans as from Democrats. After recounts, Mr. Bush won Florida by only 537 votes, and with it the presidency.
In The New York Times...
  

4:15 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Bad Call, Mr. Harkin

"Reverend Wind-Shift" Dean wants to be president too much to ever be a good candidate, much less an effective world leader. Senator Tom Harkin, a very good man and politician made a bad call for his party and perhaps the nation by endorsing Dean, whose views shift more quixotically than the weather in the Gulf South states where he will take a big-time spanking if he is the Democratic nominee. I have some experience with that statement, that's where I hail from. However, the south will not be Dean's only obstacle course. But, it is still a horse race and General Clark is still picking up speed and stride.
DES MOINES, Jan. 9 -- Howard Dean won a prized endorsement on Friday for the fast-approaching Iowa caucuses as Senator Tom Harkin, the state's most influential Democratic lawmaker called Dr. Dean "our best shot" to oust President Bush.

The backing could not have come at a better moment for Dr. Dean, who spent much of the day scrambling to recover from a four-year-old videotape that was played Thursday night on NBC News showing him disparaging the caucus process as dominated by special interests.

Mr. Harkin, whose support had been avidly sought by a number of the Democratic candidates told hundreds of cheering Dean supporters at a midafternoon rally "As we Iowans say, Howard Dean has his head screwed on right."

With polls showing Dr. Dean at the head of the pack in Iowa before the Jan. 19 vote, his rivals seized on the comments belittling the caucuses in an effort to cut into his support in a state where the voters and political establishment are famously protective of their first-in-the-nation event.

Throughout Friday, Dr. Dean said he had undergone a conversion based on his personal experiences campaigning in Iowa.

"I really didn't have much of a vision of what the Iowa caucuses were all about," Dr. Dean said, while campaigning in New Hampshire. "After two years in Iowa, 99 counties, I do have a vision, and I wouldn't say the same thing today."
In The New York Times...
  

4:08 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




My Way News

Here is an important story from a news service that deserves more attention, MyWay.com. Even in this Internet age, with blogging putting forth millions of individual perspectives on THE NEWS, still so many important stories go under-reported. I am not talking about the "Good Iraq War News versus Bad Iraq War News" controversy raging on right-wing pundits' keyboards, but rather--just for instance--the several thousand children who die every in Africa from malaria, a completely treatable, and mostly preventable, disease, not to mention all of the other diseases and maladies wrenching life and flesh and souls on the "Dark Continent."

Why? The truth is that white folks, yellow folks and tan folks don't really care what happens to black folks--or red folks, for that matter. Not enough high-ticket resources to manipulate, and not a viable enough market to sell things to. Am I a bleeding-heart leftist that should be ignored and scorned? Yes, and no, no. But I will be. And those children--and their parents--will keep dying from diseases that the developed world long ago learned how to treat while it panics over another one or two suspected SARS cases.
NEW YORK (AP) - A medical aid group said Friday that the American news media last year provided too little coverage of some world trouble spots, including the conflicts in Colombia, Chechnya and Congo.

In its annual list of "underreported humanitarian stories," Medecins Sans Frontieres also cited a lack of media attention to the high death toll worldwide from malaria, the crises in North Korea and Somalia and the limited access of poor people to anti-AIDS medicines.

"It's clearly a valid criticism when applied most broadly to the American media, but some of those conflicts such as the Congo and Colombia, we (The Washington Post) cover quite aggressively," The Washington Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news, Philip Bennett, told The Associated Press.
Give this story a good read at My Way News
  

4:04 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Mightily We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit

And so the dying continues...
NUAYMIYA, Iraq, Jan. 8 — An American Black Hawk helicopter crashed Thursday in this tiny village near the restive town of Falluja, killing all nine soldiers aboard. Less than a week ago, another American helicopter was shot down in the area.

The United States military said the cause of the crash was still under investigation, but witnesses near the mangled wreckage said the helicopter had been downed by a missile.

The crash was the most deadly incident in a 24-hour span that clearly illustrated the continuing risk to American soldiers and other foreigners in occupied Iraq. One soldier died Thursday of wounds sustained in a mortar attack on Wednesday evening that wounded 30 other soldiers and a civilian at Logistical Base Seitz, west of Baghdad.

A spokesman for the Air Mobility Command, which oversees military transport, said a C-5 transport plane with 63 people on board was struck Thursday by ground fire but returned safely to Baghdad airport.

Six months from now, the American-led occupation authority plans to hand political power to a transitional Iraqi government, but the shape of that administration remains unclear and its ability to guarantee the safety of more than 100,000 American and other troops highly uncertain.
The New York Times
  

3:53 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, January 09, 2004

Jeeze, Hans Blix Came to This Conclusion And He Wasn't Sending U.S. Tax Payers The Bill

Criminy, what an expensive wild goose chase this has been; we got this much from Hans Blix and the U.S. Taxpayers weren't footing the bill. Oh, what the hell, both Bush and Dean have promised to balance the budget in their second terms. You know, the budget that took more than a generation to get out of the red but is now so deeply red we will surely turn heavy-duty blue and purple before we ever see it in the black again? Yeah, that one. Way to go, guys. You know the litany by heart: "Good enough for government work!"
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.

A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or that it had advanced programs to build new ones.
For the rest of this rerun, it's in The New York Times...
  

11:35 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Give Truth A Chance.

No connection to Al Qaeda? No WMDs? Why not speak the truth: We invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a sadistic tyrant and mega mass killer who we should have finished off in Gulf War I except that Poppy Bush preferred a monster in Baghdad rather than have a vacuum in the region. Now that I believe the American public would have bought just as easily as they did the canards--and perhaps a number of other allies would have come along if they'd been asked nicely instead of bullied. And if they didn't, none the worse than now except that we wouldn't be facing the charge of being a nation of liars along with the usual anti-American verbiage that we are always going to receive from certain quarters no matter what we do.

In other words, why not give TRUTH a chance? I know it is a novelty in politics and foreign affairs, but sometimes it works even better than snake-oil, plus your conscience is clean and you don't have to work hard coming up with further lies to cover for the first ones. Saddam needed to be taken down--who doubts that but the nut-cakes and hardcore peace-nuts who will always be around no matter what?

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no 'smoking gun' proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted — and something administration officials have done little to discourage.
There is a whole lot more of this story to read, but it is becoming redundant and increasingly numbing to digest all of the unnecessary mendacity. It's in The New York Times...
  

6:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Welcome Back, Ms. Dowd

She's back. The lady that makes right-wing pundits either quake in fear or choke on their indignation that a lady, a lady mind you, can so effortlessly best them at their own game. We will give only a dose of her litany of one-liners goring almost all of their sacred pheasants..er, quail...I mean, mad cows, of course.
Karl Rove has the '04 effort well in hand, despite the distraction of Nosy Parkers from Justice trying to out the official who outed an undercover C.I.A. officer.

The president and vice president have raised $130.8 million, and are showing a brutal willingness to do whatever it takes to secure key bases. The president courted Hispanics by saying he would try to extend more legal rights to illegal immigrants by offering a new temporary worker status. He courted the religious right by saying he would not try to extend more legal rights to gays by offering a new marital status.

Mr. Bush has decided to offer legitimacy only to those dispossessed groups in American society who may be politically useful to him.

The president said making illegal immigrants legal would "honor our values," while conservatives went on TV to howl that Mr. Bush was rewarding criminal behavior. The president probably figures that the Republican-led Congress will never pass it anyway, so he can get the credit in states like Florida without having to deal with the results.

Mr. Rove presumably thinks that he could actually corral California by going soft on illegal immigrants, even though Arnold Schwarzenegger won there after getting tough on illegal immigrants on the hot-button issue of whether they could have driver's licenses.
Read the rest of her riffs in The New York Times
  

3:54 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Yes, Mr. Friedman, It Is World War III

Don't you love it when something you have gone out on a metaphoric limb to foretell is proven true? Perhaps my assertion for months that we are in a world war--World War III if you're counting--not some piddling sloganeer's cliche otherwise known as "the War on Terrorism," being confirmed in the opinion of columnist Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times doesn't count as proof in your book. That's fine because it's your book and you are probably hopelessly lost meandering around in Chapter One and don't have the time nor the inclination to read the best mind currently trying to put this godawful mess we're in into a perspective that might help us get out of the damned thing!

I must tell you that there isn't a great deal of optimism that we're even close to such a wondrous occurrence because of who and what we are fighting this time around the block. Whipping a regime and its military is a walk in the park compared to fighting a real but terribly anachronistic Chimera that is not defined by borders, a government, a national flag, or any of the other accoutrements of a conventional opponent, even the most evil of ones. This is a world war against a monstrous combination of idiotic but zealously believed ideas and a raging, irrational hatred of...well, us, by...well, them, a them who do not care if they live or die as long as we do more and more of the former and less and less of the latter even as we remain technically alive but imprisoned by our fear that they can accomplish the former at any odd time or place of their choosing. Thank goodness Mr. Friedman isn't as fatalistic as I am, he still has hope that we haven't completely squandered the moral capital to make hay within the globally scattered camps of those who are only too happy to blow them and us into tiny body parts for the sole cause of denying the world the most essential ingredient that makes everything work out for the better in time, progress.
Airline flights into the U.S. are canceled from France, Mexico and London. Armed guards are put onto other flights coming to America. Westerners are warned to avoid Saudi Arabia, and synagogues are bombed in Turkey and France. A package left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art forces the evacuation of 5,000 museumgoers. (It turns out to contain a stuffed snowman.) National Guardsmen are posted at key bridges and tunnels.

Happy New Year.

What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III ? the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years. As the longtime Middle East analyst Abdullah Schleiffer once put it to me: World War II was the Nazis, using the engine of Germany to try to impose the reign of the perfect race, the Aryan race. The cold war was the Marxists, using the engine of the Soviet Union to try to impose the reign of the perfect class, the working class. And 9/11 was about religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing to try to impose the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam.

O.K., you say, but how can one possibly compare the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nukes, with Al Qaeda? Here's how: As dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us. Despite our differences, we agreed on certain bedrock rules of civilization.

With the Islamist militant groups, we face people who hate us more than they love life. When you have large numbers of people ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making themselves into human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily life ? an airplane, a car, a garage door opener, a cellphone, fertilizer, a tennis shoe ? you create a weapon that is undeterrable, undetectable and inexhaustible. This poses a much more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army because these human bombs attack the most essential element of an open society: trust.

Trust is built into every aspect, every building and every interaction in our increasingly hyperconnected world. We trust that when we board a plane, the person next to us isn't going to blow up his shoes. Without trust, there's no open society because there aren't enough police to guard every opening in an open society.

Which is why suicidal Islamist militants have the potential to erode our lifestyle. Because the only way to deter a suicidal enemy ready to use the instruments of daily life to kill us is by gradually taking away trust. We start by stripping airline passengers, then we go to fingerprinting all visitors, and we will end up removing cherished civil liberties.

So what to do? There are only three things we can do: (1) Improve our intelligence to deter and capture terrorists before they act. (2) Learn to live with more risk, while maintaining our open society. (3) Most important, find ways to get the societies where these Islamists come from to deter them first. Only they really know their own, and only they can really restrain their extremists.

As my friend Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, teaches ethics to global corporations, put it: The cold war ended the way it did because at some bedrock level we and the Soviets "agreed on what is shameful." And shame, more than any laws or police, is how a village, a society or a culture expresses approval and disapproval and applies restraints.

But today, alas, there is no bedrock agreement on what is shameful, what is outside the boundary of a civilized world. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Islamist terrorists are neither a state subject to conventional deterrence or international rules, nor individuals deterred by the fear of death. And their home societies, in too many cases, have not stigmatized their acts as "shameful." In too many cases, their spiritual leaders have provided them with religious cover, and their local charities have provided them with money. That is why suicide bombing is spreading.

We cannot change other societies and cultures on our own. But we also can't just do nothing in the face of this mounting threat. What we can do is partner with the forces of moderation within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas. Because ultimately this is a struggle within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just as we did in World Wars I and II.

This column is the first in a five-part series on how we can do that.
The New York Times
  

2:39 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, January 08, 2004

2nd Case of SARS in Guangzhou: Do Not Panic

It is imperative that you don't panic with the SARS news. If you were in China last year, you know that the fear of SARS is more dangerous to society than SARS.
GUANGZHOU, Jan. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- Another suspected case of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in China's mainland was reported Thursday in Guangzhou, capital of southern China's Guangdong province.

The 20-year-old waitress was found as the suspected SARS case by the province's joint SARS medical team according to the SARS diagnosis program defined by the Ministry of Health.

She was now under quarantine and receiving treatment in the Guangzhou No. 8 People's Hospital, said local health authorities, adding that the temperature of the suspected SARS patient has remained normal for seven consecutive days and authorities have stepped up protective measures for the medical staff.

The woman whose surname has not been released reported having a fever on Dec. 26, 2003 and went to the doctors at the Yuexiu District Bone Setting Hospital on Dec. 31 and was transferred to Yuexiu No. 1 People's Hospital after blood testing and X-ray scanning.

Medical experts on SARS in the province had begun disinfection of the patient's living environment and 48 people who had close contact with the waitress have been quarantined and found no symptoms of fever so far, they said.

Meanwhile, another 52 people who had contact with the suspected SARS case were also under close medical observation, they said.
Xinhuanet.Com
 

5:34 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




With "Gawd" On Their Side, How Can Any Of Them Lose?

You'd think God was running for president these days, what with the way the "G" word is being tossed around like carnival beads at Mardi Gras. With just about the same sincerity as chunking beads to the sound of "throw me something, mister," too. Apparently, Dubya actually is a believer, if that is true, it is commendable--ignorant as a cypress stump, he believes the "verdict is still out on evolution"--and at least he's not lying about that as he has about some other weighty subjects, such as why we invaded Iraq. That can not be said with any degree of certainty about the folks running for his job, or Cheney the Great.

I am usually all by my lonesome when I go to slamming religion, which as you know is almost daily. Ah ha! But not today. Today, I am cocky and feisty and ready for a fight with all of the Christian do-badders. Why? Because all they have on their side is God. I've got Nicholas Kristof on my side. And that's a winning hand any day of the week and twice on Sunday--for the Southern Baptist crowd. Mr. Kristof's column in today's The New York Times is a full-house with Aces and Kings.
Religion may preach peace and tolerance, yet it's hard to think of anything that — because of human malpractice — has been more linked to violence and malice around the world. And now as we enter a new campaign year, it's time to brace ourselves for a new round of religious warfare and hypocrisy at home.

America is riven today by a "God gulf" of distrust, dividing churchgoing Republicans from relatively secular Democrats. A new Great Awakening is sweeping the country, with Americans increasingly telling pollsters that they believe in prayer and miracles, while only 28 percent say they believe in evolution. All this is good news for Bush Republicans, who are in tune with heartland religious values, and bad news for Dean Democrats who don't know John from Job.

So expect Republicans to wage religious warfare by trotting out God as the new elephant in the race, and some Democrats to respond with hypocrisy, by affecting deep religious convictions. This campaign could end up as a tug of war over Jesus.
For the rest of a brilliant essay, please go clickity-click, it's in The New York Times...
  

3:43 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, January 07, 2004

The Greatness of China, A Rebuttal

Help. Please. I am having an identity crisis. Let me explain. Oddly enough, there are three Joseph Boscos that come up fairly quickly on a Google search on the name "Joseph Bosco" and they all three have a connection to China. Now, on the first page, four of the first five are me. Then there are three Joseph Boscos out of the next five: He is a world-class anthropologist and professor at the University of Hong Kong; he has written at least one truly important and beautiful book, Temples of the Empress of Heaven. He is a gifted scholar, professor, writer and editor on Chinese anthropology; all persons who should know, agree that he is a also a wonderful human being and citizen with whom I am proud to share a name.

It is on the second page of the Google search where my problem begins, the 6th item on the search page results. There you will find a real scalawag of a fellow. He is an Ad Hoc (part time) Lecturer at the Georgetown University's Department of Asian Studies Program. This guy has a checkered career as a small-time lawyer and Republican Party functionary in Massachusetts. Then, suddenly, during the 1996 Taiwan Straits "Missile Crisis" he was re-birthed--for reasons that are yet unexplained--into a Taiwan "expert" and one of the most hawkish voices in America for the "liberation" of Taiwan from "Communist China." In the past 7 years, he has missed no opportunity to speak or write about the evils of the People's Republic of China and their subjugation of Taiwan. He is rabid in his hatred of the CPC, going so far as to appear at seminars world-wide in support of the Falun Gong cult. Fortunately, he does not get these opportunities frequently, and his views are not published all that often--anymore. However, he does pop up from time to time. Most notably a little more than a year ago when an Op-ed piece denouncing China was carried by several major American dailies, including the Los Angeles Times, which for the past decade had become my home town newspaper. You can imagine--or maybe you can't--my consternation when my phone started ringing--in China!--and friends of mine calling from the states wanted to know if I had suddenly had a brain transplant and had turned into a reactionary right-wing hawk! Well, that was enough of that, and I proceeded to publish a lengthy rebuttal of all of his major points. Since then, nothing he has written has surfaced anywhere that is searchable via the Internet. He did recently appear on a panel in France where he was lamenting the Chinese "repression" of the Falun Gong cult.

So, why am I bringing this up now? Because his articles--all written before my rebuttal piece below--are still on the net and Chinese students--or members of the regular populace who see me on CCTV--who are curious about me go to Google and they find his old articles and become confused. I have had a couple of quite dicey moments when students have walked into class with a printout of an article this jerk wrote with some hard questions to ask of me. Namely, along the order of: "What kind of schizoid are you?" It happened recently. What really concerns me are the times I do not know about! Times when I do not have an opportunity to explain the situation. How many Chinese people are there that believe I am the worst kind of hypocrite. I speak one way in their country, but write otherwise back in America, Perhaps even some of you have observed this apparent duality.

Consequently, I am going to republish my rebuttal of a year ago:

The Greatness of China Lies In China, A Rebuttal

(Xiamen, P.R. China) Old Cold War tin-soldiers just can’t seem to holster their pop-gun mouths even when the rest of the world long ago moved on to more realistic concerns than whose ballistic missile is or was the biggest and aimed the better. Is this because they are afraid of becoming as irrelevant as their former adversaries—the vast majority of the over-65 Communist Party functionaries of the world?

Thanks to the Internet, and the relative lack of news censorship in the People’s Republic of China, I have read several strangely anachronistic, Cold War-rhetoric assessments of today’s China in the Op-ed pages of major American Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Washington Post by a gentleman with whom I unfortunately share a first and last name. Since I am here, in mainland China, and he is not—and to my knowledge never has been—perhaps my investigative journalist-trained view will be at least of equal value as his. [I am a visiting professor of Literature in the English Language Department of Xiamen University.]

Since this Joseph A. Bosco—we even share the same middle initial, luckily, I no longer use mine in my by-line—habitually offers small-minded, mean-spirited testimonial and old school reactionary arguments on three points, we will mostly rebut in kind.

Political reform: While the other Mr. Bosco accurately credits the thrice purged Deng Xiaopeng with engineering the radical sea-change that transformed the world’s most populous nation from a controlled economy to a dynamically market driven one in the span of only two decades, he still cherishes painting him with the same old tar-brush as he does Mao Zedong—as do all of his ideological brothers of the right. Of course, he also applies the same shop-worn brush to the recently retired duo of President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zue Rongji, who together steered the course that resulted in one of history’s most amazing social and economic turnarounds. (He has yet to weigh in on newly elected President Hu and Premier Wen.)

It should be pointed out, however, that eternally attacking the ghost of the seriously flawed—and long deceased—Mao perhaps should not so often be done from a national glass house so full itself of shameless spirits and their truly shameful legacies. Say, for instance, one whose sitting President’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, one of Nazi Germany’s earliest and most enduring bankers, more than a year into America’s participation in the war to rid the world of that aberrant regime was found guilty of violating the Trading with the Enemy Act by Congress, censured and stripped of his Nazi-nourishing companies. (A scandalous statement? Yes, but true. Look it up.)

Political reform? Try explaining our version of that to Chinese university students who ask how a candidate can receive less votes than his competitor but become President of the United States because a partisan handful of judges decree it.

Try explaining political reform to those same students from the perspective of a country that habitually backs dictators of the militarist right only because said dictators sign up on the “right” side of an ideological concept that is meaningless to all but the advantaged.

The other Mr. Bosco attacks China for not yet evolving into a multiparty democracy when its Asian neighbors such as Japan and South Korea have done so with “political stability and economic prosperity.” Really? If recent memory serves, until 1945 Japan was a dictatorship with a living “God” as its ruler. Democracy and prosperity came only after a crushing defeat, an occupying U.S. Army and a Constitution written by an egomaniacal American general, and then propped up with billions of American dollars for some three decades—or until Detroit defaulted its automobile monopoly through corporate complacency, and American technology companies fell asleep at the transistor. But then Japan’s fractious society couldn’t hold onto its economic and political ascendancy for very long, could it? And Korea? Until 1945 it was a vassal state of Japan—North and South. Then came another war, an occupying U.S. Army and a lot more U.S. dollars.

South Korea and Japan: democracy and prosperity with “Made in the USA” stickers. And both “prosperous Asian democracies”, most particularly Japan, also benefited incalculably from not having to spend otherwise needed currency on its military sector. In the case of Japan, not a single Yen, since it was prohibited by law from doing so. And South Korea obediently and happily spent American dollars—and GI’s—to match its aggressively belligerent former half missile-and-tank for missile-and-tank while it spent other U.S. largesse to stimulate its quite late-blooming modern economy.

What did China get from the United States after the Red Army significantly helped us defeat Japan? A very bloody war against mostly American troops in Korea; the Cold War and a completely cold shoulder from any U.N. member who couldn’t risk American disfavor; and the costly effect of the “domino theory” in Southeast Asia.

Anyone who understands the painful history of China from the late Qing dynasty until the Second World War—from about 1840 till 1945—would also understand why only an all-powerful central government could have brought a unified China into the modern world as a sovereign state after a century or more of humiliation, occupation, splintering and cultural colonization by every Western power—plus Japan—that had a gunboat or two. The alternative, which the U.S. was financing prior to the Japanese invasion—and again after its defeat—would have been a nightmare beyond imagination: the largest totalitarian military dictatorship of the far right in the history of the world. Let us not forget that Chiang Kai-shek staffed his pre-World War Two advisory staff with Nazis (but more on the old Generalissimo later).

No. The chance for true democracy in China during the 20th Century was lost when the Western powers chose to demonize peasant and worker movements instead of nurturing them the same way we did militarist dictatorships. But it is definitely coming. Why? Partly because the people of China are gaining the means and information they need to determine their own future. But mostly it is because the increasingly irrelevant “old” Communist Party—and it knows it—has replaced the European version of Marxist-Leninism with an officially sanctioned idiom that its people have understood since before the birth of western culture: “It is glorious to get rich!” And golly damn they are going at it with a singleness of purpose that should warm the hearts of capitalists everywhere. And it is—because most if not all of them are falling all over themselves in the rush to set-up shop in China.

Of course, some folks in America take exception to this new twist on “Communism,” claiming that paying workers in South China the equivalent of 40 U.S. cents an hour is terrible on two fronts—exploitation of the workers, and the loss of jobs in America. On the former, it needs to be said that forty-cents over here isn’t what it is in the USA. Over here, in the smaller cities that one hour buys lunch in a sit-down restaurant. In other words, not too far from par with the minimum wage in America—when adjusted for what one’s currency actually buys and not a meaningless extrapolation comparing Bananas Foster with bananas. In the larger cities, professionals and skilled workers take home the U.S. equivalent of a whole lot more—and they are buying new homes, new cars, and fancy clothes at a bewildering clip. As to the loss of jobs in America? Well, that’s free-market free-trade capitalism for you.

However, if you really want to judge how smart some of those old “Long Marchers” were when it came time to change with the times, go deeper into the country-side where the backbone and soul of the Middle Kingdom has always lain. Where old Deng chose to start the “Reform and Opening up” that is the focus of so much attention today. He allowed the farmers of the failed collectives to start real farming again. He allowed them to plant what they wanted, and to sell the result at the best price they could get—in the cities, where workers in the gray-belching factories would spend an extra tenth of a Yuan for a fresh melon that tasted good and sweet like the old days.

Soon the farmers were selling all they could grow at prices rising with demand; they were actually making profits, and spending them on goods from the cities. The workers in the city saw this and as Deng had known they would, they began to clamor for the right to prosper also. And so it began—as so many things do in China: with fruits of the earth and sea.

20 years ago there was hardly a public restaurant in China; old China hands seem to remember two or three in Beijing. Today? They are everywhere, in cities and towns big and small, several on every block. And it’s not foreigners mainly chowing down on the world’s greatest cuisine three meals a day. We do, mind you, it’s just that there aren’t that many of us.

Is there still heartbreaking poverty in China? Yes. Just as there is still heartbreaking poverty though-out Los Angeles County, and every county in the United States. Much fewer beggars, though. Socialism is good for something.

The other Mr. Bosco also writes of “rampant corruption” in China. True, almost every week we read here in the many newspapers available about government officials, civil servants and influential businessmen somewhere in China being arrested and charged with some form of profiteering or corruption. But they are getting arrested. Occasionally one is even executed if he steals millions. I wonder if that would have deterred an Enron or WorldCom executive?

To truly appreciate the accomplishments of China since Deng started reinventing Chinese socialism, all we have to do is look northward to Russia. I was working in Moscow as a journalist in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union; it was—and in many ways, still is—lawless chaos that was both frightening and heart-wrenching. The mighty Soviet colossus, the great Russian bear, was reeling on her knees. Homeless beggars were on every corner; and criminal thugs were the only rule that was effective, brutally so. No, I’ll take China’s way, thank you very much.

Military expenditures: The other Mr. Bosco takes China to task for wanting what the great (and no longer so great) Western powers have: military equality. It appears he is saying that a nation of 1.3 billion people, a very large nation in land mass, with neighbors such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia—and its breakaway republics with breakaway military hardware—Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, plus their near neighbors in the Middle East, Iran and Iraq, all with indigenous Islamic fundamentalist movements, does not need a strong military. He says that Beijing military policies are based on “paranoia” and a “sense of perpetual victimhood.” Who is he kidding? Certainly not the Chinese.

Perhaps he believes only the United States should have a short memory when it comes to military threats. Of course, the last time we had armies fighting pitched battles on Continental soil was in 1865; and the last time we had foreign armies marching on the contiguous 48 states was in 1815.

During just the 20th Century, it is easier to name the countries that did not have armies invading, occupying, or policing some part of China! In the lifetime of current middle-aged Chinese citizens, shots in anger were fired on Chinese soil by troops from Russia, India, Vietnam and the United States, counting only the most serious.

The other Mr. Bosco writes that China has no need of a “blue water navy”, that China should depend on the U.S. to preserve “freedom of the seas”. An interesting notion that: the only lasting superpower, that actively tried to topple Chinese sovereignty almost continuously for most of the last half of the 20th century, China should depend upon for “secure sea lanes”? Likewise he writes that a non “expansionist” China “need not fear containment”; and that “Benign American military superiority, inevitable in any event, is not a bad scenario for China’s future development.” Again, who is he kidding? With that notion, not even American citizens, I would think.

Since when has it been sound governmental concern for any nation to depend upon a very recent, dubious ally at best, and an avowed enemy at worst, for its national security? China wasn’t flying a spy plane over American territory in April two years ago. Even the fledgling 13 states of the new American republic chose not to rely on anyone for its safety. And at no time since have we entrusted the security of the American dream to any nation other than our own. But the other Mr. Bosco arrogantly assures that China, the oldest continuously governed civilization on earth, the legendary Middle Kingdom, should submit its sovereign future to a nation that invaded Nicaragua to arrest a single corrupt dictator it empowered. A nation that continues to blockade a small Caribbean island that ceased to be a military threat to anyone a long time ago simply because politicos are afraid of losing block-votes in South Florida. A nation that is at this moment practicing a “strike first” policy of national defense which is without precedent in modern statehood.

On his third point, the matter of Taiwan, the other Mr. Bosco would have you believe the issues are about Chinese aggression and human rights. Perhaps a little history is needed for perspective: I sit writing this on old Amoy Island—now Xiamen Island, its Chinese name before the Western powers took it as a “concession” after the Opium Wars of the 19th Century that guaranteed England could continue selling the opium it banned to its own population to the Chinese whom they purposely addicted in order to have something to sell to a nation that mostly had products to export, not buy. From here the Taiwan issue is so close that on clear days I can see Taiwanese controlled islands patrolled by armed troops.

Where I sit is—or actually was—ground-zero of the long-expected final conflagration between the “Reds” and what’s left of the Nationalist legacy of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—easily continental East Asia’s worst war criminal of the 20th Century. As China’s supreme war lord of those dark days in Chinese history, old Chiang, first Japan’s and then America’s favorite son in the east, certainly murdered, tortured, imprisoned and starved more of his own people intentionally than Mao is accused of killing in the long struggle to regain Chinese nationhood.

Middle-aged Americans will remember these islands from the “hot” days of the Cold War, when Quemoy Island, Matsu Island, and Amoy were in the news almost daily as the forces of Chiang, and batteries of the People’s Liberation Army, traded artillery barrages in punctuation of their mutual indignation at the existence of the other. It was here in 1949 that Chiang made a last cursory stand before escaping across the straits to the Chinese island Province of Formosa (now Taiwan) which had been freed by the Allies from years of occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army. (He did this carrying with him much of the 3 Billion U.S. Dollars that American tax-payers had given him to resist Japanese invaders, which he chose to pocket instead.)

This issue is close here not only because it is a rifle-shot away, it is close because almost everyone here and in Taiwan are close relatives, sharing the same dialect, religion, festivals and folk customs. These people, on both sides, want to see each—and they do! Often. They just have to fly to Hong Kong first, then catch a connecting flight to Taiwan, at best a four hour plane ride, instead of a puddle-jump straight from the modern Xiamen International Airport less than a hundred miles across the Taiwan Strait. They do this because the Mouse-that-Roars Government in Taiwan wants to continue the charade that it is the legitimate government of China and will not allow direct air-flights or ferry-boats or container shipping between it and its largest trading partner lest anyone get the notion that it is giving even an inch of irrationality in its denial of reality. Not only is this a Taiwanese human rights abuse, it's costing its businessmen a lot of money.

What is the reality? As I said earlier, Xiamen, and Fujian, the Southeast China Province of which it is part, was ground-zero because it was here that the imminent battle between past and present would be fought. Because of this, the once prosperous coast of Fujian was left to despoil because why waste money maintaining a battleground. Then, a little over a decade ago, a visionary mayor of Xiamen had a dream: Build it and they will come. As one of the five Special Economic Zones first decreed by the Central Government to exercise fiscal autonomy in quest of capitalist ventures, Mayor Hong Yong Shi built a modern infrastructure where there had been only a great University, famous old Buddhist temples, fishing villages and a strategic army base atop Five-Old-Men Mountain facing the Strait.

And they came. Who came? Mostly Taiwanese businessmen—by the thousands. What happened? A small, beautiful tropical island city, with great hotels, shopping establishments to rival Beverly Hills, a spacious freeway that rings a coastline which is breathtaking and a city without car-horns (illegal—I told you he was a visionary.) Who stays in the hotels, shops in the stores, drives on the freeway? Oh, a few Westerners who work for Kodak or Dell—but mostly Xiamen natives and hordes of Chinese tourists from Tibet to Shandong, from Lionang to Sichuan, people who only a decade or so ago couldn’t dream of a real home, much less vacations to parts of their homeland they only knew from folktales.

Taiwan and the Mouth-that-Roars? Beijing knows that all it has to do is continue being patient—repeating its litany, “One country, two systems”—and reality will over-come schizophrenic sabre-rattling. In 1994, when some military fool in Taiwan ordered a short artillery barrage at Xiamen, wounding 4 workers, China didn’t fire back. And not a peep was heard about it in the Western press. In 1996, during military maneuvers, when China fired missiles into the Taiwan Straits, purposely hitting only water, the western media went ballistic, and the other Mr. Bosco found himself a cause, which he has milked with vengeance ever since.

When the Falun Gong cult recently jammed mainland satellite TV broadcasts from sites in Taiwan—with the apparent complicity of government—China didn’t put gunboats into the Strait. They ordered a new satellite system from France that will be immune from sabotage.

The other Mr. Bosco actually had the temerity to write that “China has never governed Taiwan.” His belief in the stupidity of readers is testimony to his own. Shame on him. Even through the periodic occupations by Japan over the past millennium, the Dutch back in the 17th Century, and old Chiang Kai-shek starting in 1949, Taiwan has always been a province of the Middle Kingdom. Maybe he meant this Chinese Government has never ruled China. Now that is true. But only because the People’s Republic of China has had enough restraint to eschew a very messy invasion and opt for the Chinese way of doing almost everything: patience.

As to the general charges of Human Rights abuses, and heavy-handed government control? Of the latter, I can report that I am free to lecture in my classes on any subject I wish—and I do. I and my lovely spouse (a famous pioneering rock-journalist during the 60’s; she teaches in the Economics Department, go figure) are free to go anywhere we wish at anytime we wish. Not long ago, on a hike over Five-Old-Men-Mountain behind our apartment on our way to the Ten-Thousand-Rock-Botanical Garden, we just happened to walk right into the army base on the summit. I was sure we would at least have our ID’s checked. No, soldiers and officers just waved and went on about their duties.

Human rights abuses? Yes, they are present and selectively sanctioned by segments of the totalitarian government. But then let us ask Mr. Lumia if he believes his human rights were abused by members of the NYPD. Or the relatives of the charred occupants of the Branch Davidian Church in Waco, Texas? Or the hundreds of thousands Hispanic or African-American young men incarcerated for mandatory decades only because they used or sold crack-cocaine instead of the white-man’s powdered version of the drug? Or any of the thousands of American Muslims imprisoned without charges or due process? We could go on; but the point is made—even the freest, greatest nation on Earth has its aberrant moments and miscreant zealots.

To paraphrase and answer the other Mr. Bosco again: If China has nothing to fear militarily from America, then America has nothing to fear from China. Here they wept for the victims of 9/11—and still do. Not like our “Allies” in Europe, where many people cheered. Just the other night, when my spouse and I were “dignitaries” at an English Language Competition for youngsters—everyone over here is learning English—a nine year-old, for her recitation, performed President Bush’s televised address to the nation after the attacks.

Yes, the greatness of China is China. China will define the 21st century, so one-trick pony ideologues such as the other Mr. Bosco might do us all a favor and stop trying to convince her we aren’t her friend.
  

6:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




With My Hands Would I do It And Savor Every Second

It has been years since I have wanted to kill someone; it has been many more years since I have killed someone. However, I want to do exactly that at this moment. Therefore it is a very good thing that I am in China and Andrew Sullivan is somewhere back in America or England. I might not finish him off because he would probably start crying and I learned years ago that I could not continue hitting a man once he started crying. Now, I do not know much about Mr. Sullivan personally other than that which he coos endlessly to the world at large and that is that he is a homosexual, which pretty much assures me that 1) it wouldn't be a fair fight, and 2) that he most likely would start crying. Yes, I have known gays who were not limp-wrists, but I would bet the mortgage that Sullivan isn't one of them.

Wait a minute! Surely you must be disgusted with me by now. Not only does Bosco want to kill Andrew Sullivan, he is also dissing his sexual persuasion and demeaning his ability to defend himself. Bosco must be a worse cretin than Marcia Clark and Jeff Toobin whispers that he is. No! I want you to read what that fairy little dipshit wrote in that satiny blog of his, AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish:
WAIT TILL THEY DIE: When you read a piece like this one by Arthur Miller, you realize that for a certain generation, there's no chance that they will ever get their heads around the horrors of communism. Here's Miller, dining with a murderer, thug and dictator, and finding some elegant way to remain committed to liberal principles. He can relay Castro's obvious megalomania; he can see his monstrous narcissism; but he still hangs in there, blaming the embargo for almost everything, mainly concerned that he's being kept up past his bedtime. He still longs for a world in which Castro might have succeeded, a world which cannot exist, and which never existed - except in the minds of aging Nation-readers. There is, I think, no chance of persuading this generation. They are lost. But eventually they will die off, and a new realism can take hold. Tick-tock.
I don't care who you are, what your politics are, with what and whom you play hide the salaami, if you are a person of letters, if you even think that you might be a writer, you do NOT, you do NOT, wish death upon a great artisit whose works have already stood the test of time. Long after Sullivan passes from this rock, Mr. Miller will be revered as one of the greatest writers America produced in the 20th Century! Perhaps only a dozen writers in that century belong in the strata of wordsmanship that Miller inhabits.

May you die and die quickly but in great pain you arrogant little fop who has written not a single piece of literature, only political punditry! Tickity-tock! Tickity-tock!
 

2:23 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




I Love Academia

One of the very best bloggers, Calpundit, has a post about the political donation habits of college professors, it's quite heavily weighted to the left. Hooray for us professors!
ACADEMIC LEFTYISM ....Via Pandagon, here's an interesting statistic from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics: political donations from the education industry in the current election cycle have favored the Democrats by a margin of 65% to 34%. Since this segment doesn't include teachers' unions and is "dominated by contributions from college and university professors," it's probably a fairly decent proxy for the political leanings of university professors and administrators.
Mr. Drum makes several further cogent observations on the politics of education. Give him a clickity-click.
  

12:59 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Barking Up The Wrong Tree Here, Folks

Some pretty good bloggers over at A Small Victory: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies were just about the first folks to pounce on MoveOn.org when 2 out of 1500 submissions to their anti-Bush ad contest compared their boy Dubya to Hitler. They were right to do so. Everybody else did. Even though it was only 2 out of 1500 suggestions, not actually ads, it was outrageous and an insult to holocaust victims.
A Small Victory: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies ran this post:

It appears that a second Bush=Hitler ad has appeared at MoveOn.org. One might believe that all of the movies submitted had the same theme.

I would like to say something to those that participate in such memes as George Bush being the equivalent of a mass murdering tyrant.

With the release of this new video, Bush=Hitler has officially jumped the shark. It's like when a tv show has a guest star who keeps coming back until his boorish character becomes permanent and ruins the whole show. Your guest star is Hitler and his time has come.

There are so many other guest stars you could bring into your campaign to make Bush out to be the anti-Christ. What about Stalin? His mustache was much better than Hitler's. Get creative. Do a whole Bush=Darth Vader thing. Remember when Darth wiped out Alderaan on a whim? You could probably find a way to equate that with the "illegal invasion and occupation" of Iraq.

There's so many villains to choose from. Lex Luthor. Zod. Oliver Cromwell. Ho Chi Minh. Cruella DeVille. Hell, why not Satan himself?

Hitler has become passe. It's time to shake the cobwebs off of another villain and retire old Adolf to the Home for Symbols of George Bush's Regime, along with Shrub and Chimp. I've seen those protests signs you guys have made. I know you are a creative bunch. Be a sport and come up with something else or we just won't take you seriously anymore.A Small Victory: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
However, what they did not know, and what the big-time GOPers forgot about, was the very real connection between Dubya and Hitler. Prescott Bush was Hitler's Banker. For one very good story on that, there is this link. For dozens of stories on that there is this link. Finally, the truth is going to come out.
 

11:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Finally It Is Out! Prescott Bush Was Hitler's Banker.

Prescott Bush Was Hitler's Banker! Folks, I have been trying to get my colleagues in the mainstream press to deal with this for years, and almost always it would go no where. Even though the proof was more documented than most stories we journalists run all the time. Well, it is out now, and the GOPers have no one to blame but themselves. When they screamed bloody murder over two ridiculous ads comparing Bush to Hitler that were entered into the MoveOn.org anti-Bush election ad campaign contest they opened the door!

Go to this news story or to this Google link, Prescott Bush, Dubya's Grandfather.

Even though it is long, I am going to run the full story below; since I have worked on this story for so many years, it is best that I let someone else tell it to you, I am too close to it. Remember the Google link above if you need confirmation of what you probably are not going to believe. New Hampshire Gazette: Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed


WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his 'enemy national' partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.

Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war.

No Story?

For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.

The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

The Summer of '42

The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.

"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.

The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.

Business is Business

The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury and war bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.

The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe continued unabated.

After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.

Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it.

UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.

The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler's rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler's war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to seven years in prison.

The Family Business

In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker's daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.

However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact "nominees," or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.

Seized

On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.

In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp (Vesting Order No. 259). In November, Congress seized the Nazi interests in Silesian-American Corporation, which allegedly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz via a partnership with I.G. Farben, Hitler's third major industrial patron and partner in the infrastructure of the Third Reich.

The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury and war bonds, to their foreign clients overseas as Hitler geared up for his 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that sparked World War II.

That's One Way to Put It

Following the Congressional seizures of UBC and the other four Bush-Harriman-Thyssen enterprises, The New York Times reported on December 16, 1944, in a brief story on page 25, that UBC had "received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway." The Times story did not report that UBC had been seized by the U.S. government or that the new address was the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The story also neglected to mention that the other UBC-related businesses had also been seized by Congress.

Still No Story?

Since then, the information has not appeared in any U.S. news coverage of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been included in any of the major Bush family biographies. It was, however, covered extensively in George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin's father served as an attorney in the 1940s for some of the victims of the Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.

The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the Bush family's long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream U.S. media entity reported on or even investigated the allegations, despite careful documentation by the authors. Major booksellers declined to distribute the book, which was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased and untrue. Its authors struggled even to be reviewed in reputable newspapers. That the book was published by a Lyndon LaRouche's organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.

The essence of the story been posted for years on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.

Likewise, the mainstream media have apparently made no attempt since World War II to either verify or disprove the allegations of Nazi collaboration against the Bush family. Instead, they have attempted to dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or "unauthorized" books without any journalistic inquiry or research into their veracity.

Loyal Defenders

The National Review ran an essay on September 1 by their White House correspondent Byron York, entitled "Annals of Bush-Hating." It begins mockingly: "Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush - indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president's Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?" York goes on to discredit the "Bush is a moron" IQ hoax, but fails to disprove the Nazi connection.

The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column September 29 by Reason magazine's Cathy Young in which she referred to "Bush-o-phobes on the Internet" who "repeat preposterous claims about the Bush family's alleged Nazi connections."

Poles Tackle the Topic

Newsweek Polska, the magazine's Polish edition, published a short piece on the "Bush Nazi past" in its March 5, 2003 edition. The item reported that "the Bush family reaped rewards from the forced-labor prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp," according to a copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop Media (www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure of the various Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.

Still Not Interested

Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.

Aftermath

After the seizures of the various businesses they oversaw with Cornelis Lievense and his German partners, the U.S. government quietly settled with Bush, Harriman and others after the war. Bush and Harriman each received $1.5 million in cash as compensation for their seized business assets.

In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.

John Buchanan is a journalist and investigative reporter with 33 years of experience in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. His work has appeared in more than 50 newspapers, magazines and books. He can be reached by e-mail at: jtwg@bellsouth.net.

New Hampshire Gazette
 

10:54 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Bush Equals Hitler Was And Is A Stupid Idea Because It Asks The Wrong Question

The flak that MoveOn.org is getting over the two (out of 1500 submissions) Bush equals Hitler commercial suggestions is as silly as the suggestions were preposterous and obscene to victims of the Holocaust. The storm is all over the Internet and the blogosphere. Today it made The New York Times:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 — It sounded like a fun way to expand participation in this year's presidential election, at least for those opposed to re-electing President Bush. The left-leaning Internet group MoveOn.org sponsored a contest, 'Bush in 30 Seconds,' inviting people to submit television advertisements about Mr. Bush, with the best to be determined by a vote of visitors to the site.

But two of more than 1,500 submissions have outraged Republicans and leading Jewish groups for comparing Mr. Bush, in profile and policy, to Hitler.

"This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said in one of several statements he issued. He urged the nine Democrats running for president to repudiate the advertisements.

Wes Boyd, a MoveOn.org founder, fired back, saying Republicans were "deliberately and maliciously" misleading the public by asserting that MoveOn.org had sponsored the advertisements. "None of these was our ad," Mr. Boyd said in a statement. "Nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund." In The New York Times...

However, let us pose another "question" using Hitler and Bush. Let us ask this question: What do Adolph Hitler and George Bush have uniquely in common? (We use "uniquely" to distinguish from all of the obvious: human, male, two arms, etc.)

Answer: They had a mutual benefactor. Prescott Bush, Dubya's grandfather, was Hitler's principle American banker, even till well into World War II. This is a fact folks: Prescott Bush was censured by Congress and had his banking firms taken from him under the Trading With The Enemy Act in late 1942. Don't believe it. Click on this link: Prescott Bush

Scary, isn't it? It is all there, in the Congressional Record, and more. The Bush family and its business associates started financing Hitler in 1923 during the Eugenics movement and stayed with him even after we went to war.
  

10:10 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




What Is Everybody Looking For?

Here is exactly what everybody is looking for. I kid you not; at least it is on Google. This is a snapshot of popular culture, and perhaps even a deeper view into the human condition.
Google Press Center: 2003 Year-End Zeitgeist Search patterns, trends, and surprises.

The 2003 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world. Whether you are tracking the global progression of the latest news or learning about healthy searches in Japan, the 2003 Year-End Zeitgeist enables you to look at the past year through the collective eyes of the world on the Internet.

Zeitgeist Explained
The term "zeitgeist" comes from the German "Zeit" meaning "time" and "Geist" meaning "spirit". The term is defined in English by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary as "the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era."
If you're a contemporary social historian--a literary critic actually gave me that label a few years back, and it works for me, it's better than "The Murder Guy"--Give this a look-see: 2003 Year-End Google Zeitgeist
  

8:52 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Critter In the News Has Its Side of the Story

The little critter in the news has its side of the story. But it's probably more than you need--or want--to know about civets. But, in case you are interested in it and its potential to panic you, the New Zealand's National Business Review has a few interesting pieces of information and critter-lovers "spin."
New findings from China scientists have linked the genetic structure of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) afflicting an unnamed 32-year-old television producer in Guangdong Provice to a very cute breed of civets sold in the province as food.

But China's plan to kill 10,000 of the animals as a SARS control measure has alarmed the World Health Organisation -- which is cautioning that a messy slaughter could actually spread the disease -- and outraged animal activists and pet lovers around the world, largely because of erroneous media reporting that identifies the animal in question as a cat.

The biological family containing civets, Viverridae, however, shares only the biological order Carnivora with the family that contains cats, Felidae. Other families in that order contain such wildly diverse animals as bears (Ursidae), dogs (Canidae), racoons(Procyonidae), weasels (Mustelidae) and skunks (Mephitidae).

More, even though almost all sub-families within the family Viverridae contain animals popularly known as "civet cats" the animal of concern in Guangdong Province is a particular breed of "palm civet" from the sub-family Paradoxurus larvata, known better as the Masked Palm Civet.

Civets are found all around the world, but especially in tropical rainforest environments. They are vaguely cat-like in appearance -- and all of the 15 to 20 species, placed in 10 to 12 genera, including the Masked Palm Civet, can be colloquially lumped as "civet cats" -- but with extended, pointed muzzles. Civets are also omnivorous, omnivorous, with a primary meat diet (both hunted and scavenged) supplemented with fruit, eggs, fish, insects, and possibly roots. ...

Statements from the Vice Director of the Guangdong Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Xu Ruiheng, when he announced the likelihood that the new SARS victim had likely been infected by a civet meal -- which he denies having eaten -- may have helped spawn the confusion.

Rather than refer to the specific type of animal involved, the doctor identified the animal by its broader, generic moniker, as a "civet cat."

Last April, China banned trade in civets and 53 other wild animals as part of its efforts to control SARS, but lifted the ban in August in spite of warnings from many quarters that the animals might still pose a health threat.

In fact, although the genetic structure of the SARS-linked coronavirus found in the Masked Palm Civet is closely associated with the genetic structure of the coronavirus in the new SARS patient, other wildlife, including rats, are known to be carriers of the disease.

According to official news agency Xinhua, the Guangdong Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced yesterday that experts from the University of Hong Kong had found large quantities of the SARS-like coronavirus in "civet cats and other wildlife collected from the markets in Guangzhou and Shenzhen cities."

The scientists tied the "civet cats" to the patient with the discovery that "the S-gene sequence of the coronavirus from civet cats and that of the recently-detected SARS suspect in Guangdong were 'highly homological' and were from 'the same phylogenetic tree'."

But then, according to a China Daily story, the man may have actually been infected by another carrier of a very similar version of the coronavirus in question: a rat.

A kitchen worker hits a water rat on the head to stun it before it is killed for a meal in a restaurant in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. SOURCE: China Daily

According to local media, China Daily reported, the patient had set traps for rats that had invaded his apartment before he showed SARS symptoms. Laboratory tests have shown that some of the rats caught in his apartment also tested positive for SARS.

Rats are also used as food in the area (picture). ...

According to China Daily, Liu Qiyong, an expert on epidemics from the Chinese Centre for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), said he and his colleagues have checked out more than 10 kinds of animals, including masked palm civets and rats over the past several months trying to identify the virus that has caused SARS. More work must be done to pinpoint one particular strain as the one that jumped to human beings, Liu said. ...

His concerns were echoed by Dr Julie Hall, Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response Coordinator for the World Health Organization in China, who said about the proposed slaughter of civets (and, according to new reports, rats and cockroaches), that: "there is no evidence that civets carry SARS to human beings, nor do we know the full range of animals capable of carrying and transmitting the virus.

"We are also concerned," she said in a statement, "that the process itself may entail some risk to those who are carrying SARS around?so WHO is saying to the Government of China, 'Please undertake a risk assessment before you do this, look at the risks associated with these animals, are they alive, look at measures which can be taken to limit the contact between animals and human beings, but also study carefully the risk associated with these animals and ensure that those who do these are protected.'"
New Zealand's National Business Review
  

8:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Fair Or Not, This Is What Experts Say The Problem Looks Like

If you would like a look at just how ugly this wild critter eating industry can be, check out this link, but it is not for the squeamish, or faint-of-heart animal lovers: An Overview of the Animal Markets of China.
 

8:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Kill the Cats, But Do Not Panic

Cute little critters, but the world has enough variety of meats to eat.
After nine days of repetitive tests, the suspected SARS case in Guangdong Province, a 32-year male freelance television producer, was confirmed as having contracted the infectious disease, China's health ministry said in its website on Monday.

The case is now the first SARS patient on the Chinese mainland since the epidemic was contained last July, and also the first one contracted outside the labs. Earlier, two lab researchers in Singapore and Taiwan caught the life-threatening virus respectively.

All the 81 people that had contact with him had been quarantined but none showed SARS symptoms by Monday. Twenty-five of them have been released.

Civet cats to be killed

In a campaign to stop another SARS outbreak, China will kill 10 thousand civet cats and try to wipe out rats and cockroaches as fears of new cases of the flu-like disease spread in the Guangdong province and to the Philippines.

Guangdong Province planned to kill about 10,000 civets and close wild-animal markets to eliminate a possible source of the disease, state media said.

"We will start a health campaign to kill rats and cockroaches in order to give every place a thorough cleaning for the Lunar New Year," Guangdong health bureau official Feng Liuxiang was quoted by state media as saying. Chinese New Year begins on January 22.

"And we will kill all the civet cats in Guangdong free markets, which number about 10,000," he said.
China Daily
  

3:04 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The "Cats" Have To Go

The question is why was the ban lifted?
HONG KONG, Monday, Jan. 5 — Officials in Guangdong Province in southeastern China ordered this morning the immediate killing of every civet cat in captivity in the province after researchers found that a Guangdong man had fallen ill with a new strain of SARS virus that is genetically similar to a strain found in civet cats. ...

Dr. Zhong joined Hong Kong University microbiologists at a news conference here this morning to announce that they had jointly completed a detailed study of SARS-like viruses in civet cats together with a genetic analysis of viral samples taken from a 32-year-old man in Guangzhou who is suspected of having SARS.

Initial research last spring had shown that the SARS virus that infected more than 8,000 people around the world was genetically very similar to a virus in civet cats. New research this winter shows that the virus in civet cats has mutated to form a new "sublineage" of the virus, said Dr. K.Y. Yuen, the head of the microbiology department at Hong Kong University.

Dr. Yuen said that a genetic sequencing of samples from the man in Guangzhou who has SARS had found that the main "spike" protein was exactly identical, down to the last amino acid, to the new sublineage of the virus found in civet cats. Dr. Guan Yi, another Hong Kong University microbiologist, said that it was too soon to say whether the new sublineage was any more or less infectious or lethal in people than the SARS virus that spread last spring.

The researchers said that it remained unclear how the sick man had contracted the virus, especially since the man has insisted that he did not have any contact with exotic animals in the month before he became feverish on Dec. 16. Dr. Zhong warned that with the beginning of the dry season here in southeastern China, civet cat feces could dry up and become windblown dust that would raise a risk of airborne infection.

The feces carry extremely high concentrations of the virus, which can still be detected even when the feces are diluted as much as one billion times, Dr. Zhong said. Since it took a month from the first hospital case of SARS — in mid-December 2002 — until a major outbreak started in mid-January in the Guangzhou area, doctors in Guangdong and Hong Kong should be alert for more cases, he warned.
The New York Times
 

2:30 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, January 05, 2004

"Reverend" Dean Makes Ass of Himself and Doesn't Understand Why

This "I've got God now" Dean fool is so full of himself he doesn't have a grasp on the here and now.
JOHNSTON, Iowa, Jan. 4 — For sheer comedic appeal, the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday was short a Sharpton, though it had its moments. As when Howard Dean offhandedly promised to balance the budget "in the sixth or seventh year of my administration."

Someone howled, and the audience, noticeably short of Dean partisans, broke up at the presumptuousness. Dr. Dean seemed not to realize that he was the butt of the joke, and even his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, later said he thought the crowd was laughing with him.
In The New York Times...
  

7:54 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Reforming and Opening Up Journalism In China?

On a day when SARS and the slaughter of civet cats in China's Guangdong Province hogged most of the column inches in the state-owned media, the story below may very well prove to be one of the biggest stories of the year no matter what happens with SARS. If this exceedingly good news is indeed real news, then everything changes in this amazing, ancient land. This is a fact, folks: When journalists are allowed to be journalists, and treated as legitimate partners in the process of checks and balances essential to honest governance, then freedom grows. Apparently, the central government has chosen to take that path, as reported in today's China Daily:
The State Council Information Office (SCIO) will make fresh moves this year to set up a three-tier government news-release system, Minister Zhao Qizheng told China Daily in a New Year's interview. ...

"On top of all, we'll strive to see that SCIO press conferences are more frequent, standardized and focused on major national policies and tasks,'' Zhao said. "We hope to better address the needs of the domestic and foreign media, and ensure that press conferences are well planned and timely so that news value and reach are enhanced.'' ...

"The global demand for Chinese information has increased greatly," Zhao noted.

Nor can China, or any country, seek a favourable international environment and global understanding for itself by relying on just the domestic media, he acknowledged.

He called on government information officers to treat journalists "decently".

Officials do not have the right to consider "journalists your subordinates, students, friends or enemies," he said. "They are your challengers -- like your challenger in a tennis game."

Journalists tend to raise pointed questions because that's what their profession is supposed to do, the minister stressed. ...

Efficient release of important or breaking-news events and major government decisions can also help avoid rumours, he said.

In a sign of things to come, Xinhua reported on Friday that police departments nationwide will begin issuing news releases and meeting with journalists to promote transparency.

Public security authorities at the provincial level and the ministry will hold press conferences once a month; and police at municipal level, once every fortnight. Police are also expected to hold press briefings to respond to breaking news. ...

An efficient public news-release system is necessary, contrary to some local governments' belief that they don't need the system because of the limited number of foreign journalists staying in their provinces.

Domestic journalists' demand for government information should also be treated as important, he stressed.

Providing timely public information access is a responsibility of the government, and it should not be bestowed as a favour to the people, said Zhao.

"Because of the limited understanding of China by foreigners," Zhao said, "we are willing to establish partnerships with some overseas media, and we hope to see better, objective and fair foreign media reports on China".

He also noted the Chinese media industry is changing to better satisfy the needs and interests of its audiences and is paying more attention to marketing and profits following China's WTO entry.

Domestic media "have been playing an increasingly big role in 'supervising' the work of the government in the last few years," Zhao observed in encouragement.

While promoting the establishment of large domestic media groups, Zhao said, China has already opened the business operation of websites and distribution of print-media products to foreign investors.
China Daily
  

7:44 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Bear In Winter: The Last Chairman of the KGB, Spymaster, General Leonid Shebarshin

I am the biographer of the last Chairman of the KGB, General Leonid Shebarshin; it will perhaps be my most lasting achievement in the world of letters, literature and history. I say "perhaps" because the work is not finished. It may not be finished for a very long time, because it is a task of love and respect; it is not a task of commercialism or sensationalism. It is also not a task that will let itself be answerable to the small minds of some western publishers who cannot accept that an unrepentant Soviet Communist, a dynamic figure of great import during the last 30 years of the Cold War, be allowed a platform from which to explain what they did and why for a nation they loved and served with the same kind of devotion as their opponents served theirs. It is also not a work of manipulative propaganda; it is a work born from one of the most basic, honest emotions within the heart of mankind, the simple wish to leave a record of "their" side of the story before there is no one left to tell it firsthand.

I must note that I was stunned, and soon greatly humbled, when almost a decade ago, a man I did not know, reached out to me across two continents and an ocean and thus began an intellectual, international, philosophical journey with an extraordinary gentleman whom I have come to love and respect as I did my long deceased father.

With the turning of this new year of 2004, and the onset of the Winter of 2003 - 2004, 60 years after the battle and the breaking of the siege of Moscow, where our story really begins, an event which allowed the successful opening of the second front on the beaches of Normandy that sealed the fate of the Third Reich forever, I wish to share with you a fairly large slice of this story.
The Bear In Winter: The Last Chairman of the KGB

(Moscow) General Leonid Shebarshin ran the agents that ran Aldrich Ames and Robert Philip Hanssen. He read Presidents Reagan's and Bush's CIA briefings almost simultaneously with the American Commanders-In-Chief. He is the man every spy on all sides respected—and feared—as a "pro's pro," and a "soldier's soldier."

General Shebarshin, officially "retired" from service, remains a man of legendary status among his peers, many of whom he employs in his private security company (which is almost a "shadow KGB"). He is an unrepentant Communist who still believes in the spirit of Marxism and class struggle. In word or deed, he is not a "defector," which is the only category of former KGB officers the West has heard from over the past decade.
To Read On, Click Here.

If you enjoy it, if you have any questions, or if it makes you angry and you want only to vent this anger, please E-mail me using This Link.
 

9:43 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, January 04, 2004

This Is Pandering At It's Most Rank And Vile

Blatant pandering for the religious vote in the south is despicable. Unfortunately, many of my fellow southerners will fall for it. Not that he cares, but the Witch Doctor has lost any possibility of support from this scribe and political activist. There is nothing more foul in the human spirit than hypocrisy. Its symbol now wears the slogan of "Dean for President."
The Vermont Governor: Dean Narrowing His Separation of Church and Stump

STORM LAKE, Iowa, Jan. 3 — Little by little, the Lord is seeping into Howard Dean's presidential campaign.

In South Carolina the other day, an invocation preceded the political speeches, and David Mack, a state legislator, closed the rally with "God bless you and keep you." In Iowa last weekend, Dr. Dean referred to the New Testament. On Friday in New Hampshire, he invoked a Muslim phrase, "inshallah," God willing, to make a point about Americans believing they control their destiny.

"I'm still learning a lot about faith and the South and how important it is," Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said as he flew here, 150 miles northwest of Des Moines, Friday night on his chartered jet, predicting he would mention God more and more in the coming weeks. "It doesn't make me more religious or less religious than I was before, but it means that I'm willing to talk about it in different ways."

Dr. Dean recently told an audience in Iowa that he prayed daily. On the plane he declined to detail his prayer ritual but described how a 2002 trip to Israel deepened his understanding of the connections between Judaism and Christianity. He named Job as his favorite New Testament book, then later corrected himself, noting that it is in the Old Testament.

"I'm a New Englander, so I'm not used to wearing religion on my sleeve and being as open about it," he said. "I'm gradually getting more comfortable with talking about religion in ways that I did not talk about it before."

The changes come amid concern from several corners about the stridently secular tone of his campaign so far. In contrast to his Democratic opponents, who frequently discuss their faith in public, not to mention the born-again incumbent, President Bush, Dr. Dean said plainly in an interview a couple of months back: "I don't think that religion ought to be part of American policy."

A cover story in The New Republic last month, headlined "Howard Dean's religion problem," called him "one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history," and suggested this would "mark him as culturally alien to much of the country." A rash of columns followed with similar warnings, and voters have begun to inquire about the issue at town hall meetings.
If he can't stand up to political pundits from the New Republic and all the others, then how in the hell can he stand up to the challenge of leading this nation out of the debacle Bush will leave it in? A pox on you and your kind, Howie the Pure! Jimmy Carter, you are not. That is a pious man who practices what he preaches and has elevated Christianity with every word or deed of his honest life.

If you have the stomach for it, read a whole lot more of this pandering fool in The New York Times...
  

10:27 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Be Careful What You Wish For

What is the definition of stupid? A Republican Member of Congress. Seriously. Would I make this up? Read Sheryl Gay Stolberg in today's The New York Times and you decide.
WASHINGTON — Sue Myrick set her sights high when she came to Washington in the heady days after the election of 1994. Republicans had reclaimed control of the House after 40 years in the political wilderness, and Representative Myrick was eager to eliminate government programs, balance the budget and cut overall spending — in short, to shrink big government.

Today, with her party in charge of both Congress and the White House, Mrs. Myrick would seem perfectly positioned to achieve those goals. Instead, she and her fellow fiscal conservatives are still fighting to reduce government spending - a battle that pits them against their own party and president.

"We've put up with this spending, very frankly, for the last few years and none of us feel very good about it," said Mrs. Myrick, a North Carolina Republican. "It's very difficult when you have a president of your same party, if they aren't as fiscally conservative as you would like them to be."

These are not easy times for lawmakers who hold dear the notion that, as Ronald Reagan used to say, government should get off the people's backs. The balanced budget of the 1990's, which Mrs. Myrick considers a high point of her Congressional career - is gone, replaced by a record federal deficit. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, complained earlier this year that Congress was spending money like "drunken sailors."

Rather than shrink the role of the federal bureaucracy, fiscal conservatives say President Bush has expanded it, in education, agriculture and through the $400 billion, 10-year Medicare prescription drug bill.

"At this point, I think that conservatives sold out their small government philosophy and replaced it with a philosophy of whatever will get them re-elected," said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization. "Neither party is committed to smaller government and less spending. Those who are still standing for fiscal conservatism are frustrated."

That frustration is starting to boil over, and as Mr. Bush prepares his budget for 2005, fiscal conservatives on Capitol Hill are "searching for ways to stop the spending spree," Mr. Riedl said.

Several proposals are floating around. In October, Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, introduced the Family Budget Protection Act, which would require Congress to meet budget targets to eliminate the federal deficit in five years. Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, wants to reform the government's accounting practices to provide a more accurate picture of federal spending.

"It's safe to say that there is tremendous dissatisfaction and a kind of dawning on people that Bush is not interested in smaller government," said Edward H. Crane, president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization.
The moral of this story--which you should read in full--is simple: Be Careful What You Wish For. You Might Just Get it.

In The New York Times...
  

9:39 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




THE SPIRIT IS SHOWING YOU MARS


A mosaic image taken by the Spirit spacecraft shows a 360 degree panoramic view of the rover on the surface of Mars.

Space Probe Lands on Mars
PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 3 — An American spacecraft, the robotic roving vehicle called Spirit, landed on Mars late Saturday night and radioed home that it was apparently safe and ready for three months' searching for signs of water in the planet's early history.

Launched last June from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Spirit carries nine cameras, two spectrometers for analyzing rocks and soil, and a robotic arm for digging and scraping the surface. On landing, the rover is to photograph its environs in color as the first step in planning travels over the site. It should be capable of daily traverses of as much as 300 feet.

Gusev crater is thought to be an ancient basin that once held a lake. An examination of the rocks and sediments are expected to answer some questions about the warmer, wetter past of Mars, as geologists have hypothesized.
In The New York Times...
 

9:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We grieve, But We Cannot Quit

The guerrilla warfare in Iraq continues to take a deadly toll. An insurgency is the most difficult type of combat activity to defend against and to eradicate. Much like demons of myth, you cut off a head, or a limb, and two or three more grow back almost immediately. In the thousands of years of combat history, the only known way to completely defeat an insurgency short of appeasement is total, ruthless annihilation and brutal submission of noncombatants from whom the guerrillas receive recruits and provisions. None of these tactics are an option for an American-led force. It is not who we are. So, until something very new and dynamic enters the picture, this daily, deadly dance will play on.
BAGHDAD — A mortar attack on a sprawling U.S. Army base in central Iraq and a roadside bomb on a dangerous thoroughfare outside the capital killed three American soldiers, the military said Saturday.

All three deaths occurred Friday — the same day another U.S. soldier died when an American observation helicopter was downed by insurgents west of Baghdad — but were not immediately disclosed by the Army.

Two of the soldiers were killed when an "improvised explosive device" detonated near their vehicle as their patrol passed by, a military spokeswoman said. The bomb was laid alongside a roadway just south of Baghdad, in the same general area that American forces had bombarded overnight.

A third soldier was reported wounded in the explosion. The names of the slain soldiers were not released Saturday.

Crude but powerful homemade bombs have become the preferred method for insurgents to hurt the vastly more powerful U.S. forces without engaging them directly. In recent months, roadside bombs have accounted for a large proportion of American military casualties.

U.S. troops have learned to be alert for explosives concealed in everything from concrete blocks to abandoned pipes to cardboard boxes, but it has proved impossible for patrols to spot every object that could represent a hazard.

The mortar attack, which left one soldier dead and two others wounded, occurred late Friday at one of the Americans' largest bases in Iraq, near the town of Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad.
In the Los Angeles Times...
  

8:46 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




I Didn't Know That...

Wow! I didn't know that! With all of the holiday festivities and the ending of a semester bustle, I missed a very enlightening story in the state-owned press about the economy of China that I really needed to know and understand. I am not an economist, but this breakdown of where China is now economically, what it actually means, and where it is going, is written so straight-forwardly, without economic gobbly gook, and so candidly, I actually went, "Wow! I didn't know that." I said it out loud, right here at my desk and keyboard; it's okay, I often talk to myself, and I have yet to do anything seriously maniacal. My guess is that some of you might have the same reaction to the story; so, here it is:
BEIJING, Dec. 27, (Xinhuanet) -- With the country's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) expected to exceed US$1,000 this year, the Chinese economy is steering into a new phase which will underline its balanced development.

As the end of the year approaches, it appears increasingly foolproof to endorse the forecast that China's GDP will top 11 trillion yuan (US$1.33 trillion) in 2003, a year-on-year increase of 8.5 per cent.

That means the country, with a population of 1.3 billion, will cross the threshold of US$1,000 worth of per capital GDP into a critical development stage for a better-off society.

International experience indicates that during the period when per capita GDP ranges between US$1,000 and US$3,000, a developing country will witness drastic changes in its social and economic structure for greater prosperity.

As the world's largest developing economy, China is surely no exception. Actually, the country has already made known its ambition to quadruple its economy and raise its per capita GDP to US$3,000 in the first two decades of this century.

Over the past 25 years of reform and opening-up, the country has amazed the world with an average annualized economic growth of 9 per cent.

And this year, the Chinese economy not only survived the impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak but significantly picked up against other obstacles like natural disasters.

The new per capita GDP achievement certainly manifests the increasing clout as well as the growth momentum of the Chinese economy. But being a development milestone, it also entails a shift in the focus of development strategy from high-speed growth to harmonious and sustainable development of all aspects.

The SARS epidemic sounded an alarm that economic progress can no longer be achieved at the cost of other social development.

Moreover, the widening income gap has become a serious problem as the nation's prosperity is unevenly shared.

Now, as the country's overall economic strength approaches a new altitude, it is high time for the government to redefine its development priorities in favour of the good of the people.

Latest statistics show the country's fiscal revenue has already surpassed 2 trillion yuan (US$241 billion) so far this year, accounting for 18 per cent of the GDP.

Such a swelling coffer will provide the government with much more room for manoeuvring in fiscal and monetary policy.

The government's recent announcement that it will continue its pro-active fiscal policy next year for a balanced growth is a laudable and timely change from the excessive use of treasury bonds for economic construction.

However, the slow growth of farmers' income implies that a much more concerted effort by the government is needed to narrow the yawning gap between the rich minority and the impoverished majority.

The roughly 4-per-cent growth of farmers' income this year can be claimed as a hard-won victory against the impact of the SARS outbreak which fell heavily on the rural people. But it still falls far behind that of the country's GDP and urban residents' income.

The meager average annual income for China's farmers is only about US$300. So, in a sense, the new per capita GDP level is only a starting point toward a more desirable goal of a minimum annual income of US$1,000 for everyone in this country.
Xinhuanet.Com
  

6:12 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Smut Police?

Question: Is this a case of repressive censorship? Or a case of busting up a porno ring? Let me say first, I believe in no censorship of any kind. Period. I believe that all censorship should be a personal choice made by individuals for themselves or their minor children. However, my views are radical even in the land where free speech is allegedly sacrosanct, my home country of America. In China, as a "Foreign Expert" guest working for the Chinese central government (China Foreign Affairs University is under the direct administration of the Foreign Ministry, the only such school in China), I am obliged to live and behave according to Chinese law and due process.

In the case below, reported by the state-owned press, I have no idea how obscene the objectionable material was, or if it had any "socially redeeming qualities" other than the human desire for sexual gratification. I do know there will be any number of people who will condemn this act by Chinese authorities as further proof of a repressive regime thwarting human rights--sight unseen! Yet, in America, particularly under the present administration, smut is considered a serious breach of "family values" and should be rigidly controlled, and the only people who object are folks like me, the ACLU, and a number of publishing entities and organizations of writers and artists. Is there any hypocrisy at work here?
HONG KONG, Jan. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Hong Kong Police and the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) seized 70,000 pieces of suspected pornographic video compact discs (VCDs) and digital video discs (DVDs) in a joint operation Saturday in Mong Kok District.

Officers from TELA and Task Force, Mong Kok District, raided two shopping arcade in Shan Tung Street and Dundas at about 2:00 pm Saturday.

A total of 70 000 obscene VCDs and DVDs were seized during the raids. The market value of the VCDs and DVDs seized is worth about 2 million HK dollars (257,881 US dollars).

Police also arrested three men for possession of obscene articles for the purpose of publication.

The three arrested men, aged from 30 to 45 are still being detained for further investigation.
Xinhuanet.Com
  

5:39 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




An Ugly Story of Child Abuse

"They only print happy stories about the Party," are words I hear constantly from westerners and Chinese alike whenever the subject of the state-owned media comes up in conversation, or more pointedly and more often in my "Media and Foreign Policy" classes here at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. Well, there are more and more exceptions to that commonly held perception. Below is one of them; it is an ugly story that could be in any daily newspaper in the west, particularly in America, my beloved country about which I still write as a journalist--although I have stopped doing true crime, which my public, editors and publishers came to expect from me, only one of the reasons I came to China to live, write and teach.
LHASA, Jan. 4 (Xinhuanet) -- A man from China's Tibet Autonomous Region who tortured his housemaid, a girl aged 12 years, was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment at the first trial Friday morning in Lhasa.

Zhaxi Lhamo, 37, appealed the sentence, while trial visitors applauded the verdict.

In its judgment, the Chengguan District Court also ruled that the Tibetan should pay 62,476 yuan (7,527 US dollars) in compensation to the housemaid, whose name and ethnic group were not disclosed by the court.

According to Purbu, deputy director of the court, Zhaxi Lhamo beat and tormented the girl for three years with pincers, scissors and ropes.

He broke her right shoulder after she accidentally broke a bowl,said the girl.

According to medical examiners, the girl had over 100 wounds and scarring over 50 percent of her body.

According to the police, the tortured girl paced up and down before the gate of the local police station on Nov. 19 and told police about her suffering.

The police arrested Zhaxi Lhamo on Nov. 27 and the court began the hearing on Dec. 16.
Xinhuanet.Com
 

4:59 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Roll Over Vladimir, Tell Mao Zedong the News: MARILYN MONROE IS IN CHINA DAILY!

In the flesh! Marilyn is in the state-owned press! This is one of those moments when expats in this amazing country gape and marvel at the signs of change. This is most definitely one of them. Here it is in full. Enjoy! If you are my age, ENJOY BIG TIME!!!
BEIJING, Jan. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Before she blossomed into a glamorous image of beauty, Marilyn Monroe was Norma Jeane Baker. She had dreams of raising a family and wanted nothing more than to be loved. Jim Dougherty can attest to this.

At 82 years old, he fondly cradles the love he still has for his first wife.

In a 92-minute documentary called Marilyn's Man released this month, Dougherty tells his story about Norma Jeane. The film reveals unseen photos, pictures, letters and details illustrating his continual love for her.

"I'm sure she died with a broken heart," he says. "She should have stayed with this Irishman."


Passion Shows

The story is told through Dougherty's voice, and shows his passion for Maine with scenes shot at his condo and favorite sights in Auburn, says executive producer and director, Schani Krug, of Kittery, Maine, who founded his company, Valhalla Productions in 1999.

Krug raised money to help make this film by selling his antique collections. As a member of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC) for the past 20 years, he's been a watch and clock dealer and collector.

"I'm definitely a collectorholic," he says, "and a die-hard romantic to boot. Hence, the Marilyn story about Jim made me realize that their story had to be told, especially coming from the mouth of the only person who knew her so well."

Now, after more than 100 trailer screenings throughout New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine, Marilyn's Man was to make its public debut Dec. 25 in Lewiston, Maine, says Krug. "Reactions are overwhelmingly positive; people cry and laugh."

The cost to make the film was around $450,000 — a fragment compared to the rocketing expense of Hollywood. Krug said he saved a bundle of cash and refers to the sequence of events leading up to the actual filming, as pure kizmet. "It fell on my lap. I was totally blessed," he says.

Joel Gravallese is the owner of Dunn's Watch and Clock Shop, in Kittery. About a year and a half ago, he asked Krug if he would give him an appraisal on his rare Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, which adorns his miniature museum in the shop. Dougherty had been to the shop before and was pleased with the presentation of Norma Jeane's legacy there, says Krug.

Around the same time, a contract with a Japanese production company had just fallen through. Many producers had thought about making a film with Dougherty, "but Jim didn't trust them," says Krug.

Dougherty and his biographer, LC Van Savage, were at the shop a week later signing for his book titled To Norma Jeane With Love, Jimmie. They crossed paths with Krug who took the opportunity to mention his documentary idea, which he called Marilyn's Man.

"Yeaaah, surrre," was Dougherty's first thought, he says.


No Bedtime Stories

People always want to know what it was like to sleep with Marilyn Monroe, and Krug promised him none of this. Nothing negative, Krug told him.

Krug says when he looked into Dougherty's 82-year-old eyes, the questions he asked were different from the rest. He didn't pry into Dougherty's intimate life, but focused on the synergy in the relationship he had with Norma Jeane.

"He loved the questions, no one ever asked him questions like this before," Krug says. Dougherty wanted the film to show how beautiful she was without tainting her.

Krug agreed to Dougherty's requests, and the two became fast friends, he says. The filming began soon thereafter, and took about a year to make. "I fell in love with his story," says Krug.

After filming a total of 14 hours, the challenge was to pick the most compelling scenes.

"I had to look for the golden nuggets," Krug says.

The goal of the documentary is, he says, to set the record straight.

Dougherty and Jeane, then 16, married in 1942. Dougherty joined the Merchant Marines and was posted overseas during World War II. By 1946, she had launched a successful modeling career. Later that year, they were divorced.

"There's no scandal; it's a touching story about the truth," he says. "The focus is on Norma morphing into Marilyn and how Jim integrated as a part of it."

It's like you're hanging out with Jim for a day — a very fast day, he adds.

The film features quotes and letters read aloud. "It takes your breath away that someone could be so in love," says Baron, referring to the letters. "There are a lot of quotes; she's an intellectual. She's an angel."

"The story's not about Marilyn Monroe, it's about Norma Jeane," says Dougherty. "She wasn't a whore. People claimed that they slept with her, they probably wish they could have, but didn't. I'm sure she had a lot of boyfriends, as beautiful as she was, she was bound to have a lot of boyfriends."

There's a small segment in the movie when Dougherty talks about her suicide in August 1962. "He wants people to know there's so much to live for — fame is not worth it," says Krug.

"We're not doing a campaign, there's no merchandising," says Baron. "Here's the story, if you want to see the truth, come and see the movie."

Subject Liked the Film

The crew has uncontrolled enthusiasm about the film. But when they showed the trailer to Dougherty for the first time,
they were nervous to see his final reaction, says Baron.

"You've touched every nerve I ever knew I had," Dougherty said to them.
"I enjoyed it; I enjoyed every bit of it," says Dougherty. "I think there will be laughter, tears and the thorough enjoyment of Norma Jeane," says Dougherty. "Schani's a great guy, he let everything be natural."

"I had to let the story tell itself," says Krug. "As I got deeper into it, I felt a huge loss [and] the more I mourned her as a person. I felt Jim's pain, his anguish."
Xinhuanet.Com
  

3:23 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




SPIRIT HAS LANDED!

The Spirit has landed! We are on Mars! Being in China, we could watch the jubilance at JPL live at a civilized time of the day. The state-owned press in China wasted no time in getting the story out. Space exploration is big news in the Middle Kingdom these days.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Spirit, the first of twin US rovers, landed safely on Mars on Saturday night, embarking on a three-month journey to explore the Red Planet for clues of water and life.
The rover, tucked inside a lander which was wrapped by cocoon-like airbags, was expected to hit the center of Gusev Crater in Mars, bouncing as high as a four-story building for several minutes before coming to a halt on the Martian surface.

Shortly after the scheduled landing at 11:35 p.m. EST (0435 GMT Sunday), NASA mission controllers said that the rover has signaled back to Earth, indicating it has settled down successfully.

"NASA's Deep Space Network has received a signal confirming that Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is alive after rolling to a stop on the surface of Mars," NASA said in a statement.
Xinhuanet.Com
 

2:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Runningest Dem

My "almost" choice for the Democratic nomination, General Clark, is hitting his stride at what would seem to be the right point in this race and having a good time doing it. I am beginning to feel that not only is Clark the right man for the job in this field, but that he can beat Bush. I'm not solidly in his corner--yet. I think there might be a few surprises still to come.
CONCORD, N.H., Jan. 1 — Gen. Wesley K. Clark is having fun.

On a whirlwind tour that touched eight Southern states in two days this week, he practically bounded into the room at each event, increasingly energized by the growing crowds, by his improving standing in the polls and by a steadily rising cache of money that should carry him through the primary season.

"It's incredibly energizing to talk about what you believe in," General Clark said in an interview this week. "It's been fun going around the South, where I had a chance to tell people what I'm about. Now I think I have a great opportunity to reach out to New Hampshire voters," while most of his rivals spend the first half of the month in Iowa, where General Clark has chosen to skip the Jan. 19 caucuses.

Whether that energy will give him a boost here, where the nation's first primary will be held on Jan. 27, remains to be seen. And the campaign's ability to stay in the voters' minds over the next two weeks while the national news media is racing through Iowa is anything but certain.

The campaign's newly upbeat tone contrasts sharply with General Clark's abrupt, sometimes stumbling entry into the race in mid-September. He started with no money and no organization. In the first week, he fumbled a question about whether he would have supported the Congressional resolution authorizing military action in Iraq, saying he probably would have. He now admits the mistake, and says his record of statements before the war make clear his opposition to the Bush administration's actions. ...

The Clark campaign points to what it calls tangible reasons for its growing confidence. It raised about $11 million in the fourth quarter, more than any campaign other than Dr. Dean's.

General Clark has also earned more in federal matching money than any of the six other candidates participating in that program. In essence, that means that in a little more than three months he has raised more than candidates like Representative Richard A. Gephardt and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman have in nearly a year of campaigning.

In polls in early primary states like New Hampshire, General Clark is closing in on Senator John Kerry, who is running second but is slipping. In South Carolina and Arizona, General Clark is also moving up, and in some states the numbers indicate he is neck-and-neck with Dr. Dean. It is in those Southern states where his campaign is confident that General Clark's military experience will attract independent voters who supported Bill Clinton in the 1990's but who might have defected to George W. Bush in 2000.
Read the whole story in In The New York Times...
  

2:23 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Really LowDown Poop on Cheney the Great

My favorite "little" magazine of the liberal conscience has a compendium of articles about the man who is becoming more and more of an embarrassment to his party and our country, the benighted V.P. Cheney the Great. Would that he could follow the fate of another embarrassment in that office: Agnew.
Will the French Indict Cheney?
Doug Ireland
January 12, 2004 (web)

Dick Cheney's Nightmare of Peace
Robert Scheer
September 16, 2002 (web)

Enron: What Dick Cheney Knew
John Nichols
April 15, 2002 issue

Tricky Dick II
Nate Blakeslee
February 18, 2002 (web)

Mary Cheney Just Might Teach the Right a Lesson
Robert Scheer
October 16, 2000 (web)

Tricky DickDoug Ireland
August 21, 2000 issue
The Nation
  

2:17 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Will the French Indict Cheney?

Cheney the Great to be indicted by a French court? Apparently a distinguished French Jurist is about to do just that. If it happens, I would think it a rare occurrence; I do not know that for a fact until checking around a bit, but it surely can't have happened often in our short history. The Nation has the story; where it goes from here, who knows?
Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.

At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.

One of France's best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke--who came to fame by unearthing major French campaign finance scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of indictments--has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation.

According to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret "retrocommissions" paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery's construction. These reports say van Ruymbeke has fingered as the bagman in the operation a 55-year-old London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, who has worked for Halliburton for some thirty years. It was Tesler who was paid the $180 million as a "commercial consultant" through a Gibraltar-based front company he set up called TriStar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria deal by Halliburton and Technip and registered in Madeira, the Portuguese offshore island where taxes don't apply. According to Agence France-Presse, a former top Technip official, Georges Krammer, has testified that the Madeira-based consortium was a "slush fund" controlled by Halliburton--through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root--and Technip. Krammer, who is cooperating with the investigation, also swore that Tesler was imposed as the intermediary by Halliburton over the objections of Technip.

Tesler is a curious fellow: A veteran operator in Nigeria, he was the financial adviser to the late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha and controlled his personal fortune, while at the same time working for Halliburton. Abacha's former Oil Minister, Dan Etete--who is suspected of having used some of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy--was deposed by Judge van Ruymbeke in December. According to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper), Etete's testimony seemed to confirm the judge's suspicions that Tesler laundered the $180 million through offshore and other accounts, and that part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha's coffers. Tesler's bank accounts in Monaco, Switzerland and elsewhere have been subpoenaed in an effort to find out where the money went.

Judge van Ruymbeke's authority for his transnational investigation comes from a law France passed in 2000 against "bribing foreign officials," following its ratification of a convention adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prohibiting bribe-giving in the course of commercial transactions. The notion that the judge's targeting of Cheney might be in part retaliatory for the Bush Administration's exclusion of France from Iraq reconstruction contracts is unlikely: Van Ruymbeke is notoriously independent, and his previous investigations have been aimed at politicians and parties of both right and left. He's also no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics, having previously investigated bribe-giving by the French petrogiant Elf--indeed, it was in the course of his Elf investigation that van Ruymbeke stumbled upon the Nigerian deal.

The suspected bribe money was mostly ladled out between 1995 and 2000, when Cheney was Halliburton's CEO. The Journal du Dimanche reported on December 21 that "it is probable that some of the 'retrocommissions' found their way back to the United States" and asked, did this money go "to Halliburton's officials? To officials of the Republican Party?" These questions have so far gone unasked by America's media, which have completely ignored the explosive Le Figaro headline revealing the targeting of Cheney. It will be interesting to see if the US press looks seriously into this ticking time-bomb of a scandal before the November elections.
The Nation
  

2:03 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, January 03, 2004

Republicans Running On Empty, Mr Brooks?

David Brooks has a most tantalizing look at the ironies rampant in this election year, and the political landscape itself--I mean, things are all topsy-turvy. What party stands for what these days? Which way is left? Which way is right? What's up and what's down?
The Republican Party has a problem this election year. It's the governing party, but it lacks a governing philosophy.

The G.O.P. used to have a governing philosophy: reducing the size of the state. This was a useful goal because it was the one thing all Republican factions could agree upon. The business community wanted to reduce the public sector because it stifled growth. Social conservatives wanted to shrink the nanny state because it produced dependency. Libertarians and populists wanted to reduce government because it gave too much power to bureaucratic elites.

But reducing the size of government can no longer be Republicans' animating principle. In the first place, many of the worst excesses of government have been addressed. It's harder to argue that government programs reward bad behavior after welfare reform. It's harder to argue that government stifles economic growth after a generation of tax-rate reduction and the awesome boom of the 1990's.

But the main reason reducing the size of government can't be the party's animating principle is that Republicans have no credibility on this subject. During the Reagan years, Republicans tried to cut the size of government and failed, then blamed the Democrats controlling Congress. In 1995, Republicans tried to reduce the size of government and failed, then blamed the Democrats controlling the White House. Now Republicans control everything, and over the past three years the size of government has still increased, not even counting the war on terror. ...

Bush promoted a new domestic governing philosophy: compassionate conservatism. To be honest, that hasn't panned out. So the task this year, starting with the State of the Union speech, is to come up with a new governing philosophy that will give domestic policy a sense of idealism, ambition and shape.

For my money, the best organizing principle for Republicans centers on the word "reform." Republicans can modernize the (mostly Democratic) accomplishments of the 20th century. That would mean entitlement reform, tax reform, more welfare reform, education reform, immigration reform, tort reform and on and on. In all these areas, Republicans can progressively promote change, while Democrats remain the churlish defenders of the status quo.
Read Mr. Brooks and see if you have some advice for the party in power.

The New York Times...
 

10:36 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Is The Investigation Into WilsonGate Heating Up Or Just On A Low Simmer?

The WilsonGate Reporters aren't going to give up their sources, and the investigation can only proceed if administration staffers come clean "through due process": specifically waiving their confidentiality. Being a journalist who has twice been in the situation of having to take the witness stand and refuse to identify a source, I am watching this affair with great interest. Based upon the latest news in today's The New York Times, it is hard to predict what is going to happen, or even what really is happening even now. On the one hand it may seem like the heat is being turned up on the administration, on the other it can be a way to let the whole thing simmer through the year and particularly through next November. Each staffer can draw the situation out by delaying his waiver while he legitimately says he is seeking private counsel for advice.

Most lawyers would agree that it is prudent for a staffer to seek counsel even if the staffer has nothing to hide--because these things have a way of getting nasty and one can find oneself facing a grand jury when in fact one doesn't know squat. Of course, Dubya could simply order the entire staff to waive privilege and that would speed things up, but then that would mean that someone would be incriminating himself in a felony case--confessing to a crime without being granted immunity--because someone on staff did leak to Novak. So Dubya would surely say that "isn't the American way. Sorry, folks, we'll just have to let the process work its way through the system." Interesting case legally, very interesting.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — Investigators who are trying to determine whether anyone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer have asked some White House staff members to sign forms waiving their right to have private conversations with reporters, government officials said on Friday....

The investigators used the forms in an effort to find out who among White House employees had spoken to the columnist Robert Novak, presumably to narrow the list of who might have told him about the undercover officer. Investigators in leak cases focus on government employees because they almost never succeed in obtaining information from reporters about their sources. It is unclear whether the waiver process would place any additional pressure on a reporter to reveal a source.

The waiver procedure seemed to suggest the intensity of the Justice Department's inquiry to uncover who disclosed the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. employee, to Mr. Novak, who named Ms. Plame in his syndicated column last July.
Read the full story in The New York Times...
  

10:22 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, January 02, 2004

"Johnny of the Cross"

While I was at Altercation, I was directed to a truly wonderful essay on The Man in Black, Johnny Cash, a great hero of mine and probably yours who the world lost so recently. The site is First Things, here is how "Johnny of the Cross" starts:
In the world of popular music, one generally becomes a "legend" only in death—as if death accomplishes for a musician all that he was unable to do for himself in life. Legends are often made in the manner of their death—in a helicopter crash, say, or collapsed on the bathroom floor. But Johnny Cash’s death at seventy-one on September 12 was decidedly un-legend-like: silent, slow, and unspectacular. Yet "legend" seems, if anything, not big enough a word to describe Johnny Cash.
As you surely know, I do not hold organized Christianity in high esteem, but I urge you to visit First Things.com
  

10:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Me,Too, Mr. Alterman

I was just about to post Paul Krugman's excellent Column in today's The New York Times, "Who's Nader Now?", when I stopped by Eric Alterman's Altercation site and found that he'd already done so but only briefly with a better excuse than I had--just a slow brain day, is all I can offer:
Feeling lazy this morning, but also adding additional authority, I’m simply copying The Note’s recommendation of Paul Krugman, which "takes a must-read look at the 'stop Dean' phenomenon, asking which of the Democratic candidates is playing the Nader/spoiler role in the 2004 contest. Attacks on Dean by Lieberman and Kerry put on full display why they're running behind, Krugman argues -- and those attempts to undermine the frontrunner undermine the larger goal of defeating the incumbent."
I'm going to quote two or three of paragraphs of Mr. Krugman's column in the possibility that you might have a case of Eric's lazy-bones and don't click on either The Note, link or the Paul Krugman column, (O me of little faith):
In the 2000 election, in a campaign that seemed driven more by vanity than by any realistic political vision, Ralph Nader did all he could to undermine Al Gore — even though Mr. Gore, however unsatisfying to the Naderites, was clearly a better choice than the current occupant of the White House.

Now the Democratic Party has its own internal spoilers: candidates lagging far behind in the race for the nomination who seem more interested in tearing down Howard Dean than in defeating George Bush. ...

Let me suggest a couple of ground rules. First, while it's O.K. for a candidate to say he's more electable than his rival, someone who really cares about ousting Mr. Bush shouldn't pre-emptively surrender the cause by claiming that his rival has no chance. Yet Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Kerry have done just that. To be fair, Mr. Dean's warning that his ardent supporters might not vote for a "conventional Washington politician" was a bit close to the line, but it appeared to be a careless rather than a vindictive remark.

More important, a Democrat shouldn't say anything that could be construed as a statement that Mr. Bush is preferable to his rival. Yet after Mr. Dean declared that Saddam's capture hadn't made us safer — a statement that seems more justified with each passing day — Mr. Lieberman and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Kerry launched attacks that could, and quite possibly will, be used verbatim in Bush campaign ads. (Mr. Lieberman's remark about Mr. Dean's "spider hole" was completely beyond the pale.)

The irony is that by seeking to undermine the election prospects of a man who may well be their party's nominee, Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Kerry have reminded us of why their once-promising campaigns imploded. Most Democrats feel, with justification, that we're facing a national crisis — that the right, ruthlessly exploiting 9/11, is making a grab for total political dominance. The party's rank and file want a candidate who is running, as the Dean slogan puts it, to take our country back. This is no time for a candidate who is running just because he thinks he deserves to be president.
Now, it really would be worthwhile to read the column in full in The New York Times
 

10:03 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




To the Manor Born Was He

Apparently, Dubya can't shoot as well as Cheney the Great, but then he and Bush Sr. weren't shooting pre-caged pheasant. He was in good spirits, though, and good company as you will see in the Los Angeles Times.